Essay by Aaron Abeyta
Mountain Life – December 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Dear George,
Again I am relying on the night for inspiration. Sometime within the next 24 hours I must write this letter to you. Antonito is mostly quiet; even the dogs are silent. In the not so far away distance a single car guns its engine and the sound dopplers toward me. I walk down the empty street and look toward Mars burning red; I recall that the paper reported our planetary neighbor, on this particular night, will be closer to earth than it has been in 600 centuries. After tonight it will spin away from us and never again, in our lifetime, approach us with such fire and proximity.
In the quiet Antonito night I hear that single car, the sound of its tires on the gravel of some side street, but I am not thinking about the car or Mars any longer. My father has entered my thoughts. He has made himself the subject of this letter. My father, whose stubbornness and disdain for false authority I’ve inherited, rises in my mind in much the same way he always rises in the darkness before dawn, noisily but with purpose. He works harder than any person I know and years from now, after he and Mars have spun away from me, that is one of the things I will remember.
I will remember how he woke me at 4 a.m. so that I could begin the day’s work. I will remember the winter of my sophomore year in high school when I was mother to 35 orphan lambs. I will remember how those lambs baaahhhed in the early cold of winter mornings as I walked toward them with warm bottles of milk. I will remember the stars and the way the moon was sometimes still in the sky. But mostly I will remember the night in early spring when a pack of dogs attacked my family of penco lambs. I will remember how seventeen of them died and seventeen more were left, in some way or another, covered in their own blood. In the midst of all that carnage their was one lamb left completely untouched. He was born blind and had learned to follow the other lambs by sound. I named him ciego, because he was, after all, blind. He had escaped the dogs because he was the only lamb that did not run. In all the commotion he had lost contact with the other lambs and therefore stood blind and still as the others were, one by o
Years from now, when I remember my father in the future, I will think of that lamb, not for his blindness but because he did not run. My father will come to me in every season of my life and I will remember that he too never ran away. Some have accused my father of being a trouble maker, always demanding that the highest standards apply to his family, community and people. In his own way he demands perfection and many are threatened by his unwillingness to concede even the slightest bit of weakness. Others say that he is, in some figurative sense of the word, blind to the changing world, that if he chose to he could be debt free and not have to work so hard. All he would have to do for this version of the American Dream is sell his ranch and live off of the profits. People tell him he would be happy if he did this; they ask him to see better, to see how the ranch is the root of every misstep in his life.
My father tells this story of his youth and the two dreams he had for what he would become. The first was an FBI agent and the second was a rancher. I believe he counts himself among the luckiest of men to have attained at least one of his dreams. My father, in the future, will come to me in the bend of the river where it meets the meadow, in the thick and bent autumn barley, in the first trickle of ditch water in spring, his memory will surface and persist in the rising haystacks, the sheep spreading out along a hillside, he will rise in my memory like pale llano dust and I too will consider him lucky to have known and fought for one of his two dreams.
I do not think it is an accident that he is the only full-scale rancher in Antonito with a Hispanic surname. So much has gone away from Antonito, so much poverty where once there was ownership and prosperity. Amongst the fallen lambs of Antonito’s past my father persists despite the Farmers Home Administration appraiser projecting his crop output as 1/3 less than his neighbor’s when all that separates the two fields is a thin string of barbed wire and the thick canyon of a person’s last name. I see him rise daily despite the same appraiser telling him that his land is worth $45,000 dollars less than smaller pieces just up the road from us. He knows in his persistent heart that this is so simply because those ranches are white owned. He knows in the memory of his heart that those same ranches were sold away by his own people, and he knows there is no happiness in their profit. I have seen my father endure when environmentalists destroyed the float on his stock tanks, allowing 30,000 gallons of water to floo
George, you asked me to write about the American Dream and I will be perfectly honest I don’t know what that means. The dream we all hope for seems so multi-faceted and cliché that I cannot reconcile it with the dreams I am familiar with, so singular and persistently real. I suppose I must understand the dreams of my father as the dreams of every person who sets foot in this country of ours. The American Dream should be free of arbitrary distinctions and labels that are pre-determined to represent worth. In my American Dream, my father will be unchased by the dogs of society who seem determined to kill or simply draw blood for the sport of it. In the Antonito version of the American Dream Alfonzo Abeyta will be free of banks that lend more money to lesser men because they have “better” last names. Yes, George, I imagine the American Dream is only partially real and the good parts we wish for have been predestined to remain dreamlike, therefore fleeting and only attainable in the few minutes after
Much peace Amigo,
your friend, a.
Aaron Abeyta lives in Antonito and is a professor of English at Adams State College in Alamosa.
