Neighbor is a Verb

Some think the cowboy has gone riding off into the sunset, never to return. But in our final episode, we hear stories of resilience and community pride. We return to Antonito, CO to hear how Aaron Abeyta started a school there to teach children that success doesn’t mean fleeing your hometown. It means staying to celebrate the unique heritage of the community.

A few years back, some good friends from grad school came to visit me in Laramie. They were from the Midwest and excited to see a real Western town. We hit up the thrift stores for authentic, well worn cowgirl boots and pearl button shirts. 

And then I remember driving along and one of them pointing out a cowboy walking down the street in his hat and boots and belt buckle. She asked me if the guy was just dressed up like that, or if there was still such a thing as working cowboys? It made me realize that to the rest of the country, ranching is going extinct, an artifact from a bygone era. And folks have pretty good reasons for thinking that. 

Scotty Ratliffe is a former Wyoming lawmaker. But he’s also Eastern Shoshone and grew up cowboying on the Wind River Reservation. He tells me, “We didn't have TV. We didn't have electricity. We had to haul our water. That's just what kids did. But then during the day, we were cow people. We did the things we had to do in order to make cows be a productive something.”

He says back in those days, ranchers endured the poverty and the loneliness because they loved being on horseback and working outdoors: “That whole idea of the romanticness of ranching, you know, is probably what keeps people going and probably what doesn't keep them going. Because it don't turn out to be that romantic. It's hard work.”

These days, Scotty says the cowboy is an endangered species.

“There's very few people today that want to make a career as a rancher,” he says. “There's a few people that will hire on in the summertime to be a ranch hand or they'll take a day ride or something, but it's not their career. It's not their life's ambition. They like horses, and a lot of people like horses, and a lot of people like cows, but to make that your vocation, you know, it's a fading thing.”

I’ve seen this up close and personal. Our old family friend Jake Heflin made the rodeo his vocation. And Jim Elliot never doubted once that he wanted to be a cowboy. But that was decades ago. Judy Elliot admitted that it took a lot of propping up to keep it alive. Remember when she told me?

Judy said, “You have to have a wife with a good job in town, I'm telling you. And you can live that life but one of you has to have a job that pays the bills. I did the same thing. I started waiting tables, and working for the neighbors and stuff like that.”

The cowboy is riding off into the sunset and the question we’ve been asking all along is, why we should care if he never returns? Author Wallace Stegner would have been fine with his extinction. 

Stegner wrote, “Why hasn’t the stereotype faded away as real cowboys became less and less typical in western life? Because we can’t or won’t do without it, obviously. But also there is the visible, pervasive fact of western space, which acts as a preservative.”

Our arid landscapes preserve every track in the sand. You can still see the tracks of wagon trains on the Overland Trail. If that's not a vivid reminder that history still affects who we are then I don't know what is. So what if we don't flatten the cowboy into a myth of a solitary man on a horse and instead take a more nuanced look? If we get real about what causes harm and how to heal, then maybe the rancher won't go extinct.

Fighting for Community

Remember back in episode two of this season, “Se Beneficien de Ella,” we learned about the history of the cowboy and how it originated with the Mexican vaquero?  We met the Abeyta family, who’ve been sheep ranchers in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado for seven generations. It hasn’t been easy for the Abeytas though: bad prices at the market, attacks by environmentalists, racism by the government. If anyone was going to call it quits, the Abeytas would have had good reason to. But the Abeytas, they aren’t quitters. Instead they’ve adapted to a changing world. A few years back, my good friend Aaron Abeyta got hoodwinked into a job he never thought he’d agree to. 

I ask Aaron about it: “So that brings me to this question of how you ended up the mayor of your town.”

“I was tricked,” he laughs.

Tricked because the town was facing an existential dilemma and they needed a leader.

“They started hauling radioactive waste throughout Antonito without public process,” Aaron says. “They just literally started putting nuclear waste on the back of flatbed trucks, bringing it to the outskirts of Antonito and loading it on these nuclear gondolas.”

And those nuclear gondolas carried the waste across Colorado and Wyoming to bury it in Utah’s desert.

“But it was being loaded here, right next to the town's water source,” says Aaron. 

The previous mayor led the charge to sue the US Department of Energy, the railroad, and Los Alamos to stop them from loading the nuclear waste in Antonito. But in the middle of the fight, that mayor was termed out and couldn’t run again. 

“And it seemed like the other people that were running for mayor didn't really care,” Aaron says. “That's just my opinion. And they weren't from here. Honestly, they lived here, but they were recent transplants. And I think people want to be mayor for ego reasons, and not love reasons. And I'm not trying to toot my own horn, but I wanted to do it to protect my community.”

I’ve known Aaron a lot of years and that’s one thing you can count on: he does things for love reasons. Once again, an Abeyta family member took on the federal government and corporations to save his community’s way of life. But these cases are seldom simple.

“Did you win those cases?” I ask.

“Oh, win is such an elusive thing,” he says. “They're not hauling nuclear waste through Colorado anymore. And we definitely entered into a very long term agreement, that they're not allowed to bring nuclear waste through Antonito anymore. But we didn't go to court and maybe we should have because as soon as they left us, they moved the nuclear waste to the Navajo Nation now. So they just found another community that may or may not fight back, I don't know.”

Fighting for community in the West? We could dream about a time when that’s no longer necessary, but in Antonito, it’s a way of life.

Aaron recites, “Antonito. Here at the edge of the llano, where the grass begins like a migrant pulse thumping in the wind every April. The town becomes somebody’s prayer, waiting for a candle to be lit. There are places to begin. Although everything revolves back toward us. A woman I know lost her son, believes that he became a star that looks over her. I suppose this is enough.”

The need to always hold strong is a theme Aaron touches on in this poem he wrote for his town. 

He continues, “And one thought flows from the other like silent children walking through loud kitchens, that recurring ending, a misdirected river, which always ends up where it should, coming and going, in a town where people always return to the llano’s edge, the line between us and the stars we think we see at night.”

“A misdirected river which always ends up where it should, coming and going in a town where people always return.” I too am from a small community where people leave and come back, leave and come back. For ranching communities, the biggest threat is outmigration– it’s kids deciding the work is too hard or the pay too little and heading off in search of big lights, big city or kids who grow inpatient with cowboy culture because they recognize it’s a snake eating its own tail – and to survive, it has to look hard at its own dysfunction but so far it hasn’t had the gumption. I can tell you this though, when you leave your hometown, you always feel like you’re wandering – that someday, somehow, you’ll find your way back home. It’s a labyrinth. 

The Only Way Out is Where You’ve Begun

It’s on an evening with Aaron’s dad Alfonzo I’m able to see it this way. At the age of 83, he’s spearheading a community effort to build a prayer labyrinth outside the oldest church in Colorado, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the one where the donkey wouldn’t budge so they built there. Alfonzo and his wife joined a church group that came up with the idea but they didn’t have enough money to realize their dream. They had 50,000 dollars but that wasn’t enough to buy the adobe bricks and ship them over the mountains.

Alfonzo tells me, “So one night I wake up at about two o'clock in the morning and I says, Well, my great-great grandfather built the house I was born in out of adobe. So why can’t we? So I got this idea about doing the adobes ourselves. So since I didn't know anything about adobes I started looking to old-timers. And I went and asked this guy for advice and he–”

“The old-timers are like two days older than him,” Aaron laughs.

“Well, one of them is 90,” says Alfonzo. “He’s the one that helped me most. So I went and talked to this old-timer and he says, ‘Well,’ he says, ‘you're going to have to have 30 percent clay and 70 percent sand. Then I says, ‘Darn, how do you test that?’ He says, ‘Well, fill a bottle up, a jar of water. Put in the dirt you're going to use, and the sand goes down to the bottom, and the clay stays on top. And then they can figure out how you would do the formula for it.’”

So Alfonzo started making adobe bricks like his great-great grandfather used to and got a crew of locals together to start building the walls of a full-scale maze. Even though it isn’t quite finished, Alfonzo takes me out to walk around it. We go in through the gate under a sign.

“I know you understand what it says up there, right?” says Alfonzo.

“Well, ‘pobladores,’ that means…?” I ask.

“Okay, ‘pobladores’ is settlers,” says Alfonzo. “‘Sanctuary of the Settlers.’ So we're dedicating it to our settlers that came here.”

The original pilgrims, his ancestors. We start walking the path. Along the way, Alfonzo shows me where each of the five stations will be located where pilgrims can stop and pray in a little cubby with a bronze religious image inside.

“So then you come on and then each one has its own or you pray to Mary, okay,” says Alfonzo. “You go and you're coming. Oh, here's number two. Okay. So you go to your recite number two, then you come again.”

I had to look it up, the spiritual significance of labyrinths. They’ve been used by societies all over the world for over 4,000 years. The idea is they take you on a journey within – to your center, to God.

“You know what it means, right?” asks Alfonzo. 

“No,” I say. “Tell me.”

“When you go into a labyrinth, the only way out is more or less where you’ve begun,” he says.

Kind of like our home communities. Ranching kids from rural places all over the West. We can’t wait to leave but then it’s a long, prodigal journey to find our way back again. And when we return, we aren’t the same. We’re transformed. 

A Return

The idea that the cowboy might go extinct started eating away at Scotty Ratliffe – but then he got the idea to start the Wyoming Cowboy Hall of Fame, to remember the nearly lost art of the cowboy. Guys like Charlie Fenton, one of Scotty’s childhood heroes.

“I mean, this guy could do things on a horse that nobody should be able to do,” says Scotty. “He just had that touch and it was like watching an ice skater. You know, he just was smooth and fine and his horses did everything he wanted.”

Charlie worked for an oil pipeline and rode a horse 30 miles one way, switched horses, then rode 30 miles back– every day. Now that’s what you call a rugged individual. But even Charlie got a job off the ranch to make ends meet. Even back then, the signs of the cowboy’s demise were showing up. Lately, though, I’m told, the cowboy has been riding on back home.

We met Jim Magagna back in the first episode. He’s with the Wyoming Stockgrowers Association, and he says, “If you had asked me, five to 10 years ago, I was very concerned that the young people growing up on a ranch were all going off somewhere else.”

Jim says, “Today, I'm pleased to see the number of young people – they may go off for a while, they may experience life in the city. But the combination of what's happening in our larger cities, wanting a comfortable place to raise a family, have a good education, is encouraging more and more of them to return to the ranch.”

There was lots of hope that the pandemic would help rural communities by giving all those kids who’ve long wanted to move home a chance to try working remotely from their hometowns. Jim says he’s hearing more stories about that scenario actually panning out. And he says, when those young people return, they are also more willing to innovate.

Jim says, “When I grew up in ranching, which was several decades ago, the old saying used to be: the best way to be a successful rancher is to have an oil well in the middle of your ranch. That's still true today. But there's more opportunities. It might be  oil or gas. Or it might be a wind farm, it might be a hunting or recreational opportunity to allow people to come onto your ranch and do things there. Today, it even might be getting paid for ranching practices that result in greater carbon storage in the soil. And the variety of activities that ranchers can engage in to have an alternate source of revenue to, not in lieu of ranching, but to support ranching, and continue to make it viable, is growing by the day.”

I suppose there’s some people who might be like, who cares if the cowboy disappears over the horizon and never returns? I mean, we have heard lots this season about all the problems with ranching – how livestock have displaced bison and Indigenous people, the environmental damage on public lands, the climate warming gasses cattle produce – yeah, it’s all true. But there’s always two sides to every coin. The fact is, the American West isn’t just public lands –in a lot of states a good third of the land is privately owned, mostly by ranchers. Judith Schwartz – she’s the author of Cows Can Save The Planet – she says we need to make room for a new generation of ranchers at the table.

Judith says, “Ranchers have an incredibly powerful role to play in that ranchers are managing large landscapes. So when they are managing those appropriately, then those landscapes will rebound and improve and help us be more resilient, help communities around them be more resilient in the face of drought, help communities around them be more protected against flooding.”

Before he passed away, I went out to visit Alan Kirkbride on his ranch on Horse Creek and he told me this really important thing that stuck in my head.

He said, “Really in the bigger picture, I’m the caretaker here. If I can leave it as well or better than I found it, then I’ll have done well.”

And Alan did leave his ranch better than he found it. He didn’t ride off on his horse. He got in his truck and drove to the city and fought to stop groundwater drilling that would drain the springs and creeks on his land. Temple Grandin says it’s the small family-sized ranchers like Alan that are the best at thinking outside the box.

“Because if you do grazing right, you can improve the land,” she says. “You do grazing wrong, you can wreck land. Now the thing is, small guys tend to be the ones that innovate, small operators. Every industry, little guys innovate. There's some people now growing cover crops, then they'll graze cattle on the cover crop and then do corn, soy.”

But Temple says, right now, these innovators don’t have what they need to change ranching practices. First of all, she says, “There's a lot of young people getting interested in things like regenerative agriculture, but they can't get land. And then there's a lot of land getting bought up. Somebody says, let's just, we'll just have wildlife on that, nothing else. But I think we’re gonna have some really serious issues. It's 20 percent of the whole earth, all around the world. And there's places in the world where grazing land has been really wrecked.”

20 percent of the earth is prime grazing land, Temple says, but that land could be ruined if the innovators aren’t given the resources they need to manage those lands properly. But here’s the thing– with real estate sky high in the West, it’s not a rugged individualist who’s going to reform ranching. It’s a posse. You know, that band of vigilantes that get together in the old western movies and race out to save the day?

Usually they were up to no good. But that same urge to band together is still alive and well. That’s what Rod Miller told me recently. I met up with him at a coffee shop in Cheyenne. There may be no more iconic cowboy than Rod Miller. His family homesteaded outside Rawlins in the Dakota Territory in 1867. He grew up throwing hay bales and mending fence on the family ranch. Rod is so quintessential that, in his youth, he actually appeared in a Marlboro Man ad in Playboy magazine. 

“I saw that you were in a Marlboro Man commercial,” I laugh.

“What they really wanted was a place with white sand and the water,” says Rod. “And that's our shoreline at Seminoe Reservoir, all white sand and water. And they wanted to gallop horses through the surf and get the sun glinting off the water droplets in the sand. And that's what we did for two days, just ran these poor fucking horses back and forth. And they shot 35,000 rolls of film. Darryl sent me a copy of Playboy that had the thing in it and that's where you can barely see me fuzzy back there.”

“You're just kind of a cowboy shape,” I say.

“Part of the landscape like a sagebrush,” says Rod.

“Yeah, so you get paid big bucks for this?” I ask. 

“I got paid 35 bucks a day. I got 100 bucks a day for the horses.”

Rod looks nothing like a Marlboro Man. Under his cowboy hat, he sports long white hair and a long white beard in two braids down his chest. I met Rod way back in the 90’s when he owned a really great bookstore in Cheyenne. But he’s moved on since then. A few years back, he made it into another gentleman’s magazine– GQ interviewed him when he ran for congress against Liz Cheney. These days, I make sure to always read his punditry on Wyoming politics. He’s hilarious, yes, but Rod may have an understanding of the cowboy iconography like no other. Because he definitely rode away from his past only to re-emerge transformed. For instance, he’s not starry-eyed about the great individualist.

“The people that succeeded here were, they didn't do it for the common good,” says Rod. “They were in it for themselves. And they were driven to succeed. And they did. Now that rugged individualism is part and parcel of Wyoming, the West, whatever. But so is the idea of community.”

Rod says you can’t be dualistic about the cowboy. He’s not either an individualist or a collaborator. He’s both/and.

Rod tells me, “There's an old saying in Wyoming: neighbor is a verb. That you can fight with your next door rancher over water, grazing or fences, whatever. But if there's like a wildfire, or a natural disaster, you help him save his ranch. And he'll come do the same for you. That's not the antithesis of rugged individualism. I think it's probably a logical outgrowth.”

A logical outgrowth because it’s an unwritten clause when you sign up to live cheek to jowl with Mother Nature, you gotta reckon a day will come when you’ll need a helping hand. It might be this push and pull that keeps the cowboy myth from becoming truly nihilistic. Allowed full rein, there’d be no urge to stop the nuclear waste from polluting the town’s wells, no urge to stop the depletion of groundwater, no will to keep the climate from frying our beloved landscape. 

Challenging “Success as Exodus”

Aaron Abeyta embodies this push-pull dichotomy perfectly– both deeply individualistic and a committed servant to his community. He’s not just mayor, he also started his own school – the Justice and Heritage Academy.

“So this is the main room, so all of the students from one point or another will be in this room,” says Aaron. “And then this is for our elementary kids, we only have five of them. Hence the little chairs.”

He’s showing me around the school, housed in a little building behind the St. Augustine church in Antonito. 

“And this is our math and our science room,” he says. “All our math manipulatives, our calculators, all our math stuff was dumpster dived. All this is dumpster dived. That TV stand that doesn’t have a TV stand was dumpster dived. Ironically, that shitty TV is not dumpster dived.”

The school is nothing fancy but the ideas behind it are fancy. Aaron co-directs the school with his wife Michelle Trujillo who’s a trained educator. Aaron says the two of them have been dreaming of opening this school for almost 30 years. But when their daughter reached school age, it became imperative. There was a school in town but it wasn’t filling the needs of local families.

“When we started the school, there was like 140 kids from Antonito that went to a different district,” says Aaron. “And so we thought, well, how can we grow community if the kids are leaving their community, even if it's just for school? Let's finally do it. Let's do our school and see how many we can keep. So in our first year, we had seven, our second year, we had 14, third year we had 28. And this year, we have 38.”

“So you're growing, you're growing, for sure,” I say.

Aaron says, the idea is to get those kids to stay in their community by teaching them their own culture and language. Getting kids to return home is critical for this community. Because, here’s the thing, Antonito kids have a very unique heritage. 

For instance, the Spanish they speak in the San Luis Valley isn’t what you learn in College Spanish 101. It’s what’s known as Heritage Spanish which is, Aaron says, “this really cool synthesis of Spanish, 18th century Castilian Spanish, Nahuatl, French and English and probably thrown in there just for good measure, some other Indigenous languages, Navajo and Ute as well. And the different origins were – oh, and Arabic, I forgot about Arabic, too. So you have all these different influences. And they find themselves in one place, general location, northern New Mexico, Southern Colorado.”

That’s because this region was a crossroads for generations of Pueblo cultures, French trappers, railroad workers, conquistadors, you name it. But Aaron says speaking Heritage Spanish around traditional Spanish speakers can lead to confusion.

“So to us, calzones are pants,” says Aaron. “But to the rest of the Spanish speaking world, calzones are underwear. So we're calling them calzones. So I go over to whatever locale and I say, you know, I need to go get some calzones and everybody starts giggling. To me, I'm just saying I'm going to go buy some pants or something.”

It’s a gift Aaron wants to offer the kids in his school. But he doesn’t teach Heritage Spanish in isolation– they also learn why it’s an issue of justice to protect their culture and language.

“And so even though we're teaching science or math or whatever, we try to infuse everything with food justice, or social justice, whatever is applicable to what we're working on,” says Aaron. “So now, with life cycles, we're getting a lot of environmental justice and a lot of food justice in that. So our goal is to raise our own food. So today's lunch, we grew ourselves.”

“Really?” I ask. “What did you have for lunch?”

“So for lunch, we had tomatoes and salad from our own garden,” he says. “We had, I guess, tortillas we didn't grow. Bean burritos and salsa. And then we had vegetables on the side of the salad.”

“And the kids helped grow that?” 

“Yeah, so we have our own garden, we have our own composting. Eventually, we like to have our own animals so we can be totally self-sustaining.”

Aaron says the reason families are sending kids off to other school districts is because in the rural West, we aren’t instilling a pride of place. Growing up in North Park, Colorado, we never learned about the Indigenous people who hunted our mountains or the silver miners who settled there. We never visited our heritage sites. I didn’t visit the tepee rings on the mountain ridges or our ghost towns until I was an adult. Kids at this school take lots of field trips.

Aaron says, “When I was a kid, my idea of success was fleeing, right, like some sort of exodus was equated with success. And I know a lot of places are that way, small towns in particular. But we never learned about the history of our community. We never learned about how important our ancestors were and how much work they did to essentially found our community. Essentially, there was nothing tethering us to this community. Right? So we just try and teach them those things, right? This village, this town, founded by, when it was founded. So they take pride in it.”

Maybe that cowboy is riding away because no one gave him a map for how to get back home. No one ever told him, hey, you’re the hero of your own story. Don’t forget, dude, you’ve got to come full circle.

“What do you think your hope is for your daughter?” I ask Aaron. “And for her generation in this community? And what is it that you're hoping that you maybe are helping to build and to preserve?”

“Resilience, liberation, pride,” he says. “But that they see themselves as powerful as they create their own heroic imperative. And that they are the heroes of their own oral tradition, of their own story. And that fleeing Antonito, fleeing your home, fleeing your community is not success. That success is returning to your community and hopefully assisting others with their own liberation, with their own resilience, with their own pride, with their own heroic imperative.”

Maybe asking kids to become the heroes of their own stories sounds a lot like a sales pitch for a new generation of rugged individualists. But Aaron would argue that the hero and their community, they’re one and the same. There’s no separating them. Like Rod Miller says, neighbor is a verb. If a new generation of ranchers can clear out the ghosts from the closet, we can form a new kind of posse: an interdependent way of life could very well shape the future of the American West.