The Third Station

I take the round about, just to do it, then park in the lot and look out on the Veterans Admin Building, all foreboding and cavernous, like an artifact. I keep waiting for someone to appear in a straight jacket and leer at me out of the window. Then I wonder if anyone actually goes to work in an office on the fourth floor anymore or if the place is inhabited by ghosts, and as it dawns on me why I’m here, I realize that geography holds the key to all the history that ever was and with that, an onslaught of thoughts – before my time, before my father’s time, and his father’s, all the way back to when California first became part of the US and Yankees and gringos were the foreigners, and i realize that embedded in the earth is time and I must find a way to woo the land into releasing its secret. And just as suddenly I realize why Joaquin did what he did, and even though I am opposed to the core to the taking of another life, it becomes hard to say for certain that I would do any different.

I can see horses coming
like thunder following lighting
if I set my perception just over the hill
yesterday is not that far away at all
and smoke signals are rising
heralding the new dawn
and the dun at a gallop
followed by a roan mare
with a thunder of hooves behind
 If the finest breed on the finest land
should pass this way 
and i were here to witness
would not that make it history no more 
but more a part of me now?

This is the third Station, and would be Murrietta’s destination within the first week of the drove. Latta refers to the third corral along Vereda del Monte as Mocho’s Creek, Arroyo Mocho, named after one of the youngest of Murrieta’s vaqueros. Aveleno Martinez was a Chinese Mexican who came to California at 15 to look for his father in one of the mining camps along the Stanislaus. Because he could ride well, he got caught up with the horse droves, often manning the remote outposts alone for the entire season. Despite his age, Murrieta must have trusted him, not only to maintain allegiance, but to have the ability to hold down two key stations along La Vereda – It was Avelano Martinez, seventy years later, who gives Latta first hand accounts of his time working as a vaquero, including the battle at Cantua. But I’m getting ahead of myself.