Buck and Smokey
Nearly two decades before he became a scientist, rock climber, or telemark skier, Gabe Patterson, Ph.D. was a cowboy/buckaroo. His parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles were all stewards of the outdoors. Despite the cultural expectations of what “Black people do and don’t do,” the Pattersons, Hines, Lacours, and Dixons have always been connected to nature.
In the 1990s, Gabe and his siblings grew up playing and exploring outside. With his mother, Angela, and brothers, Aaron and Ryan (twins), they would dig bath-sized pits in the reddish-brown clay and fill them with water to bathe on hot summer days in Rowe located in the mountainous and mesa regions of northern New Mexico. Years before, his mother nicknamed him Gabe "Dusty" because he loved playing in the dirt.
About a month into the start of the second grade, maybe October 1998 at the age of 7, Gabe met Antonio Marquez. On this particular day, it was in the morning when Antonio arrived at his new school, named Eldorado Elementary, as a transfer student.
He was escorted by his parents and sisters and greeted at the classroom door by our teacher, Ms. England, who asked Gabe and another student to welcome Antonio and give him a grand tour of the classroom. Little did Antonio and Gabe know that their instant newfound friendship would define their formal pre-teen and early teenage years.
Antonio’s family, the Marquez’s, are multi-generational Mexican Americans of the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. Their livestock ranch is situated in Antonito, CO, right across the Colorado-New Mexico border. It was there that Gabe would spend most weekends with Antonio and his family doing the basics of maintaining a livestock ranch - feeding cattle, fixing fences, filling water troughs, etc. The daily tasks generally occurred in the early morning, leaving ample afternoons for Antonio and Gabe, or "Buck and Smokey," to explore the flatlands and creeks and connect with the world of nature around them. In the absence of smartphones and TV reserved only for nighttime movies at the grandparent’s house across the road, their imaginations of being cowboys and buckaroos in the West would run wild!!
