Aerie InternationaL - Missoula County Public Schools

melanie brown
centennial, colorado, usa
An ImmIgrAnt’S guIde to ColorAdo
I was promised horses. I remember this distinctly.
My dad knew as well as I that moving isn’t easy, especially to a place
so very far away, so he would cushion it with promises such as these.
Thoughts of horses and mountain ranches made the process of tearing
away from my homeland all that
more bearable, so I complied. My
visions were of a log cabin situated
on the hips of the foothills, with
gentle mares that would lean their
heads in my window in the heat of
summer mornings. Of dirt roads
and tractors, of cattle and barbed
wire. But mostly horses, of course.
Colorado is not all horses and
ranches. Our house turned out to squat in a quiet patch of suburb that
seems a subtle copy of the very neighborhood from which I had come.
It is a pale ivory and not made of logs, and the grass lives in trim, green
patches like quilt squares, not in long stalks that whisper to my elbows.
And the mountains? Well, I see them. They loom in the distance like
storm clouds held forever at bay. They are dark and brooding as they
sit there, their tips just visible above the houses in front of ours, and I
wonder daily if they might be up to something.
There are no horses in suburbia. As I dreamed on our migration west
of this new home, my head vibrating against the window as plain after
great plain slid by, I could see horses trotting even through
neighborhoods, even through towns and cities. I imagined taking my
gelding to school to pick up groceries. Who needed a license when I
could ride The Black Stallion, Strider, Trigger? Hell, even Mister Ed
would have worked. But there were no horses, no such luck. It was not
the Colorado I was promised. The wilderness, the cowboys, the romance
of wind and weather—where were they? The rivers of concrete, the
herds of houses and brittle street lamps had herded them off, perhaps
into the folds of mountain. Beyond my sight, in any case. I received a
bundle of letters from my old Girl Scout Troup asking what I had named
my horse, what color it was, how fast it went; they had been well
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My visions were of a log
cabin situated on the hips
of the foothills, with gentle
mares that would lean their
heads in my window in the
heat of summer mornings.