This stream, normally a trickle of water, became a raging torrent after a cloud burst in the hills above and had dug out a deep ravine at the bottom of the garden. In 1916 it swept away Cruz Grande, a house downstream from El Rinc n, that belonged to Don Alfredo's brother John, drowning him and all but one of the six people in it at the time. The house had been threatened by floods before but, as I have said, the Benitz's were not easily frightened. The road that runs past the entrances to La California and Las Tres Lagunas is paved. The old houses have been replaced by smaller, more manageable ones.
Most people have telephones and television.
The cumbersome farm machinery of my youth that replaced horse drawn ploughs and sowers has become smaller, neater and more powerful. Generations have grown, died and scattered. Yes, things have changed, but, looking from a house on land that was once part of La California and is still Benitz property, across a dip to the woods that hide Las Tres Lagunas, watching dust raised by vehicles on dirt roads floating across the changing browns and golds and greens, clouds marking the curve of the earth as they wander above, listening to the noisy teros and the owls, to the talk of weather and farm machinery and stock it doesn't seem so very different. The Benitz descendants gathered in Las Rosas, seeing La California, Las Tres Lagunas, Los Algarrobos and other properties their forebears created, eating asados, watching rodeos and dancing should not find it too difficult to picture the plains, wild and lonely as they were a hundred and twenty five years ago.