DWI memorial a field of tears

Tears drip on this patch of hardscrabble central New Mexico desert land -- tears in steel, tears in concrete. A mother’s tears.

This is Sonja Britton’s field of shattered dreams -- a unique national memorial to victims of drunk drivers budding from four acres of scrubby grass dotted with cholla cactus and yucca.

Victims like Britton, who lost her only son when a drunk driver motoring down the wrong side of a road near Durango, Colo., plowed head-on into a car, which in turn struck the motorcycle her son was driving.

Monty Bryan Britton -- “Butch” to his family -- died instantly on Aug. 18, 1991. He left behind a wife, young son, his father and a sister.

And a grieving mother who slumped into a two-year funk.

“I was just kind of a void. I did seem to function all right, but I was just kind of out of it,” says Britton.

But this 5-foot-3 dynamo pulled out, immersing herself in drunk driving prevention programs at schools in town, including her alma mater, Moriarty High School. She became a member of the Torrance County DWI Council when she thought that drunk driving victims and their survivors needed to be recognized.

“When you lose a son or daughter in a war, there’s a purpose to that, but when you lose a son or daughter to a drunken driver, there’s no purpose to that,” Britton says.

She told her fellow council members about her idea, and received their support. Not-for-profit bylaws were drawn up in 1994. The Memorial of Perpetual Tears-New Mexico National DWI Victims’ Memorial was off the ground -- but ground is what Britton needed.

The owner of Mike’s Friendly Store stepped in.

“Sonja had been working on this project for a long time, and one day she said she would like to have that built in Moriarty, but would like the property donated,” Mike Anaya says. “I thought it was a worthwhile project and would bring people into the Moriarty area.”

Anaya, wife Mary and brother Ralph Anaya decided to donate the four acres about three years ago, some 50 yards north of Interstate 40 in Moriarty. Other donations trickled in -- money, building materials, labor, architects’ designs. And almost $1 million in funding from the state and some $92,000 from the city of Moriarty, which has adopted the memorial as a public project. The city of Albuquerque has kicked in $50,000.

The total so far: more than $1.7 million.

The donations include $10,000 from Jay Boydston, a Moriarty car dealer whose parents were killed by a drunk driver in 1988 on I-40, just west of Tucumcari.

“They were headed east and he [the westbound drunken driver] decided to use the restroom and got off the interstate in the middle and got back on the east side headed west,” Boydston says.

“My parents were behind a big truck and when they came from behind it, they were hit head-on,” he says. “The drunk, he burned to death in the car he was driving.”

The names of Joy and Lucille Boydston and Monty Bryan “Butch” Britton are engraved in foot-square granite tiles, each embedded in three concrete benches at the memorial’s southern portion.

“I still haven’t found peace, to tell you the truth,” Boydston says. “I don’t think the families of victims ever find peace.”

Boydston says he visits the memorial and feels a sense of pride.

“I go out there and I talk to my parents and, I don’t know,” he says as his thoughts trail off.

A poem by Monty’s mother adorns his memorial: “Pieces of you and pieces of me flow from the past to eternity.”

The benches of blood-red, curved cinder block walls, which are in front of a two-acre field of more than 900 powder-coated gray, unmarked plate-steel memorial markers, each about knee-high.

“These are made of steel and the reason we chose steel is because of the way people die,” Britton says. “They’re literally killed by a steel machine. In fact, we’ve done a lot of things here in steel for that very reason.”

Britton designed the markers, each topped with an S-curve, a portion of one curve representing the lower part of the eye. Tears are cut into the marker, falling from a corner of the eye.

The “Field of Markers” represents five years of drunk driving deaths in New Mexico.

The number of markers is updated each year -- some are removed if the latest year’s tally falls, some added if it rises.

“It perpetually represents five years, so every year it’s adjusted,” Britton says.

The field has room for about 1,500 markers. “I hope we don’t have to fill them,” Britton says. Her ultimate goal -- no markers.

“Some day, we will have a place where children can play,” she says. “We won’t have any deaths by DWI someday. That’s going to happen.”

Three hollow metal cylinders stand near the benches, ranging from about 5 feet to 3 feet tall, each about a foot in diameter.

“This is a memorial for unknown victims. We don’t know who they are or how they died. There’s no one here to represent them or recognize them,” Britton says.

“Three columns represent the family unit and also represent the community as a support,” she says.

And the glass atop each cylinder?

“Shattered hearts,” Britton says.

Another sculpture to the west sits on a raised bed rimmed by concrete curbing in the shape of a tear.

A bronze titled “Nesting” depicts a woman, eyes partially shut, holding her sleeping daughter to her breast. The woman clutches a book she’s been reading to the girl.

The pair sit on a curved, pink flagstone bench.

“It depicts a mother’s love so perfectly,” Britton says.

The northern half of the memorial, separate from the southern part by a parking lot, will venerate DWI victims across the rest of the nation.

“I could’ve stopped with New Mexico, but I just kept thinking, ‘You know, there’s no reason why.’ We’ve got the room, why can’t we just represent the whole nation?” Britton says.

Heidi Castle, vice president of communications for Mothers Against Drunk Driving in Dallas, says that “we aren’t aware of anything else that is on the same scale as what New Mexico is doing.”

“It’s such a great way to honor victims of drunk driving,” she says.

Britton says she needs $1.5 million for the national memorial, which is to include landscaping, meandering paths and more curved red walls with plaques for each state and the number of each state’s DWI fatalities for the current year.

“I had a lady from California contact me and wanting me to come there and build one and I said, ‘Honey, I have my hands full building this one and it’s going to be national,’ ” Britton says.

Crews are completing a 2,139-square-foot visitors’ center.

“We’re going to have video systems where we can play streaming videos about DWI. We can play victims’ testimonials; we’ll constantly have something going,” Britton says.

“I’d like to see the states join us. Send us any material that they would like for us to display, to show on our videos, to have available for the public that stops here. I want this to become a center for DWI information and the states’ efforts against it,” she says.

Willie Marquez, director of the state Corrections Department’s corrections industries division, says prisoners serving time for DWI at the Southern New Mexico Correctional Facility will be making oak furniture for the building.

Britton designed the tables, benches, chairs, bookshelf and pamphlet rack, he says.

“All the furniture is going to have the teardrop design that is on the [memorial] markers,” Marquez says.

Britton envisions a sculpture of a tree -- a weeping willow -- in the building.

She also would like to have a sculpture inside representing injured victims and their caretakers. She also foresees an outdoor fountain with a sculpture.

“I have lots of dreams. Lots of dreams,” Britton says. “I don’t stop dreaming about this.”