In the Long Ago & Used To Be

What do you see when you look at his face Weather beaten & etched by hard work’s steady pace? You see a broken down drunken old fool I see a vaquero, a cowboy old school These cattle, those horses, this land are his life They helped him provide for his children & wife The Vail brothers, Escalantes, Leons, Acosta, Andrada From the X-9 to Del Lago, Rincon Creek to La Posta Quemada Lopez, Etheridge, De La Ossa & Daly, all hard working men Holding strong to the traditions of a life from way back when From the base of the Rincons, their cattle once freely roamed These Cowboys are the lifeblood of this valley we call home I looked up to these men & others like them when I was a youth They taught me to work hard, stand tall & always speak the truth They rail at the developers who never seem to keep their word Praying that they’ll still have enough ground to run their herds They watch as suburbia comes flooding into a valley once pristine As ticky tacky houses turn good grazing lands into an urban scene The word out on the city streets is that the cowboy way is gone But as long as there are horses then the Cowboy will ride on Somewhere up in New River, a cowboy still rides out tonight To gaze out over a moonlit range, far from the city’s blight In Cascabel, an Old Vaquero & his grandchild working the pen Are doing their part to see that the cowboy way never ends What do you see when you look in his face? Weather beaten & etched by hard work’s steady pace? You see a tattered old man, shaky hands & blurry gaze I see the heroes of my youth, hear the tales of the glory days When cattle outnumbered people & Cowboys still roamed free Back when the West was Wild, back in the long ago & used to be