Civil War Reenactment - Lone Tree with Horse / The Campesino

This tree presented lots of photographic opportunities.  The setting and characters in this frame reminded me of something that happened while I was living in Old Mexico.

I hadn't been there long - just a month or so - when on a long night walk in the country a friend and I stopped by a lone adobe hut among the cultivated sorghum fields.  This was near El Ejido Charcos in the state of Coahuila, and in that region back in 1980 you didn't have to go far to encounter areas without electricity or running water.

The stars were bright enough to guide our steps, and we could see that a man was sitting in the doorway of the hut with a small fire almost burned down to the coals.  This man was a middle-aged campesino, and since there was no electricity he had a small battery-powered transistor radio softly playing ranchera music.  As we approached he offered us a seat on a log across the fire from him and we exchanged greetings while he turned the radio off.  It must have been unusual to see a couple of white guys way out there in the dark of the Mexican night.

Soon we were engaged in light conversation, which in a few minutes grew into a deeper discussion of the lore of the area.  After a while our eyes were fully adjusted to the added light of the fire, which cast an orange glow around the shadow of the campesino on the side of his hut.  A tree close behind us was silhouetted against the starry sky.

Just then a guy on a horse pulled up, dismounted and tied the steed's reigns loosely on a branch of the tree.  The vaquero joined us on the log, removed his hat, and muttered a low greeting to everyone before engaging in small shoptalk with the campesino.  This scene was growing more impressive, because now there is a horse off to the side and a cowboy sitting next to us describing his long day with the dust and the cows.  I thought aloud to my friend how we had stumbled upon a scene that could have been plucked straight out of 1880 instead of 1980.

In a few minutes it became apparent that the two Mexicans had a routine and that we might be intruding, so I excused us to walk back through the star-lit trails to my new home.  But it's a scene that I've thought of often since, when we visited a place that time forgot.