{"id":2459008,"date":"2020-05-29T21:36:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-30T03:36:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/news\/tony-vagneur-dont-sell-the-cows\/"},"modified":"2020-05-29T21:36:00","modified_gmt":"2020-05-30T03:36:00","slug":"tony-vagneur-dont-sell-the-cows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/tony-vagneur-dont-sell-the-cows\/","title":{"rendered":"Tony Vagneur: Don\u2019t sell the cows"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText DropCap\">Almost every morning he awakened, it was the same view, from the day of his birth until he was almost 80. No matter what direction he looked, across lush fields of green or up steep mountain hillsides, there was not a neighbor to be seen.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">Not many of us can claim such allegiance to our roots. The night before he died, he called his best friend and said, \u201cWhatever you do, don\u2019t sell the cows.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">He was a man I never really knew, but should have taken the time to visit with. Oh, I knew him from when I was very young and was around when he died in 2006. It\u2019s that period in between that never quite got filled in.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">One of his sons was a good childhood friend and we spent time at each other\u2019s houses, the usual kid stuff, and I helped them with their cattle occasionally, mostly trailing them around the Red Mountain range. If I remember correctly, he was a strict disciplinarian, but wasn\u2019t beyond pulling practical jokes on his son and me. When he knew he had you, he\u2019d give you a sideways look with a half-smile across his face as he walked off.<\/p>\n<div class=\"row\">\n<div class=\"col\" readability=\"6\">\n<div class=\"row at-donation at-donation-mobile p-0\" readability=\"7\">\n<div class=\"col-xl-4 p-2\">\n<div data-bg=\"url(https:\/\/cdn.aspentimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2020\/03\/AT-logo-white.png)\" class=\"p-0 mt-2 mb-2 h-75 text-center rocket-lazyload\">\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.aspentimes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/5\/2020\/03\/AT-logo-white.png\" class=\"logo m-0 p-0 invisible\"><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><h3 class=\"d-inline mr-3\">Support Local Journalism<\/h3>\n<p><button class=\"btn d-inline\" type=\"button\" onclick=\"handleDonationButtonClickMidArticle()\">Donate<\/button><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">I\u2019d ride my horse to their house, a couple miles up Woody Creek, where my buddy and I would play trucks on a great, black earth hillside made just for such shenanigans. With garden hoes, we carved roads, turn-arounds, switchbacks and had it going on for our big Tonka trucks. It was the best car and truck playground in the valley.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">My instructions were to be home before dark, and on those days when it was getting a little late, I\u2019d cluck my big, black horse Spades into a full-on gallop and head for the house through the hayfields, paying little attention to irrigation ditches or other obstacles. In retrospect, that powerful steed took better care of me than I probably deserved. Sometimes we\u2019d have to stop and open a gate or two, which didn\u2019t please either one of us.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">His family went back to 1900 in Woody Creek and was part of what Billy Grange jokingly refers to as the Aosta Mafia, meaning his ancestors came from Val D\u2019Aosta, in northern Italy. Like most of those folks from Aosta who bought or settled land in the valley, they knew how to farm and irrigate and turned good farmland into excellent farms and ranches.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">You\u2019d think the Italian heritage might have made a kinship between Woody Creek families, but the independent streaks were fierce. Even so, the man and his wife were friends with my parents for years, and it seemed like they\u2019d occasionally trade off dinner at each other\u2019s houses. My first very late night, as a young child, was accomplished at this man\u2019s house, where for some odd reason, as our parents played cards around the dining room table, we were allowed to stay up until about 1:00 a.m. Funny the things you remember.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">Woody Creek was a busy ranching community when I was a kid, particularly in the fall when grain needed to be threshed and potatoes picked. The threshing machine traveled from ranch-to-ranch, and the ranchers followed it, helping each other bring in the sheaves of oats from the fields.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">Each rancher brought at least one wagon and team of horses to haul the oats to the threshing machine, and if this man was at our ranch, he\u2019d let me drive his team. I was 10 or 11 years old. His wife congregated with the other women all morning, preparing a big midday dinner for all the hands working on the threshing crew.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">The last time I saw him was at City Market in El Jebel, maybe in 2005. He and his wife were in an aisle to my right as I passed, and for whatever reason, I didn\u2019t stop. Of course, I\u2019d hardly seen either one of them since the 1960s, so it kind of made sense, at the time, to pass them by.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">He\u2019d sold the family ranch in the late 1990s, getting the money out before inheritance taxes and potential family squabbles developed. Money, for people who had struggled for decades to keep everything together, suddenly they had a lot of it. And for him, it didn\u2019t seem to bring happiness, or any sense of relief or elation. If anything, it compromised his sense of independence, having to pay for things he\u2019d previously managed on his own.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">The night before, he called his best friend, another life-long valley rancher, laying out some of his frustrations and tied himself to the land and the ranching life he missed so much, by saying, \u201cNo matter what happens and whatever you do, don\u2019t sell the cows.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText\">The next day, he walked up to the gate at the edge of the subdivision in which he lived, gun in hand, and ended the pain.<\/p>\n<p class=\"STND-STND BodyText Tagline\">Tony Vagneur writes here on Saturdays and welcomes your comments at <a href=\"mailto:ajv@sopris.net\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ajv@sopris.net<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/news\/tony-vagneur-dont-sell-the-cows\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Almost every morning he awakened, it was the same view, from the day of his birth until he was almost 80. No matter what direction he looked, across lush fields of green or up steep mountain hillsides, there was not a neighbor to be seen. Not many of us can claim such allegiance to our [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2459008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-local-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-17 05:18:03","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley&#039;s Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2459008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2459008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2459008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2459008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2459008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2459008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}