A Real Man Among Chaps : Ex-cowboy Reyes Serrano, 92, wishes those folks who’ve invaded his beloved Trabuco Canyon would go back to the city and quit giving him that fenced-in feeling.

Reyes Serrano’s life seems to call for a bit of soundtrack music, some theme that could rise as he rode his horse across the hills, fields and arroyos of Orange County, unimpeded by fences or other man-made clutter.

But what music? It shouldn’t be your typical twangy cowboy themes, because the 92-year-old Serrano was a real cowboy. Instead of quick-draw shootouts, he spent his days in the saddle or in the dust, in the cuss-awful work of castrating and branding cattle. That considered, the tremulous reverence of Marty Robbins’ trail ballads doesn’t quite set the scene either.

The music shouldn’t be rancheras or corridos : Although he’s of Spanish and Juaneno Indian heritage, he and his wife, Dora, were more apt to dance a jitterbug on their long Saturday nights in the old El Toro dance hall.

Maybe his soundtrack should be some previously unheard music--played on rattlesnakes and accordions, perhaps--because Serrano just isn’t what one expects an august representative of the grand old ranches to be.

“Without a horse, how am I going to get down to the . . . parade?” Serrano complained last Tuesday, moments after we met. “Get me a . . . mule, a jackass, something I can ride down there.”

Lady, his horse of the last 25 years, died two months ago, and there are few things more vexsome than a cowboy without a horse. He still keeps a saddle and other equine accouterments ready in a nailed-together shed, one of a ramshackle village of sheds and bird coops by the trailer home he and his 79-year-old wife share, some two miles up a rough dirt road paralleling Trabuco Creek.

“Are you saving my money to buy a horse?” he asks Dora, clearly not for the first time.

“Every time he gets his Social Security check, I have to save his money to get a horse,” she explained, going on to opine: “He needs a horse like he needs a hole in his head. Our oldest daughter is married to a cowboy, Gilbert Camarillo, and if he thought Reyes (pronounced Ray) needed a horse he’d have got him a horse a long time ago, but he doesn’t need a horse.”

Serrano, it turns out, hadn’t exactly ridden Lady for a couple of years. Mostly, Dora said, he’d worry about the horse’s feed supply running low, since he couldn’t go get more on his own. He has a rust-hued ’55 Chevy 3100 pickup that still runs, he says, though he doesn’t drive it anymore. He would like someday to be buried in it.

He broke his leg a few years back, and his right wrist is still healing from a tumble in January. As we spoke, he was sitting in a chair next to the stuffed head of the last deer he shot, at least four years ago.

“What has cooked the goose around this county is when all the people with cattle or a farm sold out to developers and moved up north,” Serrano said.

Dora joined in, “Oh, it just makes us sick when we drive anywhere because we don’t even know where we’re at anymore, it has changed so much.

“Then the people from the city come to the country so they can sleep late on the weekend. Then they say that with our dogs barking, the peacocks, roosters and everything they don’t get to sleep late. So why in the hell don’t they go back to the city? They come to the country and make a city out of the country then they bitch because they think that we make too much noise. And it wouldn’t be the country for us if we didn’t have animals. It just gets my blood boiling I get so provoked. Why don’t they go back?”

It’s a far cry from Serrano’s childhood, when, he said, “we were originally in El Toro with nothing but . . . Indians and rocks.”

Mostly of Indian blood himself, Serrano also had a Spanish great-great-grandfather who was alcalde of Los Angeles. His son, Serrano’s great-grandfather Jose Serrano, in 1846 was given a land grant of 11,000 acres in the area that is now Lake Forest. One of his five adobes remains, at Heritage Hill Historical Park in the city.

Following a withering drought in 1863-64, the property wound up in the hands of gringo bankers. Rather than owning the land he was born on at the turn of the century, Serrano wound up working it for most of his life. This never bothered him, he said. As long as he was able to ride his horse over the land, whoever owned it on a piece of paper was of no consequence.

He first tried roping a horse when he was 3. He didn’t have much use for school--”He’d only go on Fridays, to make the school week shorter,” Dora joked--and after working some farming jobs in his youth, he’d been a cowboy all his life. He rode for the Irvine, Mission Viejo and Moulton ranches, earning a reputation as the most rugged cowboy around.

“Hot damn, I took some rough rides!” he exclaimed. “Sometimes, the horse would wheel around and I’d be going that way and the horse would be going this way.” Along with breaking horses on the ranches, he did a bit of sport riding on wild horses and steers. He also loved hunting, finding an abundance of deer, bobcats, mountain lions (he calls them wildcats), rabbit, quail and other wildlife.

He may have been hell on animals sometimes, but he was the opposite with people. “Reyes would always be the one making jokes,” Dora said.

The two met in 1927, when he would come to the kitchen in El Modena (now Orange) where her grandmother made and served tamales. They married in 1929. Neither claims to now remember why it was that they fell in love with each other, though whatever it is, it’s still working. Serrano does like to joke, though, “The old man, he had his shotgun on me. Well, I got her and the shotgun.”

Dora had never even fed a chicken prior to marrying Serrano, “and suddenly there I was taking the steers to the stockyard at 5 in the morning. I never rode a horse but three times, but I could take care of a sick calf and fix fences and water troughs.”

They lived at a ranch house in Laguna Canyon for 23 years, otherwise living in Trabuco Canyon. Serrano retired from his last ranch, the Irvine, in 1967. Since then they’ve lived in three different rustic locations, a step ahead of the bulldozers. One of their mobile homes was lost to a fire, along with nearly all their possessions, including Serrano’s silver-studded saddle and Dora’s collected bits of local history for a book she’d intended to write.

Up until development forced them to move from their last bit of grazing land on the Robinson Ranch, they kept their own little herd of 50 head. “I didn’t even know how to buy beef,” Dora said. “We’d just butcher our own steer and lambs.”

One cow tried to return the favor. Serrano said: “We were helping a cow with a hard birth, and that’s how I broke my leg. The calf started coming out, just its nose. The cow was having a hard time, rolled over and hit me in the back and threw me in the ditch! Fell 20 feet into the rocks and water! Broken from here up to here!” he said, indicating a length of shin.

“The doc said amputate. He was sure surprised it healed up. This one guy was going to cut the leg off. I’d have been a one-legged man then! I told them to cut the leg off the . . . calf they just killed and put it on me,” he said with a chuckle.

“His great-grandchildren get such a bang out of him when he tells jokes,” Dora said.

If it weren’t for his arm and leg, Serrano would still be working all day, he said. As it is, he gets around the yard with a cane and feeds the dogs, chickens, pheasants and a peacock every day. When he can he still goes hunting, though it’s without much hope of finding anything these days.

Articles on Serrano usually mention his affection for Early Times whiskey. Asked if he was still allowed to have it, Dora said, “Yes, but I wish these articles would also mention I like chocolates.

“His whiskey is his medicine. He takes it every morning.”

“I smoke a cigar. I chew tobacco, everything,” Reyes said, by way of his prescription for a long life.

Moving out to his yard, Serrano has a view that is still largely unsullied by development, though development homes aren’t more than a hill away. Where he stands though, you can still take in the day at its own speed. The sun beats down and the slow, intermittent breeze feels like an answered prayer. His peacock screams.

Serrano points out his collected antlers, the white flowers climbing the hill, his water pump and garden with tomatoes and peppers. Just off to the right is the concrete crossing where the road crosses Trabuco Creek. During the storms earlier this year, Serrano had an entertaining time watching the waters wash four-wheel-drive vehicles downstream.

“One pickup went clear down there,” he pointed. “You know, he didn’t come after the . . . thing for two weeks. That was a mistake. When he come back somebody had come across in there and took all four wheels off.”

He slowly walks over to where his main shed is, pointing with his bandaged arm in to where his saddle and reins reside.

“I’ve got everything in there but money,” he said with a long laugh.