Bull riding is last, and of all the events it’s the only one truly dangerous. Bulls are difficult to ride: they’re broad-backed, loose-skinned, and powerful. They don’t jump balletically the way a horse does; they jerk and spin, and if you fall off, they’ll try to gore you with a horn, kick, or trample you. Bull riders are built like the animals they ride: low to the ground and hefty. They’re the tough men on the rodeo circuit, and the flirts. Two of the current champs are city men: Charlie Samson is a small, shy black from Watts, and Bobby Del Vecchio, a brash Italian from the Bronx who always throws the audience a kiss after a ride with a Catskill-like showmanship not usually seen here. What a bull rider lacks in technical virtuosity—you won’t see the fast spurring action of a saddle bronc rider in this event—he makes up for in personal flamboyance, and because it’s a deadlier game they’re playing, you can see the belligerence rise up their necks and settle into their faces as the bull starts his first spin. Besides the bull and the cowboy, there are three other men in the ring—the rodeo clowns—who aren’t there to make children laugh but to divert the bull from some of his deadlier tricks, and, when the rider bucks off, jump between the two—like secret service men—to save the cowboy’s life.
Rodeo, like baseball, is an American sport and has been around almost as long. While Henry Chadwick Was writing his first book of rules for the fledgling ball clubs in 1858, ranch hands were paying $25 a dare to a kid who would ride five outlaw horses from the rough string in a makeshift arena of wagons and cars. The first commercial rodeo in Wyoming was held in Lander in 1895, just nineteen years after the National League was formed. Baseball was just as popular as bucking and roping contests in the West, but no one in Cooperstown, New York, was riding broncs. And that’s been part of the problem. After 124 years, rodeo is still misunderstood. Unlike baseball, it’s a regional sport (although they do have rodeos in New Jersey, Florida, and other eastern states); it’s derived from and stands for the western way of life and the western spirit. It doesn’t have the universal appeal of a sport contrived solely for the competition and winning; there is no ball bandied about between opposing players.
Rodeo is the wild child of ranch work and embodies some of what ranching is all about. Horsemanship—not gunslinging—was the pride of western men, and the chivalrous ethics they formulated, known as the western code, became the ground rules for every human game. Two great partnerships are celebrated in this Oklahoma arena: the indispensable one between man and animal that any rancher or cowboy takes on, enduring the joys and punishments of the alliance; and the one between man and man, cowboy and cowboy.
Though rodeo is an individualist’s sport, it has everything to do with teamwork. The cowboy who “covers” his bronc (stays on the full eight seconds) has become a team with that animal. The cowboys’ competitive feelings amongst each other are so mixed with western tact as to appear ambivalent. When Bruce Ford, the bareback rider, won a go-round he said, “The hardest part of winning this year was taking it away from one of my best friends, Mickey Young, after he’d worked so hard all year.” Stan Williamson, who’d just won the steer wrestling, said, “I just drew a better steer. I didn’t want Butch to get a bad one. I just got lucky, I guess.”
Ranchers, when working together, can be just as diplomatic. They’ll apologize if they cut in front of someone while cutting out a calf, and their thanks to each other at the end of the day has a formal sound. Like those westerners who still help each other out during branding and roundup, rodeo cowboys help each other in the chutes. A bull rider will steady the saddle bronc rider’s horse, help measure out the rein or set the saddle, and a bareback rider might help the bull rider set his rigging and pull his rope. Ropers lend each other horses, as do barrel racers and steer wrestlers. This isn’t a show they put on; they offer their help with the utmost goodwill and good-naturedness. Once, when a bucking horse fell over backward in the chute with my husband, his friend H.A., who rode bulls, jumped into the chute and pulled him out safely.
Another part of the “westernness” rodeo represents is the drifting cowboys do. They’re on the road much of their lives the way turn-of-the-century cowboys were on the trail, but these cowboys travel in style if they can—driving pink Lincolns and new pickups with a dozen fresh shirts hanging behind the driver, and the radio on.
Some ranchers look down on the sport of rodeo; they don’t want these “drugstore cowboys” getting all the attention and glory. Besides, rodeo seems to have less and less to do with real ranch work. Who ever heard of gathering cows on a bareback horse with no bridle, or climbing on a herd bull? Ranchers are generalists—they have to know how to do many things—from juggling the futures market to overhauling a tractor or curing viral scours (diarrhea) in calves—while rodeo athletes are specialists. Deep down, they probably feel envious of each other: the rancher for the praise and big money; the rodeo cowboy for the stay-at-home life among animals to which their sport only alludes.
People with no ranching background have even more difficulty with the sport. Every ride goes so fast, it’s hard to see just what happened, and perhaps because of the Hollywood mythologizing of the West which distorted rather than distilled western rituals, rodeo is often considered corny, anachronistic, and cruel to animals. Quite the opposite is true. Rodeo cowboys are as sophisticated athletically as Bjorn Borg or Fernando Valenzuela. That’s why they don’t need to be from a ranch anymore, or to have grown up riding horses. And to undo another myth, rodeo is not cruel to animals. Compared to the arduous life of any “using horse” on a cattle or dude ranch, a bucking horse leads the life of Riley. His actual work load for an entire year, i.e., the amount of time he spends in the arena, totals approximately 4.6 minutes, and nothing done to him in the arena or out could in any way be called cruel. These animals aren’t bludgeoned into bucking; they love to buck. They’re bred to behave this way, they’re athletes whose ability has been nurtured and encouraged. Like the cowboys who compete at the National Finals, the best bulls and horses from all the bucking strings in the country are nominated to appear in Oklahoma, winning money along with their riders to pay their own way.
The National Finals run ten nights. Every contestant rides every night, so it is easy to follow their progress and setbacks. One evening we abandoned our rooftop seats and sat behind the chutes to watch the saddle broncs ride. Behind the chutes two cowboys are rubbing rosin—part of their staying power—behind the saddle swells and on their Easter-egg-colored chaps which are pink, blue, and light green with white fringe. Up above, standing on the chute rungs, the stock contractors direct horse traffic: “Velvet Drums” in chute #3, “Angel Sings” in #5, “Rusty” in #1. Rick Smith, Monty Henson, Bobby Berger, Brad Gjermudson, Mel Coleman, and friends climb the chutes. From where I’m sitting, it looks like a field hospital with five separate operating theaters, the cowboys, like surgeons, bent over their patients with sweaty brows and looks of concern. Horses are being haltered; cowboys are measuring out the long, braided reins, saddles are set: one cowboy pulls up on the swells again and again, repositioning his hornless saddle until it sits just right. When the chute boss nods to him and says, “Pull ’em up, boys,” the ground crew tightens front and back cinches on the first horse to go, but very slowly so he won’t panic in the chute as the cowboy eases himself down over the saddle, not sitting on it, just hovering there. “Okay, you’re on.” The chute boss nods to him again. Now he sits on the saddle, taking the rein in one hand, holding the top of the chute with the other. He flips the loose bottoms of his chaps over his shins, puts a foot in each stirrup, takes a breath, and nods. The chute gate swings open releasing a flood—not of water, but of flesh, groans, legs kicking. The horse lunges up and out in the first big jump like a wave breaking whose crest the cowboy rides, “marking out the horse,” spurs well above the bronc’s shoulders. In that first second under the lights, he finds what will be the rhythm of the ride. Once again he “charges the point,” his legs pumping forward, then so far back his heels touch b
ehind the cantle. For a moment he looks as though he were kneeling on air, then he’s stretched out again, his whole body taut but released, free hand waving in back of his head like a palm frond, rein-holding hand thrust forward: “En garde!” he seems to be saying, but he’s airborne; he looks like a wing that has sprouted suddenly from the horse’s broad back. Eight seconds. The whistle blows. He’s covered the horse. Now two gentlemen dressed in white chaps and satin shirts gallop beside the bucking horse. The cowboy hands the rein to one and grabs the waist of the other—the flank strap on the bronc has been undone, so all three horses move at a run—and the pickup man from whom the cowboy is now dangling slows almost to a stop, letting him slide to his feet on the ground.
Rick Smith from Wyoming rides, looking pale and nervous in his white shirt. He’s bucked off and so are the brash Monty “Hawkeye” Henson, and Butch Knowles, and Bud Pauley, but with such grace and aplomb, there is no shame. Bobby Berger, an Oklahoma cowboy, wins the go-round with a score of 83.
By the end of the evening we’re tired, but in no way as exhausted as these young men who have ridden night after night. “I’ve never been so sore and had so much fun in my life,” one first-time bull rider exclaims breathlessly. When the performance is over we walk across the street to the chic lobby of a hotel chock full of cowboys. Wives hurry through the crowd with freshly ironed shirts for tomorrow’s ride, ropers carry their rope bags with them into the coffee shop, which is now filled with contestants, eating mild midnight suppers of scrambled eggs, their numbers hanging crookedly on their backs, their faces powdered with dust, and looking at this late hour prematurely old.
We drive back to the motel, where, the first night, they’d “never heard of us” even though we’d had reservations for a month. “Hey, it’s our honeymoon,” I told the night clerk and showed him the white ribbons my mother had tied around our duffel bag. He looked embarrassed, then surrendered another latecomer’s room.
The rodeo finals in Oklahoma may be a better place to honeymoon than Paris. All week, we’ve observed some important rules of the game. A good rodeo, like a good marriage, or a musical instrument when played to the pitch of perfection, becomes more than what it started out to be. It is effort transformed into effortlessness; a balance becomes grace, the way love goes deep into friendship.
In the rough stock events such as the one we watched tonight, there is no victory over the horse or bull. The point of the match is not conquest but communion: the rhythm of two beings becoming one. Rodeo is not a sport of opposition; there is no scrimmage line here. No one bears malice—neither the animals, the stock contractors, nor the contestants; no one wants to get hurt. In this match of equal talents, it is only acceptance, surrender, respect, and spiritedness that make for the midair union of cowboy and horse. Not a bad thought when starting out fresh in a marriage.
1 The word dally is a corruption of the Spanish da la vuelta, meaning to take a turn, as with a rope around the saddle horn.
TO LIVE IN TWO WORLDS: CROW FAIR AND A SUN DANCE
June. Last night, alone on the ranch, I tried to pull a calf in a rainstorm. While attempting to hold a flashlight in one hand and a six-foot-long winchlike contraption called a “calf puller” in the other, I slipped in the mud and fell against the cow’s heaving flank. I yelled apologies to her over thunder so concussive that friends at a neighboring ranch claimed “it shook the handles loose from the coffee cups.” On my feet again, I saw rain undulate down hay meadows and three theaters of lightning making simultaneous displays: over Red Basin’s tipped-up mesas a thick root of lightning drilled straight down; closer, wide shoals of it flashed like polished car hoods all being lifted at once; and in the pasture where I fumbled with a chain, trying to fasten it around the calf’s emerging front feet, lightning snapped sideways like flowered vines shot from a cannon over my shoulders. In that cadaverous refulgence, the calf was born dead. The next morning, clear and cool after a rainless month of hundred-degree heat, I tightened my lariat around his hocks and, from the rubbery, purplish afterbirth they had impaled, dragged him behind the pickup out of the pasture.
Implicated as we westeners are in this sperm, blood, and guts business of ranching, and propelled forward by steady gusts of blizzards, cold fronts, droughts, heat, and wind, there’s a ceremonial feel to life on a ranch. It’s raw and impulsive but the narrative thread of birth, death, chores, and seasons keeps tugging at us until we find ourselves braided inextricably into the strand. So much in American life has had a corrupting influence on our requirements for social order. We live in a culture that has lost its memory. Very little in the specific shapes and traditions of our grandparents’ pasts instructs us how to live today, or tells us who we are or what demands will be made on us as members of society. The shrill estrangement some of us felt in our twenties has been replaced a decade or so later by a hangdog, collective blues. With our burgeoning careers and families, we want to join up, but it’s difficult to know how or where. The changing conditions of life are no longer assimilated back into a common watering trough. Now, with our senses enlivened—because that’s the only context we have to go by—we hook change onto change ad nauseam.
On a ranch, small ceremonies and private, informal rituals arise. We ride the spring pasture, pick chokecherries in August, skin out a deer in the fall, and in the enactment experience a wordless exhilaration between bouts of plain hard work. Ritual—which could entail a wedding or brushing one’s teeth—goes in the direction of life. Through it we reconcile our barbed solitude with the rushing, irreducible conditions of life.
For the fifth consecutive year I helped my neighbors Stan and Mary move their cattle through four 6,000-acre pastures. The first morning we rode out at three. A new moon grew slimmer and slimmer as light ballooned around us. I came on two burly Hereford bulls sniffing the cool breeze through the needles of a white pine, shaded even from moonlight as if the severe sexual heat of their bodies could stand no excess light. All week we moved cows, calves, and bulls across washes of ocher earth blooming with purple larkspur, down sidehills of gray shale that crumbled under our processional weight like filo pastry. Just before we reached the last gate, six hundred calves ran back; they thought their mothers, who had loped ahead, were behind them. Four of us galloped full tilt through sagebrush to get around and head off this miniature stampede, but when we did catch up, the calves spilled through us in watery cascades, back to the last pasture, where we had to start the gather all over again. This midseason roundup lasted six days. We ate together, slept, trailed cattle, and took turns bathing in the big galvanized tub at cow camp. At the end of the week, after pairing off each cow with the proper calf, then cutting them out of the herd—a job that requires impeccable teamwork and timing between rider and rider and rider and horse—we knew an intimacy had bloomed between us. It was an old closeness that disappears during other seasons, and each year, surprised afresh by the slightly erotic tint, we welcomed it back.
July. Last night from one in the morning until four, I sat in the bed of my pickup with a friend and watched meteor showers hot dance over our heads in sprays of little suns that looked like white orchids. With so many stars falling around us I wondered if daylight would come. We forget that our sun is only a star destined to someday burn out. The time scale of its transience so far exceeds our human one that our unconditional dependence on its life-giving properties feels oddly like an indiscretion about which we’d rather forget.
The recent news that astronomers have discovered a new solar system in-the-making around another sun-star has startled us out of a collective narcissism based on the assumption that we dominate the cosmic scene. Now we must make room for the possibility of new life—not without resentment and anticipation—the way young couples make room in their lives for a baby. By chance, this discovery came the same day a Kiowa friend invited me to attend a Sun Dance.
I have Indian neighbors all around me—Crow and Cheyenne to the north, Shoshone and Arapaho to the south—and though
we often ranch, drink, and rodeo side by side, and dress in the same cowboy uniforms—Wrangler jeans, tall boots, wide-brimmed, high-crowned hats—there is nothing in our psyches, styles, or temperaments that is alike.
Because Christians shaped our New World culture we’ve had to swallow an artificial division between what’s sacred and what’s profane. Many westerners, like Native Americans, have made a life for themselves out in the raw wind, riding the ceremony of seasons with a fine-tuned eye and ear for where the elk herd is hidden or when in fall to bring the cattle down. They’ll knock a sage hen in the head with a rock for dinner and keep their bearings in a ferocious storm as ably as any Sioux warrior, but they won’t become visionaries, diviners, or healers in the process.
On a Thursday I set off at two in the morning and drove to the reservation. It was dark when I arrived and quiet. On a broad plain bordered in the west by mountains, the families of the hundred men who were pledging the dance had set up camps: each had a white canvas tipi, a wall tent, and a rectangular brush arbor in a circle around the Lodge, where for the next four days the ceremony would take place. At 5 A.M. I could still see stars, the Big Dipper suspended in the northwest as if magnified, and to the east, a wide band of what looked like blood. I sat on the ground in the dark. Awake and stirring now, some of the “dancers” filed out of the Lodge, their star quilts pulled tightly over their heads. When they lined up solemnly behind two portable johns, I thought I was seeing part of the dance. Then I had to laugh at myself but at the same time understood how the sacredness of this ceremony was located not just in the Lodge but everywhere.
Sun Dance is the holiest religious ceremony of the Plains tribes, having spread from the Cheyenne to the Sioux, Black-foot, Gros Ventre, Assiniboine, Arapaho, Bannock, and Shoshone sometime after the year 1750. It’s not “sun worship” but an inculcation of regenerative power that restores health, vitality, and harmony to the land and all tribes.
The Solace of Open Spaces Page 9
