Contention, On Rodeo

Aritha van Herk on Rodeo and Writing

So much for playing rodeo. Dismount and recalibrate.

These are the choices: become a bull rider instead of a writer; become a writer instead of a bull rider. I knew better than to climb onto the back of a young bull. I did not have to be bucked off to decide that I would need to become a writer.

The rider/writer distinction. In linguistics, “this phenomenon is one of a family of phenomena known as Canadian Raising. ‘Traditional’ Canadian raising involves the systematic vowel quality distinction made for the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ when they are followed by a voiced vs. a voiceless consonant. Generally, they are realized as [ʌɪ] and [ʌʊ], respectively (or some similar variants), before a voiceless consonant” (Musicallinguist 2013).

What the holy hell have I gotten into? A neutralization? A dropped jaw? A de-voicing?

I think I might be dying, confronted now with the sameness of the words and the difference of the actions. On a cold day, which would be preferable? A diphthong or a voiceless consonant?

It is not possible to “play rodeo.” It is possible to play hockey, or to play tennis, but rodeo reaches beyond the usual arena of sport.

The temptation haunts us though, built by every child-sized cowboy hat and holster donned for dress-up, every cheesy movie featuring a hero on a saddle riding toward a rosy sunset.

There was a dirt ring beside the Battle River, loftily calling itself the “Edberg Rodeo Grounds.” Not much more than a few bleachers and a barbed-wire fence, the announcer’s booth ramshackle on its stilts while the ledge of the valley shadowed the horizon. Under the pocked snow silent in its waiting for summer, those yearning boys who wanted to be heroes, riders and not writers, left traces of skin and sweat. “They weren’t the kind to turn into husbands” (Stampede, 75).

I was an unsporty child, awkward and graceless, shy to a degree of introversion. I had no game plan in those planning stages, never believed that I would write a word about rodeos or chuckwagons or stampedes. Predictions cannot predict, although the idea of rodeo does offer a realm for heroic fantasies shattered by hard pan and cactus and hurt.

Rodeo has developed as a complex intermeshing of practice and homage to the history of a particular field of work. It measures an evolution of skill, a test of nerve, a resolve to fail, a communion of livestock and human. In a circumscribed contest of will or achievement, it tracks the independence of the two—animal and human—in concert and opposition.

If all sport is “a collision of pragmatism and mythology” (Wall 2012, 5), then where does rodeo fall on that spectrum? An outcome of the ranching and agricultural past when roundups and their gatherings involved the harsh burn of branding, castration, dehorning, butchering, it began as grueling work, far removed from the joyous rough and scramble of faux sport.

Rodeo now avoids those requirements, the chores of ranching separated from competition, and yet, its ever-present echoes do draw on mythology. Is this how that transformation happens, how work evolves into play and competition? Or is work enough in and of itself, and the sport of rodeo heralds an alternate version of jouissance and restraint?

Okay then, who has a stake in these competitions? The bronc? The steer? The bull? Being ridden isn’t part of his job description. A thorn on his back that he seeks to dislodge.

The audience, spectators slaking some yearning to witness a close-up of sweat transformed into contest?

The cowboy? Only if there’s money involved, or pride is at issue. Always more at stake than logic. This is a sport for risk and its redistribution, violence and spectacle, the potential of injury and gore, a contemporary demonstration of machismo.

Which can only insist on a detour into marianismo, not passivity and sexual purity either, but women in rodeo, their recent exclusion outrageously limited to barrel racing, the one event that is sheer skill.

“Beautiful Daring Western Girls and Mexican Señoritas in a Contest of Equine Skill,” says a poster from Pawnee Bill’s Historic Wild West (Jordan 1992, 189). They competed in racing, roping, trick riding, saddle bronc busting, from “1896, when Annie Shaffer rode a wild one” (189). Rodeos from the 1920s onward featured “ladies’ bronc riding, trick riding, and . . . cowgirls’ relay race” (191). Talk all you want of strength, agility, speed, the masculine realm of the unmeasurable, but those competitors were full-on rodeo.

The story is that ladies’ bronc riding was dropped in 1941 because the war in Europe limited rodeo stock and transportation resources. And the “ladies” were out.

Cowgirl is ridiculous. Horsewoman is closer, and in the working history of equine care, women did everything men did. Horses gave women liberty to move, to run, to feel wind in their hair.

So, rodeo has come to believe its own masculine myth. It subscribes to an idea of purity that infests its rituals, some trial of contention that moves from a task where the human is roped by time and the livestock has all the time in the world.

There are two dimensions to this sport: timed events or rough stock domination. Timed events include steer wrestling, barrel racing, and calf roping; rough stock events include bull, bareback, and saddle bronc riding. Although time judges every outcome.

How long does eight seconds stretch on a bucking horse or a bull? How long is too long when a barrel racer performs her cloverleaf pattern and dashes toward the red line? How long does it take to tie down a horned steer?

The rider: balanced and agile.

The horse: agile, intelligent, reading the human through pressured knees or a turn of wrist.

But there hums an answer. Aside from theatricality and product sponsorship, rodeo seals “sacred, ritual, and everyday practices” (Wall 2012, 9) in blood, chaps and desperate prayers. In a lacrosse of failure and capture, rodeo bakes yearning and horror, desire and repulsion into its contest. It is a sport balanced on a thin wire between adrenaline and terror.

We search for design now, a system that is not a voiceless consonant. Narratology be damned, we cherish our raw desire for structure, for rules.

Rodeo’s constraints are story, time, and sequence, although no predictability can capture the turn and twist of the calf, the spinning of the bull, “ritualized mayhem” (Wall 2012, 269) inevitable as bruising.

This rodeo presumes to be an exhibition of skill, different skills in every category, but a mirroring roustabout. This is an envelope sport, folded within itself, the competition of human and animal, human against animal, human against dust, human with dust, human and horse, or human with human. Rodeo rides as a hybrid of sport and spectacle. In Spanish, the preamble to slaughter, a sorting. Round-up and tie-down.

And the lingo of the competition complex, shorthand more than shorthand, the long hand and the ranch hand and the top hand and the cow hand, all using the tools at hand, gloved and knuckled and handy and hand-bagged and hand-picked and handled. Give the game a hand.

The language around rodeo is embedded in myth: agriculture, iconic, symbolism, rural roots. As for its status as official “sport,” rodeo sparks confusion and diffusion, not one specific competition but a mélange of events, riding, roping, wrestling, and not to be forgotten sideline sports, drinking and fighting and eating. Cowpunchers and ne’er-do-wells appear to go together, which leads to shooting and wrangling and wrestling, fueled by subsidiary hot sauce and passion.

Every male has at one time or another thought of himself as a cowboy. Self-delusion. Whereas “Cowboy Up!” is not always advice.

Rodeo requires not only human participants but animals, so it arises not from some pure “sport,” but from an agricultural conjunction of human and animal, then transformed into a spectator sport of how animals are mastered, which becomes a metaphor for human relationship to land and livestock.

How to frame that? Is rodeo an expression of nostalgia? Or is the “sport” of rodeo a much-maligned translation of some gladiatorial contest, bread and circuses corrupted to blood and subjugation? Augmenting the opinion that rodeos are nothing more than cruelty to animals, agriculture perverted into a spectacle of abuse.

Pain is not skill, but endurance. Let’s go for skill, despite rodeo being a sport lockstep with physical pain. Researchers are fond of comparing injury rates in sports: bull-riding has an injury rate ten times greater than football. Take that, pigskin.

Evaluate pain. Rodeo competitors hurt everywhere, in places unimaginable to most, injuries specific to the sport. Chronic results. Increased potential for pain because the factors of high speed and large bodies of mass in motion combine to create kinetic energy with a definite potential for serious injury.

Gory fascination.

Head, face, knee, and shoulder are the most common parts of the body to take the brunt. Hand and wrist fractures, joint instability, elbow degenerative disease, severe ligamentous injury, public diastasis, dislocation, rope burn, concussion, whiplash, inadvertent digit amputation. That would be losing a finger. I think I might be dying.

The reconstructive surgeons rub their hands.

Statistics declare that 100% of bull-riders get injured.

One repeated chant: “The rodeo cowboy is grateful for medical assistance.”

Stop. Avert your eyes. Is this a sport or masochism? Masochism and machismo, definite cousins. The rugged individual, but not individual, accompanied by animal. Domination and its outcome. Competition and its performance. The blue ribbon ride. The big cheque win.

Or a more complex deduction: “[R]anching culture has been appropriated as entertainment in the form of rodeos” (Herbert 2017, 113). Ranching culture. Not an oxymoron. Leave that phrase there.

While rodeo performs as a reference joke to measure experience, an idiom indicating that someone is not naive or inexperienced. Note the double negative: “not inexperienced.”

But it came out of the mouth of a woman, that phrase, meant to underline Joan Crawford’s adamant toughness in Mommie Dearest. Faye Dunaway, playing Crawford in Frank Perry’s 1981 adaptation, says, “Don’t FUCK with me fellas! This ain’t my first time at the rodeo!” And there it lands, in common culture, experience narrowing its eyes against a greenhorn, or a deceiver, colloquial calling out of bullshit. In Hollywood no less, capital of bullshit.

Fugitive. This is not my first rodeo. It will not be my last.

I always wanted to be a tough girl/woman. I was a tough girl, with practice as a cow hand, a tractor hand, a hand meant to put my hands to use stacking haybales, stone-picking, and driving a tractor so old that it hardly qualified as functional.

And I am a tougher woman, having had the equivalent of quite a few dustups, been kicked, beaten, and bruised, emotionally and psychologically. Physically, I’ve bitten the dust, wrenched my shoulder, torn a ligament or two, and landed ignominiously. All without the applause of an eight second ride or a perfect tie-down, but those are male grails. Although I was never bucked off, that dread summary, B.O., never that impetuous or grounded. Was not summarily forced to dismount.

Sam Steele, training would-be NWMP recruits who were bucked off, shouting at them as they lay in the dust: “Who gave you permission to dismount?”

Dismount? I thought I was dying.

So as a settler-colonist feminist, bookworm, text nerd, page addict, grammar queen, what is it with me and rodeo? I try to trace this fascination, my own debate with its masculine slant and violent abruptness, its contest between human and animal, nostalgia and carnival. The tempting costume, a chance to wear jeans and boots, to cross lines, and yes, to celebrate.

I never won a race. Never been bucked off. But I’ve been hooked on the horn of language, and there I hang, waiting for a rodeo clown to rescue me. So I can keep writing.