I don’t know a lot about rodeo. This was my first experience in person and, frankly, it looks incredibly painful. However, I was mesmerized watching the bareback and bronco riding, calf wrestling and roping, team roping, barrel racing, and bull riding. I was particularly amazed by the little humans hanging on to very angry, thousand-pound animals for dear life and the muscular horses blitzing across the mud while precisely guiding a frantic calf or boxing in a bronco.
The bronco riding is absurd and exciting, as a highly agitated horse takes his rider all over the arena, flapping like a rag doll. I preferred it to the main event, bull riding. Bull riding just doesn’t look as spectacular, but it’s obvious that it is incredibly dangerous and, on top of that, rather uncomfortable. Some of the bulls, after easily dislodging their riders, lurched around the enclosure waiting for any poor fellow to stand too long on the ground.
We spent the whole sunny afternoon enjoying the rodeo and its trappings. The announcer reminded us again and again that cowboys are as ‘merican as you can get, and we are all proud, god-fearing ‘mericans, and wouldn’t we all enjoy a nice big Dodge pickup truck? Rodeos ritualize a lot of American ideals like the Noble Cowboy and the Hardworking Rancher, even while the source of these ideals have all but disappeared.
Anyhow, if you’d like to experience a little bit of what these men and women go through, I suggest tying a barrel to your back bumper, then get on it and have your crazy uncle drive you through the woods. You could also stand at the top of your staircase, close your eyes, and fall straight backwards. What you will feel afterwards must certainly be what these folks are feeling tonight.
This evening we gave Rich and Eleanor a date night. Danine and I took the girls to a drive-in movie. It was their first, I believe, and mine. I used to try and watch them at the stoplight on Route 1 in Alexandria until they turned the drive-in into a multiplex. Movies are better with sound. We watched the Spiderwick Chronicles, which was a fun adventure along the lines of Goonies or Gremlins from the 80s. The girls liked it too.
February 19, 2008 at 2:09 am
Elise and Emma look great in those cowgirl hats! The drive-in sounded good. My memories of drive-ins include mosquitoes which I’ll bet you didn’t have.
February 19, 2008 at 4:29 pm
My drive-in memories include piling into …was it the red Golf?… with Heather & Shannon up at the lake – we went to the Malta Drive-In. I think we saw The Truman Show. It felt like such a “big kid” thing to do.
Glad to see that you haven’t missed winter entirely – I see the snowball photos in the post above.