A million bucks.

 

Like so many things I’ve seen and done since coming to America, going to a rodeo is a a life experience. It’s one of those events whose scenes are familiar to people who’ve never been within 6,000 miles of one, and therefore, one which has the potential to surprise an outsider. I can’t even recall why I’m familiar with the images of rodeo. I can’t remember seeing one in a film or anything. It must just be one of those things which pops up from time to time, but I can’t for the life of me think where. So, as a newcomer to the culture of the American west, it was more than handy to have Dustin and Kimberley along with, who- unlike me- know one end of a horse from the other.

 The California Mid-State Fair, which came to an end yesterday, almost has to be seen to be believed by anyone who isn’t familiar with such things. You find yourself asking if there’s not something more than a bit strange when Kid Rock, Maroon 5 and Lady Antebellum perform at an event which awards prizes for the best jar of pickled eggs. But this is the United States. Where else, one asks, is chocolate-covered bacon available? Where else would otherwise-sane members of the community take a perfectly good  corn-dog, dip it in chocolate and cover it with sprinkles?

Actually, it appears I’ve been pronouncing the name of the country wrongly all this time. If I heard him correctly, the announcer at the rodeo finals, held on the last Saturday of the fair, pronounced it

“Theee HyooNaaaaaahded States

hawwwve

Ha-Ma-Rah-Kuh”

And if you don’t say it with a tearfully reverential wobble in the back of the throat you aren’t doing it correctly. He was, I have to say, very psyched up, and he was enjoying himself. But nobody talks like that. Not even people I met at the airport in Atlanta (the ones who pronounce the word “Order” with three syllables) talked like that.

At first glance, the rodeo was shaping up to be exactly what I’d been afraid it might turn out to be. There was a slightly worrying superabundance of cowboy hats. Which was only to be expected, I suppose; nothing wrong with that. And then they had the national anthem, which is a normal part of public events here, and there’s nothing much wrong with that either- the singer was good and she remembered the words, which is more than some others manage.

But they started playing the sort of country-rock music which barely manages to stop short of saying that failing to be an American is pretty much the worst sin someone can commit in the eyes of God, that if you aren’t an American you’ve got it coming good and hard, and that if you are an American, you’d better be as durned good an American as the singer is, and that’s a pretty high bar to clear because as far as he was concerned anyone from east of Dallas or north of St. Louis was no better than a Canadian or a communist. It’s strange to hear modern patriotic music. This is probably because most British patriotic music was written in the days of the Empire. It’s entirely probable that American visitors to Britain a hundred years ago found Land of Hope and Glory equally odd, and no wonder.

The reason they were playing the record was because a sky-diver was descending upon the arena, bringing with him a truly massive flag- “Old Glory”, as the announcer put it, using no fewer than 6 syllables to do so. It being Armed Forces Day at the fair, a squad of US servicemen were on hand to catch the flag before it touched the ground. The skydiver, the flag and the soldiers and marines all came together in an instant; disparate elements which started out eighty yards apart and yet were all where they had to be, exactly at the right moment and not half a second before. At this point, a corner was turned; the spectacle had begun. It was no longer just weird foreign pageantry; it was a real show.

The events started soon afterwards. You know, I assume, that rodeo events are based on the skills used in cattle ranching. Before about 1880, cattle were grazed on the “open range”; that is to say, allowed to wander over hill and dale in a landscape without fences, for most of the year. In the springtime they would be rounded up so that young calves could be branded and so mature animals could be sorted out for sale. Because the cattle were allowed to roam more or less freely, and because they are by nature herd animals, it would take skilled work by mounted ranch-hands to sort out one owner’s cattle from another’s. Not only did a cowboy have to persuade a cow to do what he wanted it to do, and go where he wanted to put it, the tool he had to use in accomplishing this task is a horse. In short, he or she had to have both the knowledge and the skills.

The techniques used in sorting out cattle (known as “cutting”) and roping individual steers, as well as horsemanship skills were showcased at the rodeo we were watching.We watched teams of three riders separate three steers from a herd of thirty, according to the number the judges called, and drive them into a pen without getting any incorrectly-numbered cows mixed in.

I apologise; I’ve just re-read that paragraph and it sounds about as exciting as watching tortoises play chess. This happens fast. I mean, really fast. It’s a race. The winning time was just over forty seconds, for a team of three to get about a ton of prime brisket from the safety of the herd into the corral fifty yards away .
“You having fun?” Dustin asked. Damn right I was. It’s always pleasant to see something done well, when you can’t do it at all, but this was fast, and it was real. No artificial aids; no computers. It was people, horses and cattle.

We saw barrel racing. Competitors- this was an all-female event- have to take their horses around three barrels. The horses have to be agile and they move like greased lightning. The dirt from the arena floor sprayed up in waves from the hooves. This is a high-octane event; the horses best known for competing in barrel races are of the American Quarter breed, which have been known to reach speeds off 55mph over short distances.

Between events we were treated to a performance by Tomas Garcilazo.  Garcilazo is probably the best in the world at what he does, and what he does is known as la Charreria. Without going too far off the point, he and his friends, as his horses are known in the literature, perform manoevres similar to dressage, incorporating skillful use of the rope. He has performed for presidents of Mexico and the United States, on Broadway and for the Disney, Will Rogers and Buffalo Bill Wild West tours in Europe. It was one of those acts which probably had to be seen to be appreciated; it was like ballet. They guy was throwing a rope in a loop so big his horse could walk through it with him on her back.

This brings me onto my final point here, which is to do with the relationship between all of the people and all of the animals involved. We saw horses ridden hard and we saw steers roped when they most certainly did not want to be. The most spectacular and dangerous events in the rodeo involved determined men trying to stay on top of bulls and horses who were equally determined that the men should be spending the rest of the evening flat on their backs in the dirt. It has been called “the most dangerous eight seconds in sport”; and I think calling it eight seconds is giving the cowboys the best of it. Rodeos have been fairly criticised in the past for endangering the welfare of the animals through some of the methods they have used.

For example, my mother, who has a keen interest in animal rights, had heard that they tied the bull’s nads together to make them buck and said it was cruel. I agree; it would be, but I have the opportunity to reassure her on three counts:

1) You could see that they weren’t tied. They were swinging around back there like a couple of grapefruit in a towel. There was something called a flank strap. This consists of a length of rope loosely  tied around the bulls’ abdomen. This was not tightly fastened; it has to flop around to annoy the bull into trying to shake it off.

2) Both the bulls and the broncos are valuable stock animals; applying undue pressure to sensitive areas is not in the interests of the animals’ owners, if they want to be able to breed from them in years to come.

3) Speaking from a masculine perspective, if I thought anyone had a tighter-than-appropriate grip on the Potts family jewels, top of my List Of Things Not To Do Next would be “Thrash around violently.”

In any case, although I saw animals treated in uncompromising ways, possibly even roughly, it was no rougher than the way animals treat each other; I would guess it was no different to watching a dog herd sheep. All of the animals walked away, which is more than you can say for the Grand National meeting, where horse fatalities average 3 per year according to researchers at Anglia Ruskin University. I’m not saying rodeo is safer for animals than horse racing; it probably isn’t. What I am saying is that I didn’t see animals in distress. I didn’t see animals abused. There’s no doubt that the broncos and the bulls were less than happy to have a guy on their back, but they were given free rein to express their displeasure and they made sure he didn’t stay there too long. The cowboys would have ached a bit the day afterwards; the bulls, not so much.

Which brings me back to what I was saying about Tomas Garcilazo, whose friends will do all he asks of them. Walk backwards, kneel down, roll over, bow, curtsey, step through a spinning rope. What we saw on Saturday night was an old-fashioned thing, perhaps a little out of time. Cowboys don’t drive herds to Abilene any more, and the skills are more to show what can be done, rather than what is routinely done.

It’s not entirely nice. It does appeal to our base instincts, a lust for speed and a will to win, which doesn’t always bring out the best in us. Perhaps if rodeo didn’t already exist today, we wouldn’t take the trouble to invent it. But it would be utterly impossible for it ever to have existed without the humans’ affinity with the animals who make the show. Enjoy the photos:

California Mid-State Fair Rodeo Finals VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL