Suburban Cowboys

Once upon a time, cowboys fresh off the cattle drive or hitting the town after a few weeks hard labor out on the ranch would challenge each other to competitions. Who could ride the rankest bucking bronc?* Rope a calf or throw a steer the fastest? These competitions came to be called rodeos, and the rest, as they say, is history.

So is ranch life for an increasing percentage of the cowboys and cowgirls these days.

There are four kids in my family. We grew up on a ranch just big enough to support one household. We're squeezing out one and half with the help of my town job. Which means seventy-five percent of my parents’ children are no longer ranchers. Extrapolate those numbers across the country and you can see why a fair number of modern rodeo cowboys have never had a home on the range. 

Even the largest ranches can struggle to support a multi-generational family. One cowboy from Oregon told us his share of the ranch settled by his grandparents was 1/64…which was why he lived in Washington and owned a convenience store.

The average rodeo fan imagines all those cowboys and cowgirls heading home to do some brandin' and gatherin' on the home place. Truth is, if you were to wander around taking a poll, you’d find that even if they did grow up on a ranch, the majority of the contestants don’t live there anymore. If they have a spread it’s a small acreage on the edge of town, with a handful of horses and some roping cattle. And a fair number are moseying home to an apartment or neighborhood just like yours.


Maybe one in ten makes a living from the land. The rest will be accountants and school teachers, insurance agents and bankers, electricians and carpenters, physical therapists and even doctors. Pretty much any career that gives you enough time off to get in some practice and hit some rodeos and ropings on the weekends, with a strong trend toward jobs where you get the summer off. Believe me, I didn't choose athletic training for the money. Just ask my husband. 

Of course, you’ll also find a fair number of horse shoers and saddle makers and other forms of self employment that allow you to have four and five day weekends in the summer. And one tradition remains true. For those hitting the pro circuit full time, the most important career is the one your wife has back home.

Welcome to the age of the suburban cowboy.


*That is not a typo. We call them broncs. Not broncos. Those are football players from Denver, or something you were wishing you hadn't bought from Ford Motor Company the first time you hit an icy patch. 

Doubling Up

Last night we had the smallest calf I have ever seen alive. He weighed less than twenty pounds, barely reached my knee. We were amazed that he managed to stand up and suck down a pint of milk. And sad, if not surprised, when he didn't make it through the first day. To cheer myself up, I took pictures of our twins. Well, tried to take pictures. Between them tearing around and their mother snorting and pawing dirt, I had a little trouble getting both of them in one frame.

As you can see, they're not identical. The one with the black spots on his face is a bull. That's called brockle-faced, and indicates a mixture of Angus blood and a white-faced breed like Herefords, which is called bald-faced, or baldy, which is not considered an insult to a cow, but I wouldn't recommend tossing it around in a biker bar.

The other is a heifer. She isn't quite a baldy because she has one black eye. When there is one twin of each sex, the heifer will usually be sterile. As a person who took over forty credits of college biology I should be able to give you a very detailed explanation of this phenomenon, but I'm drawing a blank and too lazy to go look it up. Plus, I'm sure one of my incredibly intelligent readers will explain it for you down in the comments.

There. I don't know about you, but I feel better about life in general.

No Worries

She settled into a chair on the deck, cradled her coffee cup between her hands, and savored the feel of bright spring sunshine on her warmth-starved skin. Across the road, the last grubby vestiges of a once-formidable snowdrift oozed water. If she tilted her head right, the lawn looked almost green. Another good day or two and the eager new spears would drown out last year’s dilapidated brown. The extended forecast called for above average temperatures. By then, all but a few stragglers in the herd would have calved safely.

The kitchen door opened and her husband ambled out to sink into a chair beside her. “Beautiful morning,” he said.

“Perfect. I’m so glad that storm went south of us.”

“Yep. Another week of this weather, we’ll be able to start seeding some barley over east. Be nice to get it in early for a change.”

She closed her eyes, enjoying the rare moment of peace. Calving had gone well, with fewer than normal casualties. They’d had plenty of snow early in the winter to replenish reservoirs and springs and get the alfalfa fields off to a strong start. Then the weather had turned mild, with only one significant snowfall since they’d started calving.

A rancher couldn’t ask for much more from Mother Nature.  

They sipped their coffee in silence, watching horses graze, listening to the distinct melody of a meadowlark, putting off the moment when the day’s chores would begin.

“Hate to see the moisture start going around us,” her husband said. “Remember in ninety-eight, when we had all that snow, then hardly a drop of rain all summer? Had to haul water to the cows out on the lease the whole month of August. ‘Course, if history holds true, with all that fog we had in February it’ll probably be so wet in May we’ll be lucky to get the oats in at all...”

She stifled a sigh and glanced at her watch. Eleven worry free minutes. She was pretty sure that was a new record.

What Was I Thinking?

Today it is seventy degrees and sunny where I used to live in Hermiston, Oregon. And here it is...not.

The good news is it's supposed to be sixty degrees by Friday. Which means I'll be wading around in water and mud up to my knees and all that stuff I'm standing in will be trying to run in my front door instead. Sigh. Ain't spring lovely?

It's Official

Spring has sprung. Doesn't matter whether we get a foot of snow next week, winter is officially over the day I see the first crocus of the year.

Enjoy the view. I will be heading south for a seminar for most of the week. I fully expect to see hundreds of these purple beauties sprinkled across the pastures by the time I get back.

NightMares

My horses have attitude.

Not all of them. Just the good ones. Seems like the better they get in the arena, the more obnoxious they get outside. Sort of like most professional athletes.

It’s possible it could also be genetic. My last three rope horses have all been tough little Roan Hancock mares. Betsy…well, she deserves a blog post all her own. It’s impossible to do justice to her sheer contrariness in less than a thousand words. Suffice to say my sister once rode into the arena at a high school rodeo with Betsy packing a five foot long weed in her mouth because none of us was tough enough to get it away from her.

But she was also the best I’ve ever roped on.

I got Scotty when she was nine years old. She was supposedly broke. She bucked me off twice in the first week. The second time, I didn’t even get all the way into the saddle. As I swung on, she spun left toward me, threw me head first off the other side, and hung me up in the stirrup. Lucky I wasn’t wearing the wool socks that make my boots fit real tight or we might not being having this conversation.

She also made me a roper by letting me run twenty calves a day without ever cheating or overheating. When she turned twenty-two I gave her to friends and she made a roper out of their daughter Hallie, too. Last I heard, she’s training a new kid to mount up on the run.




Hallie and Scotty


Now there’s Ember. She’s Betsy’s daughter. Scotty’s niece. Sixteen years old, been hauled a zillion miles and roped on at nearly as many rodeos. Saturday, she wouldn’t get in the trailer to go to the rodeo in Standoff. She spooked at the sponsor signs on the arena fences. She balked when I tried to ride into the roping box.

Then she scored perfect and gave me a shot so sweet it still makes me want to cry that I missed it.



Given all that, is it any wonder I have the occasional rodeo-related nightmare? Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s the same dream. I’m at the rodeo and suddenly they’re calling my name to compete and I either can’t find my horse, or she’s still at the trailer which is parked half a mile from the arena, uphill both ways.

In the other version, I realize the rodeo is about to start, I’m still at home, and my horse refuses to be caught.

There are other nightmares, of course. Like the one where Scotty slams into the back of the roping box so hard she busts the fence and they have to stop the whole rodeo to fix it.

Oh, wait. That really happened.

Or there’s the one where I’m riding a young horse and it suddenly flips upside down in the roping box.

Oh, right. That was in Cottage Grove. But we did recover nicely and still win a check.

The worst nightmare is the one where my psychologically-challenged barrel horse plasters himself to the front of the bucking chutes and refuses to move while the announcer mumbles, "I'm sure she'll get him going any minute now." Then he does go--straight to the fence behind the first barrel, where he locks up again.

Come to think of it, that’s why we never went back to Clearfield.

After acquiring Scotty, Hallie developed her own set of bad dreams. Like the one where she was practicing her goat tying dismount at night on the racetrack at the Fort Pierre rodeo grounds, and when she stepped off Scotty locked up the brakes, pulled back, and tore off into the pitch black maze around the race horse barns as the announcer was declaring that it was now time for the goat tying to start.

That’s my Scotty. A living Night Mare

Postscript: At a writer's conference in Denver, I sat with a group of very non-rodeo women and learned that every athlete or performer seems to have their own version of my nightmare. The band members forgot their instrument. Or worse, their uniform. The sprinters were in the restroom when the starting gun went off for their race. And everybody seems to have had the "What do you mean we have a test today?" classroom dream. So what about you, blog readers? What's your recurring bad dream?