Rhapsody of a Rodeo Rookie

Westcliffe, Colo.

Bareback bronc doesn’t look as fun as it sounds. A fearsome sight: lurch, rear kick, 180-degree spin, thump-thump-thrash. If one hoof is touching the ground, at least two aren’t. The mad undulation of a runaway seesaw. We’re not even three seconds in yet. Lightning punctures the somber Sangre de Cristo slopes as if it’s part of the show. No need for pyrotechnics. Look away if you can: A crash-test dummy is demonstrating Newton’s second law of motion while hitched to the back of an equine bodybuilder. The beast has a neck like Ronnie Coleman’s left quadricep. Who taught it to perform superman push-ups? Buck-spin’s the move: The cowboy’s center of gravity momentarily shifts to someplace over equatorial Asia. The timer goes off; his chaps take wing —— horizontal ejection. Godspeed and good night. Hearing the thud alone makes me slip a spinal disc. It’s my first rodeo.

“Son of a biscuit!”

“Is he all right?”

He’s all right. He gets up, gestures to the crowd. Clamor and cheers. He shambles away. Bob Edmonds on horseback relays the score: “Seventy-nine for Bill Tutor.” Frequent-flyer points for the gentleman’s eight-second journey. Calculated by some mystical formula in the judges’ booth: a raised shed sponsored by Beach Redi-Mix and Tony’s Mountain Pizza.

“I told you, he should’ve extended his legs.” The old boy next to me demonstrates by holding out his arms at 45-degree angles, palms facing the ground. “Spurs in.”

Prompted by his accent, I ask. He left West Texas for Westcliffe last year and is now retired.

A volunteer rodeo sage, then.

Prompted by my accent, he asks. I explain.

“No kidding.”

“None at all.”

He takes his pedagogical duties more seriously now. “W’lemme let you go with this: The Wet Mountain Valley Stampede’s really summin’. The professionals tomorrow’ll get you stirred up as all get-out.”

This is a professional sport, but it was a profession before it became a sport. Plaid-collar jobs can still be had at these altitudes. You can estimate how prosperous a nation has grown by how much of its agriculture has been repackaged as leisure and recreation. The primary-to-tertiary industrial crossover. It pays well. Livestock can sustain only so many: a couple of thousand between Westcliffe and her conjoined twin, Silver Cliff. (The two share a Main Street.) It’s three or four times that from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Appreciable numbers for a town whose Broadway is gravel.

At the Rancher’s Roost, a staid diner in a bowling alley, I hear a herd of cowboys saunter in: clack-clack, clack-clack. Bootheels and hats add height, gravity. Next to them, at the register to settle the bill, I look like the representative of an early primate in Gifford’s diagram of human evolution, theirs being the fully upright stage. I check my posture. The first night of the rodeo is for them: the ranchers. These are their workhorses and this their lifework. Filial franchises, often. Perhaps it’s the only way an event so cinegenic can avoid celebrity. All I can tell about Roper No. 31 — who could be 31 or 13; Stetson pulled over the eyes, shirtsleeves billowing, an androgynous silhouette — is that he has immense forearm strength, which is all I can tell about any of them. The names don’t help make distinctions: Talon, Cash, Shade, Jayce, Jase, Blaze. Not a single Philip. Not one Hector, breaker of horses: That’s nominative determinism debunked.

The second night’s the real deal. Here are the professional, rather than vocational, cowboys. The merger of agribusiness and entertainment is consummated. The opening acts require crowd participation. Mutton-bustin’ is no ring-around-the-rosie, but it’s a children’s game (six and under). Look at little Kelsey go: She emerges from Bucking Chute 3 (sponsored by Yoder’s Home Furnishings), sheepborne, upside down somehow, eyes flickering like electrical charges in a cloud. It’s a game. Much as Late Bronze Age Minoan bull-somersaulting was probably a game. Much as hog-tying cattle and the rest of it is not. No, in the main, the rodeo is an exhibition of an ancient human art: the subjection of nonhuman species. A battle of wills and flexor tendons. Cowboys demonstrate homesteading skill. The community isn’t celebrating sporting ability. It’s celebrating itself — its existence. (The Minoans didn’t make it.)

The rules for team roping are inscrutable, but you don’t mind. Quadrupeds scatter. One calf lies on the thick dirt and declares it should like not to be disturbed. A horseman casts a confident lasso at a runner. Sling and a miss. It catches a hind shank and the tail. The animal is anchored but won’t say uncle. It prances, tripodal, to the beat of the main riff of “Money for Nothing.” Another fella dismounts and steers the steer to the ground by the horns. He fetches a branding iron (unheated). Tag. You’re it. Bob Edmonds announces various integers. “Three, fourteen, ten!” He’s excited. Then, “One, fifty-three, twenty-six!” The cryptic ramblings of a seer. Nobody cares. I don’t remember from which state the winning team is. There are no breakaway-roping or barrel-racing drafts, no NCAA scholarships or shoe deals. This is bigger than a sport; the arena has no room for “personalities.”

The periphery is a different story. Joining the audience is a teenager with a moppy mullet and a T-shirt that reads “Easily distracted by t*ts and tacos.” One could’ve gathered as much. From the opposite direction totters a stylish granny escorted by what looks like Sam Elliott’s mustache saddled on a different man’s face. Two disposable vapes roll out of a woman’s kangaroo pocket as she labors up the grandstand. Her kid retrieves them. Descending the stand is an Amish girl in a blue cape dress and a bonnet, followed by Miss Stampede herself: high-school royalty with a sash to prove it. I look for the newspapermen in the crowd. The 50th-most-populous county in Colorado (out of 64) has two of them. Jordan Hedberg edits what he says, and his rival disputes, is the nonpartisan Wet Mountain Tribune. George Gramlich edits what he says, and everybody agrees, is the openly partisan Sangre de Cristo Sentinel. Both were business studs long before they decided to make the regional press profitable again. Gramlich seems to believe that a man like Donald Trump comes about only roughly once per century. Hedberg agrees, I imagine, but he’s comfortable with that frequency. Many locals subscribe to both papers. Custer County is real-life Mayberry.

In the contestants’ section, a woman in a shimmering jumpsuit tends to three palominos. I ask for their names. Mojo, Cowboy, and Vanilla. (The woman is Bethany.) They’re about to perform something called “three-up Roman riding.” Bonam fortunam. I later find out that she’s one half of a championship-winning, trick-riding, trick-roping, whip-cracking, fire-taming, gun-spinning husband-and-wife act. The feat she mentioned looks like charioteering without a chariot. She starts with two engines. Then adds Vanilla. Even Achilles amid an Anatolian siege was content to be chauffeured by just two steeds (though one could talk, and both were godly). Romans are gaudy. There’s a modern monoculture, of course: Little Americas everywhere. You can find baseball in Johannesburg, flag football in Jakarta. But then there’s this. Where else will you get the whole jamboree? Mild hypoxia — the Wet Mountain Valley is a mile-and-a-half-high trip — elevates the spectacle.

And the provisions. The provisions! Once in my boyhood I ate caramel-covered popcorn out of a white bucket with Old Glory printed on it. It’s a good time to reenact the memory. I ask for the largest bag available (who says city folk don’t get their hands dirty at work?). No Stars and Stripes on this packaging, but the label says “Don’t poke the bear” — it’s the same message. Now, the deep-fried corn dog: that thing I would feed to Mojo if I could be convinced it didn’t contain horse meat. I toss it and try a “tater twister.” Pairs well with a Banquet. (Tribute to the Coors Brewing Company — which celebrated its centennial three years before the Centennial State did — is piously paid.) Late on the first night, I’ll end up at the town’s historic feedstore. A Second Street fixture since the late 1800s. Its fare now has been adjusted to human tastes. You can park by the hitching post. Its old storage basement serves as a speakeasy for a clique of Mennonite kids, but not tonight. I’ll ask Jessa, a young artist, where the crowds are. At the only other spot open past 8 p.m.: the Silverdome Saloon & Music Hall. A large globular thing on a blasted heath. It looks like a signals-intelligence-gathering and radar station. But it has a full bar. All roads lead to Dome.

Bull-riding serves no pastoral purpose; working ranchers have no reason to attempt it. It’s the second night’s headline performance by the pros. A lad from the Wyoming town of Thermopolis scores 83 points atop a brute for whose mug natural selection has disclaimed responsibility.

“Holy cow, am I right?”

I turn around.

“Was lookin’ for you. Did you see him extend his legs?” The Texan sage is back, arms outstretched with approval. “Spurs in.”

I ask whether he was a rancher. He talks about how he met a lady at last night’s rodeo and, this morning, helped her brand 63 cattle. All right. “I used to be a rodeo clown,” he confesses. I tell him he shouldn’t be so hard on himself. No — he explains — his job in the arena was to distract bulls from downed riders. “Bulls ain’t like ’orses. They’ll be fixin’ to trample ya, sit on ya, gore ya!” Now he regularly sends Colorado-grade THC products to an old colleague whose rear end has met too many bovine front ends: The man would turn his back on bulls and goad them to launch him into the ionosphere. Different strokes . . . My sensei shuffles off with promises of beer and a reunion. I never catch his name.

How are the email-pushing proles supposed to go about their own business after watching these guys and gals make such a festival out of theirs? Host a Prezi party? Plan a family trip to Las Vegas to catch the finals of the Microsoft Excel World Championship? “Work–life balance” is bunk. When the two aren’t the same, you’ve neither. I decide to look into the Dome. It’s a dive and a sports bar and a beer garden and a swing-dance hall and a pool parlor and a music venue and a pizza joint and a karaoke lounge. (Why not also a signals-intelligence-gathering and radar station?) A patron croons with a handsome rasp. “What a Wonderful World.” Easy for you to say. You don’t have to spend two hours on I-25 tomorrow. A Ute with a long braid, black as the dark sacred night, buys drinks for his pals. He asks if I’ll have one. Will I have one? I’ll have one. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.