(~4 minutes to read)
Here at the Hatchery, we have company in from England for a couple of weeks.
My favourite second-cousin-on-my-mum’s-side and the only godparent to have retained an interest in our kids’ spiritual welfare (and who has recently been promoted(? Demoted?) to honorary cousin) arrived here in the frozen north last Friday ostensibly to spend some time with Mrs. H. and me—although their escape from the UK’s heatwave might have been an added incentive to make the trip.
Both have visited before, although we had to marry one of our kids off in order to entice aforementioned second cousin here for her first-ever visit. Hon. Cuz has been several times—as part of her duty as a godmother, no doubt.
You can only take your guests so many times to Lake Louise, a dinosaur museum and the World’s biggest glacial erratic, so we were over the moon that our company arrived on the weekend when not one but three noteworthy events were happening in town. There was a chilli cook-off on Main Street, the Alberta Highland Games in the grounds of the local high school, and an indoor pro rodeo at the recreation centre.
Faced with such a cosmopolitan selection, we did what any self-respecting Essex Girl or Essex Man would do (*). We rejected the spectacle of grown men in skirts throwing utility poles at each other and instead feasted on fifteen flavours of chilli.
But chilli (or chilli con carne to give it its full name) can be had anywhere that cows are allowed to be part of the food chain, whereas horses and bulls with straps chafing their naughty bits are not a frequent sight in Essex, no matter how cosmopolitan TOWIE tries to portray the county.
So we went to the rodeo.
For the uninitiated, rodeo features several events in which real cowboys (not your Clint Eastwood / John Wayne type) perform codified versions of activities that they would either do as part of their work on the ranch or as part of their leisure activities while in an “over-refreshed” state. A subjective categorization might place tie-down roping, team roping, steer wrestling and saddle bronc riding all into the former category, while bareback bronc and bull riding might form the latter. There’s also barrel racing for the ladies (the barrels are obstacles, not competition), and mutton busting, wild pony racing, and trick riding for the kids(**) . There are other events at some rodeos, and smaller rodeos may not include all those listed.
It’s said that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is King, so armed with my superior-to-our-guests-but-nevertheless-very-sketchy knowledge of rodeo, this particular one-eyed King attempted to makes sense of the various events to his blind subjects. I was a little concerned that the action might be a little too robust for our kids’ fairish godmother, (whose previous experience of animal sport was limited to attempting to race tortoises) but my concerns evaporated the moment she uttered the words “you go, horse—buck that bar-steward (I think those are the words she used) right into the dirt!”
During the intermission, I asked our guests if they found it odd that all the contestants were dressed in what the Brits might regard as the stereotyped cowboy clothing. Surprisingly, they didn’t find it odd at all, but just in case they were lying, I tried to assure them that for the most part, they weren’t really dressed up—their work clothes would typically be less-well-laundered versions of their competition duds.
But that got me thinking about what a rodeo might look like if it had developed on another continent, and perhaps under different influences. Saddle ‘roo riding and dingo busting in Australia perhaps (although the child welfare people might be a little concerned about the combination of kids and dingoes). Or warthog wrestling and wildebeest team roping in the Serengeti. Actually, giraffe team roping might be more commercially successful—the sight of a cowboy (‘raffe boy?) lassoing a head that can be as far as seventeen feet off the ground would surely impress the most difficult-to-please tourist.
If I’d been writing this piece in the style of many of my more recent articles, I would, at this point, lapse into a conversation between two lions who are watching some Tanzanian hunter-gatherers practising some of these African rodeo events and maybe toying with the idea of moving in to “liberate” a particularly tasty-looking wildebeest once the piggin’ string has been applied.
Sadly, my brain is grown weary from so much socializing in the last forty-eight hours that my imagination won’t stretch to concocting such a conversation. I can’t even think of original, authentic-sounding, amusing name for the lions, let alone put words into their anthropomorphized mouths.
So instead, I’ll invite you, dear reader, to contribute your ideas to such a conversation, via the comments box below.
(*) Like all most stereotypes, reality is different. Neither of our guests is promiscuous or unintelligent, and nor is Mrs. H. And although I was born in Essex, “Essex Man” didn’t fully evolve as a species until I had fled to the colonies.
(**) http://cs.calgarystampede.com/events/rodeo/events/ describes most of these events.