When 4 a.m. rolls around quickly, my head pounding from the beer and moonshine the evening before. The performance didn’t end until late; slack had too many barrel racers. We decided to leave in the morning with an early wake-up call. I scramble out of the bed, a long jump down to the floor from the nose of the gooseneck. It's freezing and I can tell the generator shut off earlier, the damned thing rarely works. I open the door and step onto the crisp grass, the horses tied to the trailer huddled together in their blankets. It’s May and the Colorado Mountains chill the air until it resembles a crisp wintry day.
The large water bucket originally sitting in front of them now sat under the legs of the large bay horse. Four horses shared between five of us and four different events. The packing proceeds—a hustle of shoving rope cans and rope bags in every crevice of the trailer, tossing the empty beer cans into the bed of the truck, and rapid stuffing of hay bags. Hay bales are thrown on top of the trailers and the horses loaded into the back. Some of us are headed to the next open rodeo, others to the jackpot down the road. Saturday morning and we already hit two rodeos the day before. That’s the rodeo circuit.
How to Get Up Early
Rodeo taught me how to get up in the morning under some of the most strenuous circumstances making any wake up call for 8 a.m. class after a night of partying shrink in comparison. You sleep in the back seat of the pick-up or the horse trailer while you travel—drives that sometimes exponentially get longer, as you have horses in the back that need to stretch their legs or drink water at a rest stop. Sleep rests at the bottom of the priority list, so waking up becomes rather tricky, coffee being the only thing to jump start a pulse and get my heart rate to a normal speed.
Patience
The long, sometimes drab drives taught me the patience to sit for hours, along with the talent of entertaining myself while driving for hours.
Growing up in rodeo, a lot of people train their own horses. I learned how to barrel race and pole bend with my horse. Neither of us had any experience and we taught each other in our own way until we started winning. But that is one of the hardest parts, working with a horse. It's also the most rewarding. For some people, it comes natural, but as a little girl learning by doing is quite the process. Not only that, but a horse has so much personality.
A horse has off days and on days just like we do. Days they don't want to work and days they have too much energy to contain. Relying on a living creature that weighs 1,000 pounds is a scary thing. Getting bucked off, trampled, and stepped on comes with the territory.
Respect for Animals
Rodeo receives a bad rep on animal abuse—a hard topic to discuss. But rodeo actually promotes the well-being of animals. Growing up around horses, you learn a lot of important skills. Skills of caring for animals, learning how to feed them, and keeping them healthy. No education compares to learning how to take care of another being, house pet or barn animal.
Competitiveness and Resilience
In a competitive world like rodeo, there is a lot at stake, time, money, and pride. While we do this for the glory, the money and buckles won are temporary pleasures that are incomparable to the lessons learned. The most important skill that applies to every aspect of my life is resilience, a trait that toes the line of stubbornness. I conjure the image of my grandpa, an old time cowboy, stubborn as hell. He suffered from hip replacements and cancer, but the illnesses couldn't inhibit his ability to keep saddling up. The sort of healthy competitiveness and resilience create the strongest kind of people.
A long weekend of traveling on the rodeo road resembles a roller coaster ride: the ups and downs. The highs and lows. The winning and the losing. The money won and the money lost. The partners that missed and the horses that didn’t perform well. All of this makes the drive home a difficult one.
But it’s the misses and the catches, the good luck and the bad luck, the record breakers and the tie breakers that define the passion, a passion fueled by the love for the sport of rodeo and the country way of life. That rodeo road is a long one, a never ending prayer of thank you’s and blessings, hardships and struggles. The rodeo road is decorated with mud and dust, silver buckles and signed checks, a lot of losses and even more wins.
