In Earshot of Water: Notes from the Columbia Plateau

Wrangling with Rodeo

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WranglingwithRodeo I n the northern Rockies of Washington State, Ice Age floods carved channeled scablands some fifteen thousand years ago, right at the spot where I sit with my son and wait for the Cheney Rodeo to start. The show’s sponsor—U. S. Smokeless Tobacco, the owner of Copenhagen and Skoal—has emblazoned its name on all the glossy programs and the arena banners. Reed and I perch on bleachers, whose paint is flaking from decades of hot sun. The coarse slats promise a rash if we lean back. Dressed in sandals, shorts, ball caps, and t-shirts, we feel out of place—and we are. Most everyone else wears cowboy hats. The announcer in his tower speaks as if praying for the gathered multitude. He names the United States “the greatest nation on God’s green earth.” Country music booms at top volume, shuddering the steel frames beneath our feet. A radio hit by Toby Keith is playing, a militant threat of a song entitled “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” Its lyrics reference a roster of enemy nations. “Hey, Uncle Sam put your name at the top of his list, / and the Statue of Liberty started shaking her fist.” The singer is giving a hit list, a pantheon of leaders of foreign nations soon to fall. This is a song of vengeance for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. “Man, we lit up your world like the Fourth of July,” the belligerent chorus roars. “It’s gonna feel like the whole world is raining down on you, / courtesy of the Red, White and Blue!” The sport of rodeo is kicking and very much alive in my bioregion. Ropers, riders, queens, and clowns are thrashing their limbs and stirring up dust in arena matches that pit humans against much larger mammals. This pastime, this sport, gratifies a throwback urge to subdue enormous beasts. 120 Wrangling with Rodeo My son hunkers between my legs, his eyes sheltering from the sun. My hands cover his ears in a pathetic attempt to block out the heavy music that is rattling the stands. He shifts, his seat on the bleachers scratchy. It is a hot day. Bull rider Steve Lebsack peered over his left shoulder, grimaced before a mirror, and dabbed salve on the healing wounds from a shoulder surgery. I was dressing on a bench nearby in a health club locker room in Spokane, Washington. I asked about the scars he wore. He told me all about them on that warm morning in July, the peak of the season for his favorite sport. Steve Lebsack’s afternoon and evening would be spent driving west for some seven hours, across the channeled scablands toward Puget Sound. He would rent a room and rest well, to be cocked and ready on Saturday morning for bull-riding contests in the coastal towns of Vancouver, Oakville, and Sedro Wooley. On Sunday morning he would aim his Chevy pickup back across the Columbia River, where Ice Age floods had rushed, and he would traverse the scablands to Winchester and Grangeville in the neighboring state of Idaho. Steve weighs more than two hundred pounds, which is big for a bull rider—narrow at the hips and waist, broad-shouldered, an endomorph . When he competes, he pulls on a pink shirt and a white cowboy hat if the weather is hot, or a denim shirt and black hat for cooler days. In a fashion flourish common among thirty-something men today, he wears his hair shaved close and dyed in wispy tips up top. Beneath his tight blue jeans he favors blunt-nosed packer boots, their fringed tongues lapping, their sloping heels slung low. In his nylon workout bag, curled from exposure to sweaty clothes, the pages of the book Idaho’s Greatest Mule Deer confirm him as a hunter of big game. His recent shoulder surgeries would not be apt to hold him back from tramping the scabrock or competing in the rodeo ring. He is a competitor. Healing in her own way that same day, Naomie Peasley was taking notes in an economics class at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. A member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, Naomie hails from a line of horse fanciers, arena buffs, mountain racers, and stock contractors. A former rodeo queen, dark-eyed, articulate, she was Wrangling with Rodeo 121 blazing...