The rodeo takes place in a dingy coliseum, one with rickety bleachers and a puny bandstand, all of which encircle a wide, mud-studded paddock. For the second time in as many hours, the PA is blaring “Old Town Road” by Lil’ Nas X, and on either end of the pasture are steel barricades and a labyrinth of animal pens, from whose darkened interiors we plainly hear fractious snorts and odd, eldritch harrumphing. Every now and then what emerges through the metal latticework of the pens are the desperate, heart-melting expressions of various confined barn animals—lambs and ponies, calves and stallions.
Soon an announcement comes crackling over the PA: “All Mutton Busters, please line up behind the Bucket Shoots. All mutton busters to the Bucket Shoots, please.” Do urban readers know anything about mutton-busting? Before coming to the rodeo, I didn’t. In fact, the very onomatopoetics of “mutton-busting” conjured, for me anyway, various carnal acts with barn animals. But Mutton-busting is far more innocent, a time-honored rite of passage for certain rural youngsters. Here’s how it works: a clique of adult-ranch hands corral a lamb into a small metal stall called a “bucket shoot.” A helmeted child is then passed through said bucket shoot, where a waiting handler situates her on the animal’s unsaddled back. Once the contestant is firmly barnacled to the lamb’s hide, the gate gets whipped open, and the ram proceeds to hightail it across the pasture, bleating madly and hurtling like a banshee. The object of the game is to see for how long the mutton-buster can hold on. As to the possible gratification the rider might receive from this bumpy peregrination, your guess here is as good as mine.
Moseying back and forth in front of the bucket shoots is tonight’s rodeo’s impresario, a deeply tanned man in his late forties who wears a pink polo and a sun-blanched cowboy hat. Right now, he’s heckling and cajoling the audience, speaking with the unctuous, concentrated poetry of a late-career car salesmen. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, before we get started, I want ya’ll to go on ahead and give our mutton-busters a nice, warm round of applause. After all, it takes a lot of courage to cross the cold metal of those bucket shoots. Because while you might think these sheep are just some docile little creatures, let me go on ahead and disabuse you of that notion. Because these ain’t your fuzzy, little, cute, cuddly-type animals that you want to take into bed with you. They ain’t the lambs that Mary had. So come on now and without any further ado, let’s go on ahead and get started.”
And yet, this turns out to be a head fake, because there’s even more pomp and pageantry. This includes not only an ovation for our veterans, but also bagpipe renditions of the National Anthem and “Amazing Grace.” Then the impresario asks to “go on ahead” and bow our heads. In my thirty-four years, I’ve heard my fair share of invocations, but I must confess this is the first time I’ve heard a Western-themed supplication. The prayer is laced with countrified motifs—cacti and tumbleweeds, desolate pastures and frontier heartache—and by the time the impresario rises to his heart-rustling conclusion, several men in the audience are wiping away a tear. “And when we embark on that final ride to the great pasture in the sky, where the grass is lush and green and stirrup-high, and the water flows deep and cool, we pray that our final judgment will be: ‘Come on in, cowboy, cowgirl, your entry ticket has been paid in full.” The resultant applause is so thunderous that the horses are bucking in their stables. (...)
If I told you how many children willingly subjected themselves to this spectacle, you’d think I was inventing things. But the Mutton Busting continues for the better portion of an hour, and by my count, some thirteen children brave the bucket shoots in front of their friends and family this evening. Sitting here in the grandstands, I try to imagine what this experience must feel like to them, how the violence of unwanted animal-riding might rest upon their nerve-endings. And yet it’s only when Eli Wakeman crosses into the bucket shoots that things begin to seem criminally negligent. Wakeman is 4 (!), and even before the gate opens, he’s already turned on the waterworks. It’s at this point in the festivities that I finally notice the coterie of EMTs resting their elbows on the fence along the paddock, where they’re clearly just waiting for tonight’s inevitable injuries to call them into action. These will come later, during the “Barebacking” contest, when four adult ranch-hands attempt to “break” a cohort of psychotic stallions. As the horses shudder and buck, each cowboy will look like nothing so much as a mannequin falling down an escalator. One man gets a concussion. Another man shatters his collarbone. A third lands hard on his sacrum, except when I see him toodling around the fair after the rodeo, he is for some reason icing his forearm). It turns out my own spine is stiffening here in the un-ergonomic bleachers, and in light of the carnage on the paddock, I’m doing my best to hide from the other spectators little winces and the occasional mewling exhalation.
After little Eli Wakeman’s mercifully short adventure, I’m wondering why these fair goers are so keen to condone violence against their children. After all, this is a sport that ensures that a hard fall and some tears is the best a participant can hope for. At one point, the impresario jokes, “You know, folks, I think we better change the name ‘Mutton Busting’ to OCA. That stands for ‘Organized Child Abuse.’ [Responding to scattered groans] Oh, come on, I’m just teasing.” And yet, you can see the parents take great pride their children’s participation. Sometimes I watch the families watching the muttons who are getting busted, and they all have that hopeful, misty-eyed look of proud parents cheering on competitive offspring. It reminds me of a close friend of mine who was explaining to me how his four-year-old daughter had just announced her decision to become a vegetarian. “What’s weird, man, is that we didn’t even coax her in any way. One day, she just shows up at the breakfast island, and says, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to eat animals anymore—not today or any other day.’” But for all the father’s claims about the child’s intrinsic motivation, I couldn’t help but remember that she’s a product of her environment. After all, this is a child who attends Montessori art classes and whose parents take her to the public library for something called “Drag Queen Story Time.” It’s interesting to think that she’s being raised only forty minutes away from a rodeo where children her age are strapping on helmets and getting dragged by lambs across pastures. A tacit debate is taking place about child-rearing and the merits of overprotection. What attributes of citizenship—what quotients of courage and forbearance—might run in the veins of these children, in the veins of the adults they’ll become? It reminds me of what Hannah Arendt once said about the difference between nation-states and republics. A nation-state is formed by neighbors who, sharing no ideological tenets, bind themselves together in defense of common resources. A republic, meanwhile, is something different. What unites the citizens of a republic is a willful act of imagination. And yet how can we share an act of imagination when our basic mental frameworks are so wildly divergent?
by Barrett Swanson, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
Soon an announcement comes crackling over the PA: “All Mutton Busters, please line up behind the Bucket Shoots. All mutton busters to the Bucket Shoots, please.” Do urban readers know anything about mutton-busting? Before coming to the rodeo, I didn’t. In fact, the very onomatopoetics of “mutton-busting” conjured, for me anyway, various carnal acts with barn animals. But Mutton-busting is far more innocent, a time-honored rite of passage for certain rural youngsters. Here’s how it works: a clique of adult-ranch hands corral a lamb into a small metal stall called a “bucket shoot.” A helmeted child is then passed through said bucket shoot, where a waiting handler situates her on the animal’s unsaddled back. Once the contestant is firmly barnacled to the lamb’s hide, the gate gets whipped open, and the ram proceeds to hightail it across the pasture, bleating madly and hurtling like a banshee. The object of the game is to see for how long the mutton-buster can hold on. As to the possible gratification the rider might receive from this bumpy peregrination, your guess here is as good as mine.
Moseying back and forth in front of the bucket shoots is tonight’s rodeo’s impresario, a deeply tanned man in his late forties who wears a pink polo and a sun-blanched cowboy hat. Right now, he’s heckling and cajoling the audience, speaking with the unctuous, concentrated poetry of a late-career car salesmen. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, before we get started, I want ya’ll to go on ahead and give our mutton-busters a nice, warm round of applause. After all, it takes a lot of courage to cross the cold metal of those bucket shoots. Because while you might think these sheep are just some docile little creatures, let me go on ahead and disabuse you of that notion. Because these ain’t your fuzzy, little, cute, cuddly-type animals that you want to take into bed with you. They ain’t the lambs that Mary had. So come on now and without any further ado, let’s go on ahead and get started.”And yet, this turns out to be a head fake, because there’s even more pomp and pageantry. This includes not only an ovation for our veterans, but also bagpipe renditions of the National Anthem and “Amazing Grace.” Then the impresario asks to “go on ahead” and bow our heads. In my thirty-four years, I’ve heard my fair share of invocations, but I must confess this is the first time I’ve heard a Western-themed supplication. The prayer is laced with countrified motifs—cacti and tumbleweeds, desolate pastures and frontier heartache—and by the time the impresario rises to his heart-rustling conclusion, several men in the audience are wiping away a tear. “And when we embark on that final ride to the great pasture in the sky, where the grass is lush and green and stirrup-high, and the water flows deep and cool, we pray that our final judgment will be: ‘Come on in, cowboy, cowgirl, your entry ticket has been paid in full.” The resultant applause is so thunderous that the horses are bucking in their stables. (...)
If I told you how many children willingly subjected themselves to this spectacle, you’d think I was inventing things. But the Mutton Busting continues for the better portion of an hour, and by my count, some thirteen children brave the bucket shoots in front of their friends and family this evening. Sitting here in the grandstands, I try to imagine what this experience must feel like to them, how the violence of unwanted animal-riding might rest upon their nerve-endings. And yet it’s only when Eli Wakeman crosses into the bucket shoots that things begin to seem criminally negligent. Wakeman is 4 (!), and even before the gate opens, he’s already turned on the waterworks. It’s at this point in the festivities that I finally notice the coterie of EMTs resting their elbows on the fence along the paddock, where they’re clearly just waiting for tonight’s inevitable injuries to call them into action. These will come later, during the “Barebacking” contest, when four adult ranch-hands attempt to “break” a cohort of psychotic stallions. As the horses shudder and buck, each cowboy will look like nothing so much as a mannequin falling down an escalator. One man gets a concussion. Another man shatters his collarbone. A third lands hard on his sacrum, except when I see him toodling around the fair after the rodeo, he is for some reason icing his forearm). It turns out my own spine is stiffening here in the un-ergonomic bleachers, and in light of the carnage on the paddock, I’m doing my best to hide from the other spectators little winces and the occasional mewling exhalation.
After little Eli Wakeman’s mercifully short adventure, I’m wondering why these fair goers are so keen to condone violence against their children. After all, this is a sport that ensures that a hard fall and some tears is the best a participant can hope for. At one point, the impresario jokes, “You know, folks, I think we better change the name ‘Mutton Busting’ to OCA. That stands for ‘Organized Child Abuse.’ [Responding to scattered groans] Oh, come on, I’m just teasing.” And yet, you can see the parents take great pride their children’s participation. Sometimes I watch the families watching the muttons who are getting busted, and they all have that hopeful, misty-eyed look of proud parents cheering on competitive offspring. It reminds me of a close friend of mine who was explaining to me how his four-year-old daughter had just announced her decision to become a vegetarian. “What’s weird, man, is that we didn’t even coax her in any way. One day, she just shows up at the breakfast island, and says, ‘Yeah, I’m not going to eat animals anymore—not today or any other day.’” But for all the father’s claims about the child’s intrinsic motivation, I couldn’t help but remember that she’s a product of her environment. After all, this is a child who attends Montessori art classes and whose parents take her to the public library for something called “Drag Queen Story Time.” It’s interesting to think that she’s being raised only forty minutes away from a rodeo where children her age are strapping on helmets and getting dragged by lambs across pastures. A tacit debate is taking place about child-rearing and the merits of overprotection. What attributes of citizenship—what quotients of courage and forbearance—might run in the veins of these children, in the veins of the adults they’ll become? It reminds me of what Hannah Arendt once said about the difference between nation-states and republics. A nation-state is formed by neighbors who, sharing no ideological tenets, bind themselves together in defense of common resources. A republic, meanwhile, is something different. What unites the citizens of a republic is a willful act of imagination. And yet how can we share an act of imagination when our basic mental frameworks are so wildly divergent?
by Barrett Swanson, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
