Steer roping and the hero's journey
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We are hungry. Hungry for nobility, chivalry, sacrifice, honour. We are hungry for meaning, of any kind. Where is the meaning to be found? Charisophia.
After the Galisteo Rodeo and the regrettable missing of the mutton busting, my son C., whose ninth birthday is this weekend, has been asking me if he can please please have some steer roping lessons. Now this is a kid who doesn’t ask for much, and, after all, he tells me, working it pretty hard, he does have a big old quarter horse out in the barn. I mean, you gotta start somewhere, mom. Right?
Right ...
C.’s request of course follows on the tail end of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with a young roper I met at the store while buying myself a pair of western boots. He and his dad team rope. He told me all about how he’s been training horses since he was a boy. Showed me the belt buckle he was sporting—he and dad each got one when they placed pretty big last year apparently. Told me he has a job hauling hay down from Colorado for the summer, then he’s going back to school. His passion when he spoke about doing what he loves doing the most was infectious. In fact, the young roper said, he’d tried to pull together a roping team at the local public school, but with limited interest. For someone so young, he was articulate, straightforward, friendly, funny, intelligent, motivated, and, based upon our conversation, one of those rare and mythical creatures (yeah, go ahead and call me old-fashioned)—a gentleman.
I must have waxed pretty poetic about that team roper to C., because now the seed is firmly planted.
So this morning I find myself on the telephone with a roping supply outfit in West Texas, ordering a kid’s rope and a steer roping dummy—essentially a life-sized plastic steer head you stick in a bale of straw and toss the rope at—along with the DVD (I am such a geek) Team Roping For Kids Part 1 by 8-Time World Champion Speed Williams (gotta love that name), as a birthday present. Somehow this seems a much better choice than that Xbox C’s also been talking about (but for Christmas).
And for some reason today I can’t stop thinking of the rapt look of awe plastered across C.’s face while we were sitting in the rodeo stands the other week, watching those cowboys do their thing.
Hero worship?
I’m not certain. But I do know there’s something about men, horses, wrangler jeans, cattle, work, sweat, belt buckles, sun, wide-open skies, and dirt, that gets to me. Kind of the Riders-in-the-Sky version of King Arthur and his knights. I try to imagine what it must all mean to C.
Can a lariat and a plastic steer’s head be the magical gifts for a hero’s journey?
I can’t wait to see.
