Wednesday, June 6, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
8-Ball
With the rodeo back
in town I’ve been think-
ing about horse-wrecks.
Depending on how you look
at it, it’s either fortunate or
unfortunate that I have a con-
siderable library of personal
wrecks to choose from. It’s
a qualifying roster of equine
catastrophes that would,
sadly, make more of a book
than a column — something
like Thomas McGuane’s
marvelous musings about
the cutting-horse crowd in
“Some Horses” — but in
the spirit of all things dust
and blood and the roar of a
Sunday crowd, I thought I’d
take a crack at it.
My professional rodeo
career ended in a spectacular
wreck at the Lost Dutchman
Days Rodeo in Apache
Junction, Arizona. It’s hard
to say exactly what went
wrong because a lot of things
can go wrong in the first few
milliseconds of a bronc ride.
Not enough rosin, too much
rosin, unlucky socks, bad
vibes, a mean girlfriend cast-
ing spells from the contestant
parking lot, or even a really
good bucking horse can all
play a role in what is essen-
tially an incalculable mystery
of gravity and centrifugal
force.
It’s important to have
some sense of what is
going on in the chute. In the
chute you don’t really hear
the crowd. You hear your
own heartbeat in your ears
because a few million years
of evolution have taken over
your body. That will happen
when you drop in on a 1,400-
pound home-wrecker that
breathes fire. It’s a physi-
ological reaction to danger
and there isn’t anything you
can do about it. There is a
loss of fine motor functions.
Tunnel vision. Auditory
exclusion.
You can never entirely
control an adrenaline-
induced survival response,
but like a frisky blonde
buckle-bunny from Chandler,
Arizona, you can eventually
learn to live with it.
It’s also important to
note that professional buck-
ing stock quickly separates
the wheat from the chaff.
Bucking out your uncle’s
rank old buckethead in the
round corral is not quite the
same thing as forking a horse
specifically bred and cared
for because it produces high-
point rides and puts a lot of
cowboys in the dirt.
And it’s generally better
not to confuse the two.
8-Ball was a professional
bucking horse. She was big
and she was strong and she
did not care one whit for
my gold-buckle delusions.
In that wreck, like so many
others a life can bring, it’s
probably better to just finally
admit that 8-Ball was a bet-
ter bucking horse than I was
a bronc rider, and leave it at
that — even if, after all these
years, I still think I might
have covered her on another
day.
I was once bucked off a
colt in front of a school bus
full of children. This hap-
pened at the Queen Valley
Ranch in Montgomery Pass,
Nevada, which is precisely
65 miles from anywhere else.
It’s not clear to me at all why
there was a school bus travel-
ing on Highway 6, or where
they found the kids to put in
it, and it was also not clear
to the froggy little colt I was
trying to put some miles on.
When that big yellow
banana full of kids material-
ized out of the desert the colt
broke in half and eventually
kicked me out the back door
and into the bar ditch.
The kids, who had seen
the whole thing developing
for a mile or more, were lean-
ing out the windows cheering
and laughing as they and the
big banana vanished again
into the desert.
Not that getting bucked
off should mess with your
self-confidence. The idea is
to get back on, and getting
bucked off is usually the easy
part. Walking down a scared
young colt in the middle of
nowhere is the real lesson
because it teaches humility
in a way that merely getting
dumped can’t even approach.
That was proven to me
again at High Rock Lake in
Nevada, when I was trying
to push some cows home. I
tried to put a young remuda
horse across a fast-running
creek, and it turned out that
15
creek was also pretty deep.
We were swimming before
I fully appreciated the prob-
lem and though I managed
to slip out of the stirrups and
slide off the horse panicked
and finally left me on the
bank like a wet wool blanket
before he went bucking and
squealing across the desert.
When I’d finished pour-
ing the creek out of my boots
I was able to enjoy another
long, humiliating walk-
down in all of that marvelous
country.
But 8-Ball, that marvel-
ous old gal, gets all of the
credit for convincing me —
after some broken ribs and
a really fantastic concussion
— that I was better suited
for chasing cows around the
desert, far from the crowds
and the entry fees and the
paramedics. She taught me
respect in a way that I hold
onto and revive every time I
watch those young cowboys
pouring their hearts out in the
arena. And while 8-Ball may
not live on in anyone else’s
memory, she does in mine,
proving once again the old
adage that the outside of a
horse is good for the inside of
a man — even when, maybe
especially when — they buck
like hell.
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