Julie Carter
Old Glory will wave majestically in rodeo arenas across America this holiday. It's the Fourth of July and cowboys, if they are anything, they are patriotic and optimistically greedy.
This particular holiday is his "Cowboy Christmas," the most lucrative run of rodeos of the year.
Don't misunderstand. It doesn't take a holiday for the cowboy to bring out the flag. It's there at every rodeo. Honor to the stars and stripes happens first, before anything else.
Even the rodeo livestock seems to know the routine. Watch as the cowboys stand at the chutes, hats held over their hearts while colors are posted and the national anthem is played.
The bucking horses in the chute will snort and kick the gate behind them adding to the music's percussion.
For the rodeo contestants, it's a sound that echoes in the recesses of their rodeo memories long after they no longer compete. Like the ringing of Pavlov's bell, it invokes a hunger for the competition about to begin.
Add that to the smell of the fresh-worked arena dirt, the banging of the gates as bucking horses and bulls are moved around, the rattle of arriving trailers as they ease across the parking lot and the sound of hoof beats as a horse lopes across the hard surface to the arena.
I want to believe that almost all of us honor America, our freedoms and the price paid for both. This weekend, I also honor the cowboy for keeping tradition year after year and in economic times that boggle the mind.
Rodeo rigs are progressively bigger, fancier, and technology has kicked rodeoing up a notch from the days of standing at a pay phone along the highway to enter a rodeo or find out when you drew up.
As much as there is that is different, there is still so much the same.
It still requires the basics. First, the cowboy has to get there, and second, he has to have brought his cowboy skills with him.
Fourth of July rodeoing is defined by road-weary cowboys, tired horses, pickups filled with dirty clothes, fast-food wrappers and muddy boots.
The pickup dashboard is full of rumpled programs, Copenhagen cans, empty coffee cups, dust-covered sunglasses, gas receipts, a ball cap or two and a road map. But in every rig, there rides great hope, unlimited optimism and a belief that this time, this rodeo, things will get better.
For me, it wouldn't be the Fourth of July if I wasn't standing in the hot sun, beating rain or dusty wind waiting for the next event to move the entertainment along.
Years past paying entry fees and waiting for them to call my name, now I carry a camera and put what I know of rodeo into print.
I don't suppose I'll ever be anywhere else but at a rodeo grounds somewhere on the Fourth of July. In a mental check of the past 40 years, there have been no more times than I can count on one hand that I haven't been at a rodeo somewhere, in some capacity. Not likely it'll change anytime soon.
Join me at a rodeo for a look into the heart of the rodeo cowboy at his best. Today would be a good day to start.
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