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During the
Calgary Stampede, Canada is abuzz with references to “eight
seconds,” the length of time needed to complete a bull or
bareback bronc ride. Walk into a Victoria coffee shop and you
may see a conservatively dressed woman pick up a scalding
cappuccino. Her doppelganger in Seattle wisely puts the cup
down, grimaces and grabs for a cardboard cup sleeve, but in
Canada at Stampede time, the woman holds the cup and waves her
free hand in the air, muttering, “Eight seconds,” before sliding
it back on the counter and inquiring about the cup sleeve.
The
references to “eight seconds” intrigued me. If the rodeo could
seep into the lexicon of nearly every Canadian, even—in one
instance—a marine biologist who specializes in the acoustics of
Weddell seals’ communication, it was worth looking into. I was
not quite intrigued enough to actually attend the Stampede, mind
you, but I was inspired to watch some on TV.
I didn’t get
to see any bull riding, but the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation did show chuck wagon racing, billed as “one of the
world's most spectacular sports” with a “history as old and as
colourful as the West itself.” The races harken back to the
days when the wagons carried the food for the cow outfits and
chuck wagon teams needed a break from the tedium and greenhouse
gas emissions.
When I was a
kid, chuck wagons gave me the creeps because of the little
wagons that rode out of the Purina Chow Bags. They reminded me
of fast tarantulas. I didn’t worry at all about slow
tarantulas, but like many kids, I feared fast tarantulas,
particularly the really big one on Gilligan’s Island. The
Purina chuck wagons were less creepy than the spider on
Gilligan’s Island, but not by much.
I didn’t
quite follow chuck wagon racing, as presented by the CBC. I
consider myself adept at picking up the nuances of sports fairly
quickly, but chuck wagon racing stumped me. I could grasp the
easy part—several wagons, each drawn by a team of horses,
maneuver through a twisted race course. The wagons, of course,
no longer have anything to do with the food services industry
and they only nominally look like the fast tarantulas of my
youth. Nowadays they’re tricked out, so that they can zip
through hairpin turns and reach 30 mph down the backstretch.
What puzzled
me about the races were the seemingly superfluous horseback
riders that accompanied each chuck wagon. When a race started,
the wagons bolted to the front, with several horseback riders
trailing. In the races I watched, I couldn’t find any
correlation between their performance and their team’s
standings. Shaky sources inform me that in the Old West, these
horseback riders were the stewards of the cutlery, trailing the
chuck wagon with pistols ablaze like a B-movie posse. But what
is their worth in a 21st century rodeo, I ask?
This is the
type of talk that’s liable to get me busted up if I ever go to a
rodeo in person. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t even fly at the
gay rodeo, where I imagine that the banter is much wittier than
what I have to offer. Incidentally, the gay bull riders in the
Atlantic Gay Rodeo Association only have to ride their bull for
six seconds, which begs the question, “How gay is that?” Eight
second rides traditionally are a staple of the gay rodeo
experience. For example, the book 8 Seconds, by Jean
Ferris, is the story of Kit, a young, gay cowboy at rodeo camp.
Would Kit impress his new friend John if he only stayed on his
bull for six seconds? I think not.
My grasp of
the inside game of chuck wagon racing was so poor that I didn’t
even catch the offensive, controversial remark that the CBC
color commentator made. It prompted the announcer to retort,
“Well, that’s just an opinion, to put it mildly,” followed by an
abrupt commercial break. After the commercials, the coverage
switched to another event.
Later, I
searched the internet for a reference to the incident, or at
least something that could explain the sport to me. I found two
things that interested me. First of all, chuck wagon racing has
unwritten rules, which—by definition—aren’t available on the
internet. I suspect that the color commentator bumped up
against one of these unwritten rules.
Secondly, if
you go to the
Calgary
Stampede website, you can find a chuck wagon video game.
This excited me because I thought it might be a fun introduction
to the basics of the sport. I’ve heard that Dale Earnhardt Jr.
(#8) plays interactive online NASCAR video games. While I
waited for the game to load, I hoped that the chuck wagon game
would be worthy of a pro’s interest.
No such
luck. The game has virtually nothing to do with chuck wagons.
If it were included in an SAT question, it would go something
like this:
Chuck Wagon
Racing : Chuck Wagon Racing Game :: Donkeys : Donkey Kong
In the video
game, a grizzled cowboy launches a miniature chuck wagon into
the desert with a large cactus slingshot. The miniature chuck
wagon isn’t creepy, but it’s still a bad game. It makes no
sense and it isn’t fun, but I feel that it does give me some
license to write a frivolous piece about chuck wagon racing,
since the folks at the venerable Calgary Stampede don’t respect
the sport enough to make a decent game.
The
website’s bonanza, though, is another game called Round 'Em Up.
It’s a version of Space Invaders, played out over a cartoonish
desert. Instead of a spaceship, you control the corpseless head
of a cowboy that, during his lifetime, slung miniature chuck
wagons with a cactus slingshot. Now this man’s head shoots
missiles at rows of lethargic aliens, all in the spirit of the
Calgary Stampede.
Copyright Jeff Lewis, 2004. |
