Rodeo Champs
Some say 20-year-old rookie bareback rider Rocker Steiner is a punk-ass bitch for cursing
‘screw ’em, they’re stuck with my ass’
My pink Stetson was the cheapest hat in the store
Rodeo has been described by Forbes as America’s “fastest-growing sport.” After a recent Yellowstone-driven burst of popularity, it now draws 43 million people a year, which is larger than what both golf and tennis attract, and is even practiced by supermodel Bella Hadid, who is currently dating a Mexican-American cowboy from Fort Worth, Texas. Rodeo competitions can be watched live or via subscription to the Cowboy Channel, which is essential, since most rodeo fans live in smaller farm and ranch towns, especially out west, where Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA)-sanctioned rodeos are a real-world fixture of local communities, offering cowboys the opportunity to show off their skills.
The sport’s popularity initially peaked back in the nineties, before experiencing a slow decline that paralleled the struggles of rural America. Small communities found it difficult to maintain …
Pug's Orchard
When business was good, they were generous with their apples
A legacy of giving includes sharing land with neighbors
A woman needs land just like a man does
Already, there are things I know I would change if I could. So much of it is just time. Then, there’s the weather.
For the better part of April and almost all of May, it rained. The trees swayed under cloudbursts like women washing their hair, tossing their heads back in the rinse. Pollen gathered in little pools and then dried yellow in halos on the blacktop. For weeks, I worried over the borrowed plot of land in the field across the road, but there was nothing to do about it — nothing to do but wait. “It’s ok,” Mike Shell reassured me, “it’s still early.” May was nearly spent by the time I got my vegetables in the ground.
Mike and his wife Sheila are my friends, the first I made when — a few years ago — I moved from my studio apartment in the northwest quadrant of Washington, DC, to a three-bedroom row home in Wise, the deep southwest Virginia town where I was raised. On a whim, I stopped into the …
Stephanie Gilmore Rides the Desert Waves
8-time world surfing champion gets stuck in the Arabian Desert. Luckily, there’s a wave pool.
The best surfer is the one who wins over and over and over again, and can’t stop winning
Don’t ever let her win at ping-pong, though
It’s been a few weeks, but there’s still a whiff of hotel lobby ambrosia from the Abu Dhabi EDITION on my long-sleeve shirt, my souvenir from the debut of Kelly Slater’s latest wave pool in the desert of the United Arab Emirates. How did I manage to get this golden ticket to the double top-secret opening of the latest “really big deal” in the elite inner circle of professional surfing on the far side of the world? The truth is I probably should not have been there at all.
The month before my trip I was mindlessly messaging an old mate on Instagram, one who happens to be the romantic partner of one Ms. Stephanie Louise Gilmore — the Australian professional surfer, eight-time world champion, and current defending champ. Her fella and I often share flat-earth/lizard-people/hollow-moon/quantum-entanglement memes while comparing notes on nano graphene, mud-flood theories, and …
