On an ironing board next to a billiards table sits a steaming iron, a crisp still-warm pair of wranglers, and a pink button-up cowboy shirt with Skoal embroidered down one sleeve in overly large letters. On a wooden coffee table, copies of PSN, American Cowboy, Club, Juggs and Spank lie next to several limp reusable ice bags–the old-school, medical-blue cloth kind with a screw top–and several nearly-empty beer bottles filled with spit. The rest is bodies and boots just kinda here and there. This is hell week. Vast stretches of driving and a unique form of redneck lounging that vacillates between R&R and creative-if-a-little-destructive time killing, all of it interrupted at least once, if not twice a day, by eight seconds—if you’re lucky—on the back of a saddle bronc horse in the middle of a not-so-well-spectated rodeo ring, in one town or another, for a week in the middle of July in the middle of rural Alberta and British Columbia.
