The Man in the New Boots

As Chandler Fritz makes his way to the bucking chute in his grandfather’s boots and a DIY cup, he turns over the forces that have moved him to ride a bull. In his telescopic essay, Fritz moves between Paleolithic cave paintings and gas-station epiphanies, the roots of early North American bull-riding events and a short list of the beef he’s consumed in the days before his fated meeting with Babyface, his steer. “A perversion,” he writes, “is a turn from a previous path to meaning. It is the betrayal of an exact course.” But I’d take a true course over an exact one any day.

I can’t tell you why I wanted to do this, but I can tell you exactly when I made the decision to do it. I was filling up my mother-in-law’s Hummer at the Shell right off the Piestewa Highway a few days after the ocotillos bloomed. My wife and I had just decided we were going to try to have kids. I know what you’re thinking, but that’s not exactly it. I don’t want to ride a bull before I have a kid. I want to make a bunch of money and buy a house and a Subaru before I have a kid.

But I was standing there pumping midgrade octane into the H3 and staring at the McDowells and thinking about how I knew the pump number where I was standing, knew the name of the mountains I was looking at, knew the hard smell of the gasoline and the flaming blue of a passing attendant’s uniform—knew these things exactly, the way I had always determined to know the world—and suddenly I thought I should probably ride a bull. Or, more accurately, I suddenly found that I was going to ride a bull, as I had already reached for my phone and called Buffalo Chip and got my name on the list before any normative notion of whether I should do this crossed my mind. It was a kind of fait accompli accomplished by my unconscious, the type of action one associates with creatures of lesser intelligence. It cost forty dollars, and I signed a waiver—anyone can do it. At least, anyone can try.