Steve Moseley

The author is still taking pictures at rodeos, including this local Nebraska event.

Photo courtesy Steve Moseley

• 
• 

I was born in North Platte, Nebraska, home of no less than the annual, great big deal Buffalo Bill Rodeo. Growing up, I was surrounded by goat roper cousins from deep in the bowels of those yonder Nebraska sandhills where we got up to mischief no end.

So why did I not follow their path to equestrian competence? Several reasons, I suppose. First, the Moseley hacienda was not a horse culture household. No cowboy way for us. We lived in big cities. You know, North Platte and Kearney.

Not surprising, I suppose, that a sophisticated, evolved young urbanite such as myself lacked any livestock knowledge or experience whatsoever.

The aforementioned cousins guffawed mightily when, while riding yearling steers out at the ranch south of Arnold, mine always tried to scrape me off on the barn siding. Memorable splinter removal procedures that still wake me screaming in the night were the result.

It took the passage of years for the dimwitted town kid to notice calves the cousins rode were not similarly inclined to deploy this tactic. Was I set up? Quite possibly. Likely, even.

Horses and I have a long history of wrecks, humiliation and, in one case while impressing a prospective love interest in a high school where I was the new kid, jeans that exploded at the seam from knee to knee — mortifyingly to include the nether regions — while attempting a macho leap onto the saddle behind her. This was late summer down at the pool right after we moved to town. A gaggle of soon-to-be schoolmates, kids I had yet to formally meet, looked on. Thus was a sad, sorrowful legend born.

My history with horses is as traumatic as it is brief. Pitched off. Bit. Slid off the hind parts (snapped a wrist on that one). Experienced an otherwise calm horse that went to crow-hopping somethin’ fierce when startled by a dead and bloodied jackrabbit carcass tossed casually aside on the cob pile.

Here’s a bet upon which you can wager the farm and the family jewels: No matter how much time remains to me on Mother Earth, I will never again sit a horse. Take it to the bank.

All of which begs the question: How did this lifelong hapless tinhorn end up possessed of unbridled (tee-hee) passion for rodeo?

Here’s why. I discovered rodeo for real when I began making my living with cameras. As the last 35 years played out, more and much better equipment accumulated in my visual arsenal. Add in all those decades learning through trial and (boatloads of) error how to go about the nuts and bolts of shooting rodeo and the results became better and better.

I came to love the variety of different looks in action rodeo shots. Calf roping bears no resemblance to barrel racing. Steer wrestling is identifiable at a glance from bronc riding. Bulls …? Well, I think we can all agree bull riding resembles insanity most of all.

A number of years immersed in northwest Wyoming’s world of rodeo as sports editor and photographer for this very newspaper set this love affair in concrete.

And there you have it, why Ole’ Mose still shuffles pathetically around the rodeo arena, poking his lens though the fence while dragging a prosthetic hip, bone-on-bone knee, two detached biceps, sciatica and a pair of destroyed shoulders along with him at age 76, perched on a 3-legged stool because squatting down and standing are kaput.

Conclusion: He doesn’t do it because he can. He does it because he must.

(Contact stevemoseley42@gmail.com)