Carried on the wind, there’s that horsey smell (manure, mud and equine sweat), a livestock odor that triggers the olfactory sense memory in the mitochondrial DNA. It recalls the centuries before city walls were built to defend against the lightning raid from an army on horseback, when only the bell towers waited to warn the farmers in the fields what was coming.
Ringed by metal bleachers, an arena draws the eye. The oval of sand in the center, where young men are busting bulls and broncos or getting busted themselves. The bleachers teem with the shouting, laughing, applauding, whistling scores who have gathered to take in the Hudson Valley Rodeo like coliseum-goers cheering a gladiator fight at the coliseum.
If the price in the bleachers was too dear, blankets and beach chairs were set down to watch the action from the grassy hills behind the far side of the arena where stands an inflatable bouncy castle fabricated to resemble a barn with a silver silo and a hayloft slide.
The bull riders hustle the action while an announcer calls the play-by-play. Some representative specimen of cowboy, hat, boots, belt and all is bucked off in two seconds flat, and now the bull is dancing on his bones while a rodeo clown harasses the enraged animal. When the next cowboy too is thrown, the announcer calls him tougher than a two-dollar steak. The competitor gains the sympathy of the crowd. And then another cowboy is thrown over and then kicked in the head. Really just a scraping blow by a dancing bull.
Under an unforgiving sun watching set in a wide open blue sky, the cowboys land hard and they land heavy where the floor of the arena is a forgiving pile of soft, rocky sand through which the riders scramble away for safer purchase.
When the contest was over, David MacMillan had been recognized as top bull rider for the day. He rode the bull until after the siren. That he wore a helmet instead of a cowboy hat makes more sense than style.
And anyway, it’s a dangerous sport. The next day in Lubbock, TX, 26-year-old bronc rider Skee Burkes would die after falling off his horse, when the bronco put the hoof to his head.
The most dangerous thing a bronco did here at the Hudson Valley Rodeo was throw a horseshoe which hit a rodeo clown in the head. But horseshoes are good luck and the clown did not die.
While riding a bull is the classic rodeo competition, this was not the only one held in the arena that day. Competitions in breakaway, barrel racing, bronc match and team roping were also on display. As exhibitions of skill and style as well as a timed element, the bronco and bull riders are scored by points which take élan and durability into account. The rest are scored solely by the time taken to accomplish a given task.
About 25 miles from Poughkeepsie and 38 miles from Danbury, the crowd shouted for it all. Amenia is one of those places that gets described by the proximity of the bigger cities closest to it. Once inside its boundaries, the Wassaic Creek and the Silo Ridge both take on greater significance. Somewhere to the west the Hudson River is lost and forgotten.
Cowgirls
Shyla O’Neill rode out fast with Maggie King, the both of them on horseback pursuing a black steer through the arena, that is, a calf-sized castrated bull with horns. King was header, and Shyla was heeler, meaning Maggie would throw her lasso over the head of the steer while Shyla threw her lasso under the back legs. When they had the steer pulled both ways the clock stopped.
“Shyla’s a big rodeo girl,” confided a woman standing on a bale of straw. “She’s 14. She can’t drive, but she can ride.”
Actually Shyla is 13 years old. Along with Summerlin, Shyla is the other half of the O’Neill sisters. Known quantity, those two. And Shyla’s star is on the rise. In the time since 2020, when she was 10 years old, she’s already won 7 saddles, the infinitely more useful equivalent to trophies.
“She’s a barrel racer, a pole bender, a breakaway roper, a team roper, a goat tyer”, says her father Sean O’Neill before pausing. “She’s a highschool rodeo champion is what she is. Last year, she won all-around in her division in the New York high school rodeo.”
With two daughters riding in the arena, raising hell on horseback, Shyla’s father is as proud as a father can be watching the competition. A woman he says is not his ex-wife leans back with her arms through the metal panels with a look on her face daring anyone to contradict him. But still, it’s a wholesome scene. When Shyla O’Neill smiles her braces flash and glitter in the sun.
Summer Lyn doesn’t win as much as her younger sister, a situation which she handles with grace and a discreetly extended middle finger scratching her own cheek.
The family has a horse and cow farm in Goshen, CT. Sean O’Neill says both girls have been riding since they were “three or four years old”. He characterizes Shyla as very aggressive. Shyla herself says she practices every day for maybe two hours. Her favorite horse is a sorrel named Dualie, spelling uncertain.
“He treats me well and he gets me to my spots when I’m roping,” O’Neill explains
She says she enjoys competing in rodeos – the New York High School Rodeo in particular allows for 9 weekend competitions a year. There’s the county championship rodeo in Lake Luzerne and there’s one in Attica, NY, nearby Buffalo. The Fonda Fairgrounds in Montgomery County is closest to Ulster, about 30 minutes outside of Albany. The O”Neills place the number of competitors at 83 contestants currently.
Here, Shyla O’Neill picked up another first place win in the breakaway roping competition, in which the goal is to put up the fastest time chasing a calf given a head start, lassoing said calf and stopping the horse suddenly. Attached to the horn of the saddle, the lasso is fixed to the calf still running. The sudden stop breaks the rope free. O’Neill pulled off the feat in 5.8 seconds.
Barrel racers
Next to the press box where the announcer is riling the crowd and dispensing his wisdom, the barrel racers, all cowgirls, have climbed up on the heavy steel panels which prevent the bulls from smashing through and running amuck in the crowd. They’re keeping a close eye on the action.
When a barrel racer comes out of the starting chute, they ride in a pattern around blanketed 50-gallon steel drums placed in the arena. Speed is the goal, sharp turns are necessary and any barrel knocked over adds 5 seconds to the total, effectively disqualifying the rider’s attempt.
Sean O’Neill explains the desired consistency for the sand of the arena floor. “When they’re going around the barrels, if it’s too loose the horses will cup out and slide to the side.” So it’s packed tight enough that when a horse pushes off they have something to push against.”
A barrel racer rides a quarterhorse, which is a nimble, short distance, sprinting horse as opposed to a thoroughbred, which is your standard horse-track betting horse. Think the Belmont stakes. Think American Pharoah.
Danielle Ventrella, she was king hell barrel racer this day with a time of 15.333.
The setting for the rodeo is the limestone-rich soil, the heartland of Keane Stud, a thoroughbred breeding farm divided by split rail fencing over numerous fields and hills into multiple paddocks. As another header and heeler competition gets underway a helicopter lifts up from one of the green meadows and buzzes the crowd with the chopping air and low frequency bass pulses felt in the chest. That some people involved with Keane Stud come and go by helicopter tells you all you need to know about their net worth.
When it’s all said and done, the marketing manager for the Silo Ridge Community Foundation will estimate that nearly 5,000 people attended this charity event in this pastorally forked valley.
Montana-based Leland McMillan, who wears a black cowboy hat, brought the rodeo here to Amenia three years ago.
“We started doing one rodeo in Montana a year,” explains McMillan. “And now we’re up to 35 rodeos a year all over the nation. It’s a family business. We can put a rodeo on in your backyard if you want one.”
A casually dressed gentleman in his seventies in the press box establishes that the backyard in question is Ulster County.
“You have the fairgrounds over there,” he nods. “I don’t think they’ve had a rodeo there in probably 20-30 years.”
Standing within ear shot, the memory of a woman is kindled.
“Outside of New Paltz!” she exclaims, discarding four decades in a single flash and gesture. “I rode there! I used to be a trick rider in the 70’s.”
Trick riding is risky, stunt work. Standing up in the saddle, hanging off the side, dropping out of the stirrups to touch the ground and bounding up and over to the other side, hanging upside down in a pose known as the Cossack Death Drag, riding backwards in the saddle and striking more dramatic poses while balancing, all while the horse canters and gallops.
This too must pass
After the rodeo finished, and the crowd abandoned the bleachers to join the audience of an imported country pop troubadour, the panel gates swung open and four horses, a Bay, a Palomino, a Buckskin and a Sorrel, were let into the arena rider-less, to entertain themselves. The Sorrel is a powerful red brown color. The Bay is dark. The Buckskin is tan with black markings. The Palomino had a mane of hair so blond and feathered it looks like a bleach and blow-out job from a Bushwick hair salon.
Wearing bright pink leg warmers, they run around the ring together, shifting direction and speed with the same sudden facility displayed by a flock of starlings. From time to time one or another leaps and kicks their back legs behind them into the air, the hooves inches from the heads of their running companions.
“They’re just playing and exercising before we tie them up for the night,” explains a barrel racer who declines to give her name. “They like to roll in the sand.”
“They behave like big dogs,” offers an eavesdropper.
“They’re more dangerous,” corrects the barrel racer, before changing the subject. “My whole family rodeos and barrel races or are into the rodeo somehow, one way or another. I’ve been doing it since I was born.”
The horses turn as a gang to charge the steel panels at high speed, eliciting a chorus of whoas. Their playtime was over.
When the horses have been led away the empty dirt and sand arena has a holy feel to it. Before the spectacle, a silent arena conjures expectation and waiting. After, it hums and vibrates with the memory of the acts which took place. The place is an argument made physical that the spirits of those once living can stay in a place they loved, out of simple affection, for the sand here holds the heat of the sun long after it’s set.
Back in their own pen, the steers having spent the rodeo being chased and roped and pulled and knocked over stand shoulder to shoulder, fanned out in a circle as they grazed, as if between them all they were protecting something at the center.
A young boy from the city gets his bravery up and approaches, asking if he can touch them.
“I have no idea,” laughs a man wearing boots and a hat with a Yonkers accent.
“Mind the horns,” another says with conviction.
Join the family! 
