Late Sunday afternoon, we brought the herd in close to the corrals in preparation and got the rodeo rig packed up and ready to roll the minute the chute gate slammed behind the last cow.
At 7:30 Sunday night we got the call that the vet had cancelled due to an impending blizzard. What? When we’d checked the forecast at noon it was only a few inches of snow (no, that’s not a shock on the first of October). Dang. There it was, we were now under a winter storm warning, scheduled to hit in the wee hours and dip south nearly to the Wyoming border.
At 9:30 p.m, when I’m usually climbing into my jammies, we were loading the horses and heading south. Greg’s bad knee was killing him from all the mad scrambling, so at Shelby I took the wheel and he crawled into the living quarters of the trailer where he could stretch out.
Fast forward three hours. I finished fueling the pickup at a truck stop in Helena, went inside to use the restroom, then grabbed a snack and a hot drink. I was about to pull out when it occurred to me that I should check to be sure Greg hadn’t also gone inside the store when I wasn’t looking. After all, he wouldn’t have been the first member of our family to be left at a gas station.
It’s always the bathroom that gets you. Growing up, our family of six plus at least one dog rodeoed in a Winnebago, pulling a four-horse trailer. One weekend, somewhere in southern Alberta, my mother was driving while my dad took a nap in the rear. As she climbed into the driver’s seat after a fuel stop, she glanced back at the empty bed.
“Where’s your dad?” she asked.
“In the bathroom,” my younger brother replied, barely glancing up from his book.
Assuming he meant the bathroom inside the RV, she fired it up and pulled out. My brother went on reading without comment. Luckily, a block down the street she glanced in the rearview mirror and caught a glimpse of my dad running behind us, yelling and waving his arms. Given my brother’s lack of concern and the number of cross country trips they make, we’re all sort of amazed he hasn’t lost any of his four kids or his wife at a convenience store, but I suppose a few tours in Afghanistan teaches a man to keep track of his fellow travelers.
I suspect every rodeo family has a similar story, but my all-time favorite is one I heard from a college friend. We grew up in the Stone Age, when everyone had a camper on the back of their pickup and no one thought twice about stuffing all the kids in there so they didn’t have to hear, “Are we there yet?” On this particular day, his mother had left him and his brother to duke it out in the front, thereby keeping his dad wide awake while she rode in blissful solitude in the camper. They made the usual gas stop, then piled in and took off.
They were five miles down the road before his dad realized something was wrong. Arriving back at the service station, they found his mother fuming beside the pump, and considering she was already in a temper, no one had the nerve to tell her they’d only turned around because his dad had forgotten the gas cap. 
Kari Lynn Dell is a third-generation cowgirl, horse trainer and rodeo competitor. She writes from her family ranch on Montana's Blackfeet Reservation. For information on her novels, short stories and other writing projects, visit her website.
PHOTO: Life on the rodeo circuit sometimes literally means "life on the road" when you get left behind at the refueling stop. Photo courtesy of Getty Images.
