 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| BARREL HORSE NEWS ARTICLES |
|---|
| Barrel Horse News is proud to have Charmayne James, 11-time World Champion, contributing to regularly-featured stories and columns, sharing her knowledge and experience to teach readers how to better communicate with, care for and succeed in the barrel racing world with their horses. From health care and horsemanship to overcoming mental anxiety, James will rely on her 20-plus years of professional barrel racing experience to inform readers on a variety of subjects.
Read the next chapter of Charmayne’s life - how she intends to fulfuill a whole new aspect of goals, helping others reach their own goals in the process. Check back often as new articles will be posted monthly. |
| Life is a highway...or sometimes a narrow dirt road |
| Charmayne recounts a few memorable moments from her road warrior days.
En route to 11 World Championships, Charmayne notched a host of memorable travel experiences under her belt - from the comical to the frightening to the flat out embarrassing. People often ask Charmayne about the personal experiences she had hauling from rodeo to rodeo for so many years, so this month we thought it would be fun to tell some of her tales. hitting the floorboards When I first started rodeoing, I was extremely shy and got embarrassed easily at the slightest little things. It was in 1984 and my mom, Gloria, and I were going to Jackson, Miss., for the pro rodeo. It was late at night and dark, and we needed to pull into a truck stop. My mom pulled off into what she thought was the entrance to the truck stop, but what she really pulled into was a big ditch. Needless to say we were immediately stuck and it was clear that the truck and trailer weren't going anywhere anytime soon. My mom tried to rock it back and forth and get it unstuck, but the rig was not going to be moving anywhere. So, after a few minutes of that we look up and the whole front window area of the truck stop is full of truckers watching us as we're stuck in this ditch. I was completely embarrassed and just crawled down on the floorboards so nobody would see me. I couldn't believe that my mom would drive us into a ditch and that meanwhile all the truckers are joking about it. I was 13 years old and just too embarrassed to deal with it so I dropped out of site. I was rotten not to help my mom out. She went in and got help and luckily in those days, we always planned to arrive at the rodeos a day in advance so Scamper could rest. So she got help, got unstuck and we made it to Jackson just fine. rock n roll There are quite a few funny stories from when my mom and I traveled together in the early years. I traveled everywhere with my mom and of course we fought about lots of things. I remember one time in specific when we couldn't agree on the stereo. In those days when you were driving through the middle of nowhere, you couldn't get radio reception so I had my rock n roll tapes with me that I liked. I wanted to listen to my music and she'd turn it down, I'd turn it up, and she'd turn it down again. So it went on like that for a while until she got mad and started pitching my cassettes out the window. At that time, I was 13 and I liked Sammy Hagar and Van Halen and there they went out the window. Later into the trip we started laughing about people on the road finding our tapes. Turns out that when we got to the rodeo - which was in Santa Maria, Calif. - that a lot of other people had trouble getting there because the roads were bad and their brakes were failing them and things. Neither one of us had stressed out or even paid any attention to the roads because we were so busy fighting over the music. black smoke Once, when my mom and I were in Kennewick, Wash., one of us filled up our gas truck with diesel. That was in the days when you had two tanks on the truck, so as we were pulling into the rodeo, we switched tanks and it went to the tank that had accidentally been filled with the wrong fuel. It looked like someone had set off a smoke bomb because there was thick black smoke billowing out of the truck. The next thing you know people are saying, "Charmayne James' truck is on fire, did you see it?" It created quite a large scene. But we were fortunate because we were able to find some really nice guys that drained the tanks for us and got us all fixed up. For a good while though while they were getting it fixed, it continued to blow black smoke. I was just 14 at the time and obviously embarrassed about drawing a crowd. If I wouldn't have made a name for myself running barrels, my vehicles were always getting a lot of attention. trick riding That first year that I went (to the rodeos) a lot of funny things happened. At Beaumont, Texas, Scamper fell down at the second barrel. He actually fell a lot the first year when he was learning to handle rodeo ground. He fell a lot at the first barrel. So at Beaumont when he fell, I came over the front of the saddle onto his neck and was stuck there as he ran from the second barrel to the third. It was extremely embarrassing! I got him pulled up, but I'm sure Scamper was thinking, "What the heck are you doing up there?" Thank goodness he didn't get his head down, because his first instinct when something upset him was to panic and run away if he got in a bind. All I can say is that I'm glad Scamper liked me because I was really at his mercy. A similar thing occurred in Walla Walla, Wash., that year. There was no center alley there, it was just a chain link fence with a banner hung on the right side of a closed gate and another banner on the left. With the chain link in the middle uncovered it appeared like there was actually a center alley, and we ran dead into that chain link. I tried not to hit the fence but what happened was that in trying to get stopped, Scamper slid under that fence. Scamper was pinned under the fence and I was pinned underneath him with my leg stuck. I just wanted to get him out of there and make sure he was okay. I petted him and talked to him and amazingly enough he stayed pretty calm. There were some good old cowboys there that knew not to panic, while meanwhile there were some women that were yelling and panicking. Thank goodness those cowboys and my mom all stayed composed and got some wire cutters and went to work. I said, "When he tries to get up you've got to pull my leg out." So when Scamper went to get up his shoe was hung in that fence but luckily for all of us those cowboys used common sense. Scamper was fine and I was fine, which just proves that it's always best in an emergency for you and your horse to stay calm and not panic. It was just crazy that first year. dodging danger The second year that I was out on the road, again with my mom, we were involved in a serious wreck in California. We had a brand new truck and we were leaving Sacramento and headed to Elk City, Okla., because those were the days when everyone was chasing Winston Tour points. I was just 15 or 16 years old and had just gotten my license. In the mountains outside of Sacramento, a semi truck and trailer came unhooked. The trailer was laying in the road with no emergency flares and at the last moment my lights hit the reflectors on the semi, but it was too late to miss it and we hit it. The doors of our truck were all smashed in and my mom had been asleep and her head hit the windshield, so of course the windshield was smashed and my mom's head was bleeding and looked real bad. My niece Elizabeth, who was just four at the time, was with us and she was also asleep in the back. I was worried about my mom and real worried that someone was going to hit our rig. I told the trucker that he needed to take our flares and get on the road behind us to stop traffic. Scamper always turned around in the stock trailer after I loaded him because it had no divider and he preferred to ride that way. That actually may have saved his career in this instance because he absorbed the shock of the impact with his hind end by being in a backward slant position. I was pretty concerned about my mom so I got her a ride to the hospital and Elizabeth was taken care of by two lady truckers that came on the scene. Then I was able to tend to the horses. When I went to check on Scamper, he was just back there eating hay. He was probably thinking, "There's no telling what these people will do to me next." Elizabeth ended up having a blast with the ladies that were watching her, and some police officers hooked me up with a rig and a place to board the horses that was about 10 miles away. Our rig was totaled and my mom had a concussion and spent the night in the hospital. My dad and uncle came right away to get us. We didn't make it to the rodeo, but in that kind of situation you're just so thankful that everyone is okay. You also really learn to take charge of things. For as bad as it was, I really don't remember panicking too much. You just do what you have to do and handle it. My cousin Lester and I experienced a very scary situation once when we were leaving Rapid City, S.D., heading home to N.M. We were in paying for fuel and there were two guys in the gas station. We were getting fountain drinks and these guys threw something at us. You learn when you're on the road to be cautious and not really make eye contact in those types of situations, so we just ignored them and went on, figuring that they were just a couple of drunk guys or something. Lester was driving and after we got down the road a few miles, here come these two guys and they pass us. They're trying to get us to pull over and so we passed them and then they'd speed up and pass us again. This went on for a while. They'd pass us and then slow down and try and move us over onto the shoulder. This went on for 30 or 40 miles and they'd slow us down to 10 miles per hour and try and stop us. It was really scary. We had no cell phones in those days and we were in the middle of nowhere. We had a CB but we couldn't get anyone on it. I told Lester, "This is serious and we have to do something." We were looking in the truck for tools that we could use to defend ourselves with. These guys just would not back off. So we shut the lights off and they started to pass us once again and Lester ran them off the road into a ditch. Well, never in a million years would you do that to another vehicle, but we were acting in self defense at that point. We thought we'd gotten rid of them at that point when out of nowhere here they come again and now they're really mad. Thank goodness we got to a main interstate and after a really scary 70 mile ordeal they gave up. I was 15 or 16 and my cousin was 20 or 21. There were no other cars on the road, no towns, no people - nothing. I think in that situation being a little bit crazy saved us. We were literally scared for our lives. four-wheeling Another time, there were about six of us all traveling together in a rig bound for Texas from Cloverdale, B.C. It was a mix of friends, family and a driver all crammed into a super cab Dodge and not a very big living quarters. It wasn't a huge rig and it was a long trip, so people were starting to get sick of each other. We heard that the interstate at Albuquerque was closed so we just planned to find a way to bypass it and go around via a mountain road. I went to sleep in the trailer and the next thing I know when I wake up, we're on a dirt road in the middle of the wilderness. We keep climbing and pretty soon the dirt road is down to a single lane and it's going straight up a mountain. There's no way we're getting turned around with our three horse trailer. The kid that was driving stopped and everyone was fighting, while meanwhile we're seeing deer and a creek in the background. You'd need a four-wheel drive jeep to turn around, so we continued to drive for about 40 minutes or so. By this point everyone in the truck had gotten pretty quiet. All of the sudden we round a bend and see this huge bonfire and all these people gathered around it holding sticks and chanting. Something was on those sticks but we couldn't tell what it was. Then one of the people in our truck commented that, "There are a lot of cults in these mountains around Albuquerque..." I mean, this scene made the hair on the back of all our necks stand up! So, we managed to get turned around before we ran into the bonfire, and we of course wanted to get as far down that mountain as we could. On the way down the mountain a car passed us that was headed from the direction of the bonfire, and one of the guys with us wanted to flag the car down and ask for directions. Of course we all immediately yelled at him that there was no way. I think we'd all watched too many horror movies. We got down 10 times faster than we got up there. I was never so happy to get back to Texas. That was one of the worst trips ever. But you can't say that those kind of experiences don't build character! |
 |
| About | Sponsors | On The Road | Store | Scampers's Choice | Clinic | Stallions | Contact | Home |
| Site designed and maintained by Teazer Graphics |
