You've heard all about snakes on a plane.
Now we bring you the sequel:
Bulls on a boat.
The Professional Bull Riders tour is coming to Alaska for shows in Fairbanks and Anchorage this week and next, and the events are strictly BYOB -- bring your own bull.
That's why, sometime late last night or early this morning, a Totem Ocean Trailer Express vessel was scheduled to unload some 100,000 pounds worth of rodeo bulls at the Port of Anchorage.
Seventy bulls and five human caretakers made the 66-hour trip from Tacoma to Anchorage via the open seas of the Gulf of Alaska aboard one of TOTE's 890-foot ships.
They traveled with 17 tons of hay, 14 tons of grain and an undisclosed amount of Dramamine -- or should we call it Brahmamine? They're coming by sea instead of by land because fears of mad-cow disease have made it complicated, if not impossible, to bring bulls to Alaska from Canada in recent years.
No sign these bulls are raging.
While at least one of the humans was reportedly struggling to find his sea legs, the bulls were doing just fine, according to Mark Ward of TMT Western Events, the promoter of the show.
"The bulls are eating more feed than we expected," Ward said.
Which makes the bulls no different than your average cruise passenger who eats his way from one latitude to another. Their all-you-can-eat buffet includes 10 pounds of grain in the morning, 10 more at night, and hay and water throughout the day.
George Lowery of TOTE says the bulls make for unusual cargo, but noted that there's some precedent to this fantastic voyage.
"It's not an everyday occurrence," he said, "but maybe once or twice a year it comes up -- circuses, a rodeo like this, or maybe a shipment of reindeer going Outside. We did a load of pigs, I think, years ago."
Remarkably, the bulls and their entourage, which includes five 72-foot double-decker trailers, take up a minuscule portion of the vessel -- maybe 2 percent, Lowery said.
What's more, he doesn't think 70 bulls, even trained professional rip-snorters like these, have a chance to jostle the giant ship during its journey.
History tells us that bigger animals have traveled on smaller ships with amazing results.
Hannibal, the famous Carthaginian general, recruited elephants for his army and took them from Africa to Europe via rafts, which his men covered with dirt and grass to fool the elephants into thinking they were treading on familiar ground.
And wouldn't you know it, there's a Hannibull scheduled to perform here. Only this one isn't coming by sea. He's homegrown, one of two Alaska bulls owned by Micah and Jenny Robertson of Soldotna considered good enough to earn an invite to the PBR shows.
Micah says no one's ever successfully ridden Hannibull, and a $1,000 reward awaits the first cowboy who can.
That's nothing compared to the saga of Snowflake, Alaska's most famous bull. He achieved folk-hero status in 1998 by surviving two months on Kodiak Island after bolting from the rodeo grounds.
During his stampede to freedom, he gored a horse (the unfortunately named Doofus), tossed a clown, chased a cowboy into a ditch, charged a man who roped him but couldn't stop him, and led about a dozen men on a three-mile chase worthy of Pamplona.
(Snowflake was shot to death after hanging out on Coast Guard property for several weeks.
"I think there were two reasons that bull was mad," said Pierre "Chili Pepper" Perez, a rodeo clown who helped chase Snowflake around the island.
"First, his name was Snowflake. Two, I think that bull was mad because Robert Ulrich from Big Lake rode the hair off of him.")
Now imagine 70 Snowflakes, after 66 hours at sea.
Maybe not as creepy as snakes on a plane. But definitely more gory.
Beth Bragg's opinion column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Her e-mail address is bbragg@adn.com.
