LEWISTON – When Bob Guerette of Orange Street woke to all the commotion and yelling, he first thought there was a desperate search on for a neighborhood dog or cat.
There probably wasn’t much that could have prepared him for reality: It was shortly after 11 p.m. and Dirty Rider the bull – all 2,000 pounds of him – was headed for his backyard.
The bull was followed by a troupe of real-life cowboys, complete with hats, boots, lassos and a horse.
“The guy on horseback came up in my driveway, and the bull went right up the next driveway, and they met in the back,” Guerette said Saturday.
His yard quickly became a staging area for efforts to rein in Dirty Rider, who had escaped the PBR Rodeo at The Colisee just minutes earlier. He’d broken free as rodeo hands tried to load him onto a trailer, said the show’s production manager, Marvin Wycuff.
“It was pretty uneventful for us, really,” he said.
Dirty Rider made it a few blocks from the Colisee, hardly stopping before his appearance on Orange Street. He was caught within 20 minutes or so of his escape, Wycuff said. “It probably took longer to get the trailer there and stuff like that.”
According to police, the Dirty Rider disturbance, which CNN reported on nationwide Saturday, took an hour to clear up.
No one was injured, said Lt. Donald Mailhot of the Lewiston Police Department. Police were prepared to shoot the bull if it threatened anyone, but that never happened.
It was Guerette’s lawn that suffered most.
PBR is expected to pay for the damages. It will probably take a couple of yards of loam and some grass seed to straighten everything out, he said.
Dirty Rider was lassoed by a cowboy, then tied to a stand of three birch trees on the Orange Street property. Guerette said the trees faired well, and there were just a few divots from the bull’s hooves, but, the PBR trailer that was backed across his lawn when the bull was picked up, left sink marks in the ground. The ground was soft from the recent rain, he said.
Guerette has had moose and deer in his backyard before, so the bull was just one more creature to add to his list of “wild” visitors.
“You don’t see that too often in the city,” he added with a chuckle.
He hoped to get a better night’s sleep Saturday.
Wycuff said this was the first time a bull had escaped the PBR rodeo crew, adding that such mishaps have been known to occur on other rodeo tours.
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