Steak - Mark Schatzker [138]
“Wouldn’t it be simpler to just stay here and eat steak?” I asked.
Yes, it would, Elzinga said.
Before getting into cattle, Elzinga sought perfection in backcountry powder snow. He sounds more like a ski bum than a rancher—on the spectrum of dude talk, his inflections and vocabulary are somewhere between cowboy and surfer. He also doesn’t look like the ranching type, Stetson and mustache notwithstanding. He stands six foot five and is leaner than a lodgepole pine, wears round eyeglasses that are more in keeping with a university library than with the ruggedness of his surroundings, and looks like a man who could get blown clean off the side of a mountain. There have been several wipeouts, including a legendary near-fatal spill in 2005. And there have been several injuries: he has broken ribs three times, and a bull once rammed a gate Elzinga was trying to shut, striking him in the head. He thought he was fine and drove into town to buy some groceries. As he was entering a supermarket, some friends approached. “They were like, ‘Hey, Glenn, did you know your ear is about to fall off?’ The whole bottom half was flapping around in the wind.” Like almost all of Elzinga’s anecdotes, asides, and full-blown tales, this one climaxed with laughter.
Elzinga pointed at a mountain off in the distance. Way up on the side of it, so far as to seem abstract, some cows were grazing the wrong creek drainage. There would be no steak until we rousted them out and sent them into the next valley, where the grass was better.
So Elzinga, his daughter Linnaea, and I piled into a 1977 Chevrolet Sierra Grande, and around midnight we rolled into camp, which consisted of a horse corral and fire pit on the side of Taylor Butte next to Big Hat Creek. The sky was black and it appeared as though someone had turned up the brightness dial of the stars to eleven. I stepped out of the truck and almost on the head of a rattlesnake, whereupon Elzinga grabbed a shovel and tried to kill it, but it slithered off.
The horses were put in a corral for the night with some hay, and Elzinga made a fire over which he warmed up a pot of the best beans I have ever eaten. (The secret to which, he says, is crumbling in yesterday’s leftover hamburgers.) In a separate pot, Linnaea baked a peach cobbler. We stared into the fire as we ate, and afterward Elzinga unfurled a tarp for us all to lay out our bedding. I looked at the sky one last time, turned over, shut my eyes, and listened to the water moving down Big Hat Creek and wood crackling in the fire.
Come morning, Elzinga was heating up a pot of cowboy coffee—coffee in which the grounds are not filtered, and so must be poured with a steady hand. He toasted some tortillas in the gray coals and fried some eggs and beef sausages in a pan. We ate our fill.
By nine, the horses were tacked up, and the three of us were on their backs, gaining elevation as we clopped up a U.S. Forest Service road under a canopy of aspens and Douglas firs. At some opening in the trees visible only to himself, Elzinga turned left, and soon we found ourselves climbing a treeless, rocky slope, beginning our ascent of Taylor Butte in earnest.
Halfway up, Elzinga paused and said, “This is where the crash happened.” He was referring to the legendary crash of 2005. His horse, Ginger, got spooked and bucked Elzinga off, stomped on his chest, then tumbled a hundred yards down the mountain. When she finally came to a halt, she was covered in puncture wounds and her front leg appeared to be dislocated. Elzinga came close to shooting Ginger that day, but he managed to walk her back to camp, where he fed her water warmed over the campfire to keep her from succumbing to shock. A few weeks later, a vet told him that Ginger would never recover, but years later here she