Steak - Mark Schatzker [5]
Something in the order of two million pounds of this slop was splatting onto the ground every day at Palo Duro Feeders. The evening is cooler than the sun-blasted day in West Texas, and according to David Bergin, that’s when the cattle at Palo Duro Feeders like to get up from their corn-fed stupor and stir. They walk over to the feed bunk and gulp down more mouthfuls of flaked corn, or they mosey over to the water trough for a drink. In their wake, clouds of baked manure get kicked up and are carried north on the breeze.
From the D. C. Jones Ranch, the fecal dust would appear as a dark fog advancing over the creek. Late at night, David Bergin would stand outside with his flashlight pointed skyward and track its beam through the cloud. The next morning, he would have to wipe down the windshield on his pickup truck.
In John Bergin’s first two and a half years of life, respiratory and sinus problems sent him to the doctor fifty-eight times. The night of May 2, 1995, was especially dry. It hadn’t rained in a week, and during the previous month less than an inch of precipitation fell. Dust was blowing, and John Bergin couldn’t breathe. Toxins found in the cell walls of bacteria that live in cow manure are known to trigger an immunological response in asthmatics. John’s airways were swollen, and he spent the night wheezing and coughing in his mother’s arms. The next morning, David Bergin drove his son to the hospital in nearby Spearman. John was placed in an oxygen tent, but he couldn’t achieve air exchange, so an air ambulance took him to Amarillo, where doctors admitted him to intensive care. When he recovered, the family moved into a house up the road in the town of Gruver. The Bergins haven’t lived on the D. C. Jones Ranch since.
As soon as the Bergins left the homestead, John’s health improved. He’s a teenager now and plays basketball and football. On weekends he visits the old family homestead and keeps a few longhorn and Corriente cows, descendants of the state’s original Spanish cows. “If ever there was a kid born a hundred years too late,” David Bergin says, “it was John.”
You can smell Palo Duro Feeders before you can see it, and it does not smell like steak. On the drive north from Amarillo to Gruver on Highway 136, you hit a wall of shit-stink, a zone of mind-boggling reek that took over the interior of my rental car and defeated all traces of what had been, an instant earlier, pungent new car smell. A mile later, the cows appear—thousands of cows, most of them black, as far as the eye can see, lined up in rows and watching the passing cars and trucks like spectators at Wimbledon. One would dip its head into the concrete feed trough and come up with a mouthful of flaked corn feed, then return its gaze to the road. On the other side of Highway 136 was an empty field where, right out of a Texas postcard, horses were galloping. They would gallop in one direction, neigh, kick their hind legs in the air, shake their gorgeous manes in a manner suggestive of freedom, then gallop off in another direction.
A little ways ahead, but still well within the epicenter of stench, there was—unbelievably—a picnic area. I pulled over, opened the car door, and came face-to-face with the olfactory wallop of 32,000 defecating cattle. A wind was pelting my face with tiny particles of dust, and I stood there, awestruck