Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T L Y M O N T A N A M A G A Z I N E • W I N T E R 2 0 2 2 82 W HEN I WAS A KID, I had a little smidge of germophobia. While other boys may have feared ghosts, or clowns, or what-have-you, I was petrified of little tiny critters so small I couldn't even see them. I can understand kids being afraid of the wolfman under their bed, but at least only one of them could fit down there. But I could lay there and worry about the billions or trillions of microbes hiding under my bed. I suppose it could be from my mother, who, as a nurse and a good Christian woman, would tell me that cleanliness was next to Godliness. To this day, I cannot feature that bacteria have any benefit at all, except for beer, cheese, and bread. Actually, come to think of it, bacteria might be ok after all. But at that time, I fixated on the thought of the little invaders getting in my system and moving in, much the same as the way some Mon- tanans might feel about hordes of encroaching Californians. We were boy scouts, but they were not the friendly, life-af- firming boy scouts you have today. Rather, boy scouts were wild, half-feral, tough-as-nails brutes. They might not have been smart but they weren't letting that get them down. They might not have smelled like a rose, but what business did roses have smelling so good anyway? We were practical- ly neanderthals, in other words. Dad, as one of the leaders of the troop, was boss neander- thal. He had an idea we would hike to the ice caves in the Snowy Mountains near Lewistown. There we would have a caveman cookout. The hike is a brutal affair, seven miles one way. The rules were simple, enough for a caveman. We were given two farm- er matches, a paper cup, two raw eggs, and a not-too-choice strip of steak from some indeterminate cut since they weren't about to waste good steak on dumb brutes like us. We could also take a canteen of water. That was it, no cooking tools, nada, zilch. Climbing the winding switchbacks, we discussed how we were going to cook our meat. A husky, bespectacled boy named Herman thought he had it all figured out. "I'm going to sharpen up a stick, like a fork at the end, stab that sucker with it, hold it over the fire a min- ute, and then tear into it." "Oh yeah, Hermie? And what're ya gonna do with them eggs?" "I don't got 'em anymore. I tripped and they broke in my pocket." By and by, the troupe made it to the top of the ridge, and as planned we were ravenously hungry. And after seven miles of hiking, most of the meat had a rather unappetizing look to it as well. Boys who had, five or six miles ago, been envision- ing farmer-rigged rotisseries were now wondering wheth- er cooking wasn't just another unnecessary extravagance compelled on us by an over-civilized society. At least one of them—Herman, I think—gnawed on his steak for a good ten minutes before any of us succeeded in starting a fire. We did not count on two mountain rain showers that drenched us to the bone, and for most of us, ruined our matches. Mine were pre-waxed and packed in a baggy, in a decidedly un-caveman-like concession to the 20th century. The other cavemen start eyeing my matches. Now my troop had won the water boiling contest the sum- mer before at the Montana State Scout Jamboree—a simple contest really: the first group of boys to bring a 5-gallon met- al bucket of water to a boil wins. I am not too humble to admit that our tenure as the best boilers in the state was due in no small part to my facility with a flame. "Give us your lousy matches, you dope," grunted Ugg. By now, we had regressed sufficiently to have forgotten OLD BROKE RANCHER BY GARY SHELTON C O O K I N G C O O K I N G S T E A K S T E A K W A Y W A Y T H E T H E C A V E M A N C A V E M A N

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