Another Round at the Say When: The Bravest Boy in Cowboy Country
A journalist moves to the small town of McDermitt, on the Oregon-Nevada line, to learn about why the high school football team never wins, and about the townsfolk who cheer them on.
One in a series.
The Tri-County Fair and Stampede in Winnemucca is a place full of unlikely surprises.
It was there, among the grouchy rodeo bulls and Midway tilt-o-whirl rides, that I first encountered Eli Long, the bravest teenage boy in central Nevada, and perhaps the entire solar system.
I first spotted him dancing under a makeshift tent, in front of an audience who perched on hay bales for seats, many of them straight-faced, rough hewn ranching folk.
Onstage, Eli’s moves were athletic and supremely confident.
And there was another thing.
He was surrounded by girls.
It was Labor Day weekend and I had gone to the fair with McDermitt High School Football Coach Richard Egan, whom I’ve gotten to know well during my reporting on the struggles of his undermanned eight-man football team.
Richard is a devout family patriarch and he invited me come along and watch his granddaughter, Maddie, take part in a holiday performance put on by her Winnemucca dance academy.
County fairs are the cultural lifeblood of small communities, the place where locals go to see and be seen, find out who’s dating who, see what somebody’s new wife looks like, or just run into the neighbors from the adjacent farm they rarely otherwise see.
In Winnemucca, hitting the fair means mean not just spinning atop the Ferris, but watching the hard-fought livestock competition. It means walking past displays of vintage farm tractors, each in cherry condition, continually polished off by their proud owners, hardly looking like they’d ever been driven out of the barn.
They’re lined up like classic hot rods, the American Graffiti of Farm Equipment.
Under the dance tent, I sat next to Richard and his family — his wife, two sons, their spouses and a couple of grandkids — as we waited for Maddie to take the stage.
Looking around at the fairgoers all around me, I felt like an alien, an intruder far from home, here inside the beating heart of rural America.
And then I saw 13-year-old Eli take the stage. The boy demonstrated the sureness and confidence of a young Mikhail Baryshnikov.
But this wasn’t the Bolshoi or the American Ballet Theater.
This was Cowboy Country.
Winnemucca sits smack dab in the middle of a rural belt of central Nevada communities that espouse the old west’s Buckeroo Culture, a god-fearing ethic handed down among generations of ranchers, farmers and working hands.
“I’m a fifth-generation member of a ranching family. Ranchers and farmers built this community, and their culture remains prevalent here,” said Michelle Hammond, marketing coordinator for the Winnemucca Convention and Visitors Authority.
“People here live by a hard-work ethic, work until you’ve got the job done. It’s based in choosing right over wrong. It all comes from that stock of people.”
Winnemucca’s city slogan is “Proud of it” and you see the saying everywhere, from the welcome signs to the casinos that line Main Street. It’s among a small galaxy of western towns with names like Battle Mountain, Carlin, Denio, Elko, Gerlach, Jackpot, Jarbidge, Lamoille, Lovelock, McDermitt, Wells and West Wendover.
The link that holds them together like a tightly-drawn lasso is homespun: They’re all part of Nevada’s so-called Cowboy Country, as the tourist ads proclaim, “the Old West as it was meant to be.”
Around here, there’s Cowboy Country realty and a country-and-western dating app that advertises “single cowgirls.” The high school football teams call themselves the Buckeroos.
And just down the road, the town of Baker hosts the annual National Cowboy Poetry Gathering, but I’m sure there’s plenty of prairie poets right here in Winnemucca if you log onto that cowgirl dating site.
The ads that draw in tourists and other city slickers are decidedly folksy. The description of one itinerary begins: “Rise and shine, the chow Bell is calling. Don your duds, and mosey on down to breakfast. Today you will experience a little of what life was like 150 years ago here in the untamed west.”
And another: “Strap on your hat and pull on your boots for a visit to Northern Nevada is cowboy country, or jeans are the fashion norm and nobody stands on ceremony. In this region all west hospitality is the Golden Rule.”
The ads promise good hunting for deer, chukar, sage hen, duck, geese, quail, dove, pheasant and antelope are all plentiful. Numerous fishing grounds are stocked with trout, catfish, crappie and walleye.
Every spring, Winnemucca is the site of Ranch Hand Rodeo Week, the self-described largest and most exciting rodeo in Nevada, where dozens of teams “compete for bragging rights and prizes in Saddle Bronc Riding, Steer Stopping, Wild Mugging, Trailer Loading, Team Roping, Ranch Doctoring, and Team Branding.”
The Tri-County Fair and Stampede over Labor Day weekend promises livestock competitions, concerts, rodeo, and the Buckaroo Hall of Fame.
And there, among all that rural macho, was Eli Long.
I turned to Richard, amazed at what I was seeing.
I had come to the are to write about football, about tough kids not afraid to take the hits, about strapping farm boys and rancher’s sons. I was looking for big hearts.
And then I spotted Eli.
Expressing himself as a dancer before an audience where many of the men had a pinch between the cheek and gums, people who, in my eyes, anyway, probably were’t used to seeing a teenager without cowboy boots.
“That kid is as courageous as any boy who hops atop a bull at some rodeo,” I said.
In my eyes, he was the bravest boy in the whole county.
By far.
“That kid there,” I told Richard, “I want to meet him.”
A few days later, I called the Encore Dance Academy and asked about the young male dancer. Owner and instructor Sara Filippe has more than 35 years of dance and theater experience. She moved to Winnemuca twenty years ago.
She said his name was Eli Long, and that he was one of her favorite students.
“He just has this spirit about him. He’s confident and smart and goofy and silly and respectful. You don’t see all this at that age in general, you just don’t,” she said. “The moment you watch him perform, you can tell he’s just a kid who likes to be onstage. He needs to be out in front of people, doing what he loves to do.”
Eli walked into the Encore academy when he was eight, and the other dancers were immediately drawn to him.
“They’re of that age that’s so fun, so young,” Filippi said. “They’re not old enough yet to feel awkward around boys, so Eli was just another kid dancing with them. They all became friends.”
Eli isn’t her first male dancer. Every once in awhile, she says, one comes along. They’re each a unique breed of young man.
“The thing is with boys who dance, they don’t care what people think,” she said. “That’s an amazing trait to have at that age, as a preteen. All the boys seem to have it. It helps the as they go on in life, dealing with people who don’t understand them.”
Eli has chosen an alternative path in a small town full of hard opinions.
“Around here, it’s difficult to be a male artist and dancer,” Filippi said. “It takes a special kind of person. But Eli’s attitude is ‘You know what? I love doing this so if you have a problem with it, it’s your problem, not mine.’”
Fillipi introduced me to Eli’s mother, Kim Long, who works in a local credit union.
Her husband, John, is an underground miner, and the couple has an older son, Cody, a high school senior who plays for the Lowry Buckeroos football team.
The family moved to Winnemucca five years ago from Summit County, Colorado, just outside Denver, and Kim said they spent their first few months in culture shock.
“I grew up in an Aspen suburb. There was a ritz and polish to everyone and everything there, even the cowboys,” she said. “Here they have what I call the good old boys club. The people you meet, they grew up here, it’s their hometown, it’s what they know. In Colorado, you rarely met someone who was born and raised there.”
Cody and Eli grew up on the range. Kim’s brother runs a small ranch with a dozen horses and both boys thrived in the environment.
Eli idolized his older brother, but when Cody began playing football, baseball and soccer, Eli was still far too young. He was still a toddler, after all.
His parents had to find him another hobby.
Why not dance?
Even if he just went to classes to tumble about the mats, he’d learn to love it.
At first, there were a few other small boys there. Nobody stuck it out like Eli, who soon found his dance legs. He began to thrive.
Before the family moved to Winnemucca, Kim discovered that Eli suffered from dyslexia. She held him back a year, brought in a tutor who worked to keep his studies up to speed.
Nobody knew what would happen when he got to central Nevada. Would he be able to keep his fragile self-esteem among a school full of strangers?
Yet one thing was for sure: he would continue dancing.
Eli liked the Encore Academy right away. Sure, he was the only boy, but he was used to that. It didn’t bother him, not in the least.
“The girls on his dance team have been great,” Kim said. “They treat him like another brother. They’ve really accepted him like family.”
But Eli is a dancer in Cowboy Country. Not two-step, but jazz and modern dance.
He was destined to raise eyebrows.
He performed at a recital Encore Academy gave at the local high school. When Eli took the stage, there were guffaws and a few isolated jeers amongst the boys. The young artist ignored them.
He danced on.
Older brother Cody plays football defensive end. He’s six-feet tall and weighs 190 pounds. After graduation, he wants to attend college and then enlist in the Army. It’s a more-traditional trajectory for a kid growing up in the small-town American west.
Eli’s route is anything but conventional. He weighs maybe 100 pounds and change.
“I’ve told him, it takes guts to do what you’re doing,” he says.
In many ways, Cody believes his little brother is mentally tougher than he is.
“When my friends find out my brother dances, everyone’s jaw just drops wide open,” he says. “They don’t know what to say. They get that look like “No way’ or ‘What the…’” he said. “With people I don’t know, the accusation of him being gay has come up too many times.”
But Cody puts that issue to rest. Sometimes, he feels protective of his brother. He tells the doubters that what Eli does is as daring as playing football or competing in rodeo.
“I ask them, ‘Can you do it?’ and that quiets them,” Cody says, “because nobody can.”
Eli tells people the same thing.
Kim knows that Eli is confident in who is and what he does, that he can defend himself. Dealing with people’s small-mindedness can sometimes make him mad. So, the mother has had those talks with her younger son.
“You’re pursuing a dream not everyone can understand,” she’ll tell him. “If it becomes too much and people pick on you, you let me know. Because you don’t have to fight this battle on your own.”
Eli’s response: “I got this, Mom.”
Would he ever dream of not dancing?
“Why would I quit doing something I love?” he says.
Cody says he’s often floored by the confidence that dancing gives his brother.
“Every day, he comes home from dance practice and shows me what he learned that day. I’m big and bulky and not at all limber, so even though I try and understand, I’m not used to that. But he’s patent with me. He’s a good teacher.”
Cody recalls the performance his brother gave in Las Vegas a few years ago. Neither boy had ever been there, the place was just so big and intimidating, and there was Eli walking onto a stage to dance in front of thousands of people.
“I saw that light switch turn on,” Cody says. “The audience was huge, but Eli was extremely confident. He was like a whole different person, not the shy and reserved kid he is at home. He was out there giving his all.”
Afterwards, Cody asked about that sea of observers who had watched him intently.
“How may faces did you see?” he asked.
“Not one,” his brother said.
Eli has trained with male dancers who have become his role models to success. Now he has a plan for the future. He wants to become a physical education is instructor.
But first, he wants to go to The Juilliard School to study dance.
To perform with the best there is.
The Encore Dance Academy was a beehive of chaos when I arrived.
The littlest dancers — girls as young as three — were being dropped off by their mothers, kissed at the door before they were ushered inside and suited up for practice.
There was a dance floor upstairs and you could hear the pounding to tiny feet. The two lower performance spaces were for the older dancers.
Like Eli.
I met him in the lobby with his father, John, who was dropping him off before he headed off to the mines for his overnight shift.
John is 41, with the confidence to raise two independent boys. He’s always told both of them, “Treat people the way you want to be treated and do what you want to do.”
We sit at a small table in the lobby, amid of a shifting sea of teenage dancers.
Eli is quiet.
He says he likes jazz dance the best. The performances offer him a year-round community, not just three months like other sports.
I ask him why he dances.
“It’s the way I express myself,” he says. “I just like to do it. I don’t are what anybody else thinks.”
His father adds, “He just brushes off any criticism. He’s just Eli.”
The father notices his son’s reticence at that small table.
“Look at you,” he tells him. “This is the first time I’ve seen you not talkative.”
Slowly, Eli opens the door, not all the way, but it’s now ajar.
I ask how many other kids go to his high school.
Five hundred, he says.
How many other boys dance?
He holds up his right hand, his fingers in the shape of a zero.
His father has watched his son’s confidence grow. Once, he challenged him to perform a recital with his head shaved into a mohawk. The boy did it.
When he was young, maybe four or five, Eli asked, “Dad, will I ever get to dance on the big stage?”
“Sure, you will, son.”
“Good, because that’s what I want to do.”
Earlier, I had talked with two other dancers who are Eli’s age.
Kylie Wikins and Leksi Hagness are both 13.
They were surprised to see Eli show up that first practice. “We’d never danced with other boys,” Leksi said, “so we thought, ‘OK, this is something new.’”
Now Eli is one of them.
“He has this huge personality,” Kylie said. “This is his love, so he’s going to do it, no matter what.”
So far, I had little glimpse into that Eli charisma. When John Long headed off to work, I asked Eli to demonstrate a few performance moves.
He stood in the hallway, outside the studio and, as the girls bustled about all around him, he seemed to retreat into a private emotional space.
He extended his arms and his legs in graceful symmetry, with agility and precision.
“Now, you try it,” he said.
I couldn’t do it. I felt like as limber as an ironing board, like a clown on stilts.
“That’s good,” Eli lied.
Suddenly, this boy had become my teacher. I can imagine him on stage, at Juilliard.
Or even the American Ballet theater. Or the Bolshoi.
Far away from Cowboy Country.