Carnival of Carnivores

TW: cannibalism

There’s no way to sugarcoat my sisters. During the holidays, the two eldest engage in some curious traditions, to put it lovingly. I am one of the rare clan members adventurous enough to enjoy their all-nighter pow-wows, which are a cross between a séance and a pioneer cookout with musical nuances of Native American spirituality.

A hardy constitution is the best seatbelt for an excursion up to my sister Ellen’s rugged mountaintop, the highest peak between San Jose and Santa Cruz in California. So, buckle up.

Contrarily, our fussy family prefers their winter get-togethers to be spent in a dwelling with walls, heat, and modern appliances. Imagine that!

I have been proven wrong about Ellen’s slapdash construction as her hand-built lean-to withstands the hurricane-force winds that often buffet this peak. Loma Prieta also gets a smattering of snow once or twice, most winters. But I confess. Surviving a blizzard in a lean-to might be a tad too macho even for my own feral inclinations, having lived in a wilderness cabin for a decade by myself. With winters warming in recent years, my occasional holiday visits to the mountaintop haven’t been too brutally cold as I huddle in my sleeping bag between a scattering of llama turds and a rash of pointy rocks.

My other elder sister Pearl doesn’t actually live on Ellen’s mountaintop, but she’s a spirited sidekick for sacred gatherings and full-moon drummings. What would a holiday be without Pearl to channel a variety of dead relatives’ spirits who trash our living kin in irresistible fun (always those toities we love to hate).

My four-wheel drive bumps and grinds up the narrow rocky rutted lane for forty minutes before I finally spot a dilapidated barbed-wire gate at road’s end. I laugh every time I see her hand-carved sign curved overhead:

Moon Ridge Retreat

“Retreat” is hyperbole if I ever heard it. There are no neighbors within sight and no conventional dwellings anywhere on her isolated two hundred acres.

Jumping out to open the gate, I stand a moment to stare across the accordion ridges of sage chaparral. The view is startling, looking down on the non-stop metropolis surrounding San Francisco Bay from this lofty desolate spot. It’s even more spectacular after dark, gazing upon city lights that twinkle fifty miles by fifty miles to frame a pitch-black bay spanned by numerous shimmering bridges.

I didn’t start attending these pow-wows until Ellen finally got electricity on her land. Before that, I didn’t trust her rustic panache when preserving and preparing wild meats that she harvests out of season with immunity from game wardens, clear up here to hell and gone. Now, she partakes of modern convenience to refrigerate and freeze. My contribution to our meals has always been to grind a variety of ancient grains with mortar and pestle before making and baking hearty bread between fire-heated boulders when I arrive at the festivities.

Crawling along the final stretch, I lean out my truck window to see if I can spot any old hippies frolicking in the buff. Sure sign I’m in the vicinity.

Rounding the horse corral and llama pen, six hounds pick up my putt-putt and howl my arrival to the others for that last half mile. I can already see that Ellen’s grinding pretty nasty against her second ex-husband who’s currently married to our distant cousin from some other family confabulation. There are others doing the campfire gnash, but I can’t identify anything, bopping along this rutted trail, after my eyeglasses leapt down my nose and I need both hands to keep this rig from taking a ridge-dive. Ladies in skimpy gypsy garb swirl around waving their colorful scarves while naked guys shake jiggly packages with an occasional salute to the warm late-autumn breeze.

Once I park my truck and the dust settles, I catch a whiff of homegrown bud torched to a skunky smolder. This party is well underway so I avoid contact with the others just yet. I want to get my baking groove on first.

The afternoon sun is waning and I need its warmth to coax my bread proofing along. Dusk brings a big chill, this late in the season. I haul out my big flowered canvas bag which holds all my baking secrets and carry it to the table beside the lean-to. When everything is kneaded, oiled, and covered in my huge crock bowl, warming in the sun, I head down to the lower level to check out the bonfire and hijack a gully of hot boulders for my baking project.

I spot a massive slab of fresh flesh crusted with herbs and rigged to twirl on a spit above the fire pit. Rotation is sporadic . . . whenever one or more of the stoned revelers catches a savory whiff and then remembers to give our main course a whirl. Some lady I never met is wrapping root vegetables in heavy foil to bank against the outer coals. I expect her butt-length hair to hiss each time she reaches into the fire to arrange her roasting tidbits.

“Hi, my name is Glenda. I’m Ellen’s baby sister,” my hands are sequestered in my jeans pockets to refrain from encroaching on her root vegetables, my throbbing urge to shove hot rocks being throttled for now.

“I get it! You must be the good witch!” She cackles at her own mystifying humor and mutters incoherently for a minute or two before continuing introductions. “I’m Barbie, married to Ellen’s first husband and we live on that next ridge over yonder.” Since half my sisters are on their third or fourth hitch, I’ve long since stopped trying to remember who used to be married to whom.

“Do you mind if I arrange some fire stones for baking my bread?” I didn’t expect a big bouncy boob-hug and lip-slobber that she hits me with the minute I stand up from the fire. “I won’t disturb your yams and beets.”

Positioning my preferred collection of stones, I craft a cozy covey at the edge of the fire to cradle my bread as soon as it’s ready for baking. To avoid prolonging my exposure to Barbie the Boob Banger, I trundle back to the upper level to see how my bread dough has been proofing in the fading sun.

Out of curiosity, I sneak a peek inside Ellen’s rustic lean-to, every surface with rat turd ribbons and dog kibble spilling from abundant knotholes.

Spotting a fairly new chest freezer, I open it. It’s nearly full with everything neatly wrapped in beige butcher paper. Ellen’s distinctive all-caps printing identifies each package, presumably meat. I’m happy to note recent date stamps on each piece: boar loin roast . . . venison steaks . . . whole porcupine . . . leg ‘o’ Blackie??? I flip this huge package over, trying to identify the mystery meat. It’s heavy and certainly not recognizable as a regularly-hunted species in the region.

But hunted prey wouldn’t be named, would it?

I glance around the horse corral and llama pen, sizing up the various thigh possibilities amongst Ellen’s named creatures. Then it hits me. The name of Ellen’s fourth and final husband . . . when she and Blackie split, he didn’t move away from their shared mountaintop. They continued to cohabitate, more or less, in the endless outdoors. I presumed this wild expanse would be roomy enough to avoid any post-divorce hassles. But maybe not.

I study this huge freezer package and then gaze down the incline where a huge hunk of flesh with a similar shape takes a lackadaisical spin above the fire.

This will be the Thanksgiving that I go vegetarian.