John Weston - Dining at the Linemans Shack

W hen The Palace reopened on Montezuma Street, the new owner served mountain lionbarbacoa. Baked all night in an underground pit, the cat slid around, as all meatwill when so treated, between two slices of white breadeither Rainbow or Holsum,Arizonas only bakeries of reach. Chicken white if you sucked the sauce off a piece,it tasted like nothing so much as its dressing. But in the glow of illegal beersand daring friends, I devoured my sandwich and swaggered on into a life of experimentalgastronomy.

Mountain lions became a protected species soon after and have, over the years, returnedto at least a fraction of their former count, roaming solitarily over a boundlessrange in the West on great padded feet, Walking silently over the rocks, as theNavajo say, despite the unambivalent attitude of ranchers who resent providing themwith lamb, mutton, or veal, and hunters who resent the natural fact that, to a lion,its deer season all year. A grown lion will kill every four or five days, with luck,accused by hunters of eating only the choicest parts, such as the heart and liver,leaving the carcass for the coyotes and buzzards to pick. This senseless depopulationof game infuriates riflemen. Actually, the lion probably hasnt abandoned its killbut is lying up in some bushes a hundred yards offfarther if a female with kittenswaiting until evening to return for another meal. Not a healthy spot for a disgruntledhunter to hang about kicking dirt.

Elusive wanderers, mountain lions are rarely seen. The only live one Ive ever spottedwas standing in a pasture in Laguna Canyon, of all places, contemplatively viewingthe traffic. A lion will carry off a dog if hungry enough, as a coyote will a housecat, because between the earth and its creatures he makes little distinction.

The barbecue sauce in which the lion was slathered at The Palace was about the sameas it has been forever, the ubiquitous cerement for male outdoor cookery. It takesno pained imagination to see the Neanderthal, slouching at the smoky entrance ofhis cave with the foreleg of a small quadruped, ripping off chunks of charred flesh,ruminating on the middle distance, and occasionally dipping the joint in a rock depressionwhere he has collected a sauce of blood, honey, and flies. If its true our responsesto things in the present are but a kind of biological remembrance of things past,then we can better understand mans need for barbecue sauce. Charcoal searing, orthe open fire, is the most primitive form of cooking, hardly advanced in a hundredcenturies except for the convenience of lighter fluid and gas.

We connect backward in a collective unconscious, after all, as Loren Eisley saidin an essay about his dog growling over a ten-thousand-year-old fossilized femur.Sometimes we pause to think, this is a terrifying passage were making, this fragmentin time we occupy, this gnat of significance we call me, over which religious fundamentalistshave so long fumed and railed, trying to get a purchase on its meaning.

Not so long, really. Maybe five thousand years. And theyre going to die too, andbe put away in an expensive and hilarious way, like the rest of us.

Which takes me back not quite so far, down into Skull Valley, the Goat Picnic, lifein a lineman's shack, disquisitions on swamp life, rotting water, and the complexexperience of finding enough to eat during the Great Depression.

Mothers name was Eloine, a moniker she regretted because no one knew how to pronounceit without instruction. Spelled like Elaine but with an o, it is Ehlwyn or, alternately,Elowen, in the South Lowyn or, finally, Connie, a nickname she adopted with reliefwhen reentering the workforce as a cook late in life.

Modestly educated at Peabody College in Nashville, she became a teacher before marriageto a man thirteen years older, the brother of her sisters husband, and began followinghis drift throughout North America, a bird of passage seeking the rainbows gildedbucket. She got high marks in organic chemistry, and in a surviving notebook I read:Art is the lasting interpretation of life through fit symbols; literature by meansof language, and the startling observation that Shakespeare deliberately walkedinto gloom so he might experience its weight.

At ten, when her mother died on the Old Homeplace in Mount Juliet, Eloine becamecook for twelve people, counting her father, her siblings, and the farmhands. Itis no wonder, then, by the time I came along thirty years later, she was a masterwith a small repertoire from which she could coax ideas surprising even to herself.Necessity wedded to goods driven by invention in order to keep from starving or goingnuts.

Books were mainly unavailable in our house, but Eloine procured them occasionally,and though with time seldom on her hands exclusively for reading, she kept one proppedopen near her breadboard, snatching a paragraph as she could, nearly blinding herselfwith Gone With the Wind. Illiterate masochist at four or five, I repeatedly beggedher to read Bambi aloud as the flour flew at her board. She never failed to cry.Po Bambi, she would invariably say, wiping her eyes on her apron. Po littledeer.

There are big jackrabbits back up there on Old Baldy, the Dad told us. Giant rabbits,big as a burro. From time to time he brought home chunks of these illusive beasts,butchered and headless. Slow to understand the obvious signs, it wasnt until I turnedtwenty-five I realized with a jolt he was poaching deer out of season for a familyalways on the brink of starvation.

Without refrigeration or any other means of keeping the meat in its raw state, wegorged on this fabulous hare, and Eloine put up some in Mason jars, even in blisteringhot weather when the woodstove made an inferno of the indoors, or crafted jerky ofit on the hot tin roof. The thoughts below apply equally for legal or poached animals.

Wild venison, leaner, with a gamier taste than ranch-raised varieties, needs a beneficentsoak. A marinade of red wine, onions, bay leaves, and juniper berries or whatnot,in which the loin saturates overnight, will do much to temper its rank taste, a methodthe French use to treat wild boar. Eloine, knowing nothing of wine, used vinegar,onions, juniper berries available in the hills, lots of salt and pepper, sugar, asmear of lard. After roasting the venison, she would add a cup or two of this mix,along with some red currant jelly, to the pan drippings to make a lusty-looking gravy.Modern chefs say venison should be cooked somewhat rare: not in Eloine's kitchen.There meat invariably roasted until it fell from the bone, in part because her boyswould not eat it if they could discern the slightest blush of pink, like the servinggirls in Death Comes for the Archbishop, who looked with horror at the delicate streamof pink juice that followed Father Josephs knife (he was French), and in part becauseany living organism would be crisped beyond harm.

Venison, from the Latin venatio, or hunt, adapts naturally and etymologically tosauce la Diane, named for the huntress. Lots of pepper, cream, and red jelly, reducedand strained.