Weekend Essay

Of Families, Casseroles and Rocky Mountain Oysters

By Kyeann Sayer, 6-23-07

At 15, of course I knew about “Rocky Mountain Oysters.” My father had even tricked me into taking a nibble from one at a party when I was little. For whatever reason, though, I didn’t know they were “harvested” at branding. My mind still saw its first attempt at making sense of the term—joining mountain and sea—and I imagined foragers chipping away at fossilized mollusks that over millions of years had cemented among the flat irons.

Making the branding pilgrimage meant leaving our ever-present view of those giant slabs on suburban Denver’s front range, and driving up I-25 to Buffalo, WY, and then over to my grandfather’s cattle ranch in the center of Montana, near Lewistown. If I was lucky, the 12-hour journey passed quickly as a hazy procession of Arby’s, Wendy’s and convenience stores briefly interrupting a catatonic Dramamine nap.

Mom and I drove alone and livestock-free this time. The parents had long since divorced and disbanded their Quarter Horse breeding farm. My brother’s college-aged autonomy exempted him from ranch visits except for family reunions or funerals. His athleticism and business sense met the approval of my grandfather, and simply being male lent itself to Grandma’s affection. These innate characteristics seemed to elevate him miles above my status of simply “daughter of the family pariah,” and he would remain universally adored no matter how seldom he appeared.

A pubescent girl who didn’t barrel race like my cousin’s girlfriend, do 4-H like every kid in Fergus county, or sew, as was my duty, was really like a fish peddling around the ranch on a bicycle.  My acting aspirations and gothic red lipstick didn’t help matters, but shunning the protein on which my grandfather’s empire was built was a personal affront.

My mother had officially banned Utne Reader from our household since an ad featuring a comparison between the footprint of cattle and vegetable raising had converged with my animal sympathies in a perfect storm, with whacky vegetarian results. The Boulder-sourced literature embargo did not sway my broccoli alignment before branding arrived, however. I had no desire to offend anyone. All I could do was hope that the meatless casserole recipe I packed would serve as an appropriate contribution and help me fit in to any degree possible.

“Larry hates casserole,” Grandma smirked as she stirred her signature iceburg lettuce and Miracle Whip salad. “He won’t take one bite of that.” Well then. All that counted about my culinary olive branch was that my uncle bucked all regional trends and prided himself on a quirky aversion to multiple foods baking together in a single dish.  Deflated, I slunk out of the kitchen, leaving the failure of a rice/corn/cheddar cheese mixture to cool on the counter until we left for the big event. 

There were few safe places to retreat during frequent moments of alienation or family tension. For a prissy teenager with a late-eighties penchant for Impressionist posters, the lodge pole ranch-style house presented inexhaustible crimes against aesthetics and hygiene.

The kitchen was not only blinding yellow and red. Denial and failing eyesight meant food-encrusted utensils. One never knew if the milk would have curdled, and I finally realized by around age ten that the same candy had been sitting in the jar for about five years.  The living room featured a sea of blue and green shag carpet with contrasting primary colored furniture and violent Charlie Russell reproductions on the walls.  I associated outside with Gartner snakes, fish guts at the swampy trout pond, and grasshopper swarms, so no true respite there, either.

On this trip, Mom and I shared my aunt’s former bedroom/bath suite, where the shag carpet was blue and white. Most alarmingly, the cover to the crawl space had been removed sometime in the early eighties and had never been replaced. You just had to avoid thinking about the rectangular hole and its views of dirt and darkness. In the medicine cabinet, multiple spores had grown. The bathtub was filled with shavings from some insect’s work on the ceiling, where one of its arachnid friends had woven a complex home.

True, I wasn’t oozing with granddaughterly hosekeeping zeal, but Mom had clearly learned the hard way that any efforts to clean would have offended Grandma. Sitting in the bed, on what one could only hope were clean sheets, usually felt like the safest option when television viewing was for some reason inappropriate. I would write or read until called to endure a group situation.
The branding scene felt both familiar and utterly foreign. Pick-ups were strewn about a pasture near my uncle’s, and kids ran around in thick coats and cowboy boots. Women swarmed around the food and chatted about the unfortunate, chilly weather as the men tended to the calves.

It all demanded coping skills beyond those honed over years of dinner table awkwardness or hours-long reminiscences in the multi-colored living room. For weeks I had been running images of molten metal sizzling into flesh over and over so I wouldn’t visibly freak out when the time came. But I wasn’t prepared for the small talk. I felt like a somewhat intrusive snorkeler among species very well acclimated to a particular reef. Since my mother was the family outcast, someone might sort of poke to test my consistency, but no one had a lot of incentive to genuinely engage. A perma-smile was my strategy. If I at least looked friendly, I was trying.

The sight of blood dripping from a silver blade, however, dissolved any of the relevance of mental preparedness and benign expressions.

Bleating from skin singeing I was ready for. But groans from anesthetic-free ear clipping and ball snipping? What? My father had castrated plenty of horses. We had sent dogs off to the vet. But—are they kidding with this? Slicing them off without pain killers? This is ok with everyone? I mean, Jesus Christ, as my grandfather would say. Ouch. No one seemed the slightest bit aware of participation in any sort of calf torture assembly line as they shuffled them along or exhibited any guilt by association while standing witness and scooping macaroni salad.

Lacking further verbal capacity or facial elasticity, I disappeared to the car with my plate-full of casserole. It’s normal, I told myself. It’s a way of life. I accepted that I was the weird one, hyper-sensitive one, the out-lyer who just didn’t get it. I didn’t know why I had been born into a family to whose livelihood I was so unsuited. I wished it was all fine with me. But of course, steeped in alienation, I felt much closer to calf than human. Just a couple more days, I told myself. Soon I would be back on our neutral-colored couch, or at a Denver coffee house.

Finally Mom appeared at the car. She had to pee, and was cold, so we could go back. I knew better than to exhaust her with my revulsion, and could only hope that the coming hours would become less uncomfortable.

I thought we were the first ones to make a return trip and was relieved by the notion of having the house, in all its rainbow glory, to ourselves.

The kitchen actually felt like a haven after the chill and barbarity of the branding. Aching to wash my hands of the afternoon, I went straight for the sink. I was used to seeing (and smelling) buckets of dog scraps on the counter, so initially thought nothing of the medium-sized one just to the right of the yellow basin. At first, I couldn’t make out its contents. I had no way to register the purple-white, gelatinous-seeming hills. Then I began to make out veins. And saw a spec of blood on the rim. These were just-rinsed testicles. This was a bucket of testicles! On the kitchen counter. Testicles.
I leapt back, Dawn dish soap coating my hands, tap still running.

After that moment, there are no more memories. Oysters were eaten, surely. I must have witnessed their cooking, seasoning, and consumption. But all of those details remain inaccessible, lodged deeply among dark emotional strata.

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