Home is Where the Fire Holds

Editor's Note: Bryant and Wendy Morton and the Barking Pig BBQ crew absolutely cleaned house in Arlington last weekend – four first-place finishes, a Grand Championship, a Golden Ticket to the 2027 Steak Cookoff Association World Championship, and a trip to the prestigious Memphis in May. Not a bad weekend for folks who know their way around a smoker. But how did Doc and Wendy get here? Turns out, there's a pretty good story behind all that smoke. The Mortons and Barking Pig BBQ are the cover story of the inaugural digital edition of MOORE Magazine.

DUANE CROSS
MCO Publisher•Editor

The farm looks like Middle Tennessee knows how to look: hollers, hillsides, trees, barns, cattle easing across the slope like they own the place, and peacocks somewhere nearby making whatever decisions peacocks make.

And then there is the outdoor kitchen, the kind of open-flame setup that would make a preacher raise a glass.

Bryant Morton works the fire like he knows every hot spot by name. A little more heat here. A little less smoke there. A cold one close by. Crack the cap, let the meat rest, and Bryant starts talking – first about the fire, then about everything else.

The meat is resting, which Bryant says is where most people mess it up. Not the seasoning. Not the fire. Not even the cut.

The waiting.

“That’s the whole thing about resting meat,” Bryant said. “That is the most important thing you can do with a big piece of meat. Especially something like a brisket. That’s more important than whatever brisket you picked out, or however you chose to cook it.”

Then he gives it the final word. “If you don’t rest it, you might as well just not even cook it.”

The talk runs like that. Steak to surgery. Barbecue to breast cancer. Peacocks to kids. A Big Green Egg to a frozen toilet in Alabama. It wanders. It doubles back. Somebody corrects somebody. Somebody laughs. Somebody remembers one more thing.

Ask Wendy how she wants her steak, and she does not have to think. “I’m going to cook it like I cook it for the competitions,” she said.

“It’s going to be a ribeye, preferably a tri-heart. And I’m going to tenderize it and marinate it and season it with my favorite seasonings.”

Then it goes on the Big Green Egg. “They’re so good,” Wendy said. “Competition steaks are so good.”

Bryant used to like his medium rare. Not anymore, Wendy says. “She’s eating a medium,” Bryant said. “I kind of like them like that now, really.”

Thirty-plus years in, and sometimes even the steak temperature changes. But some things do not.

Mention people who like a steak burned, and Bryant does not soften it: “You’re wasting good protein,” he said.

A Saturday circus with turn-in boxes

Cooking has become the Mortons’ excuse to hit the road, see their people, and keep something fun from turning into work. They compete through the Steak Cookoff Association, where a weekend can mean steaks, side dishes, strict turn-in times, and just enough chaos to keep a person honest. Wendy likes the parts where she can get creative.

“Ancillary is a side competition,” she said. “So when you go to a steak competition, usually it’s a Friday and Saturday. Friday night, you’ll cook one steak, and you’ll cook one ancillary.

“A lot of times it’s chicken wings, or a dessert, or an appetizer, or they’ll get more specific and say anything with corn, anything with jalapeños, whatever.”

The cooks know the category in advance. They practice. They plan. Then Saturday gets loud. “Saturday usually is two or three steaks, and then two to five ancillaries,” Wendy said. “I mean, the days when there’s four or five ancillaries, it’s crazy.”

She earned her SCA gold ticket in steak, then quit cooking steak for the rest of that season to chase ancillary points. “Because it’s really hard to try to cook and turn in four or five ancillaries, plus steaks on a day,” she said.

Some cooks live for the ribeye. Wendy likes the side table. “They’re fun,” she said. “They’re super fun.”

One competition had key lime pie, banana pudding, shrimp, and cheeseburger. The cheeseburger category was a show category, which meant it did not have to be packed plain into a little white box. Cooks could dress it up.

Wendy dressed it up. “So I decided to cover my cheeseburger with a parrot,” she said. A parrot. On a cheeseburger. Made of fondant.

“It was one of those sourdough rolls that’s like this big,” she said, holding out her hands. “That was my cheeseburger entry. So you have to get really creative.”

Bryant can appreciate a fondant parrot, but he is still a steak man. In SCA, the box matters. The first bite matters. A ribeye has a spinalis – the tender cap – and that part needs to face the judges.

“You turn it so that the spinalis is at the front of the box because the judges have to eat what’s at the front of the box,” Wendy said.

She remembers the time Bryant had a good steak and turned it in backward. “With the wrong side forward,” she said, “so the judges ate the tough part of it. And he didn’t do very well.”

The Jack, the Royal, and keeping it fun

Competition has taken the Mortons to big places, including speedways where cars ran the track while cooks tried to focus on meat.

Bryant was not crazy about that. “It’s very distracting to have those cars, practice cars, driver experience cars, going around the track while you’re sitting there trying to cook,” he said.

Wendy liked it. “I thought it was fun,” she said.

They have been to the Royal, where hundreds of teams cook inside the Kansas City Speedway. They have the Jack in their sights, too, though Bryant talks about it like a man who knows judging barbecue can turn on a dime.

“The Jack. I mean, I guess that’s a goal,” he said. “The more I think about it, the more I’m like, you know, it doesn’t really matter.”

Then he admits the part that does. “To sit in the pavilion, knowing you turned in, waiting for calls – that’s a goal,” Bryant said.

Not even winning, necessarily. Just being there, box turned in, waiting on a name. And if the call does not come, supper still has to be cooked.

Wendy said they will probably keep cooking, just not at the same pace. They were busy this past year chasing points, going to Steak Cookoff Association events, loading up, and heading out again. It was fun. It was also a lot.

“I don’t think we’re going to do as much traveling this year,” she said. “We’ll be home. I think we’ll be home more.”

Home has chores. Home has animals. Home has a clinic that still needs somebody to show up. “It’s hard leaving the vet hospital,” Wendy said. “You’ve got to pay someone to feed the farm and worry about what’s going on with all the animals. It’s hard being gone a lot.”

Still, the barbecue people make the miles worth it. “We do love traveling and hanging out with the barbecue people,” she said. “I think we’ll keep doing it for years.”

Just do not turn it into work. “I hope we never have to make barbecuing a business,” Wendy said.

Bryant knows what happens when fun becomes payroll. “When you start doing things to make money, you kind of lose the fun,” he said. “This is fun.”

Blood, chemistry, and 10 fingers

Wendy had wanted to be a veterinarian since she was little. There was only one problem. “I wanted to be a vet from the time I was born,” she said, “but I could not stand blood.”

She grew up outside Milwaukee, went to Catholic school, and once fainted during Mass after thinking too hard about the crucifixion.

“I was sitting there one day looking at the picture of the cross thinking about Jesus having those things put through his hands, and I was just grossing myself out about blood,” she said.

Then came communion.

“I went up for communion, and I felt really dizzy, and I was kind of blacking out,” Wendy said. “The priest handed me the host and said, ‘Body of Christ,’ and I fainted right into the altar boy’s arms.”

They carried her out in front of the whole school. “I was so embarrassed,” she said.

So she tried another road: elementary special education. She loved two uncles with special needs and thought that might be her calling. After two years, she knew it was not. She called her father and told him she was dropping out to become a stewardess.

“He said, ‘No, you are not,’” Wendy said. Her father reminded her she had always wanted to be a vet. He told her to go to UW-Madison, take pre-vet classes, and see what happened. She figured she might last a semester.

Instead, she found it.

“I loved UW-Madison, and I loved the classes,” Wendy said. “I got over my blood thing real quickly because it was so interesting.”

Bryant’s road was not a straight shot either. He went to North Carolina State, majored in animal science, and applied to vet school. He did not get in. He retook classes and tried again. He had also applied to Tuskegee at the last minute.

One interviewer asked what he would do if Tuskegee accepted him and N.C. State did not. “I said, ‘I’d go to school there,’” Bryant said.

“I said, ‘I want to be a vet. I don’t want to go to school the rest of my life. I want to get this over with.’”

He got into Tuskegee. He had never seen Tuskegee. “I didn’t know where Tuskegee, Alabama was,” Bryant said. “I just knew it was near Auburn.”

The interview was in Washington, D.C., and it was not exactly what he expected. “When it got over, they said we just basically needed to make sure you could walk and have 10 fingers and 10 toes,” he said.

“And I was like, ‘You’re kidding me. I had to come up here?’”

Tuskegee was hard. Useful, but hard. “Tuskegee was an experience,” Bryant said. “It was pretty much self-taught. But I made great memories, great friends. I had some good experiences there.”

Would he trade it? “Some days, some might,” he said.

Then he gave the real answer. “If you learn from your scars,” Bryant said, “that was a big one.”

The first clinic ate first

Before Tennessee, before the farm here, and before the competition trailer, there was North Carolina.

Bryant and Wendy met at a mixed animal practice where Wendy was doing an externship and Bryant was working before veterinary school. She was from Wisconsin. He was from North Carolina by way of Auburn, Alabama. She was already headed into veterinary medicine. He was still trying to get there.

Wendy noticed him anyway. “I thought he was just such a hunk,” she said.

Bryant was three years younger. “She’s a cougar,” he said.

At first, Wendy thought Bryant was the veterinarian’s son because the older vet kept calling him “my son.”

“For the first 24 hours, I thought Bryant was his son,” Wendy said.

The women at the clinic knew Wendy liked him. They nudged Bryant to ask her out. Their first date was dinner and a movie.

“The Godfather III was terrible,” Bryant said.

“I hated it,” Wendy said. “I think he hated it.”

They left early. Wendy liked that. “I thought, you know what? He’s willing to leave a horrible movie like that with me. He might be all right,” she said.

Then she called her mother. “I went on a date with this really cute guy,” Wendy told her. “He’s really fun, but he is definitely not husband material.”

More than 30 years later, that line is still sitting there, wrong as rain.

A lot of their early dates happened at the veterinary hospital because sick animals do not care who is trying to fall in love. “I was an intern, and so I had to watch the sick horses and cows and stuff at night,” Wendy said.

“Sometimes the dogs in the clinic, too. And so he’d come to take me out, and we’d end up having to stay and watch animals.”

Then she said the only thing that mattered. “Which was fine, because we both loved it.”

They married in May 1993. Bryant graduated from Tuskegee in 1995. They moved to Lumberton, N.C., and then opened their own mixed-animal practice in Elizabethtown. They bought an Arabian horse farm and turned the main barn into a veterinary hospital.

They opened in July 1996. Four days later, Hurricane Bertha came through. “Knocked the power out, took down trees,” Wendy said. “It was crazy.”

The clinic did not slow down for weather. “We were running it by ourselves, running ourselves ragged,” Wendy said. “We would work in the small animal clinic all day. Then we would run out and do farm calls. Then we’d get home exhausted and have to go back in the clinic and check those animals and treat them and then try to go to bed.”

Sometimes there were colic calls. “We’d be up all night,” she said. “It was crazy.”

Then, in 1997, Wendy was diagnosed with breast cancer. “So here we were,” she said. “He was a couple years out of school. We had just opened a practice.”

She had surgery. Chemotherapy. All of it. The clinic still had to open. Animals still needed tending. Bills still came. Life did not pause because they needed it to.

The fire asks plenty. But it does not call at 2 a.m. with a colic case. Once the box is turned in, there is nothing left to do but wait.

Frozen toilets, ribeyes fit for royalty

Wendy had no plans to move to Alabama. “There is no way I am moving to Alabama,” she said. Six months later, she was there. “And I loved it,” she said. “Those were some of the best memories.”

They lived for a while in a trailer with several dogs and cats, then rented an old house in Notasulga, halfway between Auburn and Tuskegee. It had a wraparound porch, gas heaters in the bedrooms, and toilets that froze in the winter.

“I kid you not, there would be a thin sheet of ice at the bottom of the toilet,” Wendy said.

They were young and broke. Wendy waitressed at Red Lobster at night. During the day, she worked at Auburn’s vet school on a research project. There were a lot of frozen burritos.

And sometimes, there were steaks. “We would ride our horses to the local grocery store,” Wendy said. “One of us would stay outside with the horses, and the other one would go in there and buy $3.97 ribeye steaks. They were so good.”

Then they would ride home.

“And we just – we thought we were kings and queens,” she said.

Horses outside the grocery store. Cheap ribeyes. A cold house. Not much money, and enough life to feel rich anyway.

“We talk like we ate them every week,” Wendy said. “I mean, it was a treat for us to have that.”

Children changed the clock

For the first decade of their marriage, children were not part of the plan. “We didn’t want kids at first,” Wendy said.

“We weren’t ready for kids. We didn’t think about kids. We never talked about having kids. Other kids annoyed us. We didn’t like kids.”

Then cancer changed the conversation. Doctors told Wendy her chances after chemotherapy and tamoxifen were slim. By then, she was thinking differently.

“I’m thinking I’m going to die and I need to leave some kind of footprint on this earth,” Wendy said. “So God works in some mysterious ways.”

Bart was born when Wendy was 37. Alex came when she was 40. “The best thing that ever happened to us was having kids,” Wendy said. “And I think we both would agree on that. Nothing better than having kids.”

They had raised foals, kittens, and more sick newborn animals than they could count. Neither one had changed a diaper.

“I remember when we got home from the hospital with Bart in 2002, and we sat there in that big bedroom and looked at each other and said, ‘Well, now what? What do we do now?’” Wendy said. “Because, I mean, we had no idea. None.

“Children change everything in your perspective,” she said. “It helps you reprioritize what’s really important.”

The boys taught them when to leave. When Bart and Alex were playing sports, the Mortons learned not to be guilty about taking off on a Friday afternoon. Even before they had an associate, they left.

“We just quit feeling guilty about it,” Wendy said.

When Alex was playing in Chattanooga, they closed out early and went.

“That was always something I looked forward to,” Wendy said, “taking off Friday afternoon and just getting away from there.”

They came for the horses ... and stayed for the quiet

Middle Tennessee entered the Morton story through horses.

They were raising walking horses and spotted saddle horses in North Carolina and coming to Shelbyville to show the babies. The trips started to feel like relief.

“We just loved it,” Wendy said. “We were so relaxed when we were here.”

No phones ringing from the clinic. No emergency call pulling them back. Just horses, breakfast, a real estate flyer, and the thought that maybe life did not have to stay so tight.

One day, they were sitting in the Midway Diner when Bryant had an idea. “You know what,” Wendy remembered him saying, “we should get a little place so that when we come here we don’t have to stay in our horse trailer.”

A little place.

They picked up real estate flyers. They called a realtor. They looked at farms. Back in North Carolina, the practice had worn them thin. “We just wanted to leave,” Wendy said. “We burned ourselves out.”

Lynchburg gave them room to do the same work differently. Their veterinary hospital here has not swallowed their life the way the first one did. “It really hasn’t run our life as much as the first one did,” Bryant said. “I think a lot of that is because we didn’t allow it to.”

The bear was named Lola. The monkeys were worse.

Veterinary medicine gives a person strange stories, and the Mortons have plenty. In North Carolina, they worked with small zoos. Monkeys. Tigers. Lions. Bears. Giraffes.

Bryant once removed a tumor from a grizzly bear by flashlight. “A female grizzly bear,” he said. “Her name was Lola.”

The tumor was big. The light was fading. The bear was asleep, exactly how a person wants a grizzly bear during surgery.

“I was hoping I could get her sewed up before the light ran out or she woke up,” Bryant said.

Ask if any animal scares him, and Wendy answers first. “Monkeys,” she said.

Bryant agreed. “Yeah, monkeys scare me too,” he said. “I worked on a lot of monkeys. They’re crazy.”

Then he added the professional version. “I don’t know if they scare me, but I respect them a lot,” he said. “They’re strong. They’re creepy. They will bite you. They will bite you bad.”

There are no Tennessee monkeys in Bryant’s regular work, which is probably best for everybody. There are peacocks, though. A lot of peacocks.

“When we moved here, Bryant said, ‘We are never having pigs, we are never having goats, and we are never having peacocks,’” Wendy said.

“Two out of three,” Bryant said.

There are cattle, too. Bryant points toward the hillside like he is giving directions. “See that hillside?” he said. “There’s 50 of them on that hillside.” Then a few more calves behind the barn.

“I don’t know what our endgame is,” Bryant said. “But I’ll just tell you our endgame is right here. Whatever that is, we’re not going anywhere.”

Wendy looked around and put it plainer. “It’s everything we ever wanted,” she said. “I don’t know what else.”

What’s left to chase

The Jack is still out there. The Royal is still out there. There is always another fire to light.

But when Bryant talks about real goals now, he starts with Bart and Alex. “As far as goals anymore, I just want to see our kids do well,” he said. “That’s what I want to see.”

Then he lowers the bar to the truest place. “I just want to wake up the next day,” he said. “That’s my big goal.”

Wendy knows they are fortunate. “I just think we’re really lucky,” she said. “Very fortunate. For the most part, very happy.”

When people compliment the food, Bryant keeps it plain. “We try,” he said.

“I tell people all the time, it may not be the best you’ve ever had, but it was the best we could do.”

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