7:06 a.m. 36 degrees, wind W 1 mph (stuffing on the stove. Turkey, brined and patted dry, lounges in the refrigerator). Sky: an iteration of yesterday. A gray, tightly fitted sheet releases a proverbial wintry mix . . . snow, rain, sleet. Road, a path of frozen slush. Permanent streams: above the culvert, the road glazed and treacherous, a skating rink. On my feet, the wrong shoes, slipping and sliding. Dogs take charge. Wetlands: evergreens on the far shore softened by the rising mist, the falling rain—deer trails, ribbons of flattened reeds, marshland sutures, run lengthwise from pines to alders. A blue jay, grayer than blue, heads north, his voice trailing behind him. Just before seven-thirty, the town sanding-truck passes. Pond: puddles on ice. Time-lapse geology, a glimpse into the formation of sedimentary rock . . . sandstone, limestone, shale. Locked within the ice, a brief history of the week, evanescent sedimentation—surface ice, snow, rain, freeze, rain. The Pleistocene is writ small upon the pond. Milkweed seeds and maple leaves, like stray mammoths, embedded, covered by a cold rainwater bath, soon to harden.
Nineteen turkeys mill in the yard. Three practice masculinity, pompously strutting, tails fanned, wings drooped. The rest, ignoring the out-of-season histrionics, gorge on spilled sunflower seeds and barnyard acorns. At the sight of me, all disperse, a troop of feathered bumble-bees, big body, small wings—a discharge of buxom birds, more glide than flap. Into oaks and maples, dark knobs on distant trees. Branches sag.
When the Pilgrims disembarked, wild turkey ranged across the eastern half of the United States west to Arizona and south to central Mexico. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they were gone from New England. In 1969 and 1970, thirty-one wild turkeys from western New York were released in Vermont. Originally native only to the four southern counties, wild turkeys prospered. Today, Vermont's population approaches fifty thousand. Residents of every county, every woodlot, every ensemble of farm and pasture and forest. Turkeys have also been introduced into several western states, southern Canada, Hawaii, Germany, and New Zealand.
During the past half-century, while the wild turkey prospered, the domestic turkey has grown fatter, weaker, slower, dumber. Over-breeding to satisfy our craving for white meat has left domestic turkeys so pathetically plump that they can't make little turkeys without help. Domestic turkeys attempting to mate look like two footballs, rocking and rolling: legs too small, chests too large.
Selective breeding left domestic turkeys flightless and witless. But while they are a bubble-off-plumb with the IQ of wood chips, it's a myth that they drown looking up in a rainstorm. In fact, turkeys can't look up; their eyes are on the side of their heads, and they lack binocular vision. Still, the bird can't be too bright for such an unflattering rumor to catch on. Darwin chose pigeon breeds to demonstrate the analogy between artificial selection and natural selection. If he were alive today, he might have had fun illustrating his thesis with domestic turkey.
The turkeys in the naked oaks hold their position, rain dripping off their beaks. I approach. They bolt, glide across the upper pasture, land in the lower, and rush into the woods, ambulatory, unlike the bird now browning in my oven.
Thanksgiving by Lynn Ungar
I have been trying to read
the script cut in these hills-
a language carved in the shimmer of stubble
and the solid lines of soil, spoken
in the thud of apples falling
and the rasp of corn stalks finally bare.
The pheasants shout it with a rusty creak
as they gather in the fallen grain,
the blackbirds sing it
over their shoulders in parting,
and gold leaf illuminates the manuscript
where it is written in the trees.
Transcribed onto my human tongue
I believe it might sound like a lullaby,
or the simplest grace at table.
Across the gathering stillness
simply this: "For all that we have received,
make us truly grateful."
Happy Thanksgiving Ted!
Factory farming is one of the worst animal abuses humans have perpetuated on our fellow creatures. Farm Sanctuary has an "Adopt a Turkey" program that I've supported for years. I choose to offer thanksgiving for the living turkeys!
https://www.farmsanctuary.org/adopt-a-turkey/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=aat_2020_paid&gclid=Cj0KCQiAwf39BRCCARIsALXWETw7e6LF8Dz3S3nAZFmSfSZ7RygnxWm1x6zcunzQFEbvNqdOw_b1bTYaAuRyEALw_wcB
This, from Henry Beston, THE OUTERMOST HOUSE:
We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.