Stick season
Autumn 2018, for those of us who live in New England, was a bit of a bust. After a beastly hot summer, the elusive cool, bright fall days of September and October were few and far between but wet, dreary ones in unwelcome abundance. For those of us who live in the Broad Brook Valley of Vermont, Old Man Winter bullied his way into our midst during the very first days of November without one day’s reprieve to even attempt to catch up on the fall clean up chores. The first snowstorm caught us off guard while the Halloween jack-o-lantern was still standing guard on the front porch. Garden beds with droopy perennials had yet to be cut down. Snow tires were buried somewhere in the basement, and I had no idea where to find the snow shovels let alone a windshield scraper. Worst of all, I was anticipating a long grazing season like the year prior with ample grass well into December. Conversely, any semblance of green was buried deeply under several inches of white. I had no choice but to commence twice a day hay feeding for Pip and her charges, Tinker and Belle, who AJ had chosen to leave behind upon his departure a few weeks earlier.
In addition to my three cows, Meg had her goats that also required feed. Unfortunately, despite our efforts in the hayfield over the summer, we were not going to have enough stored bales to get us to mid-May when a new grazing season would commence once again. Evidently I was learning “the hard way” about calculating feed requirements for Vermont’s very long winters, i.e. you never have enough! Thankfully, after a few phone calls, I tracked down a dairy farmer in the next town over who had made ample hay for his herd with extra stores to sell to newbie farmers like me.
One bright moment, despite the bleak autumn weather, however, was confirmation that Pip was, in fact, pregnant. On one of Dr. Barry’s visits to our farm, I had him conduct a pregnancy check. Like the insemination process, this required another armlength glove since the technique involved another round of manual rectal palpation (arm up the bum). Thankfully and quickly, the preg check effortlessly confirmed that an intact fetus was cooking away and would be making a debut a few months still to come. Feeling confident that Pip’s lactation would once again coincide with the arrival of the new calf, I stopped milking altogether giving her an extra-long dry off period and me a very needed break from another long winter of daily milking chores.
With milking on hold for the time being, the routine for twice daily chores simply included tossing hay bales in the outdoor hay rack, topping off water in the heated tub and regrettably, shoveling lots of shit. Pip and the two young Angus girls had all grown thick winter coats and could have happily spent most of their time outdoors. However, I could not subdue my inclination towards anthropomorphizing my seemingly pet cows. I felt they needed to have a cozy indoor alternative available to them at all times of the day, no matter the conditions outside. They indulged, and consequently I shoveled.
Meg, in addition to her growing flock of goats, had acquired a dozen or so turkey pullets earlier in the summer to be ready for processing in time for Thanksgiving. In anticipation of this event, for purposes of dunking and loosening the feathers from the freshly killed birds, Meg fabricated a cauldron out of a 55-gallon steel drum and filled it with water that she set to boil over an old cookstove. She had a separate Rubbermaid water tub filled with ice for cooling the plucked carcasses and numerous plastic bags for final wrapping. Thankfully she had also borrowed and erected a camping fly tent since, like so many days that November, it was snowing! Her friend Liz, who had ample experience butchering all types of animals, had come to help, and I volunteered to lend a hand too.
By the time I arrived at Meg’s makeshift turkey processing area set up adjacent to our farm’s machinery shed, she and Liz had already corralled the doomed birds and had stuffed the entire bunch into an old wooden poultry crate. One at a time, Meg reached her hand into the small trap door and grabbed a turkey by the neck. Panicked and flapping its wings like mad, Meg adjusted her hold on the bird, maintaining a tight grasp of the writhing beast by holding it just above its gnarly taloned feet. Then, in one fell swoop she flung it upside down into the awaiting death cone tacked onto the side of the shed wall. Squawking away with its head now conveniently locked in and accessible just below the opening of the cone, Meg, with fearless prowess, swiped her super sharp boning knife, cutting a deep slice through the bird’s neck. The turkey’s head was now dangling from its backbone with blood pouring from the freshly severed artery, but it’s body, still in the wider section of the cone, immediately started flailing about, purging the last of its energy in a full-blown demonstration of the death throes. A terrifying childhood experience came to me at that moment – having witnessed a similar murderous act of a chicken. Unfortunately, the perpetrator did not have Meg’s experience, and instead of setting up a cone for the slaughter, there was a block of unsplit firewood with two nails lightly tacked into the top creating a space just wide enough to hold the chicken’s neck in place while an axe came down and dispatched with the head. Since the chicken wasn’t secured, once the handler removed his hand from the body of the bird, off it went… running about exactly like a chicken with its head chopped off!
Once the turkey’s nervous system put forth its final twitch, Meg made one more quick slice through the severed neck, and the head dropped to the ground. The remaining cadaver was then extracted from the cone and immediately dunked into the cauldron of hot water. Since I was the novice in the group, I was relegated to plucking duties. The purpose of the hot water bath is essentially to flash cook the base of the follicle thereby weakening the skin to allow for easy pulling of the copious feathers. Of course, the intention is to submerge the bird for as little time as possible. Any further cooking is exclusively earmarked for Thanksgiving Day.
At this point in my story, I need to point out that this was Meg’s first foray into raising turkey poults, and like all new endeavors, there’s undoubtedly a learning curve and always a hindsight is 20-20 moment. Her hindsight moment was not recognizing that only white turkey poults make white turkeys. Any other baby turkey presenting with varying color schemes, like Meg’s, will become black turkeys. Black turkeys have black feathers, and black feathers have black feather follicles. Despite my efforts plucking and ultimately tweezing, all of Meg’s turkey carcasses looked like they had yesterday’s shave, a five o’clock shadow. Thankfully, she had pre-sold most of her stock, but all her customers were in for a surprise, nonetheless.
Once I finished plucking, I passed off the bird to Liz who had command over the evisceration table. Her mastery with a knife carefully removed all the machinations of the turkey’s digestive system without puncturing a single organ. Any accidental bowel leakage onto the flesh could result in potential bacterial contamination. After spending the summer nurturing her flock by regularly moving their enclosure to fresh plots of grass, feeding them costly feed, and fretting over critter intrusions, the last thing anyone wanted was to render these valuable Thanksgiving delights inedible by accidentally puncturing into their guts and poisoning them with their own poop.
With freezing fingers and soaking wet from managing the turkey dunk tank, we finally finished processing the last bird. A week or so later, Liz, who had also raised turkeys, was looking for volunteers to facilitate her own processing effort. Thankfully, I was otherwise unavailable. Fortunately for Liz, my son Miles was visiting for the weekend and somehow, I managed to talk him into stepping up to assist. I expected him to return later in the day to chastise me for guilting him into “helping out,” a local farmer with such a dreadful job. However, I was conversely astonished when he sauntered up to the porch with bloodied boots pulling his iphone from his jacket pocket, so he could share with me the photo of him in full regalia, clenching a newly postmortem turkey by the feet with his legs straddling the body and both wings held securely behind his legs while they had their final flap. I was thrilled! Meg introduced me to something new, another page in my storied evolution as a mid-life farmer. But even more satisfying was that I was paying this experience forward to my son. One by one, in their own way, my family was getting their head around what I’ve been up to, and while I don’t expect it to happen very often, I was seeing a glimpse that they just might think it’s pretty cool.
