There’s Always Been This Song
You can’t actually see the whole, strutting, tom. It’s like trying to talk about love in any quantitative way. You can only watch the handful of petals, tossed into the river, with your eyes in soft focus. Try to slow your questions and follow down, down, down around the eddy to the woman sitting in the sand, pounding a drum. She skims the petals from the pool, sips them into her mouth, glides over the granite bank and vanishes, into the pines without missing a beat. You’re left with a song. You realize there’s always been this song no words – a chest humming and somewhere, a rhythm you follow into the woods like a lily on slow water, between trees, pulled to a light place an opening in the dark heart stage-lit – the dawn rising flowers begin to reach the tom steps in head blooming like a gong in a chapel feathers swallowing the sun as he turns, a black hole, in perfect time.
I’ve been waking up to toms gobbling, hens yelping, but most times when I sit up to listen I realize the call is coming from inside the house, my head, my dreams. Wild turkeys have a way of sneaking inside you, like a song. I wrote the above poem (which you can hear me read by pressing play at the top of the page) the other day when I stared at a tom turning slow circles in a field, my heart pounded so hard, but slow, rhythmic, and there was a black hole burned into my vision the whole ride home. Turkeys have somehow gotten the reputation, in this modern American culture at least, as being dumb, silly, clumsy birds, and I’m not sure how that happened or how it persists. They are, to me, obviously, gods. I was so happy when I first saw the painting "Sleep of Reason"at the top of the page, by New Hampshire artist Alex Kanevsky, who was gracious enough to let me share it here with you, because it perfectly portrays the bigness of the turkey spirit - standing over us - big enough to black out the sun when he wants to be seen.
This is a tremendous video by turkey enthusiast, and I’ve never used the word “enthusiast” more appropriately, Bob Etzweiler. Click on his name to see photos of someone who is excited by the existence of turkeys every day of the year. Bob’s opening day of turkey season is today and I love thinking about how much fun I know he’s having. Good luck Bob!
“Culture replaces authentic feeling with words. As an example of this, imagine an infant lying in its cradle, and the window is open, and into the room comes something, marvelous, mysterious, glittering, shedding light of many colors, movement, sound, a transformative hierophany of integrated perception and the child is enthralled and then the mother comes into the room and she says to the child, “that’s a bird, baby, that’s a bird,” instantly the complex wave of the angel peacock iridescent trans-formative mystery is collapsed, into the word. All mystery is gone, the child learns this is a bird, this is a bird, and by the time we’re five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of dis-empowered perception.” — Terence McKenna
I think the act of naming the thing a “turkey” may be the beginning of our stereotype of the bird. This goes for all things, of course, as McKenna said - all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words - but I find the chasm between the word “turkey” and the reality of “turkey” to be especially huge and baffling. Turkey hunters, I think, have found their way back to the place of perceiving before verbal language, and they’re able to see, with fresh, unnaming eyes, the real thing that’s been tiled over by the name “turkey” - and they want to talk to it, not about it. Turkey hunting, more than any other hunting, is courtship, albeit a unique courtship, in that it results in one of the only relationships where effective communication means killing, but a courtship, nonetheless. Communication in this case, is able to happen in that old place before verbal language, where we can’t really spell it out, but boy do we try.
On a recent episode of The Hunting Public podcast titled "Reading the Behavior of Individual Turkeys" host, Zach Ferenbaugh and friends were talking about some recent hunts and examining them down to a granular level. This could come across to some people as a bunch of dudes in camo, jawing about guns and gobbling, and it is, but if you back up just a few thousand years, it’s humans, around a fire, trying to communicate with each other, about how they tried to communicate with this other thing, in this other language.
“...When you’re just thinking about it as, is he gobbling or is he not, you’re not thinking about it from the communication standpoint. What does that communication mean?...” — Zach Ferenbaugh
“that communication” that he’s referring to was actually a moment of silence - a small moment when the bird was not responding. This kind of moment would go unnoticed by most people, myself included, but these guys circled around and around that moment, trying to see what it really meant.
It’s a crush, it’s wondering why he didn’t call, why he called so much but didn’t come over, why he looked at that other girl, should I change my hair, oh my god he said hi to me when he walked by, when am I going to see him again…
Some direct quotes from Zach and my translations:
“Be the hen.” (Be what he wants.)
“Play to the personality of the turkey.” (Do what he wants.)
“Listen for the scratching.” (Body language is louder than words.)
With turkey mating season upon us and turkey hunting seasons opening across the country, you’ll be seeing turkeys and their pursuers dotting your local fields and hills and some people might scoff or roll their eyes, stuck inside the walls of stereotypes, and see the birds as silly, peabrained strutters, and they might see the hunters the same. I hope they look again. I hope they listen.
If you’re fortunate enough to sit outside and forget every name you know and be in the orgiastic place that is a spring morning, and you see a shimmering, swirling black hole and you remember to raise your gun and you get to stroke those miracle feathers before you pluck them off and turn that mystery into meat, may I recommend a recipe. I’ve always been partial to dark meat, but I made this Pan-Roasted Turkey Breast the other night with last year’s tom and dandelion crowns and I am now a convert to breast meat, it was so juicy it made it’s own gravy!
This tom I killed last spring was the first bird I’ve ever called in with my natural voice. It was one of my favorite moments as a human and I can’t wait to try again.
The other night I braised his thigh in sweetfern and garlic, pulled the meat and simmered in a sauce of porcini broth, wine, and oil, and heaped over campanelle with porcini, ramps, dandelion buds, chili flake, last spring’s peas, and lots of parmesan. It was proper turkey worship.
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