by Bob Johnson
I had just turned 21 when I encountered a “Wild Turkey” for the first time. Friends had taken me to a strip club – my first and only visit to such an establishment – and at one point during the evening, I was served a glass of Wild Turkey, neat. Only years later did I learn that the Wild Turkey I consumed that night was a bourbon, and that “neat” meant it came with no ice, no water and no other mixers.
Truth be told, I didn’t particularly like the flavor of Wild Turkey. My 21-year-old palate was better suited for beer, and even more so for my favorite drink at the time: milk.
And that’s about all I remember about that night at the strip club – which probably is a blessing.
It had been decades since I’d thought about Wild Turkey, but one day after moving to the Inland Northwest, I saw a scrawny-looking bird loitering next to the road, seemingly looking for food.
“What is that?” I asked my wife.
“It’s a wild turkey,” the lovely Michelle replied.
“Seriously?” I asked.
“Seriously,” she said.
“Like a Thanksgiving turkey?”
“No. You wouldn’t want to eat that.”
We drove another half-a-mile, and about a dozen wild turkeys came into view. It was fascinating to watch them spread out across a narrow strip of the shoulder, then scurry to safer ground when a car traveling in the other direction drew close.
The journalist’s mind works in mysterious ways, and the encounter with Inland Northwest wild turkeys prompted me to want to learn more about Wild Turkey bourbon. It turns out that it’s a spirit first formulated by brothers John and James Ripy in 1869, and sold at their family distillery on Wild Turkey Hill in Lawrenceburg, Ky.
But it wasn’t labeled “Wild Turkey” at the time. That didn’t happen until 1940, when a succeeding distillery executive shared his bourbon with friends on a hunting trip — a hunting trip targeting wild turkeys.
Were they hunting for food or hunting for sport? The answer to that question could not be unearthed, but I know what my wife’s opinion would be.
I hadn’t given wild turkeys a second thought until a few weeks later when I was having some stitches removed following another Mohs surgery – the result of one unprotected summer of my misspent youth.
Not that wild turkeys have anything to do with skin cancer. It’s just that the nurse who was removing the stitches lives alongside a road that had just recently been paved, and she was lamenting the fact that the speed limit had been increased from 30-mph to 50-mph.
“There are a lot of wild turkeys who live alongside that road,” she said, “and they don’t move very fast. I’m afraid a lot of them are going to get hit, and that sucks because we’re invading their habitat.”
She told me about the history of that road. At first, about half-a-mile from the highway, two houses were built and an unpaved road was put in so the owners could access them. Over time, more houses were constructed, some closer to the highway and some deeper into the heavily wooded area. The unpaved road was extended as needed.
Today, she said, there are about 150 houses from the beginning of that road to its end. It’s about a two-mile stretch.
“I think they paved it mainly for the people who live the farthest from the highway,” she continued. “I would have been perfectly happy if they’d left it unpaved. But the worst part is the speed limit. There’s no reason for it to be 50.”
As a silent form of protest, she said she continues to drive at 30. Sometimes it’s not so silent when someone gets on her tail and starts honking. The honking does not compel her to drive faster, though. If anything, it prompts her to ease back on the gas pedal.
She admitted that’s probably not a great idea in a part of the country where so many people are armed, but said she’s banking on the fact that she’s a woman, and a man is less likely to go all nuts-o on a woman.
“What about the nuts-o women?” I asked.
She paused, clipped another stitch, and replied, “Good point. I’m just worried I’m going to start seeing a lot of dead wild turkeys on the side of the road.”
I told her I understood how she felt and hoped her fears didn’t come true. With that, she placed a steri-strip on my mostly healed wound. I bade her farewell until the next Mohs adventure and immediately began seeking information on turkeys of the non-alcoholic kind because, after all, November is upon us and this is their month, although not necessarily in the most positive way.
The first thing I learned is that what I was taught in grade school about the first Thanksgiving dinner involving the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people in 1621 most likely did not include turkey on the menu. This was disturbing because I had devoted countless hours to coloring pictures of Pilgrims with turkeys and cutting construction paper into turkey-like shapes. If there were no turkeys at the first Thanksgiving dinner, and I’d wasted all that time on coloring and cutting, what did that say about the rest of my education?
Further research revealed that around 30 states had formalized “a day of thanks” by the mid-1800s, so by the time President Lincoln declared an annual national day of Thanksgiving in 1863, the country was ready. That included our farmers, who had already begun to domesticate wild turkeys.
Then in the 1900s, as agriculture became more industrialized, turkey farmers mirrored the preferences of Hollywood directors and sought larger and larger breast sizes. Today, there’s even a National Turkey Federation, which I presume is similar to the Screen Actors Guild, representing the 210 million turkeys raised on farms.
Wild turkeys, on the other hand, likely have no such representation, even though they’re the ones who could use it. This is especially true of the female wild turkeys who, without exception, have a dead-beat dad with whom to contend. In the wild turkey world, the fathers provide absolutely no parental care. Zero. Zilch. Nada. All gobble and no guidance.
Not that the mothers are much better. True, they allow their newly hatched chicks to follow them around for a few days, but that’s just so they can learn to find food on their own. Wild turkeys are foragers, and as the chicks grow, several hens get together with their broods and form gobble groups, similar to human coffee klatches. These groups can sometimes reach 200 turkeys, the size of a wall-to-wall league in a 40-lane bowling center – something that does not exist in the Inland Northwest where the centers typically range in size from 16 to 32 lanes.
As any experienced bowler could tell you, a “turkey” is a good thing in bowling. It’s the term used to describe having rolled three consecutive strikes. In days of yore, in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, some bowling centers would present a frozen turkey to any league member who paid a fee (typically in the $2-$5 range) and rolled strikes in the third, sixth and ninth frames of a given game. It wasn’t a turkey for a turkey, but it was a cool thing – or, to be precise, a frozen thing.
As a side note, while you’re not likely to encounter a wild turkey at your neighborhood bowling center, it’s a pretty good bet the center’s bar has a bottle or two of Wild Turkey on hand.
Which brings us full circle in this feathered friend featurette. Except for the strip club part, which, since I am a happily married man, is best left in the haze of one overserved evening long, long ago.
A curious nature and willingness to ask hard-hitting questions has resulted in Bob Johnson receiving 99 national writing awards over the course of his career in journalism. Now a resident of North Idaho, he and his family enjoy exploring the Inland Northwest, and Johnson is asking lots of questions and sharing his observations with Huckleberry Press readers.