Tales of a Hay Hauler: Holiday Fowl
by Brad Nelson
I love to eat turkey. I know that the logic of the thought is faulty, but it seems to me the more turkey I eat, the fewer turkeys there are in the world.
It was 1968. I was freshly married and in college. The employment I found to go with the college and the new family left me working Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays and attending college Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. My employer had a fair amount of farm land as well as a small feedlot and too many turkeys.
I got along fairly well with the farm land and the feedlot. This fellow’s place was my first experience with liquid manure pits, which he had under the pens in the feedlot. The manure was scraped into the pits while it was still mostly liquid. Then it was pumped into the “turd hearse” and spread on the fields in the winter. The turd hearse was a tank mounted on a surplus military truck of about 1952 vintage with an engine that looked a lot like a Chevy six-cylinder car engine.
While driving this monster I never had to worry about breaking an axle or getting stuck very bad. It did not have enough power to spin a wheel. The military instruction and warning labels that were still visible inside the cab stated that the truck was not to be driven faster than 45 miles per hour. In the Pleasant Grove, Utah area I never found a hill long enough or steep enough to get it going 35 miles per hour.
The plan was to spread the manure on the fields before the fall rains softened the soil, bogging the turd hearse down. After this happened, we had to wait for the ground to freeze. As the low guy on the totem pole, I spent more than a few nights spreading manure in the dark. For one of my college English class writing assignments, I wrote of the beauty of the sunrise on a frosty morning. The young lady who was teaching the English class loved the part about the sunrise. She told me that I had ruined the whole thing by mentioning what I was doing at that hour to see the sunrise.
The owner almost lost his life over the liquid manure. He donated and delivered, unannounced, a load of fertilizer to the lawn of the local church house about two hours before the sisters gathered there for an all-day event.
A couple of years before I came to work there, a heavy rain had filled the liquid manure pits and flooded the feedlot. Finally about dark, to keep the steers from floating away, the crew had knocked a hole in the lower panel of the planks making up that portion of the wall of the pens. The slurry drained into a concrete irrigation ditch that ran downhill away from the feedlot. This ditch ran behind the owner’s house.
All would have been well had someone walked down the ditch to make sure the dam plates that were used when irrigating with siphon tubes had been removed from the ditch. The feedlot drained nicely. The rain stopped and the temperature dropped too fast and too far. When the owner returned much later that night from a business meeting in Salt Lake City, his garage door would not open. It would not open because his garage was filled about a foot deep with now frozen manure slurry. The crew said it was a good month before anyone could have a civil conversation with the man.
My luck finally ran out and I got involved with the turkeys. It was vaccination time. The birds were herded in crowd pens. I was in the crowd pen with them. My job was to gather up the birds one at a time and hand them to those giving the shots. The directions were to reach under the birds and grab one turkey by both legs, pick it up, and hand it to the crew with the needles.
They released the bird on the other side of the vaccination area. Now to grab one turkey by both legs and pick it up resulted in some squalling by the turkey and not just a little flapping of the wings. When I missed and only got one leg there was much more of a fight. But not as much as when I got three legs. This was not as bad as getting two legs, each of which belonged to a different bird. The event that almost had me airborne was to grab and come up with three legs; and yes, you guessed it, three turkeys.
For two weeks after this wonderful day everything I tried to eat tasted like powdered turkey manure. For at least six months, every time I coughed or sneezed, the smell and taste came back. My bride told me how much better she liked to have me come home smelling like cow manure. It’s all a matter of perspective.
I learned how to roast a turkey the Thanksgiving my wife was laid up, I think for knee surgery. It turned out so well that I almost had to go out and buy myself a larger hat. The next year one of the places in Moses Lake, Washington, had a crew showing off a cast iron turkey roaster. The bottom part had a hollow cone in the center over which the cavity of the bird was placed. Add a little water, put the lid on, and turn on the propane burner.
The free sample tasted so good that I went back later and bought a roaster. I should have tried it out alone at home before showing it off in front of all the relatives. The main thing to remember is that you eat when the turkey gets around to getting done, not when the meal had been scheduled.
The next year I deep-fat fried a couple of turkeys. If you let the oil get over 350 degrees and lower the bird into the oil, the oil will boil over and make a mess – with the possible side effect of starting everything on fire. The first bird turned out fine. The second one is where I learned about the antics of the oil at 450 degrees. We lucked out and only had a greasy mess.
Last year on Christmas morning I found my son Dan with a mile-wide grin on his face as I opened a big box with my name on it. Inside was a propane-fired smoker. Never having had much patience, we set it up and got the turkey going inside it. It takes about 4 ½ hours to cook a 15-pound bird. I prefer hickory chips over mesquite chips for the smoke. I’m not sure which manner of cooking a turkey gives the best flavor to the meat. I wonder if I could get away with setting up all three propane-fired turkey roaster-fryer-smokers at the same time to be able to compare the finished product side by side? HG
