But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft a-gley ....
— Robert Burns, “To a Mouse, on Turning Her up in
Her Nest with the Plough, November, 1785”
NORMALLY OUR PRE-HOLIDAY TURKEY slaughtering is planned for the Monday and Tuesday before Thanksgiving. Back in the fall of 2010, I spent extra time on planning and organizing this thrilling event. We were expecting several people to come up and help with the slaughtering, some of whom were going to process the turkeys they were buying from us. We were also listening with some apprehension to the weather forecasts: The barometer was falling, as was the temperature. The chance of snow falling, however, was rising. While the predictions were for “snow showers,” with possible accumulations of between one and three inches, we both felt it would be prudent to have a plan B in case conditions worsened either before or during the slaughtering.
The Sunday before Thanksgiving, light snow fell most of the day, ending in early evening, with maybe an inch on the ground. It cleared up that night, with temperatures dropping to the mid-20s, and remained so when I got up Monday morning. Great, I thought, no more snow overnight. People won’t have trouble getting up the hill. (Snow showers, I reminded myself, one to three inches.)
Profile of Old Tom on a sunny day.
Well, about 7:30 that morning, it started snowing again. A little before 9:30, our friend Giles drove up, bringing a large bronze turkey he had raised and planned to slaughter here. At that point, it was snowing harder; about three inches were already on the ground. We were pretty busy then with the final preparations: I had a big pot of homemade minestrone on the stove and a kettle of water keeping hot for coffee and tea. The wood stoves were stoked, and extra firewood was in the rack. Outside, the large screen-house tent was set up with the plucker and a table inside, and gloves, paper towels, knives and sharpeners, and cutting boards in place. The twenty-gallon scalding pot was heating up on the propane burner outside the tent, and a large bucket of ice water stood ready for cooling the freshly scalded birds prior to plucking.
It was our third year raising and slaughtering turkeys, and the first time we had had snow to deal with at slaughter time. Being late November, it’s usually cold, and of course the days are short, which is why we usually spread the process over two days. This time we hoped to get all twelve turkeys slaughtered on one day, since we were expecting helpers. I had also done most of the setup on Sunday, thinking it would help us to get an earlier start on Monday.
Turkey tracks in the snow.
Shortly after Giles arrived, we started getting phone calls. It was snowing just as hard in Sequim and Port Angeles, and in the end, we weren’t surprised that Giles was the only one who made it to the farm that day. By late morning, it was getting windy, snowing steadily, and the visibility was very poor. Because of these conditions, the guys decided to get three turkeys ready for eviscerating at once, instead of doing them one at a time. (We usually do the killing, scalding and plucking outdoors, then bring the birds inside to do the eviscerating.) With the snow now piling up fast, I had to keep knocking it off the tent about every ten minutes. The footing was very slippery, which slowed us down, too. Finally we took the three turkey carcasses inside, grateful for a chance to warm up (the high temperature that day was 22°F), get a bite to eat and get out of the snow for a while.
While David and Giles worked on cleaning the turkeys, I gulped down a cup of tea before heading back outside to check on the birds’ feeders and drinkers. It was so windy that it was snowing sideways, and the birds’ feeders and drinkers were accumulating snow, even though they were under shelters. I also had to top off the drinkers with warm water, as the water freezes fairly quickly when it’s this cold.
Since the snow had piled up to nearly twelve inches, I decided to go knock the snow off the tent again. I looked over toward the slaughter area, and guess what: The tent had disappeared. Between the wind and the weight of the snow, it had just come down. I went back in to report this to David, and we all agreed it was a good thing we hadn’t been in the tent at the time! Although the snow continued to come down thick and fast, we were able to raise the tent again pretty easily. However, given the wind, the time and the cold, we moved the plucking operation indoors.
By then, it was nearly 3:00. Knowing that there would only be about another hour of daylight, we decided not to process any more birds. That evening, I phoned most of our turkey customers to let them know their turkeys might not be processed in time for Thanksgiving. Also, given the amount of snow on the ground, and the swiftly dropping temperature, it seemed questionable whether anyone would be able to get here to pick up their birds. Everyone was very understanding and looking forward to getting a fresh turkey sometime in December.
That Monday night, our low temperature was 7°F. (As David said, “You know it’s cold when you have to bring the coolers with the turkeys indoors to keep them from freezing overnight.”) On Tuesday, David and I slaughtered two more turkeys. Thankfully, it was sunny most of the day, although the temperature got no higher than 22°F. We knew it would get pretty cold that night if it stayed clear, and it did; our low temperature was 0°F. We processed one more turkey on Wednesday morning, loaded it onto a sled and walked the half mile to our gate to meet the customer, in case she couldn’t get through the deep snow between there and the house. Fortunately the road crew had plowed our road up to our gate, so she was able to make it that far.
We definitely learned a lot from this experience. Although I had spent extra time planning and organizing, as the snow piled up, all our plans went pretty much out the window. With snow coming down hard that Monday morning, I had said to David, “I suspect the key to making it through the day will be flexibility.” That certainly turned out to be the case!
On the positive side, the turkeys that weren’t delivered in time for Thanksgiving put on a little more weight, since about another three weeks passed before they were finally slaughtered. We only sell our turkeys fresh, partly because we have no means of freezing them here, and also because we believe that fresh is preferable to frozen.
Once we had a chance to catch our breath and relax, we sat and enjoyed the gorgeous view: the frosty-looking Blue Mountain to the southwest, the beautiful snow-covered cedar and fir trees around our property and our two pigs playing happily in their pasture, seemingly oblivious to the weather. Although the days before Thanksgiving didn’t go as we had planned, it all turned out all right, and we are truly thankful that we are safe and warm here at home in the beautiful Olympic Mountains.
