Turkeys in Boston
There have been surprises moving from Northern New York to north of Boston, but the last thing I expected was the turkeys. And not just some turkeys but somehow more turkeys than where we lived in the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains. I’ve actually been thrilled how much green space is close to our new home. Loons live on the lake five minutes from our former leather factory apartment. A racoon picked its way through a small creek as I watched from a footbridge at work. Even the parking lot is crowded with juncos, the classiest, black and white sparrows, milling around like it’s a ball. Nuthatches call out from the spreading oaks. There are nature preserves less than a half hour away where I’ve seen snowy egrets, American avocets, and swallows migrate in the thousands, filling the sky - dark bodies in pink dusk. And for all of that, the sight that brings me the most joy is wild turkeys.
I feel irrepressible, anarchic glee from seeing, even the thought of seeing, a flock of five or six wild turkeys traipsing through the pristine lawns of Newburyport. In the middle of all that is proper and well maintained comes a four foot tall, dinosaur of a bird, teetering on its stilts of legs and eyeing everyone with mild suspicion and seasoned indifference. There are many ways for the human sense of control over and separation from nature to be shattered. The pandemic was a long confrontation with the limits of the human species. Storms, floods, landslides, drought, and famine each remind us of our inseparability from all the earth. None of those are anywhere near as fun as turkeys stopping traffic. They silently assert that they were in New England before us, and plan to be here after us. We’re fellow creatures living in the same corner of the planet. Local fauna includes turkeys and humans.
But why do I love wild turkeys so much? It is fun that they puncture our perception of ourselves and our lives, but my wife doesn’t doesn’t find anything like the same kind of wild joy in them. She finds my excitement bemusing, hopefully cute bemusing, but bemusing nevertheless. I think it connects with the different ways we viewed moving to the Boston area. For her, being around Boston is very natural. Her dad was proudly raised in Cambridge, just north of the Charles River. The North Country where she grew up is more like rural New England than it is like Western New York, or New York and the surrounding metro area. It’s not a shift in the way she thinks about herself to live in the quaint towns of Boston’s North Shore. Unlike me. I grew up in Central Pennsylvania, a Mennontie from Lancaster County who knew that Boston was for snobby people who weren’t as smart as they think they are. My family's orientation was towards the Midwest. My mom grew up in the tightly packed hills of Eastern Kentucky, my dad in the drained and reclaimed fields of Eastern Michigan. Thanksgiving was watching college football and eating smoked everything in the hollows. Christmas on the farm ment watching the winds snake the dry snow in the sunset’s long light and eating my grandma’s delicious food with too much butter and salt (which is what makes it so good).
I never realized how much of I was a part of the American heartland, Mennonties have strong beliefs about nonresistance and our role in the world which are inherently skeptical of the nations they live in, until I went to England. My wife and I were dating, and we went to the wedding of some of the friends she’d made when she worked in London. When she spoke, she could pass as English or Canadian or German or Scandinavian, but as soon as I opened my mouth I was plainly American. And I realized in a new way that I grew up with my heart looking towards the Midwest.
Mennonites tend towards the fear, though I don’t think they’d acknowledge it as fear, that living outside of where you were raised will change you for the worse. I brought that anxiety with me when we moved. Who would I become in Boston, which is afterall a land of prim snobbery? Would it bring out my worst impulses for elitism? And I think this is why I love to see turkeys here in New England. Even though they’re here, transplanted from the Adirondacks, they’re still just turkeys.
There are things I don’t want to lose from how I was raised. Going to bleak rural Michigan and destitute rural Kentucky as destinations full of love and excitement lets me see them in ways my wife never did until we started dating. They are places I love, not just the abstractions of politics. Seeing the turkeys be wild and anarchic, distinctly turkeys up to turkey business, gives me hope that I can remain who I am, even in these beautiful, pedigreed towns. And I will change, that’s inevitable, but hopefully those changes will be for the better and that the changes will expand me so that I may continue to love Kentucky and Michigan, Lancaster and Potsdam, and come to love Boston and Newburyport, and all the myriad animals, people, and turkeys who are home in all my homes.
