The Unmuddled Mathematician

The Turkey

By Chris S. Coray, The Unmuddled Mathematician

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving, spent time with your families, and enjoyed turkey sandwiches.  At the end of this story it may be a while before you eat your next one.

Many years ago a young man, Russ Weeks, left his teaching job at Richfield High School and came to USU to earn a Master’s degree in mathematics.  He became my student.  As he was not yet married we sort of partially adopted him and he spent many holidays at our house.  We became and are very close.  Eventually he married and bought a small house in Paradise.  He and his new wife remodeled the house, added a garage (the inside of which he painted the brightest white I’ve ever seen) and began teaching at Logan High School.

As he had a couple of acres of land, he and his former professor (me) hatched a plan to raise a little fresh provender for our families, in this case, turkeys.  Special, genetically enhanced, broad-breasted white feathered turkeys.  There were 12 of them.  Spring became summer, then fall, and our flock of birds did well.  They did so well that we became victims of our own greed.  These turkeys just kept getting bigger and in our greed we kept putting off the harvest.  Although it is getting a little ahead of the story I tell you now that near Thanksgiving these turkeys weighed 55 lbs each on the hoof.  They were seriously big.   Now it’s time for you to pay attention.

Neither of us is a farmer or rancher.  But what the heck, how hard could it be to harvest a turkey?  The answer is that our education and degrees didn’t work worth spit.  But it wasn’t because of a lack of planning.  Here was our scheme.  We would capture the turkey and hang him upside down from a truss in the spiffy new garage.  Then we would take a 5 gallon plastic bucket, put about 15 lbs of rocks in it, and attach the bucket to the neck of the turkey, nicely stretching the bird out.  The bucket was suspended about 1 inch off of the garage floor.  Then, as our plan for actually killing the turkey was to slit its throat, we engineered and built what we called our “Cone of Harvest”.  This 6 inch long cone was made to fit around the neck of the turkey so that the blood would drain straight down into the weighted bucket, making no mess, even if the turkey flopped a little.  After a short interval we would use scalding hot water to help us remove the feathers, then we’d clean the bird, and voila, Norbest would be only a vendor in our distant past.

Our plan proceeded as designed right up to the work of the “Cone of harvest”.  It was a bitterly cold night.  Russ and I had all in readiness.  However, when we slit the neck of the turkey all of the muscles in the bird relaxed and I swear the turkey got about 3 inches longer.  Down to the floor went the bucket, no longer applying any tension.  The turkey began a wild flop which was not much stopped by any of our gear as there now were a couple of inches of slack in our system.  Round and round went the turkey, so fast and so strong that blood sprayed all the way to the beautiful white walls of the garage.  Then it froze.  Viewed later it was sort of like we had thrown red speckle paint all over the walls, except where the blood hit Russ and me, leaving sort of a clean white human shaped shadow behind each of us on the walls.  I don’t think my wife kept the clothes.

We had not distinguished ourselves, at least in the way we had hoped.  Afterwards, the scalding water and removal of feathers went well, the cleaning just fine, but this story isn’t over.  Remember, I wrote that the turkey weighed 55 lbs on the hoof.  This was determined when the turkey was freshly dead but still wearing all its clothes.  Once cleaned it didn’t weigh that much, but it was still huge.  So big that we tried an experiment to see if it would fit in the oven.  Nope, not close, and this was not a small oven.  Too tall and those darn drumsticks.  So we pondered some solutions, e.g., cutting it in half, going to a commercial place to cook it, and some other more dramatic tricks involving truck bumpers.  The one we settled on, and this is the truth, is that we took an 8 pound sledgehammer and bashed the turkey breast on the top, crushing skeletal structure, but making it a really, really broad-breasted turkey.  Further, we gave the turkey a case of anklehipolitis, which is done by turning  the ankles into hips using severe pressure.  But we ended up with a half inch to spare, not a lot of circulation room but the oven door closed.  We note that should you try this that you cannot make enough dressing to fill the cavity. 

Our leftover turkey sandwiches lasted 4 months and were not thin sliced.