Daily Grist; Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous… Albert Einstein
Out of all the holidays that America celebrates, my very favoriteist is Thanksgiving. I have studied about this over the years and I have come to the conclusion that it comes during one of my favorite times of the year when the weather has finally cooled off , and before winter sets in with all the miserable cold and snowy weather. I was reminded of that fact this morning as I looked out my kitchen window to see the ponderosa pines bending before the wind of the oncoming first rainstorm of the fall, with the red and golden maple and oak leaves doing pirouettes at their base’s and dancing up the hillside in a fast shuffle. Overhead a large flock of band tailed pigeon’s racing before the wind heading for their feeding grounds, cutting through the sky so fast you barely get a glimpse of them before they are gone. Seeing that flock of pigeons reminded me of a Thanksgiving my family spent at my aunt and uncle’s place east of Sonora back in 1951. My uncle Lloyd worked at the huge lumber mill back then, and he and my aunt Violet had rented a big house a few miles from Phoenix Lake, and the whole family gathered there to have Thanksgiving that year. The house was located on a 2000 acre cattle ranch out in the mountains and was my favorite place to spend my summers as a young boy. That fall, the wild pigeons were thick as the hair on your head and were everywhere you looked. The daily limit on them back then was 15 birds a day and when you multiply that by my dad, two of my uncles and me, that added up to a lot of fresh meat for Thanksgiving dinner, which is exactly what we had for dinner. About a half a mile across the meadow were two dead pine trees that wild pigeons love to light on, so that is where I set with my single shot shotgun. When a flock of 10 or 12 birds would light, I would knock down one or two of them and about 15 or 20 min. later here would come another bunch, so it didn’t take long for me to harvest my limit. I could hear my dad and uncles shooting up on the mountain and it only took all of us a bout an hour or two to limit out and head for the house to clean the birds to have for Thanksgiving dinner.
The meat from band tailed pigeon’s is dark and rich and a wonderful tasting bounty of nature to be sure, but do not, I repeat do not cook the gizzards to make gravy with. The main food source for band tailed pigeon’s is acorns, and acorns are loaded with bitter tannic acid. It won’t kill you, but it sure does ruin a big skillet full of gravy. My mother had cooked up wild pigeons before but had never used the gizzards for the gravy so she didn’t know it would spoil the gravy, and spoil the gravy it did! That gravy was so bitter you could have used it to tan hides with ! Thankfully, it didn’t ruin the whole meal because it didn’t take long for my mother and aunts to whip up another batch of gravy , MINUS the pigeon gizzards ! A fully grown band tailed pigeon is about the size of a Cornish game hen and being the gangly hungry teenager that I was back then I could only eat about three of those at a setting, along with the customary smash taters and gravy, green bean casserole, cornbread dressing,hot yeast rolls, and pecan pie for dessert slathered with whip cream.
25 years later in the mid-1970s while in Sonora one day on business, I got to thinking about the house my aunt and uncle had rented and I drove out by Phoenix Lake and finally found it. What used to be a cattle ranch back in the 50s, I found to be wall-to-wall houses of suburban East Sonora. The meadows and hills where I used to run free and wild during the summers of the late 40s and early 50s as a young boy, is now nothing but a memory. The trout stream that was at the edge of the meadow back then, is now a culvert, and the dead ponderosa pines where I used to shoot band tailed pigeon’s has long since disappeared.
This getting old really sucks at times, and I am reminded of the fact that there is only one constant in our life and that constant is change. At the age of 80 years old I have finally realized I have less days before me than I do behind me, but that’s okay. I am glad I can say that I knew the mountains of my youth long before they were filled with houses, cell phone towers, and “civilization” ! I don’t like it, but that’s just how it is !
If there is a moral to this story, I guess it would be this; always taste the fried gizzards before making gravy with them. May you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving this year folks. I better sign off now because my monitor is getting a little blurry, why I don’t know.
God bless you all. Yer friend, JDRhynes
