Urban Turkey

When I went for a walk just now, I saw a real turkey. Literally: a real turkey.

Between the political season, the gloomy weather, and the ongoing angst of looming middle age, I was feeling down. So I figured I'd get out of the house for a little bit and treat myself to comfort food: a chicken sandwich and fries from Wendy's. There's one about half a mile or so away, so I put on my coat and hat and started walking. A couple blocks from home, on one of the side streets, I saw it wandering down the side of the road.

Naturally I did a double-take. Sure enough, it was a turkey. No mistake. It was as tall as my waist when it held its head up... way too big to be a pheasant. It was fairly plain, so I assume it was female. And it was just slowly walking along. It saw me as I approached, and strutted quickly to the other side of the road. (Insert silly joke here.) But otherwise it just went about its business as I slowly passed.

I've seen wild turkeys before, even here in the city, so I wasn't completely floored by this. But that was at my parents' house, out closer to the suburbs, where there are more "undeveloped" patches of land around (or at least there were when I lived there), and it's only a few miles to the nearest farmland. In this part of the city, the largest wild animals one usually sees are squirrels, with the very occasional raccoon.

But there are still some semi-wild areas nearby: the wooded campus of a college, a big park with a few medium-large stands of trees, and a couple miles down the street there's a small lake with some wetlands and woodlands on one side of it. You don't have to look very hard to find trees that are decades, even a century or more old; they're just part of the landscape here. In fact, near the edge of the aforementioned campus, there's a tree that must have been here when the first Europeans got here. It's a hoary and wizened old thing, barely holding up its splayed and leaning trunks, and only a few branches even show signs of life... the sort of tree that neo-pagans would revere as an elder soul. I just see it as an example of the wilderness that survives here.

The "save the wilderness" campaigns of a hundred and more years ago were a Good Thing, and I'm glad that they preserved (at least to some extent) the places now designated as government parks and wilderness areas. But they also promoted the idea of wilderness being something "out there", when it shouldn't be. It should be "in here" as well. Especially in cities.

We need some wilderness in our daily lives, because wilderness is what we're built for. It's demonstrably better for our health than a paved urban wasteland. We need trees, and bushes, and plants other than homogenous heavily-trimmed lawns of grass. We need fireflies, and ladybugs, and spiders. We need squirrels, and chipmunks, and yes even mice. We need sparrows, and jays, and... turkeys.

There were those (Ben Franklin in particular) who thought that the wild turkey should be the United States' mascot, rather than the bald eagle. I kinda wish it were. Nationalist reverence for the eagle is probably what got it federal protection and perhaps saved it from extinction, which is good. But if our national bird were the turkey it'd make for a lot less militaristic and (so to speak) hawkish images representing the nation, and maybe that'd rub off on the populace. Unlike the eagle, the turkey is an animal I can relate to. And even bump into on the street.