By Michelle Maga, Cuddy Valley
The title may make you wonder if this tale is about a seriously overcooked bird gracing our Thanksgiving table. Not so. I’m a pretty fair cook. This story tells of a strange tradition that takes place every Thanksgiving here at the Maga "ranch."
It’s going on six years since we moved from Pine Mountain to Cuddy Valley, into our magnificent tree-filled acres loaded with stately Jeffrey and Pinon pines. Each year after the weather cools down, we begin working on a small part of our forest, limbing up trees and removing brush to create our "defensible space" in the woods. For some strange reason, this annual event begins on Thanksgiving weekend.
Our very large family—children, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews—converges on the last Thursday of November, numbering thirty-five or more ’round the table.
After the feast, they transform into a well-oiled machine, donning safety goggles, gloves and earplugs. We supply chain saws and pruning implements and out to the forest they march. No postprandial football games around here!
We’ve yet to figure out what’s in the turkey, ham or pumpkin pie that fills them with the need to wield sharp objects. Maybe it’s just the snappy mountain air. My private theory is that it assuages guilty feelings of overindulgence.
Whatever the reason, we’re grateful for the crew that helps us with our task, making our place fire-safe.
These city dwellers are eager to become mountain men and women for a day. They saw and prune away fire fodder, drag it up steep slopes to the hungry wood chipper and generally adopt a behavior so foreign that they’re unrecognizable as the same group holding hands and saying grace just hours before.
At the end of a strenuous day, covered in pitch and sporting a few bruises, they tromp out of the hills, clean up and sit down to a sumptuous turkey sandwich, more pie and a hot cup of cider.
Sharing tales of aching muscles, brushes with danger and trees they tackled, our city folk are replete. Until next year when the craving for turkey and chain saws strikes again!
This is part of the November 23, 2007 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
Have an opinion on this matter? We'd like to hear from you.
