On Lessons Learned

Faulkner, turkey hunting, and a recipe for frittata.

I have a bookshelf in my office, filled with books — as bookshelves are¹. I was browsing through said shelf recently, trying to catch a spark of inspiration for this essay, when I noticed a well-creased copy of Faulkner’s Three Famous Short Novels — a collection comprising of Spotted Horses, Old Man, and The Bear.

I’m fairly certain I bought this book my junior year of college for a course on American Fiction (1900-1950)². Clearly I read it: the spine is creased and throughout The Bear, in particular, the pages are annotated with brackets and underlines, as I was wont to do in those days³. However, for the life of me, I don’t remember much at all of the story⁴. It’s about a bear hunt, obviously, but what ensues over the story’s 130-some pages, I couldn’t tell you. The blurb on the back cover describes it as such:

Perhaps one of the best known of Faulkner’s shorter works, The Bear is the story of a boy’s coming to terms with the adult world. By learning how to hunt, the boy is taught the real meaning of pride and humility and courage, virtues that Faulkner feared would be almost impossible to learn with the destruction of the wilderness.

If you had to write a description for a book tailor-made to entice me to read it, you couldn’t do much better than that. Famous American writer — check. Moralizing on what it means to be a man — check. Hunting as a proxy for life — check. The wilderness as a sublime teacher — check. Frankly, I’m not sure what is missing. If I were an ambitious essayist, I would have immediately started reading The Bear⁵ and then sat down at my keyboard to fire off an insightful piece on the power of Faulkner’s work and its relevance today.

But, that ambitious essayist I am not. Three Famous Short Novels sits still on my desk upstairs⁶. Instead, I spent most of the front half of this week getting ready to on an actual hunt with my friend (and reader), Kyle. I made the drive down to his neck of the woods in the wee hours early on Wednesday morning, coffee in hand⁷, to try and sweet talk some birds into bow range⁸.

We did just that, and I successfully killed my first turkey, which I’m stoked about. I’m excited to eat it over the next few weeks and am already planning how to fill the remaining tags I have before the end of the season⁹. But, the hunt wasn’t all celebration: I made some mistakes and, like Faulkner’s protagonist, I, too, learned some lessons on humility and on pride¹⁰ — ones I’ll definitely be taking with me going forward. I’m optimistic the experience, described below in the footnotes, will make me a better hunter, but, man, do they still sting.

All that being said, I had grand visions for featuring a turkey recipe in today’s dispatch, but, alas, that’s not to be. According to my trusty Turkey Book, wild turkey is best given a day or two in the fridge for a pseudo-dry age, so that’s where our bird is now. And, due to a confluence of factors, we didn’t do much grocery shopping last weekend, leaving us with a dearth of newsletter-worthy meals. So instead of fried turkey with mashed potatoes, turkey boudin, turkey enchiladas, or turkey soup, we have a bacon and onion frittata. I apologize for letting you all down.

That being said, frittatas are infinitely versatile, infinitely easy, and infinitely adaptable — so why don’t you go ahead and pretend this one is made with turkey bacon and we’ll call it even?

Pre-heat your oven to 400(F). Dice up a few slices of very thick cut bacon and cook them in a cast iron pan until mostly rendered. While this is happening, dice an onion and add that to the mix. Beat 4-6 eggs in a small bowl with some milk and shredded cheese, seasoned with salt and pepper, and then add the egg mixture to the pan with the bacon and onions. When the eggs start to get firm around the edges, dump a boatload more cheese on top, along with some herbs, and remove the pan to the oven to cook for +/- 10 minutes, until the eggs are cooked through.

So there you have it: a frittata. Feel free to add any other vegetables you have on hand hanging around in the fridge — peppers work well, as does broccoli, asparagus, radishes, even potatoes and sweet potatoes. Just make sure that any additions are mostly cooked through before you add the eggs, since the eggs cook pretty quickly.

With that, I’ll leave you to enjoy the rest of your Fridays. Big one here in the Household CWD, as we’re getting a visit from the first subscriber to CWD, Mr. Freidaddy himself¹¹. The guy can negotiate deals with the upper echelons of Wall Street, but I’m beyond excited to see how he fares while debating with a toddler and a pre-schooler.

However you spend your weekend, try to spend some of it outside. Drink some water and we’ll see you here next week.

1. And are most of the coffee tables, nightstands, and spare shelves on any kind in our house. This leads to a literary clutter, and, according to Mrs. CWD, we have too many books for too few bookshelves. I suppose this could be rectified with the purchase of additional shelving — or with a donation of books — but that would require a level of effort that has thus far eluded us.

2. Shout out to Ronna Johnson, the professor, whom I remember mostly for describing her wish that Ralph Lauren would come out with a sub-brand in the vein of (the now defunct) Rugby, but instead of skulls and crossbones, the clothing would feature peace signs and flowers.

Odd lady, but lovely.

3. I’m terrible at taking notes while reading, by the way. Mostly I just underline or bracket passages I find interesting, but without any other context, looking back, I have no idea why those line in particular would have stricken me. In The Bear, for example, I have underlined the word abrogated. An interesting word, yes, but I have no recollection why that would make the cut over a decade later.

4. Sadly, this is true for most of the reading I did in college, wherein I was not so much reading for enjoyment, but instead reading in such as way as to capture the smartest insights from any piece of literature and then regurgitate it later in a paper in such a way as to affirm the professor’s view on that piece of work.

With that context, it’s no wonder I can’t remember why I made any annotation!

5. Taking great care to annotate clearly and concisely, of course.

6. Not even on my bedside table, believe it or not — which is where my physical book queue begins.

7. Puff Coffee’s LSD blend, which is a half-caffeinated option that allows me to drink twice as much coffee without all the caffeine. The downside in this particular situation, however, being about thirty minutes into our hunt and having drunk about 4 cups of coffee, I had to pee like a racehorse.

Regardless, shoutout to

Myles Snider

for the coffee recommendation. And don’t worry Nana (and G-ma): LSD in this case stands for “Longshoreman’s Decaf.

8. Here’s an excerpt from one of our conversations leading up to the opening of turkey season:

9. Mrs. CWD-willing.

10. Primarily this: when the first bird of the morning rolled in silently and unexpectedly, I got caught up in the moment and rushed my shot. I took what I still think was a good one, but the arrow merely passed through the bird and he walked away seemingly unphased. Kyle and I tracked him for about a hundred yards before we lost his trail; I can only assume my shot just missed his vitals, and, after getting over the initial shock, he simply flew away.

Lesson learned here is simple: slow down. The saying “slow is smooth, smooth is fast” applies here in spades. I had in my mind that this turkey was going realize these were decoys and not real hens and immediately fly away, but in retrospect, I could have given myself a few minutes to breathe and get settled, waiting for what probably would be an even better shot later on. After replaying this over and over in my mind for the last two days, I’m still good with the shot I took — and it just goes to show turkeys are tough birds (some might say this is why you hunt turkeys with a shotgun) — but a little humility and patience will go a long way on my next hunt and I’m beyond torn up about wounding an animal.

The silver lining in this misadventure was us leaving to try and find the first bird gave space for four more to walk into the field about an hour later — which provided a pretty cool opportunity for a spot-and-stalk style hunt, which isn’t typical in New England, and ultimately led to the bird I took down.

11. Yes, that’s right — the first person to voluntarily subscribe to this newsletter was not my loving wife or any member of my family, but instead a guy who swears he reads every week’s essay on the train right after he finishes the Financial Times.

Ladies, take note.