Dirty Duck Day

For the past few years, I’ve been the guy in charge of the Thanksgiving turkey. Whether for friends, family or a personal desire to eat a whole turkey, I’ve learned that something always seems to go wrong. Personally, I always put it off to the day of the feast, only to realize I should have purchased the turkey and let it thaw in the fridge for the prior two days. Searching the Internet for a miracle solution, I always seem to find a way to thaw out a frozen bird in a couple hours. This year, I’ve focused on prevention rather than last-minute mayhem. We’ve purchased our bird the morning before Thanksgiving and have allowed it to sit out for more than a full day. Due to our situation, “sitting out” means strapping it to the back rack of my Surly and bringing it along for the day’s ride. It only fell off once and seemed to enjoy the cool, yet thawing rays of the Arizona sun. Up and over the pass through Texas Canyon it sat, experiencing the fastest descent of our trip at 47mph. Boulders, sized in comparison to small homes, zip past in my peripheral vision. Somebody has tagged “You are Beautiful!” in soft, swoopy cursive across the entire length of one. A flower, making even the most stern and reserved person smile, dots the exclamation point.

Arriving in Benson, Arizona, we find the perfect location for our loosely planned Thanksgiving extravaganza. Crossing a bridge, into the core of this small town, we cross a desert wash, lined with mesquite trees and long grass, tracked by the seemingly occasionally passing of an off-road buggy. We pass by the wash, towards Safeway, knowing this will be our home for the next 48 hours. The grocery store is packed full of people, many of which approach us asking “You must be the guys with the bicycles out front, huh?”. Walking through each aisle, we’re gathering the food required to satisfy a small family on this yearly day of giving thanks. In the end, we pile everything together outside the store, to find a duck, loaf of bread, three yams, a butternut squash, a bag of green beans, fresh rosemary, a bag of brown sugar, sticks of butter, two apples, a mince pie, aluminum foil, a loaf of French bread, a container of Safeway mac n’ cheese, a bottle of honey, an orange, two cans of cranberry sauce, paper plates, a bag of charcoal, a bottle of orange liquor and a Fat Tire seasonal variety twelver.

My mouth begins to salivate through simply looking at it all. I imagine smashing it all onto a singular plate and then finding a way to get most of it into my mouth. Carefully, we load it onto our, already loaded, bicycles. Everything is carefully placed, or smashed, into its own perfect little nesting place for the couple miles back to our planned home. Wes’ front racks grumble under the base weight required to carry our gear. They now produce a more noticeable and nagging grumble as he loads them with our future meal. My bike looks pudgier than usual, with a loaf of bread being the only item without a secure spot amongst the mess. Right arm becomes the dedicated bread carrier, while the left attempts to control the two-wheeled steamroller. The bridge underpass leaving downtown nearly takes me out, but I pass through it collecting only a rip in the shoulder of my jacket, making it the 87^th hole in the jacket. Pushing the bikes through quite a distance of loose sand, through a bend in the wash, we find our home nestled between the steep walls of an inlet canyon. For the first time since we left Bar Harbor, we set up camp with the plan to spend the entire next day in this location. Exploring the surrounding areas, we find trails and paths, narrow and neatly maintained. It’s almost as if the trail was packed in, then manicured by a short man with a leaf blower. Paths are narrow and shrouded over in areas, allowing only 2-3 feet of height clearance. Animal tracks pick up in the sand, where each of the neatly kept trails end, coming down from the steep walls along the wash. The tracks must belong to some precious kit foxes or sugar plum fairies. We hope to get a sight of whatever we may be in the presence of.

It’s a cold night and therefore we both retire to our hammocks fairly early. It only takes a couple New Belgium 1554s and a temperature drop below 30 to get me nestled into my hammock. Listening to the occasional movement of bushes and Wes restlessly rolling around in his hammock, I peak out of my fully-enclosed hammock and see the wash slightly lit by the last third of the waning moon. It keeps the trees, bushes and sky a deep black, while making the wash an illuminated path through it all. As I drift off to sleep, I notice condensation forming in my hammock, but my level of comfort limits me from creating any sort of venting to prevent it from continuing. I’d rather wake up in a puddle of condensed liquid than unzip my sleeping bag for a moment.

There’s a sniffing and crunching of branches on the hillside towards the foot-end of my hammock. I lay silent and listen to the movement of whatever is out there. We saw quite a bit of trash and clothing up on the hillside, about thirty feet above us. Remnants of a few makeshift homes, and the materials that make them, are scattered above. I lay there, wondering if this is a person or curious animal. These encounters raise the hair on the nape of my neck, because there are really only two likely situations. Either there is a curious animal moseying around our camp or it is a person who has passed the realm of curiosity and has now moved closer to investigate or act. The animals usually create a fun encounter, while the person in that situation will usually not be there with the right intention. Slowly, I unzip my hammock cover and begin to peak out into the night. As I begin to move my head through the opening, I notice the creature of the night has stopped moving. I too stop and slowly begin to reach for my flashlight, which is known for harnessing the power of the sun. The creature of the night will not stick around for much longer. I quickly, but quietly, swing my arm above the ridgeline of the hammock and beam it directly towards the hillside. Two bright red eyes stare at me from roughly fifteen feet away. It tenses up and rocks back in its stance, but doesn’t break its gaze or position. Two feet tall, with coarse and dark hair, it breaks its vision from my flashlight for a second and analyzes the trail ahead of it, enabling me to further make out the features on the creature of the night. Two small, but easily distinguishable, tusks protrude from the mouth of this boar. It softly eases its stance, then turns around and slowly makes its way back up the trail. It does so in a surprisingly agile way compared to how I would imagine a boar would. Bye bye piggy.

Naturally, we wake up in the morning and instantly make spears. We’ve used our knives to whittle the end of some mesquite branches down to sharp and piercing points. In the end, we remember zip-ties are part of our repair kit and we simply fasten our knives to the ends of the branches. We have no intention to hunt boar, but if they have any intention of tusking us, at least we’ll be prepared. Furthermore, while Wes is on a morning walk to get some Coronas, he spots a rough man, kneeling in the long grass, watching me move around camp, through his binoculars, from about a hundred yards away. Wes’ surprises the man with a Thanksgiving greeting, simply to show the man that his presence is know, and the man quickly jerks the binoculars down and returns the greeting, trying to act as if everything is normal. In the end, the makeshift spears serve as dual-purpose boar/human safety devices.

We’ve decided to cook our duck in a fairly unconventional way. The oh-so-conventional convention oven isn’t something we can get our wandering hands on at the moment. Instead, we’ve had a plan for how to cook our Thanksgiving bird since roughly the first week we started planning this trip over a year ago. Sure we could simply slow roast it over a campfire or cook it one piece at a time on skewers, but we wanted to do something unique and memorable. We’ll be cooking our duck in the sand bed of this wash we’ve camped on. There is some prep to get everything ready, but the main task is creating a fire hot enough to keep an area of coals, sand and rocks hot enough to cook a duck for at least three hours once the flames are completely extinguished and covered with sand. Our shoes and socks come off first thing in the morning. The next few hours will be spent digging around in the sand and gathering dead limbs from mesquite trees in the area. The sand is warm on the surface, but shows its cooler side once disturbed with a step or impromptu dance move. All moisture from the surrounding area drains into this wash, creating a bed of damp sand. The coarse granules squish between our toes and create some light abrasion, but it feels good. Digging with our hands until the hole is deep enough to crawl into and dig around my feet, the whole is eventually more than three feet deep. Collecting rocks the size of cantaloupe (us mountain bikers call these baby heads), we create a floor of rocks, then compliment the outer edge with a wall of rocks. At this point, most of the hard work is done and the fun can begin. Wes is endowed with the power of flame and lights a collection of branches, of which I amply doused in gasoline. Regardless of how wrong it may sound, there’s something that feels so right when it comes to the combination of spears, Coronas, hand dug sand pits, copious amounts of gasoline and a lighter.

Teamwork goes into full effect. By afternoon, this fire needs to be hot enough to feel from yards away, which is harder to achieve in a desert wash than it is in the abundantly wooded areas in which we normally have campfires of the controlled nature. Team A is in the constant search for fire fuel while also making annual Thanksgiving calls to family and friends. Team B takes on the role of prep cook and begins slicing, chopping, seasoning, glazing and stuffing all the components of our glorious feast. “I’m ready to switch!” is occasionally yelled, once one of us has endured enough cuts, or coarse sanding of our feet, to want to join the other team for a bit. The fire grows hotter and larger as the hours go by. Wes has taken the core out of two apples and filled them with brown sugar, making me want to bite into them without any cooking. The food prepping area has turned into an attractive hotspot for bees desiring a few nibbles of brown sugar and butter, which covers most of the food. See if you can spot all five bees in the squash photo below. Wes and bees have a hate/hate relationship and therefore I’m delegated to finishing up the prepping, while he becomes the documenter of memories. Bees land on the food I’m cutting, occasionally buzzing to my hands or even giving my nose a quick landing. My approach is to let them be and hopefully they’ll let me be. One of these days it’ll backfire on me. The bees try to accompany the glaze on and inside the duck, but I have no way of explaining to them that they don’t want to be going where this duck is headed. Everything is wrapped in layers of foil, putting more layers on the bottom of the duck, which sits directly on hot coals and rocks. Once the duck is placed in its tailor-made oven, we place a damp towel over it and quickly follow it with all the sand we previously dug out. Within seconds, the hours of digging, fueling and prepping are covered up and unrecognizable as ever occurring. The only distinguishing characteristic of the oven is “DUCK” written and underlined in the sand. Within minutes, we feel the warmth of the coals coming up through the sand as we stand directly above it. This is actually working. Our duck is cooking beneath us, while we employ the out-of-sight, out-of-mind concept.

I enjoy the next couple hours by relaxing by our secondary fire and enjoying a few more seasonal brews. Wes heads back to the store to buy more candy and items to compliment our dinner and desert. Collecting wood for the fire, I snap a branch from a tree, but notice it creates a much greater commotion on the hillside behind it. I look up to find the dark figure of a large boar running off down the trail. I catch it off-guard on the inclined trail, and it seems to send half the hillside tumbling down as it bolts away. I reach back for my spear, but it’s gone from sight and sound within a minute. I crouch low and follow the path for a few hundred yards, but find nothing more than bedding areas and continual routes of intricate trails. Wes also has an encounter with an aggressive boar on the way back from his store run. This place seems to be teaming with boars, but I enjoy its employment of keeping us on our toes.

With only forty minutes remaining before we uncover the duck, we nestle all our veggies around the fire, wrapped in their numerous layers of aluminum foil. Conversations become silly as we sit back and take in the full experience of where we are. The air is crisp, the sand is now cold, the veggies sizzle in their brown sugar and butter baths, occasional scans with the flashlight show pairs of eyes staring at us, the beers are creating giggles and the smell of smoke is mixing with the aroma of food. All is illuminated by the flickering orange hues of our campfire, which drowns out the cool lighting of the faint moon. I’m not one to believe that this is what life is all about. I don’t see gain in complete release or lack of responsibility. I won’t sit anywhere trying to explain that people need to be free, exposed to occasional discomfort or sitting around a campfire with some beers as their duck cooks in the ground, but I do feel that everybody should include a moderate amount of these experiences in their life. It’s moments like this that show me how much one can get out of $40, a few hours in the dirt and a strong friendship to share it with. All the while, our veggies continue to sizzle as the laughs continue on.

Time to uncover it all. One full day of work is coming to immediate fruition within a single minute. Called “dog digging” from my childhood digging on the beach, we plant our feet and begin clawing at the sand as it kicks up into a granular wave behind us. While this may seem alarming or strange, my fingertips begin to bleed, but I’m far too excited to slow down, let alone stop. One clawing is followed by another, then another, which quickly reaches the clawing of an aluminum foil duck. Juggled from one hand to the next, the duck is out and ready to be dished, along with all the veggies and mac n’ cheese one could desire. With two plates of food each, our mac n’ cheese mixes in with our duck as our other plate delivers us our fair share of the butter roasted “healthy” side of our meal. Each dish cooked different and presents itself in a unique way. The yams come with a little bit of char, while the green beans and mac come out perfect, but the star of the show is the squash. Our duck is cooked all the way through, somewhat to my surprise to be completely honest. I’ve had high hopes the whole time, but certainly realized the possibility of failure the whole time. It came out with more of a boiled textured than it did baked or roasted. It’s somewhat strange, but the satisfaction of cooking it in a sand pit makes everything else, including the quality, seem trivial. We lean back in our chairs and dive into our food. At this point in the evening, we normally indulge in a moment of silence until we’ve reached the point of discussing how we can’t fit any more food in our bulging stomachs. With all the work and anticipation put into this meal, you'd think our moment of silence would be even stronger, but once again, the beers and company of a friend make the food seem like the smallest part of our Thanksgiving dinner. Smiles are shared alongside the fire, we begin reminiscing about the last few months as if they were years behind us, laughs overpower our uncertain futures that have stressed the previous weeks and cheers are put up in the air with the mention of any fun, silly, outrageous or thoughtful idea or moment. We’re happy and it takes very little for us to realize this.