As the sun rose over the rolling hills of Sonoma, Mike Idell scratched away on a turkey call. Methodically, I looked around for any sign of a turkey through the rolling oak savanna around us, and instead noticed a familiar, yet distained breed of three leafed plants poking up around me.
"Fuck me, we're sitting in a poison oak bush."
"Yah, I just noticed that too," Mike whispered. In the distance, some 500 yards down in a draw, a group of Toms, male turkeys, announced their presence from their perch in a eucalyptus trees. "I have tecnu back at my house. We can do some laundry tonight."
Twenty minutes later, a group of seven Toms flew down from the trees into the orchard of olive trees we were looking over. In a game of cat and mouse, Mike called in the Toms towards our decoy. I missed my shot but Mike made his. By lunch we were heading back to Bolinas to process the bird and link up with Lloyd Kahn.
With the breasts we made turkey Schnitzel, frying them in avocado oil and breading them in a combination of Tempura mix, eggs and milk. As I tenderized breast cutlets, Lloyd shared stories of eating roadkill, Big Sur in the mid 60s, and hippies in the 70s that changed Bolinas into what it is today.
Shoveling down the turkey with some brown rice seasoned with matsutake mushrooms from up the coast and kale from Lloyd's garden, Mike and I listened to a depiction of the bay area during a time the counterculture flourished, and the cultural pole of the west coast was not 300 miles to the south. I wondered when and what happened.
The next morning we left Bolinas at 7 and headed over the hill to the boat launch at San Rafael, to take Mike's 15-foot Boston Whaler out in search of California Halibut. We headed north and joined a hundred other boats trolling in circles in 10-14 feet of water as the tide came in.
I manned the controls and watched our speed on the GPS and inspected the fish finder with skepticism similar to a group of high school kids on a Friday saying they weren't drinking. As far as I could tell, there was zero correlation between the blobs I saw occasionally on the pixelated LCD screen and the 4 fish we caught. Mike, a former fly-fishing guide, avid hunter and forager from Bolinas, confirmed some of my suspicions of the fish finder and did the heavy lifting managing the poles.
By noon our coolers were full, and we motored back to San Rafael. In Lloyd's yard, next to his 50-year-old garden, Mike expertly processed the fish and Lloyd, with a spryness that defied his 88 years, took the scraps and shoveled them into the compost pile.
I fried up a few of smaller fillets on my skottle camping grill.
As I munched on halibut tacos topped with cabbage from a local garden, I pondered the irony of eating a meal made up of hunted and foraged food less than an hour away from a fleet of the first fully-autonomous self-driving Amazon Prime one-hour deliveries and the epicenter of the development of general artificial intelligence.
Before I could formulate this thought enough to share it with the table between bites of tacos, I moved on to pondering if the itch on my ear was from the sun or the first hint of the onset of poison oak. It ended up being poison oak.
Big fan of your writing and of Lloyd. Having heard a few of his stories myself at that table, this one felt great to read.
Great article and pictures. Thanks for always having something interesting to share.