Roll Eating and Drumsticks

Being thankful for memories, the old and the new.

Growing up, we spent most of our Thanksgivings down in Southern Utah, congregating at my Flanigan grandparents’ house in Enoch and, later on, at their cabin up Cedar Mountain. My earliest distinct memory of Thanksgiving dinner involved a contest to see who could eat the most belly-button rolls by the time dinner was over, with a brick of .22 ammo as the winning prize. I won the ammo, by somehow consuming 20 rolls (and I still ate plenty of everything else too). When you’re a growing boy…

Speaking of ammo, a long tradition that has held across most of my Thanksgiving celebrations is recreational target practice. We’d have huge plinking contests back in the old Flanigan Thanksgiving days, more modest but still extremely fun contests as the Stapley clan of West Jordan did our own Thanksgiving gatherings with an always very intense clay pigeon contest, and the Thanksgivings I spend with my in-laws have come to also involve recreational shooting competitions, usually involving both a .22 pistol shooting (I’ve never lost) and clay pigeon contest (I lose sometimes).

From left to right, shooting clay pigeons with my Beretta Silver Pigeon, sighting in my custom-built PSA-15, and hunting rabbits in the snow with the Ruger 10-22 I’ve had since I was twelve.

In talking about pistols and shotguns, here’s an aside on something a lot of people don’t know about different types of marksmanship: pistol shooting and shotgun shooting have completely different forms of marksmanship with many principles that are counter-intuitive.

With a pistol, for example, the focus is on steady, slow breathing with a smooth trigger squeeze, ideally at either the top, bottom, or middle of the breath (depending on how rapidly you’re shooting). Since even minute movement can alter your aim dramatically with such a short-barreled weapon, the whole point of marksmanship principles in pistol shooting is to eliminate even the smallest of movements.

Even gripping a pistol too hard can cause serious marksmanship problems as white knuckle gripping increases sympathetic movement in your fingers, meaning that when you squeeze the trigger with your index finger, the rest of your fingers subtly squeeze the grip, forcing your bullet to fly down and to the left of where you were aiming. This is why expert marksmanship with a pistol is built largely through dry-firing exercises rather than live ammunition target practice, the slow-building of muscle memory that allows you to observe what your hands are doing as they squeeze the trigger and trains your hands and body not to anticipate recoil.

Just watch world record holder Jerry Micelek. Even as he’s shooting faster than seems humanly possible, his breath is steady, and his hand movements are imperceptible other than subtly bringing his gun back on target after recoil:

Shotguns, on the other hand, are not precision firearms, at least not in the same sense as a pistol or a rifle. And, shotguns are designed primarily to engage extremely fast-moving targets, usually birds and small critters. They also pack a punch, especially as you get into larger shot loads. If you shoot a shotgun the way you would shoot a pistol, you won’t necessarily have bad marksmanship, but neither will you excel.

For example, focusing on a slow, steady breath and relaxed, gentle squeezing of the trigger is detrimental in shotgun shooting for a few reasons. Thanks to the spread of a shotgun’s projectiles, it’s far less important to worry about what your subtle movements are doing to the shotgun and far more important to keep the bead on the target, move steadily with the target, and fire at the precise moment when you need to fire. Focusing on your breath distracts you from your target, and gently squeezing the trigger distracts you from firing immediately when the target lines up with your sights for an effective shot. With shotgun shooting, you can pretty much throw breathing out the window, and you want to more or less slap the trigger (you heard me right) as soon as you’re on target.

Oh, and maybe grip a shotgun a little tighter than you would a pistol and, dangit, make sure you’re pressing it nice and snug into your shoulder pocket…

But, hey, back to the food. One of my fondest personal traditions is getting my hands on a drumstick every year. Turkey drumsticks are among my most favorite things. If you give me a choice between a premium steak and a slow-smoked turkey leg, it’s a fifty-fifty toss-up. People have asked me what my favorite part of Disneyland is, and I tell them Pixar Pier without hesitation, because the turkey legs there are a slice of heaven on earth (I could spend all day at Disneyland just bouncing back-and-forth between Pixar Pier for the turkey legs and Adventureland for the pineapple and consider it a day well-spent).

Last year, I had to wait until Christmas to scrounge up a turkey leg while deployed with the National Guard:

One last final tradition I’ll discuss, and one I sure get a kick out of, is heading out and finding a Christmas tree, usually on the Friday or Saturday directly after Thanksgiving. My wife and I love Pinyon Pines, a desert pine tree that thrives in the foothills and mountain benches of Utah. It can be a bit harder to find one that has that Christmas tree look, but the smell of Pinyon Pine is the smell of Christmas (especially combined with the homemade apple cinnamon decorations my wife puts on the tree). This year, I’ll be out hunting for a tree as you are reading this.

Our 2020 tree, one of our best.

I hope everyone is enjoying all of their varied and enjoyable traditions this Thanksgiving weekend, and may we have many returns.

Justin Stapley received his bachelor’s degree in political science from Utah Valley University, with emphases in political philosophy, public law, American history, and constitutional studies. He is the Founding and Executive Director of the Freemen Foundation as well as Editor in Chief of the Freemen News-Letter. @JustinWStapley