Odd Birds

by Ian Harding

  There’s a community of Big Green Egg fanatics. They call themselves “Eggheads,” and every year they gather in the Midwest for something called “Eggtoberfest.” Owning one of the grills put me on the mailing list, but I’ve yet to attend one of their big annual events.

  Smoke was beginning to pour out of the top of the grill. I’d set hickory blocks on top of lump charcoal, and it smelled delicious. I checked the thermometer again—it was hot enough to put the bird on.

  I opened up the Big Green Egg and placed the turkey on the grill and quickly realized: my Big Green Egg was not big enough. Perhaps I had a medium Green Egg, or an egg-sized Green Egg. Either way, the lid wasn’t about to fit over the turkey. It couldn’t. The legs and wings of the bird jutted out over the edges.

  I looked down at the turkey—plump from the two-day brine—that I’d trussed up earlier in the kitchen. It was sprawled helplessly on the grill, waiting patiently to be smoked. It looked oddly sexual, with twine wrapped around various body parts. I had auditioned for the lead role in Fifty Shades of Grey a couple of months before, and this turkey was giving me flashbacks.

  I could cook this bird, I thought, but it wasn’t going to be pretty.

  I got some more twine and used it to tie the top of the grill down as best I could.

  I picked up a couple of bricks off the ground and balanced them on the lid of the grill for added weight. It wasn’t fully closed, and it didn’t look even remotely safe, but some smoke was getting trapped in the grill now, and it looked like the bird had a chance at cooking.

  I cast one last worried look at the precariously balanced turkey and my makeshift grilling solution, and I went inside.

  The recipe called for the turkey to be rebasted every hour for three hours. I had time to get cleaned up and answer a few emails. I hopped into the shower.

  A few minutes later, I heard a loud crash outside. I put on a towel and ran upstairs.

  The bricks had fallen off the Big Green Egg. The top had flown open, and the turkey had rolled off the grill and onto the ground. It was now caked in dirt with a few burn marks scattered across its skin.

  Mochi and Bailey rushed over, assuming that this must be their supper. They wagged their thanks to the dog gods and tried to dig in.

  I shooed them away and inspected the bird to see if any parts of it were salvageable. None were.

  I hauled the turkey back inside and threw it away. I needed a solution, and I needed it by tomorrow morning. The grill definitely wasn’t going to work.

  I decided to just cook the turkey in the oven. It wouldn’t be unusual, it wouldn’t be unlike anything my family had ever tasted, but, with any luck, it also wouldn’t be a total disaster.

  * * *

  The next morning, most of the fam arrived just before noon: my dad, Mari, and Erika. Sarah was coming a bit later.

  My dad is a military historian. He has never not had a beard—I’m convinced that he was born with a goatee. My stepmom Mari is fluent in several languages, knows more about wine than the grapes themselves, and is one of the most supportive, upbeat people I have ever known.

  Divorces are hard. They can rip families apart at the seams. But there can be a couple of positives. If you’re lucky—and I was—you can end up with some totally badass stepsiblings. That’s where Erika comes in. Erika lives on a farm in Northern California, before which she was interning on a small ten-acre veggie operation outside of Portland, Oregon. I went out to help her a couple years ago and was humbled. What gym-carved muscles I had were no match for actual labor, and before we broke for lunch, I had to lie down in a field of shallots and hold my hand over my mouth so the other farm hands couldn’t hear me whimpering. Farmers are the strongest people I’ve ever met.

  I helped my dad carry the luggage into the house and showed everyone to their rooms. While they were unpacking, I went upstairs to check on the turkey. I was slow-cooking it—at an extremely low temperature—so it had been in the oven since five in the morning.

  I checked the meat thermometer. Everything seemed to be on track. This turkey was going to be delicious. The meal would be a hit. My family was going to be blown away.

  I set the oven timer and went to go see if anyone needed any other grown-up items: a newspaper, extra towels, cufflinks, that sort of thing.

  Once everyone was settled in, we gathered in the living room to catch up. There’s a tradition in my family: pregaming. We’ve been pregaming Thanksgiving ever since I can remember. Around 2:00 P.M., various Thanksgiving-themed finger foods are set out on the kitchen island, along with at least three bottles of wine.

  A lot had changed since I’d last seen my family. My dad was working on a new book, Mari’s wine-importing business was expanding, and Erika had just settled into the new farm in Northern California. All my dad wanted to talk about, though, was Pretty Little Liars.

  * * *

  My dad and Mari hold viewing parties at their home in Virginia. Every time a new episode comes out, they gather a dozen or so of their close friends to have dinner and watch the show. I always smile when I think about it. I have this image of a room full of middle-aged professionals—doctors, lawyers, military historians—all dressed to the nines, gathered around my dad’s living room TV, watching season after season of this teen drama.

  When I was growing up, my dad didn’t watch much television. He had a little set, but it was nothing fancy. Then I landed a job on PLL, and he upgraded to a state-of-the-art flat screen with surround sound.

  They’ve been hosting their viewing parties since the show started. By now, my dad and Mari’s friends know more about the show than I do. They are current on all of the gossip, all of the rumors and fan theories, all of the Easter eggs that the show has to offer.

  Recently, I went home for a long weekend, and one of my dad’s friends—a 60-year-old periodontist named Phil—cornered me after dinner and told me he’d done the math and he’d figured out who “A” was.

  “It’s Aria, isn’t it?” he said, examining my reactions closely. “You can tell me.”

  I told him, honestly, “I have no idea who ‘A’ is.”

  He frowned, looked me over, then smiled as if he’d worked something out in his head. “I hear you,” he said. “NDAs, right?” He winked. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell.” He laughed and strolled back to the table to help my dad put the dishes away.

  * * *

  The smell of turkey was beginning to fill the house.

  On the couch, Mari and my dad were laughing. “Should we tell him?” she asked.

  My dad shook his head. “He’ll be too embarrassed.”

  “He won’t be embarrassed,” she said, still giggling. “He’ll think it’s funny,” She leaned forward to get my attention: “Ian, we saw the funniest article about you the other day. Do you read Perez Hilton?”

  “No,” I said. “Do you?”

  My dad shrugged. “It’s not that bad. Erika, did you bring your laptop?”

  She had, and ran downstairs to get it. When I protested, Mari simply refilled my wine glass. Erika came back with the laptop, and we gathered around the sofa to have a look.

  “It’s really not bad at all, Ian,” Mari said. “Steve, what was the title of the article?”

  “It’s … uh … wow, I can’t remember.”

  “Here, let’s just look up your name.” She typed “Ian Harding” into Google and hit enter. On the top of the results page was a row of photographs of me smiling. “Look at all of these nice photos of you!” she said. She clicked an image, and it opened up a page of dozens of photos of me grinning on red carpets.

  Erika laughed. “Why do you always look so squinty in these photos? Are the lights really bright, or are you just trying to look sexy?”

  My dad chimed in: “I think it has to do with animal instinct. When we squint as humans, we’re signaling to a possible mate that—”

  “I do it because one eye is bigger than the other,” I said, cutting off his evolutionary theory.

&
nbsp; All three members of the family crowded up close to my face.

  “No you don’t!”

  “It’s not really—well…”

  “Oh yeah, I guess you do!”

  Self-consciously, I turned back to the screen and started scrolling.

  And that’s when we saw them.

  Down at the bottom of the second page, clustered on the right side of the screen, were a handful of terribly Photoshopped images of me completely naked, always with a comically large erection.

  “Is that…?” Mari said.

  “No!” I shouted. “No, of course not. That’s not me!”

  The room was very quiet. My dad suddenly became interested in the bookshelves across the room and walked away. Erika stood slightly behind her mom, tears of silent laughter filling her eyes.

  “Wait, Mari, do you think that’s real?!” I asked.

  “Well I didn’t look at it long enough to take an educated guess!”

  Erika lost it and burst out laughing. I assured Mari that I would only ever do full-frontal for HBO, then excused myself to go check on the turkey.

  Erika joined me in the kitchen, still laughing, and began to chop veggies for a salad.

  As she and I cooked, I noticed Mari had sat back down at Erika’s laptop.

  I called over: “Are you still looking for that article? Seriously Mari, I believe you when you say it’s funny, but you don’t…”

  I realized she wasn’t looking at me as I spoke. Her eyes went wide and her mouth fell open. She stood and brought the computer over to where Erika and I were standing.

  “I … I googled ‘Ian Harding fan,’ and this came up…”

  I looked at the screen. I began reading what looked like an interview, but my costar Drew was also part of the interview.

  It wasn’t an interview.

  “Wait, Mari, what is this?”

  She pointed, finger trembling, to the middle of the page. I began to read out loud: “He pulled off his boxers instantly, revealing his bare ass. Jason sighed, stepping forward. He dropped his belt, jeans, and boxers as well, and then made Ezra bend over the couch—”

  Mari yanked the laptop out of my hands and snapped it shut.

  “You know what,” she said, “I’m all for loving who you want to love and freedom of expression and all that jazz, but I have to say, I’m not really interested in reading this about my stepson!”

  I turned to Erika, who a moment ago had stood by my side but was now crumpled on the floor, convulsing with laughter.

  “Is she dead?” My sister Sarah stood at the top of the stairs. We hadn’t heard her come in.

  “We were just reading some of my erotic fan fiction,” I said.

  “The gay or the straight stuff?”

  “The what now?”

  “The gay or the straight stuff? The hetero fan fiction is super dull. You basically just make Lucy soup when she’s sick or, like, fix her bike while wearing plaid. The gay stuff, on the other hand, that can get pretty interesting.”

  “Wait, you knew about this?”

  She walked over to the kitchen island and popped a chip in her mouth. “Yup. One of my friends from back home found a few of them and emailed me. I can’t believe you didn’t know about them.”

  My dad had had enough of the bookshelves, and came back over to refill his wine glass.

  “Are we done talking about my son the porn star?”

  Right on cue, the oven timer went off. I donned a pair of oven mitts and took out the turkey—it was perfectly golden. It was time to eat.

  * * *

  The meal was a hit. We ate our faces off, piling on the stuffing and gravy and Brussels sprouts.

  As Erika handed me a platter of sweet potatoes, I asked if anyone had gotten a chance to talk with Aren that day. Aren is Mari’s son, Erika’s brother, and he couldn’t make it out to LA that Thanksgiving because of school.

  “I did,” Erika said. “He sends his love to everyone. He said he wishes he could be here, but he’s got a lot on his plate right now.”

  My dad coughed, and indicated the plate overflowing with food in front of him.

  “I’ve got a feeling he’s going to love hearing about your fan fiction, though,” Erika continued. “Maybe he can read a passage at the next PLL party our parents throw.”

  * * *

  It seemed so natural when she said it that it didn’t hit me until later in the conversation.

  “Our parents.”

  The first few years after my mom and dad got divorced, the holidays were tense, almost bitter. Sarah and I were angry. Yet now, years later, I find myself looking forward to family gatherings—they are different than before, yes, but families change, and this one is mine now.

  THE CALIFORNIA CONDOR

  The California condor once ranged from Canada to Mexico—and could be spotted as far away as the East Coast—but by the early 1980s, only twenty-two remained in the wild. Due to a massive conservation and reintroduction program, the population has since grown to just over two hundred birds, but they are still at risk of extinction.

  Condors are massive. They can soar up to 15,000 feet above the ground and are often mistaken for small aircraft. With their ten-foot wingspan, they are by far the largest flying bird on the continent.

  As humans, we have an interesting attachment to big, majestic birds. We like to tie big, lofty ideas to them. Take the bald eagle, for example. Really pretty and really big. It isn’t just a bird for Americans. Bald eagles mean freedom. They mean liberty, justice, victory. Bald eagles have become a stand-in for all the values that our country holds dear. That’s a lot of pressure to put onto one bird, no matter how big and majestic it may be. Which, in my opinion, is why the turkey would never have worked as our national bird. No offense to Benjamin Franklin, who preferred them over bald eagles, but turkeys just aren’t regal enough to support that much symbolism.

  Since we love attaching big ideas to big birds so much, I’m going to do the same with condors. Bear with me here, but I’m going to say that—for me, at least—the California condor is a metaphor for great, meaningful acting roles—the kinds of roles you see pop up once, maybe twice, in a lifetime.

  Like outstanding roles, encountering a condor is rare, incredibly rewarding, and, often, a huge surprise. Nowadays, California condors only live in extremely remote, craggy, hard-to-get-to locales. So to see one—much like booking a dream role—you have to either put in a lot of hard work or be ridiculously lucky. Usually both.

  Last summer, my friend Walter and I drove out to Pinnacles National Park to try to get a glimpse of one. Our friend John was supposed to come with us, but John—who, as I’ve mentioned before, only goes birding when forced to do so—had said that he would rather get run over by a car than go look at birds with me again.

  And that’s what he did. John called me the day before the trip to say that a car had hit him while he’d been riding his bicycle and he couldn’t come on the trip.

  I called bullshit. John had tried to sneak out of birding trips in the past. “Prove it,” I said.

  John hung up the phone.

  Five seconds later, he FaceTimed me. I answered the call, and there was John, holding up his blood-soaked arms. “Enjoy your sky rats,” he cackled into the screen. “Have fun without me.”

  “Go to a hospital, John,” I said.

  He shrugged and told me he was going to make breakfast first, then signed off.

  Walter drove over to my house early that Saturday morning. We loaded my car with camping gear, quickly downed some coffee, and set off for Pinnacles.

  Pinnacles is one of the newest national parks in the country. President Obama gave it its park status in 2013. It’s a pretty cool spot, and out of the way, so not many people visit.

  I had been looking forward to the trip for weeks, but that morning I was particularly happy to be going. I’d had an audition for a lead role in a Netflix show earlier that week, and I’d felt really good about it, but my manager had called me l
ate Friday night to let me know that I hadn’t gotten it. I don’t tend to get worked up about auditions—rejection is a huge part of being an actor, and I usually don’t let it get to me—but I was glad to have an excuse to get out of LA for a couple days just the same.

  After driving all morning, we made it to the park. We noticed driving in that the ranger station had its own swimming pool. We thought about taking a dip, but we hadn’t come to swim. We drove farther down the road to look for a campsite instead. We needed to get hiking soon if we were going to have any chance of spotting a condor.

  The park was pretty empty that weekend, so we had our pick of campsites. We ended up finding a beautiful little spot nestled in the shade of two big oak trees and just a few steps away from a small, gurgling creek.

  The first thing we noticed as we pulled up to the campsite was that there were California quail everywhere. Seriously, everywhere. Not flocks, either—they moved in herds. Whole sections of ground were covered, absolutely blanketed in sheets of quail.

  We left our tents and bags in the car for the time being and drove over to one of the major trailheads. Condors nest in caves high up in the cliffs, so we had to get some altitude to get a chance to see them. We decided to start out on the Moses Spring Trail—a nice warm-up hike before the vertical trek up the mountainside.

  Hiking up the mountain, we crossed through several distinct habitat zones. Occasionally the elevation change can make for some pretty interesting overlap. Normally scrub jays prefer—as their name would suggest—lowland scrub, whereas Steller’s jays like a bit more altitude and forest. But, at one point hiking up, we saw both perched side by side.

  It was a great day for birds. We saw a big flock of American goldfinches, a few California towhees, a Nuttall’s woodpecker, and a black-throated gray warbler—probably getting ready to begin its migration back south for the winter. Off in the distance, we heard a canyon wren, its lonesome descending call echoing across the rock faces, like a cartoon character falling off a cliff.