It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Those are… frozen turkeys?
Residents living in Skwentna and West Susitna Valley, Alaska, had their Thanksgiving dinner delivered in a very unusual way. It’s a common belief that turkeys can’t fly, but it seems they can—at least in Alaska.
For the past three years, local pilot Esther Sanderlin has been dropping what local news outlets call “turkey bombs” near her Alaskan neighbors who live off the road system. After hearing one of her newest neighbors talk about how squirrel meat would be their protein of choice for Thanksgiving dinner, she began a new personal mission.
“I was visiting our newest neighbor and they were talking about splitting a squirrel into three pieces for dinner, and how it didn’t really go very far,” Sanderlin told Alaska’s NBC affiliate KTUU on Monday, Nov. 25. “I just had the thought at that point, ‘You know what, I’ll drop them a turkey for Thanksgiving,’ because I recently rebuilt my first airplane with my dad and so I can do that very easily.”
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Image of frozen turkeys in freezer at market.
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Traversing frozen terrain, especially without a nearby road system, can make it difficult for locals looking for a hot holiday meal, but Sanderlin’s air delivery system gives her an edge.
“During the freeze you can’t move so you can’t travel there,” she said. “But you can fly until you land.”
But Sanderlin isn’t the first in her community to drop turkeys from the sky. In fact, she got the idea from someone who did the same thing for her neighborhood when she was growing up in Alaska, and she decided it was time to pay it forward.
“We had a friend, a neighbor, who used to throw turkeys from the air at my family and other families in the neighborhood,” she recalled. “It’s been a huge influence on my life and the lives of others in the community.”
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This year, she’s leaving about 30 to 40 turkeys to ensure her neighbors have a good, warm Thanksgiving meal, but she hopes to do even more in the future and turn her personal mission into a nonprofit so she can reach more people across Alaska.
“My vision with this is to reach the more remote parts of Alaska,” she said. “Because there are so many families living off the grid.”
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education