Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (10 page)

“Hey, you got a turkey over here,” a man I didn’t recognize yelled from the corner.

Harold and Maude had drifted down the 2-8.

“Can you . . . ?” I yelled. And he did. He herded them toward me by getting down into the age-old turkey-wrangling position: crouched low, arms open wide. I found myself making the exact same motions when I herded the turkeys, although no one had ever taught me this method. It’s as if it was in our DNA, an embedded dance move.

The Hillbilly left, and I opened the gate and joined the passerby in convincing the turkeys to come back behind the fence. As we both moved slowly—arms open, hunched over—the man, who turned out to be from Tulsa, looked over at me and asked, “Where are we—Oakland or Oklahoma?” Our laughter persuaded the turkeys to retreat farther into the backyard. An ambulance then went by, and Harold gobbled out a warning.

Your chicken came into my house!” the Vietnamese guy across the street told me. He was very upset. “We had the door open, and it just came in!”

To me, this seemed like a minor nuisance. I mean, I once slept with a sick chicken. (Wrapped up in a towel. His name was Twitchy. He had a leg problem that never righted itself.)

When my neighbor saw I was nonplussed, he added, “It pooped in my house!”

Oh, dear.

“OK,” I said, “I’ll try to do something about that.” But what? Give the chicken a talking to? Train it not to go outside our gates? In Seattle, our chickens roamed the streets with impunity. They had the run of our neighbors’ backyards, and they sometimes walked down the sidewalk. But Seattle had more of a laid-back, suburban vibe. The houses weren’t quite so close together, and the neighbors were less likely to be armed. None of our Seattle chickens had ever, as far as I knew, made it into someone’s living space.

There was more going on than just impolite birds, though. Everyone was on edge that summer because of avian flu. It was killing people in Vietnam, where many of the people on our street had friends and family. Clucking my tongue, I went to the World Health Organization’s Web site to get the skinny. “All evidence to date indicates that close contact with dead or sick birds is the principal source of human infection with the H5N1 virus,” the WHO warned. “Especially risky behaviors identified include the slaughtering, defeathering, butchering and preparation for consumption of infected birds. In a few cases, exposure to chicken faeces when children played in an area frequented by free-ranging poultry is thought to have been the source of infection.”

Dear lord, chicken poop could actually kill someone! It wasn’t a good time to have twenty chickens in our backyard.

And yet I wasn’t that worried. H5N1 hadn’t reached American shores yet. My chickens couldn’t pick up avian flu, and they couldn’t give it to our neighbors, until the virus reached the United States. I promised our Vietnamese neighbor that I would get rid of all the poultry the moment H5N1 hit North America.

Every week, though, news sources threatened that avian flu was coming. Wild migrating birds, we were told, would bring the disease through Alaska and then to the mainland, where avian flu would kill countless birds and, eventually, maybe a human.

I bought some netting and stretched it over the chicken area so the birds couldn’t get out. But within a few hours, they discovered an opening in my avian-flu shield and were back out in the lot, in the street, terrorizing the neighborhood.

A pandemic on the 2-8 seemed wildly fantastical, and yet I was starting to have my doubts. Especially after I read a
New York Times
article entitled “Avian Flu: The Uncertain Threat, Q and A: How Serious Is the Risk?” Question three asked: If bird flu reached the United States, where would it appear? The answer: “Although health officials expect bird flu to reach the United States, it is impossible to predict where it may show up first, in part because there are several routes it could take. If it is carried by migrating birds, then it may appear first in Alaska or elsewhere along the West Coast.”

I turned to question five, “How will I know if I have bird flu?” Symptoms, the article said, include flulike feelings: fever, headache, fatigue, aches and pains. But instead of getting better, the patient gets worse and ends up dying, in most cases from acute pneumonia.

Feeling a little congested, I sat at my table reading this news. I looked outside and saw the chickens marching around the lot. Chasing one another, pooping copiously. Suddenly they seemed sinister, out of control. Was a dozen eggs a day worth all this drama?

And so I became a pusher. A chicken pusher. Everyone in our neighborhood had a hustle, and this became mine. Chickens are, after all, the gateway urban-farm animal. I wanted others to join in the fun. “You’ll get tons of eggs,” I would whisper to my coworkers, “lots of fertilizer.” No one in my neighborhood seemed interested, but Willow knew of some families. And then I posted an ad on Craigslist.

I had never seen such a parade of oddballs. A surfer guy who wanted to give his wife urban chickens as a tenth-anniversary gift. A chubby middle-schooler who translated for her Spanish-speaking dad. An eyeglasses-wearing gardening teacher who wanted some hens for her schoolyard. The teacher expressed interest in getting other animals, too, and so, like a dealer, I gave her my extra copy of
The Encyclopedia of Country Living.
I laughed when I imagined that soon the school would have bees and then a turkey, a few ducks.

I finally managed to whittle down the flock to a reasonable number, six, and the neighborhood gave a large collective sigh of relief.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The automotive shop behind our backyard had a ten-foot-high fence, festooned with razor wire. Behind that fence lurked the shop’s two large crime-stopping dogs. One day, Maude, being smaller than Harold and perhaps having an especially low species-specific sense of recognition, tried her luck clearing that fence in order to meet the dogs. Unfortunately, she succeeded.

I heard the barking, her shrieks, Harold’s gobbles, and I came running. Feathers were literally flying. The cream-colored pit bull and the Rottweiler mix danced around Maude in the auto-shop yard. I scaled the fence.

Compared to the locals, I made a terrible fence climber. Every once in a while there is a car chase down MLK: squealing tires, police sirens, engines opening up. If the pursued car careens around our corner, it soon encounters a dead end: a schoolyard circled by a twenty-foot-tall fence. Not having options, the car thieves usually throw open the car door and sprint to the fence. I timed them once: five seconds to get to the top. The cops got out of their cars, lights flashing, and watched them climb away to freedom.

Now I got a startling reality check into what remarkable physical strength it took to scramble up a chain-link fence. The metal cut into my hands; my toes were jammed painfully into the small openings. Once near the top, I had to negotiate to an area without razor wire. My biceps quivered. I was a weak Spider-Woman. I yelled discouraging words to the dogs in my best stern voice: “No. Bad dogs! No.”

Amazingly, instead of sinking their teeth into my ass, they backed away from Maude when I scaled down their side of the fence and landed in the auto-shop parking lot. On the asphalt, Maude lay torn and dead, her white and black feathers dotted with blood.

I stood in the middle of the parking lot and caught my breath. The Rottweiler looked up at me expectantly. If this had been Idaho, things would have been different. My parents’ ranch dog, Zachary, wouldn’t stop eating their chickens, and so one day, after another dead hen, my dad put a bullet in his head. That was country life for you.

I patted the Rottweiler’s head without thinking. He didn’t know what he had done. Maude’s flight into their yard had to have been one of the highlights of their careers as junkyard dogs. There was only one way that scenario—turkey meets dogs—could have played out.

I was only a few feet from my backyard, but my house looked so different from here. Smaller. The gray paint was peeling; the stairs were scuffed and worn. I picked Maude up. Her eyes were closed; her throat was clotted with dark red blood. She was warm. Unlike Harold, she didn’t have an impressive snood or wattles. From her head sprouted a few wispy black hairs. Though her body was small, she was dense and weighed more than a chicken. Her gray reptilian feet were scaled, but her toenails blushed with a bit of pink.

I tried to climb back with Maude in my hand. This was impossible, so I had to fling her limp body over the fence. On my trip back, the fence ripped my corduroy pants in the thigh and the crotch.

Harold discovered Maude before I reached our side of the fence. He was acting weird, puffing up and preening around her prone body. He was doing a mating dance, I think, as if he confused her current state with readiness to mate. Then he hit his head on the ground, making a strange thumping sound.

My eyes welled up at this curious spectacle. Harold mourned, and so did I. The injustice, the absurdity, of Maude’s death upset me. But also, on a pragmatic note, as a burgeoning urban farmer, this was a serious setback. Maude was nearly full-grown, and she had been a lot of work, from teaching her to drink water, to cleaning up after her, to feeding her daily. Vast quantities of organic meat-bird feed and greens from the garden had disappeared down her now-ravaged gullet. I had practically risked my life to pick her weeds. And now she was dead.

Harold was making circles around Maude, some kind of turkey death dance that I had never heard about. It was amazing. But I felt awful. I was down to only one turkey.

Pushing Harold away after a few minutes of mourning, I scooped up Maude’s body. Her tail feathers fell off and made a trail into the lot, where I carried her for her burial. I had hoped to celebrate Maude by serving her for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, I dug her a grave under the apple tree.

As I laid Maude in the ground I recalled her generous spirit and remembered the time she pecked Harold’s pendulous snood, mistaking it for a worm. How they’d slept together on the roof of the chicken house every night, cuddled like hobos under the pinkish glow of a streetlight.

I told Lana about Maude the next morning, and she cried. That it happened at the jaws of a dog—a fellow animal—didn’t make it any better in her eyes. She just hated the fact that animals die.

I erased the 2 in “2 turkeys” on the chalkboard tally and made it a 1. I thought about my parents and their burned-down smokehouse. Bill shook his head. “What a waste,” he said. He told me I should have killed her sooner. I could tell he was starting to seriously doubt my meat-bird plan.

Harold became a lonely turkey. His ancestors, brothers, and cousins lived in flocks. Though Harold had vaguely assimilated with the chickens, he always seemed to be looking for more solid company. So at night he scrambled onto our neighbors’ roof to peer into their window and watch television with them.

As Thanksgiving neared he perched on our back porch to sleep next to the laundry line, emitting enormous turkey poops as he slumbered. In the morning, when I went out to feed the chickens, he greeted me like a lover, his tail up and feathers puffed. Two months to Thanksgiving and it was looking like Harold’s end was going to be more of a mercy killing.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
stood in a circle of light. I wore a hastily thrown-on pair of shorts and mismatched flip-flops. It was September and 3 a.m. I had a rusty shovel in my hand. Over and over, I chanted, “Don’t.” Clang. “Kill.” Thud. “My.” Wump. “Ducks.” My chant was instructional but also moot, as the opossum I was beating had already killed a duck and a goose. Now he was going to die himself. He would take the lesson with him to hell.

I had awoken to the sound of the ducks quacking their heads off in the pen in the garden. I dashed downstairs and saw two fallen forms and a pair of reflection-lit green eyes inside the pen. Two ducks hunkered together near the pen entrance, quacking urgently, trying to get out. Their brother and the goose lay in the straw, not moving. Behind them, now trapped, their murderer, the opossum. Bill, who had followed me downstairs, wordlessly handed me a shovel.

Perhaps sensing a potentially painful situation, the opossum came at me and pushed his way out of the pen. I loathed how he moved—prehistoric, uncoordinated. His tail curled out behind him like a skeletal finger. I raised my shovel as he got closer and swung. With that one tap, he immediately fell into the grass. Lying there, he looked like a stuffed animal, or maybe a hairy taxidermied armadillo. One might have been tempted to think him deceased, but I knew the creature’s patented skill: playing possum. If I stopped, he would eventually creep away, living another day to kill more of my farm animals. My weapon continued clanging against the marsupial’s side.

Bill scooped up the surviving ducks and carried them upstairs. From the kitchen, he mounted a spotlight he used for fixing cars to help me to dispatch the murderer. The light also lit up my fallen animals—the bright white of the duck’s feathers gleamed in the night. The goose slumped over in her cage, her neck broken.

My neighbor Neruda came outside and handed me her gun. I abandoned my shovel and tried to remember how to fire it. The gun was small, a purse gun, really, about the size of a butane torch that fancy people use to caramelize the top of crème brûlée. I had shot guns before, in gun-safety class at the middle school in the hick town where I grew up.

Neruda, in a fluffy pink terrycloth robe, shrugged and smiled in encouragement. Her daughter, Sophia, was asleep. Neruda must have needed the gun to feel safe in this neighborhood. That I could borrow a firearm like a cup of sugar sure felt neighborly. But in this case, it didn’t seem right. With one eye on the opossum playing dead, I passed the purse gun back to her.

I picked up my weapon of choice again. If I were a movie gangster, I would’ve been the hit lady with a shovel in the back of my Cadillac. Channeling my rage, remembering the cuteness of my ducks, and the goose who would rest her head in my lap, I raised the shovel and came down on the opossum’s neck. After a few thrusts—and, I admit it, grunts—head separated from body. I had my bloody revenge.

Somehow, this wasn’t quite what I had imagined when I decided to expand my farm enterprise.

Only a few months ago, I had been signing for an air-hole-riddled box clutched by a mailman, anticipating liberation from the meat market. And now the mangled bodies of some members of the poultry package lay in a heap. How far I had fallen.

I had once wanted to be a naturalist, so I had read all the nature-loving books—
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Sand County Almanac,
even Barry Lopez’s
Apologia,
in which he describes tenderly burying roadkill. Now there was a headless opossum in my garden, and I was seriously contemplating putting his head on a spike and posting it in the garden as a warning to all other predators.

Oakland’s city code section 6.04.260 reads: “It shall be the duty of all persons having dead animals upon premises . . . to bury the same under at least four feet packed earth cover.” If I didn’t want to bury the opossum, I was supposed to call animal control and pay them to take the animal away for cremation. Otherwise, I would be guilty of an infraction. Forget the law. Even in my full-blown rage, I could see that the magnanimous thing to do would be to bury him.

Mr. Nguyen came outside smoking a cigarette and surveyed the damage. My yells had awoken him. Not that yells are uncommon in our neighborhood. There’s one neighbor who shouts at her boyfriends and smashes dishes on the street late in the night. There are the shopping-cart crazies who smoke crack and then stand in the street yelling at their ghosts. But this was the first time in my three years in GhostTown that I had added my voice to the choir.

Mr. Nguyen clucked his tongue and shook his head when he saw the dead poultry. “Wow!” he said, gesturing at the opossum. I threw down my shovel. Mr. Nguyen picked up—no, cradled—the dead duck and gently set it out on the grass. He did the same with the goose. Then he disappeared back into his house with a wave.

This act of tenderness strangely inflamed my rage against the opossum.

Forget the spike. I would place the opossum in the middle of Martin Luther King Jr. Way, where he would be run over repeatedly. I shoveled him up.

I walked toward the main street, the opossum balanced on the end of my shovel. For a moment, I had the illogical fear that he would come back to life. But no, no, the head was definitely separated from the body.

Before I heaved the carcass into the street, I leaned against the bus stop to think. I felt jittery and wide awake. A few shadowy figures stood on the corner a few blocks away. What would they have thought had they looked my way: a perspiring white lady carrying a mangled corpse in a bloody shovel down MLK at three in the morning?

The abandoned building across the street loomed. Graffiti writers had been up there recently; an infamous tagger, Logo, had made his mark on the tallest part of the building. A lone car bobbed down the interstate.

The opossum must have lived there, in the slim greenbelt next to the highway. He eked out a living there on the margins, probably eating garbage and insects, nested up against the concrete. My ducks must have been a welcome snack for him, something fresh and delicious rather than the boring old garbage and grubs along the highway. Most likely this had been his first experience with a real farm animal. Like the junkyard dogs who killed Maude, this beast was just following instinct.

With the death of Maude, and now the duck and goose, I saw what a gamble it is to raise something that you care about. But the paradox was, I had planned to kill them myself, to eat. The dogs, the headless opossum—they were not the biggest killers. I was. Compared to what I had planned to do—roast the goose, confit the ducks, and truss the turkey—this opossum was a small-time player.

I tightened my grip on the shovel and looked down at the beast. His fur, I noticed, was a mixture of white and gray hairs. His paws were tiny and had sharp-looking claws. Small teeth peeked out from his mouth. His nose was pink, like that of a kitten.

Caught up in protecting my babies, I realized, I had become a savage. I was a little shocked to see the wildness in myself. That I could lose myself in human rage and commit this act of savage hate—I hadn’t known I had it in me.

A few blocks away I could see a flickering-candle memorial. Churches in GhostTown had started a program called Stop the Violence. Bobby had even erected an instructional sign: STOP KILLIN’ EACH OTHER. I suddenly felt very tired and sick of death.

My anger turned into exhaustion, I tossed the mangled opossum into the garbage can next to the bus stop. Take that, I thought, and went back into the garden, where I buried the duck and the goose under the apple tree next to Maude. I returned to bed just as the sun came up, a murderer.

A
few weeks after the opossum incident, I went out to the garden to examine my watermelon. Yes, singular. The vines had unfurled throughout August and ran along the bed. Pale yellow flowers had come out. A watermelon must be visited by a pollinator eight times to ensure fertilization, so I had chastised my bees if I saw them working the cheap and easy fennel that chokes our parking strip. “Check out those melon flowers,” I had urged them.

Deep in August, I had spied a swelling at the end of the vine. Just one. It had been a terribly cold Bay Area summer, and the rest of the plants were barren. Now the thing had ballooned, and its black stripes were beginning to show.

As I admired my sole, soon-to-be-harvested watermelon Jack Chan walked through the garden gate with a tall white man. The man wore a sunhat and had a bushy white beard. He carried a spray-paint can in one hand and some iron rods in the other. Somehow I had come to think of Jack Chan as my Emerson—a man not concerned with ownership, perhaps a transcendentalist who enjoyed communing with nature. Maybe he came to our garden and enjoyed its appearance, smiled beneficently at the towhee, a sweet but territorial sparrow that had come to live in the garden, along with the hummingbirds and fritillary butterflies.

Totally ignoring me, they began to mark property lines. I walked over to them.

They were standing smack-dab in the middle of one of my raised beds, whacking an iron post into the dirt.

“So, you’re—” I started.

“Condos, right here. Three months,” Chan, master of few words, said, turning to me.

“Oh,” I said. My Emerson bubble popped. Chan was simply a real estate developer.

He smiled. “It looks great, thanks for cutting the weeds, but you will have to move it.”

Then the white guy spray-painted the rod he had just placed, spritzing some of the leaves of my passion vine yellow.

I looked around the garden. What about my prized watermelon? According to a directory of heritage seeds called
The Seeds of Kokopelli,
the Saskatchewan promised to be “pale green with dark stripes. The seeds are black. The fruits are ovoid with very sweet-tasting cream colored flesh.” Heirloom varietals often don’t ship long distances well, the book explained, which makes them difficult to find in stores. In the case of the Cream of Saskatchewan, it has an explosive gene—if the fruit is knocked, it will split open. This seemed unbelievably sexy. What store could stock an exploding watermelon? It was now poised to be the last thing we harvested from the lot.

The empty duck pen lay near the blackberry bushes, where I had dismantled it after the opossum attack. Absurdly, I found myself relieved that the surviving ducks—they were living on the back stairs now—weren’t here to see this. Suddenly, all the plants and trees I had regarded with delight seemed like a burden. I would have to dig them up? All that horse manure and dirt we had struggled to bring here, we’d have to get rid of it all?

I went upstairs, dread-filled, and watched Chan and his friend move around the lot casually, stepping in and out of beds, mindlessly crushing lettuces and herbs. They placed a total of four posts in the garden, sprayed them with yellow paint, and then left.

The bulldozers would arrive and level everything. They might even excavate the graves of my various dead animals. Inspired, perhaps they would name the condos Rotten Poultry Townhomes.

I heard Harold crying in the backyard. It’s really a barking noise—three short yips. Harold had begun regularly flying to our neighbor’s backyard, but he always had trouble getting back. After hours of dabbling, he would finally grow hungry and gobble and bark until I came to rescue him. This involved a ladder, a bucket, and furtive looks at my neighbor’s back door.

I climbed up the ladder that I kept against the fence for just such instances. There he was, under the apple tree. Harold chirped and took a few steps in my direction. “Get your ass over here now,” I ordered.

The woman of the house, a silent Vietnamese lady, came out at just this moment. She took in this ridiculous sight—me on the ladder, peeking over her fence and rebuking Harold the turkey—and flew into action.

Within five seconds, she had grabbed Harold (faster than I could ever catch him) and passed him over the fence to my waiting arms. Harold pretended to be a regal creature, used to being carried in the arms of a beautiful young woman. But once he returned to our side, it was back to the same old routine: chicken shit, circling flies, and loneliness.

I walked back to the lot. I saw that Chan and friend had posted NO TRESPASSING signs on the gate to the garden. Did that mean everyone? Or were these signs a directive to me, their resident squatter?

I stood at the gate to the garden and peered in. The scarlet runner beans wound through the chain-link fence and were heavy with furry green beans. Huge squash rolled on vines. Malabar spinach, a heat-loving variety, twined up a trellis. Apples were ripening on the tree. Blood-red beet stems sprouted next to bushy basil plants. Eight varieties of tomatoes ripened in various beds. A stand of corn rustled in the corner. My presence, my influence, was evident all around me.