Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (14 page)

On page 66, I reached the rabbit section. Along with reviews of the Farmers Bulletin No. 2131,
Raising Rabbits,
it included something called the “Rambling Rabbit Rap,” written by Gurney Norman: “Raising rabbits is play, it’s fun, a hobby. But it can also be work, good, productive work of the kind that contributes to health and vigor by getting good home-grown food on the table.”

That had been one of my parents’ main goals: to be self-sufficient, to raise their own meat and milk, to build their own house. This desire was a cultural virus, part of the first ecological movement in the United States.

I flipped through the
Whole Earth Catalog
with growing interest. One female rabbit, I read, could have up to thirty offspring in a year. They enjoy shady, cool conditions. Don’t feed them cabbage. Building rabbit housing is fun and easy.

The History Room, full of coughing scholars turning dusty pages, suddenly became a vibrating, living place. These old words weren’t just memories; they were still useful. I took down notes, pledged to Google the Farmers Bulletin No. 2131, and became increasingly convinced that rabbits might just be the perfect farm animal.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

W
hen the weather warmed, I donned my bee veil, set fire to some burlap in my smoker, and went out to the deck to perform a hive inspection. I had noticed there weren’t many bees flitting in and out of the bee boxes, but this was normal: when the weather is cold and wet, bees usually don’t venture out much.

The hive inspection is a springtime ritual for beekeepers. Mostly we want to see how our queen is performing—by early spring, she should be laying a circular pattern of eggs in the brood chamber. The bees’ larder of honey and pollen is checked, too. If there isn’t enough, they might need a sugar-water supplement to pull them through. This supplement is delivered through a mason jar with a lid riddled with tiny holes; the jar is filled with equal parts sugar and water and inverted to cover a hole on the top of the hive.

I held the smoker near the entrance of the box and squeezed the bellows to let out a few puffs. The smoke has a calming effect on the bees. It is thought that smoke worries them into eating honey (the hive is on fire!), which distends their bellies, which makes stinging difficult. But I’ve noticed that the smoke mellows them instantly, so it’s hard to know exactly.

I pried open the lid with my hive tool, which looks like a thin metal spatula. The lid creaked open, well coated with propolis to keep drafts out. Inside, there should have been bees—moving across the frames, doing clean-up work, making new honeycomb, trying to sting me, an invader. There were no bees. I heard a faint echo of a buzz at the very bottom of the box.

Frantic and feeling sick to my stomach, I pulled off the uninhabited top super and set it on the floor of the deck. Then I pried up the middle frame from the brood box. The brood box is the bottom-most container and is deeper than the honey super boxes. It gives the queen a larger area in which to lay eggs, of which she can sometimes deposit twelve hundred a day. Down at the bottom of the dark chamber was a fist-sized cluster of bees, huddled together.

Smoke curled into their chambers like a fog. I wrenched off my veil and pulled off my gloves. I prodded the bees with the tip of my hive tool. I wanted the cluster to come to life, to attack me. They were entirely docile—nothing to defend.

I started to look for clues to what had doomed the colony. I tipped up each of the brood frames. The top edges were decorated with concentric circles of mustard yellow, almost pure white, and bright orange—pollen, like pop art. A few of the frames were lined with dark-colored capped honey. But there was no sign of brood, the white larvae of the honeybee; none of the honeycomb contained the chubby yellow cells that indicate pupating larvae. Alas, the queen must have died. I put the frames back into the bottom box over the cluster of survivors. They wouldn’t make it.

Just as I snuffed out the smoker, ten black-and-white cruisers careened up MLK. For an instant, I thought they were coming for me. When I lived in Seattle, I had a fairly sizeable marijuana-growing operation in the attic. It had made me very paranoid. So seeing the police, even all these years later, caused my heart to race. But what would they get me for this time? Killing a turkey without a license? Too many chickens? The death of my bee colony?

They squealed past the 2-8 and stopped in front of an anonymous warehouse kitty-corner from the garden. Some of the cars were emblazoned with CANINE UNIT. I had always wondered about that warehouse. No one seemed to live there, but at night a guy with a brand-new SUV would sometimes idle in front of the building. Probably a grow operation.

Two plainclothes police pounded on the building’s metal roll door. The other officers crouched behind their cars and slowly moved in. The police inched closer. The door came up cautiously—and then, from the deck, I noticed the peach blossoms.

They were frilly and deep pink. The peach trees, a gift from the monks, grew in the parking strip between my garden and the just-raided pot warehouse. And now they were in bloom. Bobby had helped me plant them, saying, “We’re going to have us some peaches!”

Then I noticed the other trees. A weeping Santa Rosa plum, branches like dreadlocks decorated with white blossoms. The three-way-grafted apple, with its girlish pink and white blooms, each promising a fruit, each branch a different variety. Even the eucalyptus across the street, throwing shadows on the police, was adorned with thousands of filamenty flowers.

I looked down at the vacant beehive, sprawled apart, empty, there on my deck. All those blooms but no honeybees. I put the empty hive back together again. The boxes were getting old, I noticed, paint chipping off. They were looking as tattered as some of the houses in GhostTown.

Across the street, there appeared to be quite a few plants behind the doors of the warehouse. The police were prodding them. Growing pot for medicinal use is legal in California. There are some rules for indoor operations, though, including only ninety-nine plants per building. Maybe this warehouse had gotten too ambitious.

It was funny to see so much green behind a metal roll door, framed by so much concrete and city. My squat garden was the same way. Incongruous. The police started to load up the plants in the trunks of their cars, to evacuate the building of its life.

I knew there were other creatures—native bees, flies, ants even—that would pollinate my crops. But the death of a hive left me feeling sour and alone.

When a beekeeper dies, someone has to tell the bees. I learned that at a beekeeping museum in Slovenia years ago. I had been in Europe for my sister Riana’s wedding to Benji, her French husband. After the wedding, my mom and I had traveled through the former Yugoslavia. One day, exhausted from sightseeing, we stopped into the beekeeping museum near the town of Bled. We rested our feet and watched a movie in the back of the museum.

The film was shot in golden light. A grandfather showed a lederhosen- wearing boy how to be a beekeeper. It was instructional—how to install a hive, harvest honey, and winterize the bees in snowy Slovenia. Near the end of the film, my mom and I were startled when the grandpa character died.

In the last scene, the boy hunkered near the hive, his lips moving in a whisper. His grandpa had told him that the bees would need to know of his death. The whisperer would feel the heat of the hive, generated by so many thousands of bees. He would smell the wax and propolis. Hear the noise of the bees, as if they were wailing, too. I could see how this act would be consoling in the face of death.

When the lights came up, my mom and I cried a little in each other’s arms (we tend to get a bit emotional about things like this) and then proceeded, in the true American response to death, to buy up most of the museum’s bee-related merchandise. Posters, honey wine, and folksy hand-painted hive panels.

The movie my mom and I had watched in Slovenia didn’t address the tragedy of the death of a hive, though. Maybe the bees never died in Slovenia. I left the empty hive on the deck, another failure. The smell of smoke clung to my clothes the rest of the day.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

W
hile I grappled with the death of my hive, my sister, Riana, welcomed a new life—she had given birth to a healthy baby girl. From France she had been sending me adorable photos of her little munchkin, Amaya Madeline, and I had to go see her. I saved my pennies for the flight, and Bill agreed to hold things down at the farm.

Five years earlier, my sister had abandoned America. She had been living a life of excitement and excess in Los Angeles, full of parties, Botox, and extreme waxing. My mom had worried about Riana, who, in the ultimate reaction against hippie values, had become a materialist working for a high-end department store and driving an SUV. But then she met Benji in, of all places, the Paris hotel in Las Vegas. I found it amusing that I rediscovered bacon in Las Vegas, while my sister found true love. “I knew the minute we kissed on the dance floor, sober,” Riana said, “that he would be my husband.” Now she and Benji lived a quiet life in a seaside village in the south of France near the Spanish border. He worked as a math teacher, and Riana became a travel writer.

In March, after a fourteen-hour flight from San Francisco to Barcelona, I took a train from Spain to Narbonne, where Benji picked me up from the station. Like any immigrant, Riana missed a few key things from her native country, and so I entered Europe bearing the tastes of home: baking powder and, though they aren’t technically American, corn tortillas. The road from Narbonne to St. Pierre, where my sister lived, passed rolling hills of wild thyme, oak woodlands interspersed with grapevines. I ignored the beautiful scenery—I couldn’t wait to hold that baby.

At the apartment, which had been the summer home of Benji’s parents, I clambered up the stairs. My niece, Amaya, was exquisite in her purple onesie. Large eyes, dark hair, olive skin. She looked just like Benji. And yet there was a hint of Elvis to her—a little pompadour, a snarl to her lips. Yes, she was American, too. I buried my nose in her baby neck and greedily smelled her baby essence. Then I passed out on the couch from exhaustion and jet lag.

The next morning—after I had settled into their place, learned how to work the espresso machine, and ventured out briefly to explore the sleepy seaside village—Riana pried Amaya out of my arms and sent me and Benji to the market in Narbonne. Our mom was arriving that afternoon, and Riana wanted to make her a special dinner.

Les Halles in Narbonne reminded me that I wasn’t in Oakland anymore. There were stacks of sardines, still shiny from the sea. There were the
boucheries chevaline,
the horse butchers, selling blood-red cubes of horse-flesh. There were reasonably priced goat cheeses, solid blocks of tomme, and ripe Époisses. The chickens had their heads and feet still attached. The French housewives sashayed through the covered market stalls and stopped to examine the scales on the legs of the chickens before buying.

“To make sure it is fresh,” Benji explained, his French lips lingering irresistibly on the “sh” sound.

We were an unlikely pair—Benji suave, calm; me wild-eyed, loud, and slobbering. We paused at the rabbit stall. Skinned bunnies lined a glass case, their heads still attached. So that’s how they look underneath their fur, I thought. They were pure muscle, with no fat. Their back legs looked like skinned chicken thighs.

The rabbit farmers had mounted photos of their idyllic south-of-France farm on the wall. Their place looked nice—rolling hills, a stone farmhouse. The lady behind the counter smiled and greeted me. “Bonjour!” I said, then worried she might say something else. I couldn’t even say I didn’t speak French in French. It was a comfort to have Benji at my side.

“Benji, will you ask them how they kill the rabbits?” I said, and nudged him.

Benji sighed and reluctantly said something in French to the woman. She looked a little surprised. Benji laughed nervously and said something else and pointed at me. The woman cleared her throat and looked at me while she made some brisk sawing motions with her hand while explaining.

“She said they make a slit in their throat,” Benji reported.

“They don’t bash them in the head?” I asked. “Or break their necks?”

Benji asked in French. The woman looked mortified. Who was this barbarian?

“No.” Benji has these big brown eyes, and they were cast downward in shame.

“Sorry, Benji,” I said.

I was sorry to embarrass Benji, but I had to figure it out for my own project at home. The
Whole Earth Catalog
had been silent about how to actually kill a rabbit.

The French rabbit lady nodded her head when we pointed at a plump bunny in the case. She took out an enormous pair of scissors—I mean enormous: the blade was almost two feet long—and cut our rabbit up into pieces like a chicken.

At my sister’s insistence, we brought the rabbit’s head home. Though many French people do eat the head—the cheeks and the brain are particularly toothsome, according to Benji’s grandmother—this one was for Lucky the cat.

Back at the apartment, Riana announced that Mom had arrived while we were shopping and was taking a nap. While Benji unloaded the groceries, I held and bounced the Buddha-like Amaya on my knee. I couldn’t get over the fact that my sister had become a mom. I wondered if having a baby around had any similarities to raising farm animals.

Riana dredged the pieces of rabbit in flour, thyme, piri-piri. Her blond hair up in a bun, she stood at the gas stove wearing an apron and fried the rabbit in hot oil. Growing up, we had always been mistaken for twins, even though we are separated by eighteen months—we both have angular faces with prominent chins and tend toward the tall and leggy side of things. My sister, who has always been a confident person, both in cooking and in traveling, now had a slightly different aura. She just seemed more authoritative than usual. In her time in France, I could see that she had really blossomed. And her cooking had clearly reached another level of deliciousness.

Riana and I had always been into cooking. We could make a marinara and a béchamel sauce before we hit puberty. We learned to cook because we had to. When I was ten and Riana twelve, our mom was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. One morning, she went blind in her left eye and had to wear a patch. She had trouble walking. And since she was a single parent with a full-time job and a sickness that left her exhausted after a day of work, my sister and I learned to make dinner.

My parents had divorced in 1977. My mom then took us to Shelton, Washington, a rainy logging town near Seattle, where she got a job as a schoolteacher. Times were tough—teaching didn’t pay well, and my dad didn’t pay child support and rarely saw us. I remember overhearing my mom talking with one of her friends. “You’re like a mother wolf, taking care of your babies,” her friend had whispered. My mom protected us and wanted us to thrive.

The image of my mom as a wolf stuck with me, because my mom brought home all manner of free food for us. She worked at a school on the Skokomish Indian reservation, so her students often gave her whole salmon caught in the Skok River and sacks of oysters from Hood Canal. She and friends would go out on chanterelle-mushroom-picking expeditions. My mom also grew—and had Riana and me tend—a large kitchen garden next to our house. It was a small reminder of her ranch days, except instead of fields of corn and tomatoes, it was just a few rows.

The door to the guest bedroom opened. My mom, jet-lagged, staggered out. She sniffed the air with her long nose, which I inherited.

“Smells like rabbit,” she said. We hugged, and then Mom sat down at one of the kitchen stools to watch Riana cook. “I remember when I would take you two girls out to the rabbit hutches . . . ,” she began, fingering her long, dangly turquoise earrings. Despite her jet lag, she was awake enough to recount another one of her farm stories.

Riana glanced at me, and we simultaneously rolled our eyes.

We’ve heard all the Idaho farm stories so many times that if Mom starts one, Riana and I can recite it verbatim. The time Zachary the dog killed the chickens and Dad had to shoot him. How we would watch my mom milking the cow, waiting with bottles in hand for our milk fix. And, yes, the rabbit butchering, when Mom, wearing a down coat that she had stuffed herself with goose feathers from the farm, would give us a tour of the inside of a rabbit. “These are the small intestines; this is the heart,” she would instruct as she’d point with her knife tip, the rabbit, tied to a tree branch and flayed open, steaming in the cold air.

There’s also a piece of photographic evidence for this ranch tale: Riana and I standing in a snowy glade with bad haircuts, Riana holding a big white and black rabbit in her arms. These animals were not pets.

But that was a long time ago. Along with most of the other back-to-the- landers, my mom had realized that the remaking of our entire American society might not be possible in her lifetime. That spinning wool or churning butter might be fun for a while, but eventually the conveniences of modern life—grocery stores, clothes driers—seemed pretty wonderful. The possibilities for mockery, in hindsight, are endless. The back-to-the-land movement’s failure, as inevitable as the collapse of every other utopia, became a buffet of schadenfreude at which even I had occasionally feasted.

But now that I was farming, I knew it was hard work and that plans never went the way you thought they would. After the Maude tragedy and the watermelon debacle, I would never laugh at my parents’ hapless experiment again. I’m sure my mom had many a run-in with an opossum—and that shit is not funny.

Most of my memories of the farm disappeared in the 1980s, replaced by neon-hued socks and crimping irons. But our mom kept the idea alive with her endless retelling of farm stories.

Although Riana and I give her grief for it, I could see why she did it. Her time on the farm had been filled with defining moments: the first beam raised in their house, her first homemade cheese, her first baby. It was an era when creatures had become characters in the fabric of her life, when the apple harvest meant there would be fruit throughout the winter, when a rabbit raised and slaughtered behind the house meant both a biology lesson and a tasty dinner. There was a lot of room for nostalgia. It was also a time when she was young and healthy and could do anything. And so Riana and I let her tell her stories, out of respect and sometimes curiosity, and tried to imagine what she had been like then.

In honor of Mother, Riana was making
civet de lapin,
rabbit in blood sauce, a step up from how it was usually prepared on the ranch in Idaho, fried like chicken. Riana put the browned rabbit into a tagine, a ceramic cooking vessel. The still-raw liver went on top, and a bottle of wine was poured over the whole thing. This all was covered with the smokestack lid of the tagine and whisked into the oven.

We sipped the local rosé and watched the sun dip into the Mediterranean. My sister and I dutifully listened to my mom tell the rabbits-on-the-ranch story again, happy to be together, making new memories in France. I halfheartedly wished that my dad could have been there, too. He spoke perfect French—he had studied for a year in Grenoble when he was a young man. After he and my mom got together, they traveled through France. Not far from my sister and Benji’s home, my parents had picked grapes as hippie gypsies. My mom loved to tell the story about how the other pickers would call her the Snail. She was slow because she was pregnant with my sister, and she had to periodically stop her work and quietly vomit into the grapevines.

My sister was born in Idaho but had, thirty-five years later, found her way—all this way—back to where she had been conceived. It is my mom’s—our family’s—most amazing story.

Later that night, Riana was up with the baby. Since I was sleeping on the couch next to Amaya’s crib, I was up, too.

“How did Mom do this?” Riana said, looking down at Amaya nursing. While Riana couldn’t relate through farming, motherhood had made her see my mom in a different light.

“Dude,” I said, “they didn’t even have electricity.”

“And they—we—lived in the trailer while they built the house,” Riana whispered. “That tiny trailer,” she said, and wiped Amaya’s chin. “I can barely cook dinner with a baby, much less
build a house.
”

“All those animals,” I added. Our minds were boggled at our parents’ moxie.

That night, lying there on the couch, I thought about my life in Oakland and its general trajectory. My parents had, by my age, built a house from scratch, had two children, and fed themselves from their land. My sister had, in the past five years, gotten married, given birth to a beautiful child, and learned to speak fluent French and cook flawless French food. I, meanwhile, had some raggedy chickens, some borrowed rabbits, and a dead beehive. On land that could be bulldozed at any moment. My peers were homeless people and freaks.