Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (17 page)

I couldn’t believe that the cakes actually puffed up like real pancakes. I ate them with a drizzle of honey and some stewed peaches on the side, with the blackened dwarf potatoes. They were the best pancakes I’ve ever eaten. I licked the plate. I counted the remaining corn cobs. Twelve.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

J
uly Fourth has always annoyed me. The endless gazing upward at a few flecks of light, the snarled traffic, people blowing off their fingers. But this year was different. This Fourth of July, I would be reaping the benefits of some work I had done months before.

In a wave of 1970s California nostalgia, my friend Jennifer and I drove up to Mendocino County last fall to pick grapes and make wine. Jennifer was a DIY lesbian who, when Bill and I arrived pale and eager from Seattle, taught us how to power our cars with biodiesel made out of fryer grease. Jennifer and I became friends and now worked together at the biodiesel filling station in Berkeley.

Jennifer had negotiated to exchange some biodiesel she had made for the grapes. When we drove into the valley, the vineyards were a riot of grapevines whose leaves were just starting to get their fall color. Purple fruit, the color of a bruise, hung amid green-gold leaves. The owner of the vineyard sat in his tractor. He was a tall, bearded hippie who grew biodynamic grapes. Jennifer handed him the jug of biodiesel with a look of triumph—she loved bartering. “The brix is at twenty-six,” he said, referring to the sugar levels, and smiled. Then, in a rush because it was harvest season, he grabbed the jug of fuel and drove off, leaving us to harvest acres of grapes.

Days before, professional pickers had moved along the neat green rows and selected the best clusters, so we were picking the sloppy seconds. The overripe, the wrinkled, the tattered grapes left on the vine would become our wine.

It was hot when we picked, but the work wasn’t hard. We snapped off clusters and dropped them into plastic lug boxes. The grapes were sweet and seedy. It only took an hour to pick hundreds of pounds.

The much harder work would be the crush, but luckily Jennifer and I had invited friends to help. Willow, always interested in gleaning and fermentation projects, had come over. First we pulled off the stems by hand, a circle of us gossiping and telling stories. Though there are crushing machines, we decided to do the crush in the traditional way. We poured the destemmed grapes into a large tub. Jennifer and I washed our feet and climbed in. There was a sickening moment when toes met grapes. Suddenly, it felt like we were standing in a pool of water. But we tromped and stomped. Our legs got sticky. It was kind of like an exercise machine. The party lasted well into the night. The yield: four five-gallon glass jugs full of grape juice.

Through the following winter and spring the juice bubbled and fermented in the jugs. Now, on the nation’s day of independence, Jennifer and I would make the wine official by placing it in bottles and corking it.

I arrived at her place with only a slight caffeine headache, and we began bottling, using a tube, gravity, and some used but clean bottles. I’ve never been much of a drinker, but as I filled up bottle after bottle, I was glad that I had planned for the future. Putting up food is, at its heart, an optimistic thing. It’s a bold way to say: I will be sticking around. Our wine had been fermenting for eight months. That’s long-term planning for eating. Well, drinking.

And, in a way, bottling wine was the perfect way to celebrate America’s independence.
The Alcoholic Republic,
by W. J. Rorabaugh, explains that a state of hunger and drunkenness was a way of life for early Americans, most of whom drank four ounces of distilled spirits every day. “The taste for strong drink was no doubt enhanced by the monotony of the American diet, which was dominated by corn,” Rorabaugh writes. In the wild West, families subsisted on corn pone, salt pork, molasses, and whiskey. I, on the other hand, would be living on cornmeal, rabbits, greens, and wine.

While I happily contemplated spending the rest of July in a boozy torpor, Jennifer’s roommates—amazing cooks—worked in the kitchen, roasting a chicken with new potatoes, pan-searing steaks, tossing salads. When everyone else took a break from bottling to eat real food, I wandered out to Jennifer’s garden.

I tried to channel Euell Gibbons, the famous forager from the 1960s, whose books had been on the shelves of most ecologically minded folk of that era. His
Stalking the Wild Asparagus
is a beautifully written guide to harvesting cattails and milkweed pods. Nature provided; you just had to know where to look.

I knew the book because my dad is a big fan of foraging, and he had given me a faded green paperback version the last time I saw him in Idaho, about seven years ago. I had just reached the age of my parents when they started farming and I felt drawn back to the ranch. Bill, always game for a road trip, packed a spare tire and jugs of water for the ten-hour drive to Orofino, Idaho.

After a swim in the Clearwater River, which smelled just as I remembered—like swampy willow water but fast-moving and clear—we drove up to the ranch. I wanted to see the house my parents had built with their own hands: a rough-hewn cabin covered with cedar shingles and a tar-paper roof. I made Bill stop so I could pick some thimbleberries, berries in the
Rubus
family that my sister and I used to pick as children. They were velvety and tart.

The circular alfalfa field had gone back to thistles and small trees. The house had disappeared. Burned down. In the clearing where it had stood, the apple trees had gone feral.

After the disappointing visit to the ranch, Bill and I met up with my dad in town. I rarely saw him—only a handful of times the whole time I was growing up—but I could see that he, too had, gone feral. He smelled of woodsmoke and was wearing a wool shirt I had sent him years ago for his birthday. Bald, with a mustache, he walked a little bowlegged, but overall he was fit as a fiddle.

Over hamburgers in a diner in Orofino, he shrugged his shoulders about the house burning down. It and the property had been sold years ago, and he had given up the idea of being a rancher. He had been living in a small cabin without electricity or running water. He hunted for food, went fly-fishing.

When my sister and I were teenagers, our dad would send Christmas gifts of pine cones and photos of birch trees. These were worthless things to us—we craved the name-brand jeans we could never afford. But now, when I think back on that, I realize that those were heartfelt gifts. He was trying to express who he was and what he cared about.

He handed me the book with one caveat: “Euell sold out,” he said, and shook his head. “Goddamned Grape-Nuts.” As Gibbons had gotten more and more famous, he had been hired to be a spokesperson for the cereal company. This broke my poor father’s heart.

Now, as I stood in Jennifer’s garden, I thought my father would be proud of me, foraging for my supper, living off the land as he does. I grazed on some red Russian kale, pulled a couple of green apples off the tree, and discovered a few Cape gooseberries—orange fruits that grow in tomatillo-like husks. They were as sweet as honey.

I checked on Jennifer’s bees, feeling a bit voyeuristic. Her healthy herd was finishing up the day’s work; many of them loitered outside the entrance of the hive and dripped down the side of the box in a cluster. I was filled with longing for my own lost bees. I had tried to order another package, but the beekeeping supply stores were sold out. One man told me they sold out by January. Colony collapse disorder had hit beekeepers hard that year, so there were no surplus supplies for backyard beekeepers like me. Without bees, I had no honey.

I tried to ignore the good smells coming from the kitchen and went back inside to drink a few glasses of wine. A man at the party tried the substance we had made and declared it “a witty little wine.”

By midnight, we had forced the last cork into the seventy-fifth bottle. Bill picked me up, and we stuffed my share—twenty-five bottles of not very good Sangiovese wine—into our station wagon. That it wasn’t good didn’t matter. The possibilities were endless. I could use it for cooking. I could make balsamic vinegar. Sangria. Mulled wine. As we drove home along MLK the festivities of the Fourth on our street unfolded: children holding Roman candles, a car that shot out a twenty-foot flame, police and fire engines roaring up and down the streets. I imagined that this is what our street would look like if there was a riot. It was wonderful. I was drunk.

CHAPTER TWENTY

By day five, my headaches—and body aches—from caffeine withdrawal had subsided. I actually felt terrific. Light, energetic, with a thrumming, exuberant feeling from eating so many greens and salads and farm-fresh eggs. I rode my bike around, trying to remember the taste of the food I used to eat. I had pizza and Chinese food amnesia.

In the mornings, I would wake up and go to my feeding area—the garden. The new ducks and geese greeted me with great quacking shouts. They gorged down a few scoops of chicken food and nibbled at the bok choy from Chinatown I upended into their area. The geese ate first, always, and made a big show, craning their necks up and down—looking at me, then back to feeding.

“What are they?” someone called out from behind the fence. “Swans?”

“No, they’re ducks and geese,” I said. I peered between the slats of the fence to see a large woman with two children. A few of the ducks, following the sound of her voice to the end of the fence, stood and begged for food.

“Well, bless you and have a wonderful day,” the big lady said. The children trailed after her.

I plucked an apple and a few plums, and made plans for lunch. The pumpkins were still small but numerous. I yanked the smallest from the vine; I’d shred it and make pumpkin hash browns. A red-chested hummingbird came down, letting out short bursts of air, then flew back into the ether. It was mating season for the little hummer; maybe he mistook me for a potential competitor.

I squeezed the green stalk of a corn plant. Still just ear and silk, no substance. The Brandywine tomatoes were causing me much heartache. They were enormous but stubbornly green, and even after a hot day, they never threatened to blush.

I crouched near the zucchini plants and examined them. Beneath the giant turgid leaves, the fruits were still too small to eat. There was an abundance of the yellow-orange flowers, though. I had heard you could eat them, so I gathered a colanderful, with the intention of frying them.

I gave the flowers a quick rinse in the sink and shredded the pumpkin with the grater. When I dabbed the flowers dry with a tea towel, I heard a curious noise. A muffled buzz. I checked my cell phone: no. It was coming from the flower. I peeled back the crepelike lips of the zucchini blossom, and out veered one very upset fuzzy black bee. It adjusted to the new light and hastened toward the open back door. My heart beating very fast, I picked up another flower and pried open the blossom. Another furry prisoner buzzed out. Four captives were released before I could eat lunch.

I dredged each of the flowers in egg, dipped them in cornmeal, then fried them. I sprinkled the former bee prison with lemon juice and stuck it in my mouth.

After eating “lunch,” I made plans to go to Willow’s garden to harvest lettuce for some former Black Panthers. A few months before my experiment in self-sufficiency began, I had encountered the organization, which I thought was long dead. “Join the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party!” a kid with dreadlocks shouted outside North Gate Hall on UC Berkeley’s campus, where I was taking some classes. He stood behind a table with another man, behind a stack of newspapers with the words THE COMMEMORATOR and an image of a black panther busting out.

What did I know about the Black Panthers? Black power, guns, men in leather jackets, Huey Newton sitting in that big wicker chair. My mom and dad were active in the civil rights movement and had lived in Berkeley and Oakland when the Panthers first started in West Oakland in 1966. I was curious and wandered over.

The two pamphleteers were in the middle of explaining to a young black student that the Black Panthers were necessary for social justice in America. That education was the most important thing for all the kids who lived in the inner city. I nodded my head in agreement.

“Can I help?” I asked the kid and the middle-aged man standing next to him. Remembering the scene from the Malcolm X movie where the blond lady’s help is rejected, I figured they would say no thanks, whitey.

“Yes, we’re integrated now,” the man said, and handed me the Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program.

“Well, I don’t have time or money, how about vegetables?” I asked.

The man, whose name was Melvin, beamed. “We could really use some salad for our literacy program.”

Melvin took down my name and promised to call. I read the Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program in my car. The list covered employment demands, an end to police brutality, and education and health-care concerns for “our black and oppressed communities.” The final program point read: “We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice, peace and people’s community control of modern technology.” It was followed by the first two paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence, the document that embodied the ideas of the American Revolution.

When I called Willow and asked her about supplying salad for a literacy program—I wasn’t sure I could grow the volume of lettuce necessary alone—she told me that her nonprofit garden project had been inspired by the “survival programs” of the Black Panthers, in which they distributed food and eyeglasses to the needy. “Hell,” she said, “we’ll plant a Lil’ Bobby Hutton memorial plot of lettuce!”

Every week since that meeting, I had been harvesting lettuce from both my garden and City Slicker Farm to share with the Black Panthers’ literacy program. For the month of July, though, I couldn’t share my bounty. So, after my lunch of fried flowers, I swung open the gate to one of Willow’s community farms and yanked five sturdy-looking heads of lettuce out of the ground. I snipped off the roots, leaving them there on the ground to rot back into the earth, and tucked the leaves into my bag. I chose the red frilly Lolla Rosa, the bright green Deer Tongue, and Speckles, a green lettuce with red spots.

After washing and bagging the greens at my house, I got on my bike and rode through GhostTown to deliver the lettuce to the office of
The Commemorator,
the newspaper of the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party. It was the errand of an optimist. I knew that providing a salad once a week to kids at their drop-in literacy program wouldn’t change anything. But I did it anyway because—if I’m honest with myself—it made me feel better. It gave me hope.

I pedaled up Martin Luther King Jr. Way on my ten-speed, a bag of salad greens gently rocking on the handlebars. I spotted Johnny, the Watermelon Man, who sells watermelon in the summer and greens in the winter at his produce stand. I have never noticed much buying going on; mostly he and some other old-timers just hang out under the awning of the little shop. As I pressed on I noticed a man sleeping in an overturned refrigerator box, arms flung out like a baby. I counted five men and one woman with shopping carts filled with aluminum cans headed to the recycling center.

Acts from people’s lives are played out on the streets and sidewalks like Shakespearean drama. On this July day, whole families sat on the sidewalk, chairs placed just so, to take in or be part of the day’s events. Just the night before, I had happened on a woman yelling at the father of her son for money he owed her. While she ranted (from the seat of a Hummer), his friends recorded the performance on their cell phones. “You’re acting like some kinda Michael Jackson,” she hurled, and the Hummer screeched away. The man and his friends cried out at this dis, slapped street signs, and groaned.

A person on a bike gets to be part of this sidewalk theater. I got a sweet “Hello, good morning” from a man walking with a cane across the crosswalk.

After thirty flat blocks, the landscape changed. I crossed the border into Berkeley. There’s a NUCLEAR-FREE ZONE sign and the giant, gleaming words THERE and HERE, a lumbering piece of public sculpture that has always rubbed me the wrong way.

“There is no there there,” Gertrude Stein once famously said. Though she was referring to her Oakland childhood home, which was destroyed in a fire, seventy years later Berkeley, in the form of public art, continued the misunderstanding that she was dissing all of Oakland.

The gold-embossed sign above the door read THE COMMEMORATOR. The quarterly paper has a circulation of ten thousand and specializes in stories for the black community. It was started in 1990, a year after founding Black Panther Huey Newton was killed. The remaining members of the party felt the Panthers’ socialist legacy might be lost.

I rang the doorbell, and Melvin Johnson, tall and handsome yet bogged down by the formidable task of running a newspaper, let me in. The office smelled of incense, and on the wall there were hand-painted drawings of various Black Panther all-stars. There were Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and Mumia Abu-Jamal and an oil pastel of a Black Panther youth group, all painted directly onto the wall.

“Hey, salad lady,” called the other Melvin, Melvin Dickson, a stocky, muscular man with kind eyes. Dickson was an original Black Panther, in charge of all things culinary for the Bay Area Panthers from 1972 to 1982. After I put the lettuce in the fridge, we often sat in the office and chatted about events and history. I found myself frequently asking him for advice.

“I see kids eating all this junk food in our neighborhood,” I said the first day I dropped off the lettuce. “That’s why I’m bringing this salad.”

“Kids are hyper on that junk food,” Dickson said. “They can’t learn in that state of mind. One thing we imparted was a nutritious diet. That’s why we fed them three meals.” The Black Panthers weren’t just about guns and self-defense; they started a free breakfast program for hungry children. Later, in some of their schools, they served breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the students, so their parents could go to work. I thought about how different my neighborhood would be if those self-sufficiency programs had survived.

When I wished aloud that more programs like the ones the Black Panthers started existed today, Melvin sighed. “There just aren’t any programs anymore. You’ve got to challenge them, educate them, get them to try new things.”

I knew Melvin was right, but now that I was surviving on lettuce and pumpkins for several days, I do believe I would have killed someone for a bag of red-hot Cheetos.