Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (5 page)

The road to our ranch in Idaho had been similarly treacherous, and I remembered her story about the day I was born. It was late December, and my parents had hoped to win the New Year Baby contest put on by Les Schwab Tires in Orofino, Idaho. The parents with the first baby born on January 1, 1973, would win a pair of tires and a side of beef. My parents thought they had timed it perfectly, but I was a restless little baby and emerged instead on the snowy night of December 30.

When my mom tells the story of my birth, which has become part of the popular lore of my family, she paints a colorful picture. There was three feet of snow on the ground, and the truck barely avoided sliding off the steep ravine near the ranch. Then the truck threw a rod, destroying the engine, so they had to hitchhike to the hospital. She always tells the story with a smile, as if it had all been a great deal of fun. But now that I’m an adult, when I hear her story, it sounds dangerous, frightening, cold—distinctly unfun.

I cracked open the window of the truck to stop the condensation on the windshield and braked slowly around a hairpin turn.

The country had taken a toll on my mom. She was lonely up there on the ranch. My dad, who eventually went semiferal, would often go on weeks-long hunting trips, leaving my mom to tend to the ranch duties: milking the cow, watering the garden, and locking the duck pen at night. She missed her friends, her exciting life when she had attended be-ins in Golden Gate Park, danced at rock shows, and traveled the world.

I still regard the country as a place of isolation, full of beauty—maybe—but mostly loneliness. So when friends plan their escape to the country (after they save enough money to buy rural property), where they imagine they’ll split wood, milk goats, and become one with nature, I shake my head. Don’t we ever learn anything from the past? And that’s probably why I avoided rural places and chose to live in the city—but, of course, my modified, farm-animal-populated version of the city.

The fog broke once we hit the highway. Propelled by the weight of the manure, we swooped down the concrete mainline of Highway 24 back into Oakland with a fine dusting of horseshit trailing behind us. My melancholy mood was replaced by a wave of love toward my adopted city. With its late-night newsstands and rowdy bars, a city meant I would never be lonely.

When we turned down our street, Bobby was there, guarding the gates.

Bill and I met on an elevator, fell in love because of cats, and lasted because of bees.

In 1997, I was headed to a class to show David Attenborough’s
The Private Life of Plants
to a group of Ecology 101 students. While finishing up my degrees in English and biology at the University of Washington, I worked as a projectionist, paid $3.85 an hour to hit PLAY on a VCR and then sit back in the AV booth and do my homework.

Classroom Support Services, my employer, had recently hired a skinny new guy who wore an ugly red wool hat and a too-short sweatshirt. He was in the elevator when I got on, and he scrunched up against the wall and seemed extremely nervous. I gave him a smile, and he returned it with a half wave. I like nervous people, because they make me feel confident. He was cuter than I initially thought, with olive skin and warm brown eyes.

At my floor, I stepped off the elevator.

“Um, excuse me,” the man stammered. He had cotton balls stuffed in his ears. Later I would find out he had problems with his ears, especially in the cold wet of Seattle. The cotton balls kept out the elements, as did the red hat.

He handed me a folded sheet of yellow paper. I glanced at it—
The Speckled Pig Zine,
it said. The doors closed, and I walked to my class.

A few minutes later, while David Attenborough’s British-accented voice filled the auditorium, I looked through the zine in the booth. Some funny poems, a story about a lost dog, and a questionnaire mostly about cats. (You see a cat. Do you, a. kiss its head? b. kiss its paws? c. kiss it on the lips?) I find men who have felines impossibly sexy.

On our first date, he gave me a ridiculous pair of rabbit-fur gloves he had found on the bus. They were turquoise with a white fur lining. I loved them. We walked around to various bookstores. It was cold, and he took my arm and leaned in to smell my hair. Later I met the cats, Speck and Sparkles, and saw Bill’s tiny studio apartment.

Bill had grown up in Indiana and Florida. His mom was from West Virginia, a strapping farm girl with ten brothers and sisters who helped her mom raise chickens and pigs on their little five-acre farm. She and Bill’s dad had gone into construction and built fancy houses in Florida. Bill hated Florida and had recently moved to the other end of the country.

We moved in together after our second date. We settled into a rambling house on Seattle’s Beacon Hill that became known as the Hen House.

For my twenty-fifth birthday, Bill loaded me into the car and we drove toward Mount Rainier. We pulled into a U-cut Christmas-tree farm and gift shop, and I wondered why he thought I would want a Christmas tree for my birthday. Plus, it was December 30—was he not only totally off base but also incredibly cheap? Maybe I had really misjudged this guy, I thought, looking at a beeswax candle in the shape of a gnome in the store. While I pondered my bad-gift future with Bill—snow globes, kitten-statue door-stops, balloons that read I WUV U—I weighed the merits of our relationship. Great pillow talk. A love of reading. A similar sense of what is funny. Gift hell would have to be a concession.

After he wandered around the rustic cabinlike store, which smelled like cinnamon sticks and pine needles, Bill stopped in front of me. “Novella,” he started in his soft but gravelly voice. He scooted me closer to some pine-colored boxes stacked up near the door. “I’m giving you a beekeeping kit for your birthday.”

He pointed at the hive boxes and supers (boxes to add as the colony grows) I was standing next to. Only then did I understand the name of the shop: Trees ’n Bees. Elated at this sudden stroke of genius gift-giving, I hugged Bill. The rest of the kit consisted of a smoker; a veil and cap; a pair of long, thick gloves; a hive tool; extra supers; a small book,
First Lessons in Beekeeping;
and the promise of a small wire box filled with worker bees and one queen come spring.

The bearded salesman, who reminded me of a bear, rang up our order, then showed us the observation hive on view from inside the little shop. Behind Plexiglas we could see a seething mass of bees moving along a dark-colored honeycomb. I inhaled the scent surrounding the box; it was a richly textured odor—sweet nutmeg and new wood.

I had been in love with the idea of beekeeping—danger coupled with hard work blended with sweet rewards—but figured that I could never do it in the city. My mom’s friend Lowell had been a beekeeper in Idaho. I distinctly remember a trip to his farm, a land of rolling gold hills dotted with dark pine trees and white painted boxes, which my mom told me were bee houses. Lowell had wild blond hair and an unruly beard, and he had studied agriculture at Cornell before going back to the land, so he had a leg up over most of the other hapless hippies struggling to live off the land. His bees’ honey came suspended in comb. The sweet golden liquid was the best thing I ever tasted. As a child, I never thought about the details. It was simple: Lowell made honey. And the idea of becoming a beekeeper myself? That seemed wildly improbable, about as attainable as becoming an astronaut.

Until Bill started to tell me about hobbyist beekeepers.

One of whom was Sylvia Plath. The daughter of a beekeper, she and husband Ted Hughes kept bees during the happy years. Bill showed me her bee poems, and they took my breath away. “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” for example:

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it. . . .
I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner. . . .

And Bill pointed out that there were beekeepers in cities like Paris and New York City. The forage, I read that winter in anticipation of receiving my bees, was better in cities because of city gardeners who keep plants that bloom year-round.

That spring, I returned for my bee package—a shoebox-sized cage with wire mesh sides so the approximately five thousand bees inside can breathe—and the bearlike man took me and a few other customers out to a field to demonstrate how to “install the hive.” I stood in the lush green grass, terrified behind my brand-new veil. The bee guy, wearing shorts, gave a rambling discourse on beekeeping while he poured the new bees into the hive. The other newbies and I stood very far back. But as he got more and more animated about beekeeping, about the order of the hive—workers, drones, and queens—we all crept closer and closer to him. Bees landed on our shoulders and veils and then flitted off. As the details of the mysterious honeybee filled the empty beekeeping section of my brain, I felt lucky and giddy, as if someone had shown me a secret door.

The Trees ’n Bees guy did make it look easy. Then I was sent home to do the same with an increasingly angry-sounding hairy herd. I experienced a glimmer of what it must feel like returning from the hospital with a baby.

As I pulled the Dodge Dart away from the forest of Christmas trees I wondered how the bearlike man could trust me with the care of this thing. What if I dropped the box? What if they grow up and decide to swarm, to abandon me? And I thought about getting stung. A lot. Mostly because I was actually choosing to get stung. It felt a bit transgressive.

It certainly seemed so to my next-door neighbor in Seattle.

“You should move to the country,” Tudy said when she saw the buzzing shoebox. She was out on her lawn, trimming the grass with a pair of scissors so that it was perfectly even. Next to her painstakingly manicured yard was our parking-strip garden, a raised bed with tall stalks of fava beans and a chaotic jumble of lettuces and Swiss chard. She hated us.

Seattle’s city code allowed for beekeeping if the distance from the hive to neighboring structures was at least fifty feet. By hosting the hive on our upstairs deck, we were complying with the code. And so I ignored our neighbor and marched upstairs, clutching the bee package as if I knew what I was doing.

Then I put on as much clothing as possible. Triple shirts, a mechanic’s jumpsuit, several pairs of socks hiked up and tucked into the jumpsuit, the heavy-duty-fabric beekeeping gloves (regretting I hadn’t traded up for the more expensive leather ones), and finally, my veil. Swaddled as I was, I could barely put my arms down. I grabbed the gleaming hive tool—it still had the price tag on it—and installed my hive.

The sun was going down on a rare cloudless April day. Bill watched from a safe distance. As instructed, we positioned the hive to face east so it would get early morning sun. Installing later in the day avoids confusing the bees, who should spend at least a night in their hive before venturing out. I pried the lid off the bee package and tilted the opening toward the virgin hive body, with its orderly rows of frames that the bees would fill with honey.

The bees came out like a liquid, spilling into the box without incident. The Trees ’n Bees guy had showed us how to tap the package like a ketchup bottle to get out the last of the stragglers. From fear and sheer clothing volume, I had a slick of sweat dripping down my back. My terror was unfounded: The bees were entirely docile.

I fished the queen chamber out of the almost empty wire box. A few bees, her attendants, clung to the outside of the little box within the box. At the bottom was a plug of candy. The idea is that the workers will eventually chew the candy and release the queen. But I wanted to see her. So with the end of my hive tool, I somehow popped the candy inward, and she emerged. Her ass was enormous; she looked like some kind of exotic beetle. As I held the little box across the top of the beehive she strutted into her new home. Was it just me, or did she actually have an air of royalty? Then she was gone, down into her chambers, where she would lay all the eggs to keep the hive going.

I received one sting on my ring finger.

We had two years of productive beekeeping in Seattle. Bill and I worked the hives together, giving the bees sugar water to get them through the winter, adding new supers during the honey flow in summer. We harvested by stealing a few frames at a time and letting the honey drizzle out into a large pan.

Over those years, Bill and I both grew a little fatter. When I first met him, Bill was a skinny poet. Over the Seattle years he went to mechanic school at a local community college, and all that wrench-turning (and my cooking) bulked him up. I gained a few pounds, too. Maybe it was all that honey harvesting, but I think it was just being in love.

When we decided to move to Oakland, we entertained for a brief instant the idea of bringing the bees with us in our van. Using our good judgment for once, we left them with our roommates at the Hen House.

It wasn’t until that second spring in GhostTown, when I started to feel like the lot might be mine forever, that we got another hive of bees. I had called our roommates in Seattle, and they had told me the news: My bees had finally died. Because beekeeping equipment is expensive, I hired some movers to bring down the empty bee boxes from Seattle. Then I ordered another package of bees like the ones I got from Trees ’n Bees. Instead of picking them up at a local bee store, I got them through the mail.