Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (8 page)

It took me a full five minutes of scrubbing to remove all the slug slime from my hands. Like a low-stakes Lady Macbeth, I couldn’t shake the sensation that they were still soiled. But I wasn’t conflicted: I felt great. I killed so that others might live. Death is all around us, even in an innocent watermelon. You just have to know where to look.

CHAPTER FIVE

A visitor used the word “unhygienic” to describe the almost full-grown chickens and turkeys living in our house. She had a point. Our record player was coated with a golden dust I had never seen before. Bill complained about the noise they made—even he, deep sleeper extraordinaire, couldn’t sleep through their crack-of-dawn racket anymore. When I read something about getting chest infections from living in close quarters with chickens, I finally moved them outside.

I was reluctant for a reason. We already had chickens. Since they are territorial and had an established pecking order, it was going to be a brutal smack-down for the little ones. So I slowly introduced the turkey poults and the new chickens to the big chickens. First I kept the new ones in a large wire pen. The big chickens thought this was some kind of gladiator event and lined up breast to breast to peek through the wire at the newbies and get in a sucker peck whenever possible. After a few days of this, they all knew one another, and I unleashed my chickens and turkeys into the cruel world of urban chickendom.

They fared well. A few of them got their asses kicked. One of the big chickens, a beautiful, normally docile Buff Orpington, body-slammed one of the poults and mercilessly pecked its head until it yelled uncle in turkey. That’s how chickens do it. They establish dominance, an order, that every bird agrees upon, and then they get back to what they do best: pooping and eating.

Back in Seattle, our first chicken was an Americauna named Agnes. She was a lesbian chicken who crowed like a rooster but also laid eggs with bluish shells. At the time—the late 1990s—I was working for a company that published a book called
The Encyclopedia of Country Living,
by Carla Emery, a how-to guide for would-be homesteaders. I laughed as I thumbed through the book in my cubicle in downtown Seattle. How to dig a root cellar, shoot a pig, and castrate a goat—not things that I would be doing anytime soon. But the sections on how to can vegetables, grow pumpkins, and keep chickens—these were things that even a city person with a backyard could do, I realized.

Keeping backyard chickens was more than socially acceptable then. Martha Stewart had them; PBS aired a documentary about poultry fanciers; and in Seattle, having chickens in the city was a badge of progressive moxie. Finally driven over the edge by Emery’s book, I bought Agnes and three full-grown Golden Laced Wyandottes, beautiful gold- and red-feathered chickens who laid big brown eggs.

These hens provided more eggs than we knew what to do with. I started to breeze past the egg section in the supermarket. Cold, white eggs were an affront compared to our warm brown- and blue-shelled eggs, so fresh they didn’t even need to be refrigerated.

After two years of egg-laying service, Agnes was killed by a dear friend’s dog. We held a formal funeral, during which I distinctly remember swooning. A few weeks later the same dog dug up Agnes from her final resting spot and presented horrified backyard picnickers the ossified corpse as a gift. My beloved chickens were pets, almost human; I had never thought of them as meat birds.

What I didn’t know then is that keeping chickens in Seattle had placed me squarely on the path toward urban farming. Chickens are the gateway urban-farm animal. Because of them, I would soon be learning how to kill and pluck a duck and a turkey. If smoking marijuana led to snorting cocaine, then chickens eventually led to raising meat birds.

After I released the birds into the backyard, I officially updated our chalkboard tally:

3 turkeys
3 ducks
1 goose
14 chickens
50,000 bees (they were doing really well)
74 flies (ditto)
2 monkeys

A
few days later, I came outside to find Lana, her sister, and her guinea pig, Maya, in the backyard. They had come over to see the new feathered flock. Lana was in love.

“Wow, who’s that?” she shouted, pointing at the black turkey as she squatted down to admire his shiny, iridescent feathers. Glad to the get attention, he puffed them all out and made a huffing noise. His black tail feathers stood at attention.

“That’s one of the turkeys,” I answered. “He doesn’t have a name,” I added pointedly—real farmers don’t name their meat animals. Another turkey, a small white and black female, was eating some corn. I couldn’t find the other male. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t seen him all morning.

The preening black turkey glided in front of Lana. His head blushed blue. The sunlight made his feathers glow. “I don’t want to hear why,” she said, not looking at me.

Lana was a strict vegetarian. I understood—I had once lived a meat-free life. Starting in high school with the refusal of a steak, I had forced my sister and mom to go vegetarian with me. I happily ate cheese sandwiches through my first two years of college and dutifully made earnest, bean-heavy meals from the
Moosewood Cookbook.

My fall from grace came in Las Vegas. There with friends over a college spring break, I looked at a Circus Circus breakfast buffet that included a ceiling-high stack of bacon and felt dizzy with desire. My years of resolve floated away, and I ate fifteen pieces in one sitting. I felt simultaneously awful and wonderful. Though the top of my mouth felt as if I had eaten a can of Crisco, all that protein gave me vivid dreams, and I had the energy of one of the Bull Ship Pirates from the hourly Treasure Island show.

The next day, strolling down the Bellagio’s fake Greek pavilion and thinking about my next meat binge, I started to worry about the origins of the pig meat I’d eaten.

The PETA videos and the anti-factory farm comic books that had been my vegetarianism’s inspiration weren’t easily forgotten—the wheezing pigs getting slapped around by mean (and probably underpaid) workers; the live baby chicks piled on top of one another in the Dumpster; the turkeys hanging from a conveyor belt as workers slit their throats one after another, as casually as turning a page in a book. In these settings, living beings—animals who love sunshine, fresh food, and taking naps in hay—became meat machines. In meat factories, the animals weren’t allowed to be truly alive, and that was wrong. Lana and I agreed on this point. However, I couldn’t believe, as Lana did, that animals were like little people wearing fur coats.

Lana held the guinea pig up to the turkey. “Harold, meet Maya,” she said.

“Harold and Maude,” Lana’s sister said, laughing.

Suddenly my turkeys had names.

T
here’s a weed called pellitory that grows all over GhostTown. It can grow in the tiniest crack in the sidewalk and flourish. My chickens loved it. I noticed this fact when we put our first four Oakland chickens in our pellitory-choked backyard and they chewed down every shred of the weed they could find.

I then picked all the pellitory that grew in our lot, and the birds literally came running toward me, they loved the snack so much. With fourteen chickens, plus the turkeys and the waterfowl, who loved pellitory, too, I desperately needed another source. Luckily, all over our neighborhood, pellitory grew alongside houses, in lawns, and through chain-link fences in abandoned lots. It was there for the taking. But first I would have to get over my fear of walking around our neighborhood.

When we first moved to GhostTown, I wouldn’t walk around at all. Our landlords lived four blocks away but insisted, for safety’s sake, that we mail the rent checks. Lana had been right that the 2-8 was like Sesame Street, but beyond it, all bets were off. GhostTown was a gauntlet of crackheads, homeless guys, and prostitutes. There were drive-by shootings almost weekly. When venturing out, I either rode my bike or drove my car. I never walked down the streets.

But I had noticed a patch of pellitory growing along the abandoned brick building on the corner. And I had read in
The Encyclopedia of Country Living
that meat birds who eat greens will taste better. I became motivated. I stuck a toe in: drifted to the end of our safe street and found myself on the main drag, where the weeds grew and often bullets flew. As I pulled up weeds various bleary-eyed citizens wandered by, stared at me for a minute, and then said hello or good morning. Even people I had written off as totally fucked up—like the scabby blonde who was always spare-changing everyone—were quite friendly. I was a little ashamed that it had taken me two years to finally venture out into our neighborhood on foot.

On a bike ride the next day, after my successful harvest, I happened to notice the pellitory on 29th Street—a busy thoroughfare that attracted a lot of pot-smoking teens. There was a constant layer of debris on the street, and at night dark-windowed cars idled on all the corners. But 29th also had Durant Park, a little green spot where the pellitory grew lushly. In order to get to these weeds, I had to get over my fear of the guys who presided on that corner.

One night, drunk at the Blue Wednesday speakeasy, I explained to Lana my problem: wanting the weeds but fearful of the thugs. Lana worked at a local teen drop-in center and had lived in our neighborhood for fifteen years. She knew everyone, even the guys who intimidated me.

“They’re just babies, Novella,” she said to me. “Imagine growing up and everyone is scared of you. Pretty soon you use that power—you become what everyone is afraid of.”

Bolstered by Lana’s insight, the next day I gathered two plastic buckets and went out for my maiden voyage to 29th Street. As I rounded the corner of 28th Street I took on my best don’t-fuck-with-me attitude. At least I was trying, though I’m not sure anyone carrying two clattering buckets can be entirely tough. I walked down the sidewalk. A group of ten guys slouched on the corner, blocking my way. “Babies, babies, babies,” I muttered to myself.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Hello.”

The group parted, and a few of them said hello back.

As I walked through the crowd I looked up at the tall teenagers and smiled. Lana had been right. I harvested a shitload of weeds at the park and brought them home for the birds. On my way back, I realized that, carrying the buckets of weeds, I must have appeared just as crazy and eccentric as anyone else on the streets of GhostTown.

One hot morning in the middle of summer, I grabbed my buckets and headed to the park. As I clattered past Brother’s Market the shopkeeper, Mosed, waved from behind the counter.

I turned onto 29th Street. None of the teen guys were on the corner. At Durant Park, a circle of candles burned on the sidewalk. Just the day before, the sound of gunshots had echoed through the neighborhood. Bill and I had stopped what we were doing—he was working on a car, I was sowing some lettuce seeds—and peered down MLK. Police cars came, then an ambulance. Now a T-shirt, attached to the park’s gate, “Rest in Peace 1985-2005” written on it with a Sharpie, marked the death. A few teddy bears and empty Jack Daniel’s bottles sat next to the candles.

I stepped past the altar and began gathering weeds. A little kid in diapers across the street watched me from behind a gate. Pellitory is soft green with red stems. Young and pliable, the stems break off easily, but the plant’s strong root system ensures its survival.

I worked the area underneath a eucalyptus, pulling up handfuls of the weed. I wondered whether Lana had known the victim. He would have been five when she moved here. She probably saw him riding his bicycle around. And then, with no opportunities, he eked out a living on the corner. Maybe spent some time in jail. Who knows what happened.

Tiny burrs from the pellitory dusted my sweatshirt sleeves. My hands were slightly wet from pulling up the dewy plants. I had two bucketfuls, plenty. I waved goodbye to the baby at the gate, then turned the corner and walked back past Brother’s. Two loud men paused outside the store to crack open their brown-bagged cans of beer. It was 8:30 a.m. After seeing the altar, I could understand the logic of such a decision.

I put down the buckets and went in. The store had two aisles. Gum, candy, chips, cans of beans, and plastic bags of pasta were on one shelf; the other was devoted to alcohol: jugs of Gallo wine, Wild Irish Rose, Boone’s Farm. I grabbed a six-pack of Tecate—for later—and placed my purchase on the counter. Two Yemeni men sat there; behind them were batteries, phone cards, and cigarettes.

Mosed smiled and rang me up. He has dyed red hair—vivid red, not natural at all—and a goatee. His wife, in a head scarf, stood in the doorway that led to their apartment upstairs.