Farm City Read online

  All these people out on the street—they were characters I had never met in Seattle, or in our more suburban house in the Oakland hills. I was curious, and yet I had to admit it: they scared me. Could I really live here? Walk around the streets without worrying about getting mugged?

  The place was a postcard of urban decay, I thought as we turned down 28th Street. Cheetos bags somersaulted across the road. An eight-story brick building on the corner was entirely abandoned and tattooed with graffiti. Living here would definitely mean getting out of my comfort zone.

  We came to a stop in front of a gray 1905 Queen Anne. Like almost every other house in the Bay Area, it had been divided into apartments. The place for rent was the upstairs portion of the duplex. Bill and I surveyed the house. The paint was peeling; a bougainvillea sagged in the side yard. It was a dead-end street, stopping at what was once the grass playground of an elementary school.

  Bill pointed out that a dead-end street is a quiet street. He had once lived on one in Orlando and got to know all his neighbors. It made things intimate, he said. Just then, a dazzling woman with cropped platinum hair and platform boots peeked out of her metal warehouse door and beckoned us over to her end of the street.

  “My name’s Lana,” she said. “Anal spelled backward.” Bill and I exchanged looks. She stood behind her chain-link fence, a 155-pound mastiff at her side. A robed Buddhist monk emerged from the house next door. He and Lana waved. He disarmed his car alarm—the danger of the ’hood trumps even karma—and drove away. Lana gazed at the retreating car and said, “The old monk used to make me bitter-melon soup when I was sick.”

  Lana told us, in her high, funny voice, that she had lived on “the 2-8” for fifteen years. “It’s not bad now,” she assured us. “A few years ago, though, I had people running over my roof, firing machine guns. Now it’s like Sesame Street.” She shook her head.

  Lana then pointed at each of the houses and described its inhabitants: a white family she called the Hillbillies in the teal house, a black mom with two kids in the stucco duplex, an apartment house filled with Vietnamese families who wanted to live near the temple. An abandoned building with a sometime squatter. An empty warehouse that no one knew much about. As we took leave of Lana she invited us to Blue Wednesday, a salon for artists and performers she held every week.

  “She seems interesting,” I said as we walked back to get our tour of the apartment. Our landlords had arrived in their gold BMW.

  “We should move in,” Bill said, running his fingers through his shaggy dark hair. He didn’t even need to see the apartment.

  Our soon-to-be landlords were an African couple with socialist tendencies. They led us upstairs for a tour of the bright little apartment. Hardwood floors. A tile-lined fireplace. A backyard. A living room with a view of a 4,500-square-foot lot filled with four-foot-tall weeds. The landlords didn’t know who owned the lot, but they guessed that, whoever they were, they wouldn’t mind if we gardened there. We gaped at the enormous space. It had an aspect that would guarantee full sun all day. In Seattle we tended what we thought was a big backyard vegetable garden, but this lot—it was massive by our standards. It sealed the deal.

  Bill and I grinned on our way back to our hovel in the hills with the vegan anarchists, still giddy from too much California sunshine and the prospect of a new home.

  A few weeks later, when we moved into our new apartment, we discovered that our neighborhood was called GhostTown, for all its long-abandoned businesses, condemned houses, and overgrown lots. The empty lot next to our house was not rare: there was one, sometimes two, on every block. And through the vacant streets rolled GhostTown tumbleweeds: the lost hair-pieces of prostitutes. Tumbleweaves.

  The day we moved into GhostTown, a man was shot and killed outside a Carl’s Jr. restaurant a few blocks away. We drove past the crime scene—yellow caution tape, a white sheet with a pair of bare feet poking out. We heard on the radio that Oakland had been named number one—it had the highest murder rate in the country. When we drove by later, the body was gone and the business of selling hamburgers and soda had resumed. That night, the not-so-distant crack of gunfire kept me up.

  Because of the violence, the neighborhood had a whiff of anarchy—real anarchy, not the theoretical world of my former roommates. In the flatlands, whole neighborhoods were left with the task of sorting out their problems. Except in the case of murder, the Oakland police rarely got involved. In this laissez-faire environment, I would discover as I spent more time in GhostTown, anything went. Spanish-speaking soccer players hosted ad hoc tournaments in the abandoned playfield. Teenagers sold bags of marijuana on the corners. The Buddhist monks made enormous vats of rice on the city sidewalk. Bill eventually began to convert our friends’ cars to run on vegetable oil. And I started squat gardening on land I didn’t own.

  As I fiddled with the door to our apartment, the new box of fowl tucked under my arm, I recognized that I was descending deeper into the realm of the underground economy. Now that I had been in California for a few years, I felt ready for what seemed like the next logical progression, something I had never dared in the soggy Northwest.

  Meat birds.

  I felt a bit nuts, yes, but I also felt great. People move to California to rein-vent themselves. They give themselves new names. They go to yoga. Pretty soon they take up surfing. Or Thai kickboxing. Or astral healing. Or witch camp. It’s true what they say: California, the land of fruits and nuts.

  In Northern California one is encouraged to raise his freak flag proudly and often. In Seattle my mostly hidden freak flag had been being a backyard chicken owner, beekeeper, and vegetable gardener. I got off on raising my own food. Not only was it more delicious and fresh; it was also essentially free.

  Now I was taking it to the next level. Some might say I had been swept up by the Bay Area’s mantra, repeated ad nauseam, to eat fresh, local, free-range critters. At farmer’s markets here—and there is one every day—it isn’t uncommon to overhear farmers chatting with consumers about how the steer from which their steaks were “harvested” had been fed, where their stewing hens ranged, and the view from the sheep pen that housed the lamb that was now ground up and laid out on a table decorated with nasturtium blossoms. Prices correspond with the quality of the meat, and Alice Waters assures us that only the best ingredients will make the best meals. But as a poor scrounger with three low-paying jobs and no health insurance, I usually couldn’t afford the good stuff.

  Since I liked eating quality meat and have always had more skill than money, I decided to take matters into my own hands. One night, after living in our GhostTown apartment for a few years, I clicked my mouse over various meat-bird packages offered by the Murray McMurray Hatchery Web site. Murray McMurray sold day-old ducks, quail, pheasants, turkeys, and geese through the mail. They also sold bargain-priced combinations: the Barnyard Combo, the Fancy Duck Package, the Turkey Assortment.

  These packages, I had thought, might offer a way to eat quality meat without breaking the bank. But I had never killed anything before. Blithely ignoring this minor detail, I settled on the Homesteader’s Delight: two turkeys, ten chickens, two geese, and two ducks for $42.

  I bought my poultry package with a click of the mouse and paid for it with a credit card. It was only after the post office delivered the box that I realized one can’t just buy a farm animal like a book or CD. What I now held in my hands was going to involve a hell of a lot of hard work.

  My first task was to install the birds in a brooder, a warm place where they could live without fear of catching cold or encountering predators. I carried the box o’ birds upstairs and set it next to the brooder I had hastily built the night before. “Built” might be a strong word—my brooder was a cardboard box lined with shredded paper, with a heat lamp suspended above it and a homemade waterer inside.

  The hatchery advised that the chicks would be thirsty from their twenty-four-hour journey in a box. So the first order of the day was to dip the birds’ beak
s into a dish of water and teach them to drink on their own.

  I picked up my first victim, a little yellow chick covered in a soft, downy fuzz, and held her tiny pink beak up to the homemade waterer. It consisted of a mason jar with tiny holes drilled into the lid; when the jar was turned upside down into a shallow dish, capillary action allowed only a bit of water to dribble out and pool in the dish. Amazingly, the chick knew just what to do. She sipped up a beakful of water, then tilted her head back to swallow. The mason-jar waterer glugged, and more water seeped out.

  I released her into the cardboard-box brooder, and she wandered over for another sip of water. Then she realized she was alone. She peeped and stumbled around the shredded newspaper looking for her companions. The fowl still in the postal box, strangely silent since I’d placed it on the living room floor, suddenly went wild when they heard her peeps.

  So I reached into the box for another chick and worked quickly. Without fail, each victim peeped in distress. The others then chirped in solidarity. All ten finally installed, the chicks quieted down. Exhausted from their journey and my manhandling, they mounded into a fluffy pile under the circle of warm light and took a nap.

  Bill stumbled out of our bedroom wearing his boxer shorts, his hair mussed. Not a morning person, he glanced at the baby birds like they were a dream, then headed for the bathroom.

  While the chicks slept, I had to educate the dim little turkey poults. They looked like the chicks but with bigger bones and that strange pucker of skin on top of their heads, which I later learned would develop into a turkey part called the snood. Their demeanor was reminiscent of chicks that had done too much acid.

  It took the first turkey poult three firm dunkings before it got the hang of drinking water. The poult resisted when I put its beak into the dish, craning its head away, struggling in my hand like a hellcat. Finally, exhausted from struggling, its head went lax and drooped until it dropped into the water dish, where it discovered—surprise!—water, and drank greedily. The other two (the hatchery had sent me an extra poult and an extra duckling, probably as insurance against death by mail) were no different. After I released them, the poults poked around the brooder, gentle and cautious. Eventually they waddled over and joined the puff pile of chicks.

  The downy, almost weightless ducklings and goslings drank deeply, using their bills to slurp up large amounts of water. When I set them into the brooder, they waded their big orange feet into the water dish and splashed around. Water hit the side of the box and splattered the sleeping chicks, who awoke and began to peep in protest. Sensing that this might be a disastrous species intersection, I lugged out an aluminum washtub and set up a separate brooder with extra water, a towel, and a bright warm light for the waterfowl.

  The baby birds were home, warm and safe. The chicks scratched at their yellow feed just like our big chickens out back did. Sometimes they would stop midscratch and, feeling the warmth of the brooder light, fall asleep standing up. The puffy gray goslings curled their necks around the yellow sleeping ducklings. A Hallmark card had exploded in my living room.

  I called my mom. A brooder box full of fowl was something that woman could appreciate. She had once been a hippie homesteader in Idaho.

  “Listen to this,” I said, and held the phone near the brooder box. A hundred little peeps.

  “Oh my god,” she said.

  “Three turkeys, three ducks, two geese, and ten chickens,” I crowed. I watched the chicks and poults moving around the brooder—pooping, scratching, pooping, pecking, pooping.

  “Turkeys! Do you remember Tommy Turkey?” she said.

  I didn’t, but the photo in our family album had stuck with me: my older sister, Riana, in a saggy cloth diaper being chased by the advancing figure of a giant white turkey. Tommy. My mom told us about Tommy every time we got out the old photo album from the ranch days.

  “Well, he was mean as hell, and he would chase you guys. . . .”

  I looked out the window while my mom described the smokehouse she and my dad had built. Bill had made it downstairs, where he was out front tinkering with our car. His legs peeked out from underneath our dilapidated Mercedes as he rolled around amid the street’s numerous Swisher Sweet cigar butts. I had warned him about my meat-bird purchase, and he had been excited about the prospect of homegrown meat, but now that he saw the baby birds—fragile, tiny—he seemed a bit skeptical.

  Tommy grew to be an enormous size, my mom said, and as back-to-the-land hippies, she and my dad had been very pleased. They didn’t encounter any predator problems that year, and butchering him was a cinch. But disaster did hit: the smokehouse burned to the ground while they were smoking the turkey.

  “Oh, no,” I groaned.

  “Life was like that,” she said glumly. I felt sorry for her. My mom’s stories usually involve some heroic hippie farm action. I hadn’t heard this part of the story before, but I knew bad things had happened. My parents’ marriage had dissolved on the ranch in Idaho, after all—my dad too much the mountain man, an uncompromising nonconformist; my mom isolated and bored.

  Her voice brightened. “Even though the smokehouse burned down, we did manage to salvage the turkey.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “We dug through the charred wood, and there it was, a perfectly cooked turkey. I brushed off all the cinders and served him for dinner.” She paused and smacked her lips, a noise that was repellent to me as a teenager but now filled me with hope. “It was the best turkey I’ve ever had,” she declared. We said our goodbyes, and I hung up the phone.

  I glanced into the cozy chick brooder. The chicks slept on their mattress of shredded pages from the New York Times. Their fuzzy bodies slumbered on snatches of color ads for watches, a stern op-ed about pollution in China, the eyebrows of a politician. I had to remind myself that though they were cute, these baby birds would eventually become my dinner. Thanksgiving, in particular, was going to be intense. I imagined the killing scene: a butcher block, an ax, three giant Tommy turkeys I had known since poulthood. I wasn’t sure if I could bring myself to do it.

  But the conversation with my mom left me emboldened for my foray into killing and eating animals I had raised myself—this urge was clearly part of my cultural DNA. I wondered if this would prove that I could have it both ways: to sop up the cultural delights of the city while simultaneously raising my own food. In retrospect, though, I wonder why I thought my experience would be any less disastrous than my parents’.

  The next day, following the suggestions of a homesteading book from the 1970s, I swabbed the baby birds’ butts with Q-tips. The long flight in a box can cause digestion problems for the chicks—namely, pasted vents. Which is a fancy way of saying blocked buttholes. So I dutifully wetted them down, plucked dried matter from their bottoms, and felt terrible when I had to tug off whole chunks of downy feathers. I wasn’t satisfied until all their parts looked pink and healthy.

  After morning chicken-butt detail, I sat in my kitchen and surveyed our squat garden. All the east-facing windows of our apartment overlook the lot, which after the past few years had been transformed into a vegetable and fruit-tree garden. I could see that the collards were getting large and that the spring’s lettuce harvest promised to be a good one. Even from inside, I could see some mildew forming on the pea vines.

  It was going to be a remarkable year; I could sense it. If my life in Oakland was a developing embryo, with this meat-bird addition, it was as if a fishlike creature had suddenly sprouted wings.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The garden—squat, verdant—started small, and in fits and starts. When we moved into the apartment on 28th Street, Bill and I halfheartedly painted our walls and hung some curtains. Then we started in on the lot, the real reason we had picked the apartment. We spent days hacking back the four-foot-tall weeds that had taken over, revealing a cracked concrete foundation where a house had once been and a large, circular patch of dirt.

  Before we planted anything, just to be safe
, I had the soil tested by a friend with an environmental-services lab. The lot being so close to the freeway, the lead from years of gas exhaust might have drifted down. Or other toxins from the house could have leached into the ground. Our friend called with good news: the soil was, miraculously, heavy-metal free.

  The day after getting the green light, I stood in the lot, trying to get my nerve up to garden. I was having a tough time getting used to the idea of cultivating land that was not my own. Cutting down weeds was one thing, but planting seeds?

  As I stood immobilized, our new neighbor Lana, dressed in patent-leather combat boots and a miniskirt, stomped into the now cleared-out lot. Everything about Lana was theatrical: expressive hazel eyes, a gap-toothed smile, and a platinum crew cut that matched the color of the fallen weeds. “Look at this!” she shouted. She held two shovels in her strong arms.

  “There’s a patch of dirt here,” I said, showing her where the yard to the house may have been. Even though she had never gardened before, Lana set to work with enthusiasm. I was glad to follow along. Her dog, Oscar, sniffed at the piles of dead weeds and did a little digging himself. Gentle for such a large dog. We dug out a small area, unearthing rusty toy cars, submerged bricks, and glass bottles.

  “Do you remember He-Man?” Lana asked, wagging an action figure in front of my face. The toy had big muscles and a bowl haircut but had been drained entirely of any color. Lana put He-Man and all the other toys she found in a small section of the garden.

  I had been reading a book from the library called Gaia’s Garden. It was a permaculture guide to gardening that promised I could create an easy-to-maintain, no-work food forest if I just followed the instructions. Plans were included for something called a keyhole garden: a series of pathways cut into a circular bed—which is what we happened to have. So Lana and I set to work.