Farm City Page 4

  Bill was already there, sinking the shovel into the crumbly black gold. We had only one shovel, so I squatted down, facing away from the bed, and used my hands to bulldoze the manure between my knees over the edge of the truck. Bobby watched us unload the soil with a mix of curiosity and disgust.

  In February, Bobby had been kicked out of his apartment. This is why he was living in a car parked in front of his old house. We never asked why he had been evicted, though he was seeming less and less lucid, so we had our suspicions. He had become the unofficial security guard of the 2-8.

  That he lived in a series of cars wasn’t the kind of thing that raised eyebrows on our street. One neighbor, after arguments with his girlfriend, regularly retires to his car—a cream-colored BMW with the windows knocked out and replaced with Mexican-soda cardboard boxes. When we see him shouldering a bag of clothes in one hand, headed to the BMW with a defeated slouch, Bill and I look at each other and say, “Someone’s in the doghouse.” So Bobby’s new home seemed perfectly acceptable.

  Besides becoming a squatter, Bobby became a farmer, too—only his crops were cans and metal. He hauled them via a shopping cart to the recycling center a few blocks away. Like a pack rat, he also collected other items: backpacks, light fixtures, exercise equipment. Anything that once had value (but now was stained and smelled weird) Bobby would take home with him. And home was that wheelless Chevy Colt.

  “So that’s horse poop?” he asked while we unloaded the rest of the manure.

  “Yes,” I panted, picking up a bucket and scooping out the corners of the truck bed. When I looked up into our apartment, it was dark except for a warm yellow glow in the living room—the brooder box. The chicks were getting bigger—and louder. They often woke me at dawn with their squabbling.

  “And you grow vegetables in it.” Bobby was wearing a pair of antennas he made out of a girl’s headband and some tinfoil.

  “Yes, it’s really composted down, though,” I assured Bobby. I stood up to stretch my back but found I couldn’t stand up completely. I hunched over, my shoulders caved in, and gasped, “So there aren’t any bad bacteria or whatever.”

  “We used chicken droppings,” Bobby said. “Whoo, that stuff stunk. Now, this isn’t too bad.” He took a pinch of the manure and sniffed. Bobby had come from Arkansas as a young man. Many of the black people living in Oakland came from families who had migrated from the South in the 1920s to work as longshoremen for the port, as porters for the railroad, or in manufacturing jobs. Back then, Oakland was known as the Detroit of the West. In the 1940s, in what some historians call the second gold rush, manufacturing and military jobs attracted more immigrants from the South, and the black population grew by 227 percent. Oakland, once a monoculture of whiteness, became diverse when people like Bobby’s parents moved in.

  Bill and I surveyed our progress in unloading the horse manure. The truck bed was empty. The raised bed was . . . half empty. I stared at it with contempt. I was exhausted, but this was our last chance to use our friend’s truck. We would have to make another run.

  “Can you make sure no one parks here?” Bill asked Bobby. We needed the area in front of the lot clear so we could unload our next load of horseshit. Bobby nodded and went to get a shopping cart to block the parking spot. He waved at our truck as we drove away, back to the hills, back to the stables.

  We had to cross the county line to get our horse poo. Oakland’s county, Alameda, gave way to Contra Costa County, land of rolling hills, working cattle ranches, and more recently rich folks with McMansions. Lucky for us, rich people like horses. And horses make a lot of manure. Which piles up and composts away until an enterprising gardener arrives and offers to take away this jackpot of tilth and nutrients.

  The horses whinnied when they heard us drive up. I backed the truck as close as possible to the mother lode: a massive mound of composting manure the size of a small barn. The smell—horse sweat, dirt, grass, and that unmistakable odor of cellulose breaking down—was heavenly. It reminded me of growing up on my parents’ property in Idaho. Two of my favorite family photos are one of my father astride a gorgeous pinto in a snowy field and another of me riding a brown pony.

  I was only four years old when my parents’ life on the ranch finally unraveled and my mom, my sister, and I moved to town. I had my first existential crisis when I realized that it was not possible to have a pony in the city. I still remember standing in my bedroom, looking out my window, and feeling the utter horror and emptiness of my horseless life in town. Eventually I got some unicorn posters, and all was healed. Or maybe not all, because I still feel a prickle of almost religious ecstasy at the smell of horseshit.

  Our buckets clattering, Bill and I marched up to the edge of the pile. My method was to cradle a bucket in my arms and scrape the side of the manure hill until a mini avalanche filled the bucket. Bill used a shovel to scoop from the very bottom of the pile. Red worms came along with the black dirt, which was warm to the touch. It steamed a little in the chilly night air. Bucket after bucket until we filled the back of the truck. It was our third trip of the day, it was night, and our arms were aching from the schlepping.

  We paused in our bucket filling and noticed the silence. No highway noise, no car alarms or ambulances. The hills unfolded off to the east, little farms marked by a light or two. We were truly in the country.

  Driving away from the stables, the truck’s suspension nearly buckling under the load, I looked back at the massive hill of manure. It looked untouched.

  “Man, Willy’s going to be pissed when he finds out how much manure we loaded into this thing!” I said.

  “Let’s not tell him,” Bill suggested.

  Farther down the road, a fog had rolled in and enveloped the hills that looked out over the East Bay.

  “Well, we’ll just give him some tomatoes or—”

  “Look out!” Bill cried and grabbed the truck’s Oh Shit handle.

  We had almost veered over a cliff. I’m a horrible driver, once almost launching us into the Pacific Ocean while driving along Highway 1. I braked and slowed down and started to really concentrate on the road.

  “God,” Bill said.

  “Sorry,” I muttered, and we fell silent as the truck rattled down the road. With the low visibility, everything suddenly felt treacherous. A strange loneliness filled my heart, and I thought of my mother.

  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 r
ural 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 cou
ntry,” 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.