Farm City Read online

  These heritage breeds aren’t eaten much anymore. Slow Food blamed my turkeys’ distant cousin twice removed, the Standard White. Turkey breeders in the 1950s wanted a standardized bird, one that grew quickly and finished with a uniform size that would mesh perfectly with new mechanical pluckers that had been developed. With careful breeding of heritage stock, they arrived at the Standard White. Over the years, the breed has been further engineered to do well indoors, and the breasts have plumped up enormously. On a strict feeding regimen, a Standard White takes just two months before he’s ready to eat. He’s a meat-growing machine on two legs.

  My heritage turkeys, on the other hand, were growing slowly—it would take six months for them to develop fully. The difference in taste, according to the Slow Food book, makes it worth the wait. Firm, extraordinarily dark meat. More delicious breasts and thighs. They might be happier, too: The Slow Food book reported that heritage turkeys, unlike Standard Whites, can indeed mate naturally.

  My turkeys were heritage as hell, I told myself as I slobbered over the book. And the fact that they could have sex was somehow wonderful news. I was going to have the most amazing Thanksgiving feast of all time. Only three more months to go.

  Mr. Nguyen’s wife, Lee, pulled up in their battered silver car and tooted the horn, then began to unload bright pink plastic bags from Chinatown. Mr. Nguyen finished his hoeing and unloaded crates of oysters from the trunk. The night before, the Nguyens’ son had erected a giant white tent in the lot, and he was now setting up tables.

  By noon, the flimsy plastic card tables were threatening to collapse under the bounty of rice-noodle salad, prawns, steamed rice, sliced cucumbers and tomatoes, and, of course, cold Heinekens. Bill and I were beckoned down from our apartment. It was the first-year birthday party for the Nguyens’ grandson Andrew.

  Giddily, Mr. Nguyen led me to three smoking barbecues. He pulled a giant oyster from the grill with a hot pad and pried off the top shell. While we waited for the grayish piece of protein to cool down, Mr. Nguyen demonstrated in pantomime that I would first dip it into a bowl of pepper and salt, then squeeze a bit of lime over the whole thing. It was an epiphany. The rough grit of the pepper, the sweet oyster, the sour lime—perfection. I looked over at Bill, who was wolfing down oysters with Mr. Nguyen’s son, Danny, and drinking a Heineken. I noticed that none of the Vietnamese women drank beer. The birthday boy slowly shoved rice and birthday cake into his mouth.

  Once Mr. Nguyen saw how much I enjoyed the oyster delicacy, he deemed me ready for the grand treat. He handed me a largish egg, still hot from the grill, and a spoon. Sensing my confusion (hard-boiled eggs?), he demonstrated that I should tap off the top of the egg. I did so, and a yellowish fluid came out, revealing a duck embryo floating in the yolky orb. While Mr. Nguyen watched and encouraged, I scooped out some embryo, which somehow had feathers, and gave it a taste. It was like a salty Jell-O banana pudding topped with bonito flakes.

  I faked delight, thanked Mr. Nguyen, and wandered off to deposit the thing under a cabbage leaf.

  “Novella, what are you doing?” Mr. Nguyen’s ten-year-old granddaughter, Tammy, said as she caught me burying the culinary monstrosity.

  She laughed when she saw the uneaten egg. “Don’t tell your grandpa,” I begged.

  “They’re pretty gross,” she said, like a teenager, then flitted away.

  Other people at the party followed my lead, except their embryos were eaten. By the end of the day, the garden was heaped with empty duck eggs and oyster shells, some of which I later used as impromptu digging tools.

  After the party was over, I herded the turkeys back to their roost.

  “What’s that?” our neighbor the Hillbilly asked. We called him the Hillbilly (behind his back, of course) because he regularly “borrowed” packs of cigarettes from Lana, wore a camo/American flag baseball cap, and worked the night shift as a security guard at Wal-Mart. And he had an aggressive pet Chihuahua. Which was lunging mightily at Harold.

  “My turkeys,” I said. Harold gallantly protected Lady Maude by puffing up to the size of a Rottweiler and standing in front of her.

  Maybe Ben Franklin had been onto something when he proposed that the turkey should be the symbol of America instead of the eagle. These turkeys truly embodied the concept of American independence. They did their own thing and refused to sleep shut in the henhouse with the chickens. Instead, they perched on top of the chicken house, out in the cold. They could—and did—fly around the neighborhood. The third turkey, a Royal Palm like Maude, had winged off and was never seen again. I like to believe he ended up at the nature preserve at Lake Merritt, a few miles away, instead of as roadkill on the nearby freeway. There was an odd assortment at the sanctuary—a pelican with a goiter, a skinny chicken, and now, hopefully, a black-and-white-checked turkey strutting around, trying to mate with a duck.

  Harold and Maude commonly took afternoon strolls down Martin Luther King Jr. Way. Though this is a regular thoroughfare for drug dealers, sex workers, and homeless men, the sight of two turkeys strutting down MLK nearly caused car accidents. The turkeys, on the other hand, didn’t seem to mind the cars, the pigeons, or the sketchy pedestrians.

  The turkeys were displaying a form of youthful behavior biologists call behavioral neoteny. Dogs, the animals that have been domesticated the longest by man, are considered neotenates: They don’t have a species-specific sense of recognition, which means they will play with cats, goats, chickens, humans, or their own species. Dogs are also very curious, and they exhibit “juvenile care-soliciting behaviors” like begging for food. Other domesticated animals do the same thing.

  It’s thought that this is precisely how certain wild animals became domesticated. It wasn’t human will, as many people believe, or that a baby animal of the domesticated species was found and thereafter raised among humans. According to Stephen Budiansky’s argument in his influential book The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication, animals decided to be domesticated. Neotenates’ behaviors, Budiansky argues, “would all have been powerful factors in inducing wolves, sheep, cattle, horses . . . to approach human encampments and to allow humans to approach them.”

  And turkeys probably did the same. Wild turkeys, native to the Americas, were most likely domesticated 2,500 years ago. Like most domesticated species, these birds chose to associate with humans—perhaps begging or following human encampments in South America. The ones who displayed the most curiosity, had the most open minds about different species, and could ask for help—like Harold and Maude—were the most successful. Eventually they were invited to live in human settlements. Their offspring were reared in captivity, fed and sheltered, ensuring an evolutionary future tied to man. It was a good bet.

  As I explained my heritage-turkey pursuit the Hillbilly slowly nodded his head. When I started to babble on about how the turkeys were a product of thousands of years of domestication and how I was trying to reconnect to man’s ancient contract with domesticated animals in order to rediscover my place in the natural world, he seemed to be looking at me in a different way. I realized the Hillbilly now had a name for me: the Hippie.

  “Hey, you got a turkey over here,” a man I didn’t recognize yelled from the corner.

  Harold and Maude had drifted down the 2-8.

  “Can you . . . ?” I yelled. And he did. He herded them toward me by getting down into the age-old turkey-wrangling position: crouched low, arms open wide. I found myself making the exact same motions when I herded the turkeys, although no one had ever taught me this method. It’s as if it was in our DNA, an embedded dance move.

  The Hillbilly left, and I opened the gate and joined the passerby in convincing the turkeys to come back behind the fence. As we both moved slowly—arms open, hunched over—the man, who turned out to be from Tulsa, looked over at me and asked, “Where are we—Oakland or Oklahoma?” Our laughter persuaded the turkeys to retreat farther into the backyard. An ambulance then went by, and Harold gobbled out a warning.


  Your chicken came into my house!” the Vietnamese guy across the street told me. He was very upset. “We had the door open, and it just came in!”

  To me, this seemed like a minor nuisance. I mean, I once slept with a sick chicken. (Wrapped up in a towel. His name was Twitchy. He had a leg problem that never righted itself.)

  When my neighbor saw I was nonplussed, he added, “It pooped in my house!”

  Oh, dear.

  “OK,” I said, “I’ll try to do something about that.” But what? Give the chicken a talking to? Train it not to go outside our gates? In Seattle, our chickens roamed the streets with impunity. They had the run of our neighbors’ backyards, and they sometimes walked down the sidewalk. But Seattle had more of a laid-back, suburban vibe. The houses weren’t quite so close together, and the neighbors were less likely to be armed. None of our Seattle chickens had ever, as far as I knew, made it into someone’s living space.

  There was more going on than just impolite birds, though. Everyone was on edge that summer because of avian flu. It was killing people in Vietnam, where many of the people on our street had friends and family. Clucking my tongue, I went to the World Health Organization’s Web site to get the skinny. “All evidence to date indicates that close contact with dead or sick birds is the principal source of human infection with the H5N1 virus,” the WHO warned. “Especially risky behaviors identified include the slaughtering, defeathering, butchering and preparation for consumption of infected birds. In a few cases, exposure to chicken faeces when children played in an area frequented by free-ranging poultry is thought to have been the source of infection.”

  Dear lord, chicken poop could actually kill someone! It wasn’t a good time to have twenty chickens in our backyard.

  And yet I wasn’t that worried. H5N1 hadn’t reached American shores yet. My chickens couldn’t pick up avian flu, and they couldn’t give it to our neighbors, until the virus reached the United States. I promised our Vietnamese neighbor that I would get rid of all the poultry the moment H5N1 hit North America.

  Every week, though, news sources threatened that avian flu was coming. Wild migrating birds, we were told, would bring the disease through Alaska and then to the mainland, where avian flu would kill countless birds and, eventually, maybe a human.

  I bought some netting and stretched it over the chicken area so the birds couldn’t get out. But within a few hours, they discovered an opening in my avian-flu shield and were back out in the lot, in the street, terrorizing the neighborhood.

  A pandemic on the 2-8 seemed wildly fantastical, and yet I was starting to have my doubts. Especially after I read a New York Times article entitled “Avian Flu: The Uncertain Threat, Q and A: How Serious Is the Risk?” Question three asked: If bird flu reached the United States, where would it appear? The answer: “Although health officials expect bird flu to reach the United States, it is impossible to predict where it may show up first, in part because there are several routes it could take. If it is carried by migrating birds, then it may appear first in Alaska or elsewhere along the West Coast.”

  I turned to question five, “How will I know if I have bird flu?” Symptoms, the article said, include flulike feelings: fever, headache, fatigue, aches and pains. But instead of getting better, the patient gets worse and ends up dying, in most cases from acute pneumonia.

  Feeling a little congested, I sat at my table reading this news. I looked outside and saw the chickens marching around the lot. Chasing one another, pooping copiously. Suddenly they seemed sinister, out of control. Was a dozen eggs a day worth all this drama?

  And so I became a pusher. A chicken pusher. Everyone in our neighborhood had a hustle, and this became mine. Chickens are, after all, the gateway urban-farm animal. I wanted others to join in the fun. “You’ll get tons of eggs,” I would whisper to my coworkers, “lots of fertilizer.” No one in my neighborhood seemed interested, but Willow knew of some families. And then I posted an ad on Craigslist.

  I had never seen such a parade of oddballs. A surfer guy who wanted to give his wife urban chickens as a tenth-anniversary gift. A chubby middle-schooler who translated for her Spanish-speaking dad. An eyeglasses-wearing gardening teacher who wanted some hens for her schoolyard. The teacher expressed interest in getting other animals, too, and so, like a dealer, I gave her my extra copy of The Encyclopedia of Country Living. I laughed when I imagined that soon the school would have bees and then a turkey, a few ducks.

  I finally managed to whittle down the flock to a reasonable number, six, and the neighborhood gave a large collective sigh of relief.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The automotive shop behind our backyard had a ten-foot-high fence, festooned with razor wire. Behind that fence lurked the shop’s two large crime-stopping dogs. One day, Maude, being smaller than Harold and perhaps having an especially low species-specific sense of recognition, tried her luck clearing that fence in order to meet the dogs. Unfortunately, she succeeded.

  I heard the barking, her shrieks, Harold’s gobbles, and I came running. Feathers were literally flying. The cream-colored pit bull and the Rottweiler mix danced around Maude in the auto-shop yard. I scaled the fence.

  Compared to the locals, I made a terrible fence climber. Every once in a while there is a car chase down MLK: squealing tires, police sirens, engines opening up. If the pursued car careens around our corner, it soon encounters a dead end: a schoolyard circled by a twenty-foot-tall fence. Not having options, the car thieves usually throw open the car door and sprint to the fence. I timed them once: five seconds to get to the top. The cops got out of their cars, lights flashing, and watched them climb away to freedom.

  Now I got a startling reality check into what remarkable physical strength it took to scramble up a chain-link fence. The metal cut into my hands; my toes were jammed painfully into the small openings. Once near the top, I had to negotiate to an area without razor wire. My biceps quivered. I was a weak Spider-Woman. I yelled discouraging words to the dogs in my best stern voice: “No. Bad dogs! No.”

  Amazingly, instead of sinking their teeth into my ass, they backed away from Maude when I scaled down their side of the fence and landed in the auto-shop parking lot. On the asphalt, Maude lay torn and dead, her white and black feathers dotted with blood.

  I stood in the middle of the parking lot and caught my breath. The Rottweiler looked up at me expectantly. If this had been Idaho, things would have been different. My parents’ ranch dog, Zachary, wouldn’t stop eating their chickens, and so one day, after another dead hen, my dad put a bullet in his head. That was country life for you.

  I patted the Rottweiler’s head without thinking. He didn’t know what he had done. Maude’s flight into their yard had to have been one of the highlights of their careers as junkyard dogs. There was only one way that scenario—turkey meets dogs—could have played out.

  I was only a few feet from my backyard, but my house looked so different from here. Smaller. The gray paint was peeling; the stairs were scuffed and worn. I picked Maude up. Her eyes were closed; her throat was clotted with dark red blood. She was warm. Unlike Harold, she didn’t have an impressive snood or wattles. From her head sprouted a few wispy black hairs. Though her body was small, she was dense and weighed more than a chicken. Her gray reptilian feet were scaled, but her toenails blushed with a bit of pink.

  I tried to climb back with Maude in my hand. This was impossible, so I had to fling her limp body over the fence. On my trip back, the fence ripped my corduroy pants in the thigh and the crotch.

  Harold discovered Maude before I reached our side of the fence. He was acting weird, puffing up and preening around her prone body. He was doing a mating dance, I think, as if he confused her current state with readiness to mate. Then he hit his head on the ground, making a strange thumping sound.

  My eyes welled up at this curious spectacle. Harold mourned, and so did I. The injustice, the absurdity, of Maude’s death upset me. But also, on a pragmatic note, as a burgeoning
urban farmer, this was a serious setback. Maude was nearly full-grown, and she had been a lot of work, from teaching her to drink water, to cleaning up after her, to feeding her daily. Vast quantities of organic meat-bird feed and greens from the garden had disappeared down her now-ravaged gullet. I had practically risked my life to pick her weeds. And now she was dead.

  Harold was making circles around Maude, some kind of turkey death dance that I had never heard about. It was amazing. But I felt awful. I was down to only one turkey.

  Pushing Harold away after a few minutes of mourning, I scooped up Maude’s body. Her tail feathers fell off and made a trail into the lot, where I carried her for her burial. I had hoped to celebrate Maude by serving her for Thanksgiving dinner. Instead, I dug her a grave under the apple tree.

  As I laid Maude in the ground I recalled her generous spirit and remembered the time she pecked Harold’s pendulous snood, mistaking it for a worm. How they’d slept together on the roof of the chicken house every night, cuddled like hobos under the pinkish glow of a streetlight.

  I told Lana about Maude the next morning, and she cried. That it happened at the jaws of a dog—a fellow animal—didn’t make it any better in her eyes. She just hated the fact that animals die.

  I erased the 2 in “2 turkeys” on the chalkboard tally and made it a 1. I thought about my parents and their burned-down smokehouse. Bill shook his head. “What a waste,” he said. He told me I should have killed her sooner. I could tell he was starting to seriously doubt my meat-bird plan.

  Harold became a lonely turkey. His ancestors, brothers, and cousins lived in flocks. Though Harold had vaguely assimilated with the chickens, he always seemed to be looking for more solid company. So at night he scrambled onto our neighbors’ roof to peer into their window and watch television with them.