Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (21 page)

I walk past the pallets stacked with fifty-pound bags of goat chow and the rows of new John Deere lawn mowers. I glance at the bargain bin of tools and move toward the racks of vegetable seeds but pull myself away before I start fondling the packets of haricots
verts or black-seeded Simpson. I make a mental note instead: time is running out on ordering from the seed catalogs I have back at home, the ones stacked on top of the bill file.

The Holy Grail I’m seeking today, though, is the help desk in the back of the store, where a man named Larry presides like the Pope—the Pope of farming.

I don’t know Larry’s last name and he doesn’t know mine, but from him I have learned any number of useful skills: how to estimate the amount of electric fence needed for a two-acre pasture (measure, then multiply by three); what the secret is to growing mammoth pumpkins (pinch off all the early blossoms but one); and a surefire repellant for Japanese beetles (squish their kin, float the dead bodies in a bucket of dishwater, and place strategically).

I’ve followed each of these suggestions like the good little agricultural acolyte that I am. They all work. Larry is a real farmer, not a wannabe like me. He is the son of a farmer, the grandson of a farmer, and the great-grandson of a farmer. I am the daughter of schoolteachers. He has hundreds of acres and hundreds of head of cattle to match. He is a judge for the 4-H, butchers his own pigs, can surely do the big “S” himself, and probably not with a handgun, either. I have a farmhouse and six acres that my sons and I are still hanging on to, miraculously, by our dirty fingernails.

I have a
Wayne’s World
moment every time I approach the help desk and see Larry in his sporty red TSC vest standing behind it: I’m not worthy. But I am something better: ready. Ready to try something new but practical. Something docile and inexpensive and not so big that I can’t consider killing it, or so cute that we can’t eat it. Like chickens.

The boys like the idea, too. I talked to them about it on our
way home from church on Easter, and I could tell by their enthusiastic responses that they are fully vested.

“Boys,” I announced, “we’re going to raise some chickens.”

“Another pet to play with!” said Will, the idealist.

“Another kind of poop to clean up,” said Luke, the worker.

“Another animal in bondage,” said Owen, the activist.

“Rule over all the livestock on earth,” said God, the God.

Ostensibly, God said this to “man” in the first chapter of Genesis, but what if Adam was off somewhere taking a toke on his bong; then wouldn’t these directives be settled upon Eve? I mean, there was no one else around, right?

Although I have been without a husband for ten months, and although my spiritual searching began about the same time, I am so raw still, so unevolved spiritually, that with spring and Easter on my mind, Genesis actually feels like a pretty good place to start.

I don’t know about ruling over livestock, especially since I still believe that I am to blame somehow for what happened to Major, and for what happened to Rocky’s meat, but I still think I can handle chickens. I don’t tell any of this to Larry, of course. When I take my turn at the help desk, I’m all business.

“I want to buy some chickens,” I tell him. “How do I do it?”

Larry has come to expect all my questions to have a “how?” in there somewhere, and he reaches under the counter, pulls out a thick, four-color catalog, opens it up, and right then it feels like the whole earth downshifts in slow motion. The age-old chicken-and-egg question becomes immaterial. Chickens—and if you want them, fertilized eggs, too—come from the post office. The way to buy chickens is through mail order.

“Good thing you came in today,” Larry says. “It’s the last week for orders, and the hatchery is closed on Sundays.”

I look up at him, at his scratched eyeglasses, his pocked and bluish nose, and at that moment I am aware of my surroundings: Larry’s wisdom is an immediate blessing, and I think he might be the most enlightened being on earth.

Chickens from a catalog. On a Saturday.

You can order up the birds on the sixth day of the week, just like God ordered up all the animals on
the
Sixth Day.

It surprises me to consider the previously unthinkable possibility that in the months since I lost the horses, the Big Valley has actually grown closer to being a real farm, and not, as I feared, farther away. A real farm feeds the people who live on it, and we are working toward this.

I would definitely not have expected the way toward this realization to wind through Tractor Supply, but I am trying to let go of my expectations. I am getting back to basics, and what could be more basic than an egg?

I look back at the catalog. There are light-brown chickens and black-and-white-striped chickens. There are chickens with fancy feathers cresting the tops of their heads and chickens so small they look like quail. There are even chickens that look like celebrities. Foghorn Leghorn, the Kellogg’s Corn Flakes rooster, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Chanticleer. In each vivid rendering, a rooster and a hen are shown, the rooster erect and proud, throwing out his chest, the hen calm and plain and friendly looking.

“Meat or egg?” Larry asks me.

“What?”

“What d’ya want, meat chickens or egg chickens?”

He says this quietly, and with the patience of a kindergarten teacher, even though there are three people in line behind me.

Which came first, chicken stir-fry or egg foo young? Barbequed
chicken or deviled eggs? I don’t even have the birds yet and I already feel inadequate. I still haven’t decided if I’m going to kill them or not, and I had no idea meat chickens and egg chickens were two different birds.

Everything, I learn later, depends on that decision. What kind of feed you buy, what kind of coop you build, how long you plan on keeping them, and how they will get from coop to stove.

Under the watchful eyes of Larry, I decide not to decide and tell him, Eve-style, that I want both. I want it all. He nods, almost as if he were expecting this to be my answer. This is called a “mixed run.” A straight run is all hens, also called pullets. The hens, the girls, are more expensive. I’m not sure why that is, but I like it.

“Okay, now you gotta pick your breed.”

“Hmmm” is all I can muster.

Larry suggests Leghorns for my meat chickens and Ida Browns and Araucanas for my egg chickens. All three breeds can tolerate the northern Michigan cold. Before he closes the catalog and puts it back under the counter, he tells me there’s something else.

“Them Araucanas are called the ‘Easter Egg chicken’ because their eggs are light blue and light green. Ain’t that something?”

Can it get any more spiritual, I wonder, here among the galvanized toolboxes and salt blocks and rolls of chicken wire? I place a minimum order—ten egg and fifteen meat. They are $2 each for the mixed run, $2.75 each for the straight run of hens. I write a check out of my
Finding Utopia
money for $57.50 plus tax and shipping. Not a bad deal for a Saturday-morning revelation.

Seeds are much cheaper than chickens, but their catalogs are just as glorious. Some women might drool over designer clothing,
lingerie, or home-decorating catalogs but I reserve my coveting for the catalogs that offer mail-order vegetable seeds. These companies have names like Nature’s Crossroads, Abundant Life, the Cook’s Garden, Johnny’s, and Fedco. I order only organic seeds from companies based in the Midwest or at least from places in cold-weather climates. A tomato from Texas or a bean from Alabama is probably not going to make it here.

A small fire glows in our fireplace and I spread the catalogs out on the dining room table. Outside there is still snow on the ground and the trees are bare, even though a few patches of grass are showing near the old stone foundation of the house. It’s hard to believe that it will ever be warm enough to grow the heat-loving melons and gleaming purple-black eggplants that take some coaxing to ripen in our short season, but these catalogs, and my own experience, assure me otherwise.

The Congregationalists have the Bible to refresh their faith; I have seed catalogs.

Color photographs of Ox Heart tomatoes, Jacob’s Cattle beans, Tall Telephone peas, and Detroit Red beets beckon. I love the vintage names people have given these heirloom vegetable seeds over the years, some of which are old favorites that have been grown in American gardens for a century or more.

That history makes me feel connected to a whole ancestry of farmers and gardeners I labor alongside of through time, but will never meet or know. It makes me feel part of something bigger than me, bigger than my sons, bigger even than the Big Valley. All of which will, if I take care of them, still be here on this earth long after me.

I see something called an Eight Ball zucchini and have to order some, just for the name. This is a tiny extravagance: a packet of seed is only $1.50.

There’s poetry, too, in the catalog descriptions. Fedco’s are my favorite. Their catalog is just tiny black-and-white text and a few drawings, no photographs, so maybe that’s why they put so much obvious love into the writing. A radish’s “crisp white flesh has a good sweet taste with only a little heat.” And here’s to Presidential leeks, a relative of the onion: “Lincoln may be sown thickly like scallions, and bunched for discerning chefs. Will withstand frosts.” Be advised, however, that yellow tomatoes “will catface under cold or excessively wet conditions.”

And I learn new things from these catalogs, too. A parsnip pie is an amazing treat. The spicy burn in hot peppers is caused by a naturally occurring compound, capsaicin; police-issue pepper spray is made from this same chemical, just concentrated.

And if one has cause to order more than
fifty pounds
of Brussels-sprout seeds, there is a price break. I grow Brussels sprouts, too. A seed for this vegetable is the size of a small peppercorn, and I try to imagine the farm and the mother and the children who preside over such a harvest. They are superheroes.

A bush bean’s varietal description from Fedco makes me smile, though, because I think it says as much about me as it does about the bean: “Nothing provides like Provider, even under adverse conditions.”

I add three packages to my order: $6.10.

Because I’ve been busy ordering the chickens, planning the garden, ordering the vegetable seeds, and working for
Finding Utopia
, we haven’t been to church in two weeks, not since Easter Sunday.

So far, we haven’t found a place to call our church home, but I’m still determined to try. My grandma Link was a dedicated
Lutheran, and she attended the same church for more than eighty years. In her memory I rally the four of us to visit another new church this week.

I know what the Lutheranism of my childhood has to offer, and that’s not exactly what I want to pass on to my own children, so this Sunday we give a nondenominational church a try instead.

Will needs no encouragement on this enterprise, Luke is neutral, Owen skeptical. Combined, their approach to organized religion mirrors my own. And even though I can still feel those Easter hymns inside me, the Congregationalist reverend’s sermon about America’s “just war” and the place for such an opinion in a church on Easter still irritate me, and we won’t be going back.

We pick a new church to visit out of a newspaper ad. The ad is small and doesn’t say much beyond the time of worship, but it does advertise that they are a flock known for their practical Christianity and their optimism, which both sound pretty good to me. I could be the poster woman for optimistic practicality, so when we sit down in folding chairs inside a gymnasium, I am hopeful our blind-date church will turn out to be “the one.”

At the appointed time a tall woman wearing a caftan made out of wads of purple scarves sewn together twirls up to the lectern and chants a modern interpretation of a familiar Bible verse into a scratchy microphone: “But whoever takes the water I give him will never be in need of drink again, for the water I give him will become in him a fountain of eternal life.”

Uh-oh
, I think,
so it’s
that
kind of church
.

Yes, this sermon turns out to be about the innate strength of all God’s children to confront our nation’s epidemic of alcoholism. There is emotional testimony from several members of the
congregation and an overhead projector that flashes the times and locations of area AA meetings.

Owen and Luke sit next to me in our pew, and there’s not a fidget in either one of them, stunned as they are into stillness by personal tales of Breathalyzers, jail-cell toilets, and other wayward stops on the long trek to sobriety.

For the first time I realize that my sons are the only minors in the room. And then Will, who said he wanted to try going into the Sunday-school classroom with the other kids his age, chooses this moment to return to my side.

“They got stuffed animals in there,” he whispers. “And they smell like pee.”

Before I can process this non sequitur, the woman in purple marches back up front. We should use the power of our minds and the power of the Bible’s spiritual water to replace the rusty nails, the Bloody Marys, the sacramental wine.

I casually look to the left and right. People are watching her intensely, lowering their chins and praying, and even smiling and nodding their assent. Guilt, guilt, guilt is what I feel. How could I dare feel superior to these worshippers? They have all found their church home; my sons and I have not.

But still, this is not the thought process I was hoping to enter into for an hour by coming to church today. I was hoping to put my mind and my heart and my sons’ souls in a place where we could explore the way I felt days ago inside Tractor Supply. I was hoping to learn how to find God in our everyday lives.

The woman in purple flounces off and a thin man with his skullet tied into a long gray ponytail begins setting out dozens of Tibetan singing bowls in a circle. He sits cross-legged in the center
of them, moistens his fingertips in his mouth, and begins to “play” the bowls.