Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (13 page)

By meal’s end I was uncommonly satisfied and full. I looked at my dear friends seated around the table and felt humble and grateful to have nourished them. Then I piled a plate with dark and white meat and went downstairs. I paused at Mr. Nguyen’s door, then knocked. I wanted to bring him food and proudly say, This is how it used to be done in America. The plate of turkey was a tasty piece of evidence of an earlier, very different time. I thought of my parents while I stood there, about how they had once salvaged their turkey out of the charred remains of a smokehouse. I had essentially done the same thing.

Mr. Nguyen giggled when he saw the plate in my hands, just like when we had peered into the peeping box of baby birds. “Yours?” he asked as he took it with a grin. I nodded proudly. Behind him, in his living room, I saw his family’s altar. It glowed with red lights and incense.

Back upstairs, the ten guests and I polished off the rest of Harold. In the end, I was left with a carcass.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

W
inter arrived. The hens got wet. The crops grew slowly. Bobby put a tarp over the roof of his car.

Then, in deep winter, something happened to me that made living in GhostTown suddenly seem a lot less fun. January in Oakland meant cold nights and lots of rain, so at 5:30 p.m., as I rode my bike home from work at the plant nursery, it was already dark. A light rain misted my glasses.

I saw a pack of twenty or so kids hanging out on the corner a few blocks from the park where I picked weeds for the chickens. Instead of avoiding the kids, I rode right by them. Some of them were on bikes, too. I hadn’t thought much about it.

One time on this same street I had encountered a bunch of teenagers playing football. Since it had been night, I couldn’t see the ball, just twelve six-foot-tall teenagers running toward me. I had nearly pissed my pants with fear. Then the football had bounced at my feet, and I had laughed at my wildly beating heart.

This pack, unfortunately, wasn’t playing a game. One of them kicked my tire. Then a circle of kids ranging in age from twelve to sixteen formed around me. The kid who had kicked my tire, a thirteen-year-old in a puffy parka, suddenly had a gun in his hand. I couldn’t tell if it was real or not.

I dismounted from my bike. Lana’s word, “babies,” flashed through my mind. This was the exact thing I had always feared would happen. It was why I had at first been reluctant to walk around our neighborhood gathering weeds for the chickens. By now my fear had been erased, though, and I felt like I was part of this place. I liked to think I understood our ’hood’s dynamic and my place in that dynamic as the resident, slightly batty, urban farmer.

“What do you think the police will do to you if they see you with a gun?” I asked the kid. I had been here long enough to know that I wasn’t prey and that this kid was not a predator.

He didn’t say anything, just fingered the metal thing and scowled. I put down my kickstand and began a strange oration, which at its heart was motherly. I had killed an opossum with a shovel and axed a turkey with my bare hands—did he understand what kind of crazy bitch he was dealing with?

“I’ll tell you. The cops will kill you.” A dark car eased by a few blocks away. “And if they don’t, someone else will. Some other gang member. You have given them a great excuse to kill you. To just . . . execute you.”

I swallowed. I was in tears, but my heart was swelling with love for this kid. “You have to be careful,” I told him, thinking about the R.I.P. candle altars. “I care about you. Please be careful or you’ll end up dead.”

The kid made a face and walked away from me. I climbed back on my bike. The circle broke up, and the kids let me go by. A few of the group followed me and told me their friend was crazy. I pedaled slowly with them. “You have to help your friend,” I said, “or he’ll be dead soon.”

When I got home, Bill was in the tub reading a book about Bob Dylan. The bathroom was steamed up and foggy. From the wrinkles on his wide feet, it looked as if he had been soaking for several hours.

“I just almost got mugged,” I said, only realizing it then. I sat down on the toilet lid and started to shake.

Bill put his book down. “What happened?”

I told him about the kids, the gun, my strange lecture. I cried in the steamy bathroom about the stupidity and injustice in this world, the cycles of violence that seem like they will never end, and my inability to change anything.

“Do you want to move?” Bill asked, looking concerned.

I looked at my hands. My nails were ragged and my fingers were lined with dirt from working at the nursery. What if that gun had been real? I allowed myself to think. What if I had been shot for my bicycle? I knew bad shit happened in lots of places, but I had a choice: I didn’t have to live in this place with so many problems.

But I couldn’t imagine any other neighborhood where I could have turkeys and chickens, bees and the squat garden. That lot, that verdant place, destined to become condos. If I lost the lot, if the bulldozers came, that would force us to move on. Maybe Bill and I would relocate to North Oakland, which had less random gunfire and fewer muggings.

If my fate depended on the lot, I had to find out the truth. The next day I called the City of Oakland building-permit office to find out about the soon-to-be condos. In five minutes, I knew everything about the lot. Chan had bought it for $40,000 just before we moved in. His building permit had been rejected.

“Hey, the rainy season is here,” the deep-voiced permit officer told me. “There’s no way he’s going to build this year.”

I mentioned that our neighborhood was a bit rough. How could they sell condos here? I asked him, just talking out loud.

“Yeah, no one’s going to finance that,” he said.

And I hung up the phone, knowing that my garden had a stay of execution.

I also recognized a paradox: As long as our neighborhood stayed messed up, I could have my squat garden and my menagerie. Bobby could keep his improvised home on the 2-8. I might still lose some of my produce, like the coveted watermelon, but maybe that had been an offering in return for all our strange blessings. I made a pledge to grow the garden even bigger, to raise more animals, to keep going as long as we could on this chunk of squatted land.

Even while I plotted for the next spring, I felt a little sorry for Jack Chan. As a real estate developer, he’d had his plan squelched. Though his loss was my gain, I could empathize. A bold plan—in my case, a tenuous garden and a box of live poultry; in his, a lot in the ghetto transformed into luxury condos—tends to bring with it a great deal of heartache.

PART II

RABBIT

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
’ll admit it: I missed Harold the turkey. At least, the idea of Harold. It had been a delight to have his unapologetic turkeyness strutting all over the neighborhood. I did not, however, miss his incessant gobbling, having to clean up his enormous turkey poops, or the constant uneasy feeling that he might die at the jaws of a junkyard dog or take off for Lake Merritt before I could enjoy him for Thanksgiving dinner.

Having slain that last fear (literally) but still a little exhausted from my meaty experiment, I felt a touch of worry as I climbed into my station wagon and steered it north into the Berkeley hills. It was early spring, and the air, even in the ghetto, was fresh with misty rain and possibility. My wipers didn’t work, so I had to rub a rag across the windshield at red lights.

A woman I knew vaguely, Nico, had recently acquired some rabbits. I had met her while working at an alternative-fueling station in (of course) Berkeley. After paying for her vegetable-oil-based fuel, she had handed me a business card, which was a seed packet of sweet peas with her name and number written across it. We had hung out a few times, mostly at her boyfriend’s farm in Pescadero.

I turned east on Dwight and began to wind my way up a forested hill-side near the UC Berkeley campus. The sharp mentholated cat-pee odor of a eucalyptus forest wafted into my car and combined with its newly acquired barnyardy reek. Last week, delirious with our annual spring gardening fever, Bill and I hadn’t been able to borrow a truck to get our usual loads of manure. So we had improvised: We lined the back of the station wagon with a tarp, drove to the stables, and loaded up. Of course, the tarp could only do so much. Many a clod of horse manure had broken free and now lurked in the car’s surprising number of crevices.

Following Nico’s directions, I crested a steep hill and pulled into her driveway. She lived in a rustic cabin, a wooden cottage nestled deep in the forest. At her door, I noticed that chaos was clearly unfolding. Stacks of boxes cluttered the stairs. Bottles and jars of various homemade ketchups and jams stood in front of the garage. One cracked jar gently wept out its sticky contents.

“Hello?” I called up through the cabin’s open door.

Nico clambered into view. “Come in, come in.” Her frazzled blond hair looked more disheveled than ever. A few years ago, Nico had relocated from Boston to finally finish college at UC Berkeley. She hadn’t been successful so far because she was always getting distracted with some project or other.

Something skittered across her kitchen floor.

“Bunnies!” Nico shouted when she saw my eyes following the shadow.

There were four of them—two with white and brown spots, one pure white, and one solid brown—milling around the couch.

“The woman I bought them from,” Nico said, offering me a homemade pickle from a murky mason jar, “lived entirely off a quarter of an acre of land.”

“Really?” I said. “Eating rabbits?” I didn’t know much about rabbit tending, except that my back-to-the-land parents had once raised them for meat.

Nico’s plan was grander than mere survival; she had high-end dining in her sights. Rabbit had recently been showing up on the menus of fancy restaurants, and Nico, always a dabbler looking for a new project, bought three young females and a solid brown buck named Simon with the idea that she would sell their offspring to these restaurants. She couldn’t have been doing it for the money. Though her hair was matted and her clothes tattered, she was a trustafarian, a common species of Berkeley resident. Her dad was worth millions. I think she just wanted to be a farmer, even a small-scale one.

Once the rabbits were of breeding age—around eight months old—Nico planned to mate them, and after two months she’d harvest the offspring. It didn’t sound like fun to me, but Nico was always trying something different. In the short time I had known her, she had started a landscaping business, then gotten distracted by starting a catering company, and now was getting distracted by the rabbit business. The constant dabbling was a pattern, I had noticed, shared by many a trustafarian.

I reached over to pet a particularly soft-looking female. She made a screeching grunt and hid under the couch.

“These bunnies,” Nico said, “are like mini grass-fed cows!” Grass-fed beef was all the rage in the Bay Area at the time. Guilty carnivores had realized that the soy and corn fed to beef cattle could feed starving people instead. But if the cows ate pasture grass, inedible to us and starving people in Africa, then we could have our steak
and
the moral high ground.

“Sounds good, Nic,” I said. Yes, her idea was solid. But why had she invited me over? And what was up with the boxes?

It turned out there was one holdup in Nico’s rabbit venture.

“I’ll be gone for three months at Ballymaloe,” she said, slapping a baseball hat on top of her hair. Ballymaloe, she explained, was a cooking school on an organic farm in Ireland. Finishing college, it seemed, could wait another semester. In Ireland Nico hoped to learn the fine arts of preserving food, making cheeses, and, no doubt, cooking a rabbit. She took a bite of pickle. “Six at the max—there’s a Swiss goat farm that I might go to. . . .” She got a dreamy expression on her face. Nico loved, almost worshipped, farmers.

Then she informed me that her bunny-sitter had flaked out. So would I . . . ?

I hesitated. It was as if I had found myself at a party and been offered a new drug. It was one that I had never intended to try, but now, with the offer on the table, I started to remember all the good things I had heard about it.

Namely, that rabbit manure is manna for the garden. Their turds are like those of Lana’s guinea pig—round, vegetarian, and nutrient rich. Chicken manure has too much nitrogen to apply directly to a garden; it first has to be composted, or it will burn crops with its scorching nitrogen load. Rabbit poo, on the other hand, is almost like compost from the moment it passes by the bunny’s furry tail. Its nutrient levels are the perfect harmony of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphate.

I chewed on my pickle and looked out Nico’s window. She, sensing that I needed time to process, fiddled with her belongings. I could see the San Francisco Bay from her window. Nico had once come to my house and refused to get out of her car, she was so scared of my neighborhood. It’s funny, most trust-fund kids would be blowing their wad on fast cars and cocaine, and here was Nico, geeking out on preserving food and raising rabbits.

“You know that whatever you breed, you can eat, too, right?” Nico said, folding a sweater, sweetening the deal.

I nodded my head. She had heard about the turkey and knew about my tendencies. I had actually been researching a miniature breed of beef cattle when she had called. My plan was to put the mini steer out on the abandoned-schoolyard field. Alas, a mini cow was not in my price range. The grass-fed rabbit concept was definitely more feasible. Besides, the peer pressure was excruciating. I sighed and finally said yes.

Nico let out a whoop and gave me a hug. We packed the bunnies into a cardboard box and loaded them into the horse-manure-scented station wagon.

“This is going to be great,” Nico said as she threw a bag of rabbit food into the backseat. Then she dashed back inside to finish packing.

As I drove through Berkeley and into Oakland, I looked down to see that the brown bunny, Simon, had squirmed free of the box and was now perched in the passenger seat. A cold March wind blew into the car as I dangled my arm outside to wipe off the windshield. I sighed. This—a bunny riding shotgun—had not been part of my urban-farming plan. There were many things that I would have to learn about rabbits. And there was no doubt that they, like Harold, would present their own unique challenges.

The most obvious problem was that in order to get that grass-fed meat, I was going to have to kill one of Simon’s babies. Probably an adorable fluffy baby. Simon found a rip in the car seat and started to paw at the frayed fabric, as if he wanted to burrow into it.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about killing a furry mammal. Normally I would not have gone out of my way to start raising rabbits. Yet it wasn’t entirely out of my range of experiences. I had eaten a lot of rabbit while growing up on my parents’ ranch. Tastes, as they say—and I recall—like chicken.

At home, I put Simon back in the box and carried the rabbits into the backyard.

Bill was tinkering with an engine in the shed.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Nico’s rabbits,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. I put the box in what had been the chicken run, a wire-enclosed pen connected to the chicken house. The chickens were going to have to learn how to share. The rabbits peered over the cardboard flaps of the box, then hopped out.

“So what are you going to do with them?” Bill asked, warily watching the bunnies sniff their new home.

I shrugged. After the Harold dinner, Bill couldn’t stop talking about when we were going to raise another turkey. He loved the taste of the heritage turkey and the rich stock I made from the carcass.

But I, being on the production end of things, was a little less smitten with raising turkeys. Harold and Maude had been expensive. Bill hadn’t seen the receipts from the farm store where I bought the meat-bird feed. The feed had been like a new dress on
I Love Lucy
—an extravagance that would’ve set Ricky to yelling and swearing. The rabbits, on the other hand, were going to be relatively cheap.

“Breed them and eat them, I guess,” I said.

Bill made a face. Every Thanksgiving for the past thirty-six years of his life, he had eaten a turkey. He hadn’t grown up eating rabbits.

But I had. And compared to Harold, the rabbits were going to be very easy. There were no rescue trips over to the neighbors, no turkeys chortling from rooftops. The bunnies hunkered in their pen, meek and skittish.

I poured the alfalfa-pellet feed into a dish and filled the waterers Nico had given me—plastic containers embossed with the word “Lix-it.” For bedding, I tossed in some fresh straw, which they immediately pounced on and began to nibble. They seemed quite content.

T
he next day I rode my bike to the downtown Oakland Public Library. It sits on a busy corner in a nicer part of Oakland, the part with coffee shops and baby-clothing stores and Lake Merritt, a jogger’s paradise and a bird-watcher’s dream. The library was built in the 1950s and has a modernist feel to it. I walked past the homeless people using the computers and climbed the marble stairs to the third floor, past some framed black-and-white photos of historic Oakland. I paused at one, a shot of five men holding loaves of bread, one with a glass of wine in his hand. THE SCAVENGERS, a sign on their truck read. These were the famous Italian garbage collectors of Oakland; someone had told me about them at a dinner party. In the 1920s, they scooted around Oakland collecting garbage. They recycled everything—food scraps went to hog-raising operations, paper and metal were separated and reused. Even clothing was cut up and used for scraps. Now, that was American thrift at its finest. Some of them probably raised rabbits, even. I leaned in for a closer look. Their bread looked pretty good.

Down the hall, I entered the musty History Room, a cramped space filled with books that you can’t check out.

“A little young for that, aren’t you?” the librarian, a pretty blond lady, asked when I handed her the slip of paper with the call number for the
Whole Earth Catalog.

“Yeah, my mom always talks about it,” I said. The periodical had been one of her main resources for country living on the farm in Idaho.

My parents weren’t the only ones in their day to move to rural areas and try to live off the land. By some estimates more than one million young people in the 1970s moved out of cities and tried their hand at farming. The
Whole Earth Catalog
had been like the Internet for this generation of wannabe farmers.

After a few minutes in a back room, the librarian emerged and hefted a massive tome into my hands. It was oversized and featured a photo of the moon. On the back cover the words “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish” were embossed across a photo of a country road running next to some train tracks.

I sat at a solid wooden table and flipped through the catalog’s enormous pages. Reviews of Gregory Bateson and E. F. Schumacher and Thoreau’s
Walden
(“The prime document of America’s 3rd revolution, now in progress”). An ad for a book called
Should Trees Have Standing: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects,
by Christopher Stone. Whole sections devoted to windmills, composting toilets, and other tools of the hippie revolution.