Enslaved by Ducks (21 page)

Back when we had first brought the bunnies home, I built a rectangular pen for them in the backyard by throwing up a run of fencing alongside the duck pen, and I use the words “throwing up” deliberately. My results looked just that professional. After the siblings became dysfunctional, I was forced to add yet another fence to divide the enclosure into separate territories for Messrs. Hatfield and McCoy.

“With this, my days of building pens are done forever!” I must have hollered as a challenge to the gods when my labors had come
to an end. I have no other explanation for the Herculean construction project that was set in motion when Linda’s newfound friend LuAnne phoned about an advertisement she had spotted in a local weekly shopping newspaper called the
Buyers Guide
. Linda had met LuAnne the previous year when her son performed pet-sitting duties for us during our Amish-watching vacation in Pennsylvania, and LuAnne’s devotion to animals put ours to shame. Her house pets included an orphaned Green-Winged Teal named Terry who lived in her upstairs Jacuzzi. While paddling in crystal-clear water strewn with floating romaine-lettuce-leaf treats, Terry also had the option of nibbling from a row of bowls that curved along the edge of his tub. His smorgasbord included Cheerios, freshly grated filberts, succulent garden peas, sweet corn sliced off a cob each morning, and occasional dollops of pasta.

“I talked to the poor woman who placed this ad in the newspaper,” LuAnne explained gravely to Linda. “She was chopping up an onion for dinner when she happened to look out the window. And can you believe the knife slipped and she nearly cut off all her fingers? She had to take a leave of absence from Amway, and now she can’t afford to keep her animals, so she’s giving away two ducks.”

“Sweetheart,” entreated Linda, “Could we maybe take a couple of nice ducks in need of a good home? Before you say no, just listen,” and she told me the tearful onion tale.

Three ducks, five ducks, I didn’t see what difference two more ducks could make and enthusiastically replied, “I don’t know. I guess.”

“LuAnne said the lady has a couple of geese.”

“Geese!”

“I told her no.”

“Definitely not.” A goose was a vicious annoyance with wings. In my graduate-school days in San Francisco, I would hike to
Golden Gate Park from my Willard Street apartment and throw stale cookies to appreciative tame ducks. I stopped feeding them the afternoon a large white goose took exception to the quality of my offerings and rose from the water to energetically bite my leg. More recently, Linda and I had been admiring a scenic pond and Victorian gazebo near the West Michigan town of Cedar Springs, when a gang, not a gaggle, of domestic geese rousted us from the area. A goose was the last thing I ever wanted to own.

A woman with a bandaged hand took us around the side of an attractive ranch-style home and into a backyard as scarred and denuded of vegetation as Rupert Murdoch’s place. A ring of fencing housed a pair of the fattest ducks I had laid eyes on to date along with a clamorous pair of geese. The enclosure was so decrepit, my pathetic pens evoked the grandeur of Chartres Cathedral in comparison. A loose corral of four-foot-tall wire fencing fixed to the ground by a few wooden spears kept the ducks and geese confined by virtue of their own lack of will. More miraculous than the waterfowls’ failure to push their way through the makeshift gate was their survival in this sorry jail in the face of raccoons, owls, foxes, dogs, and even coyotes. I could only guess that these nighttime hunters feared that the pen might collapse on them if they set foot inside.

Plump as penguins, the two Khaki Campbell males, Stewart and Trevor, easily lived up to Rupert Murdoch’s show-duck claims. Their necks, chests, and shoulders were a buttery caramel that grew pale around their wings. Their lower backs and tails were cocoa colored. More arresting were their upper necks and heads, which appeared to be the same shade of brown as their backs, but glinted iridescent green when hit by just the right angle of light. Equally striking was the incredible roundness of their breasts, which gave each duck the bearing of a pampered pasha who expected to receive his weight in gold on his next birthday.

“Will male ducks be all right with our females?” I asked no one in particular, and no one duly answered.

“The geese sure will miss Stewart and Trevor,” the woman lamented above a din that could only have been matched by my sticking my head under the hood of a car while someone punched the horn. But I had to admit being attracted to the geese. They winningly balanced the attributes of bluster and shyness, first honking threateningly with their necks extended and their heads nearly touching the ground, then straightening to dance away on timid tippy-toes. Far from menacing her, as I had expected, they approached with embarrassed awkwardness. By any reckoning, the pair was beautiful. Caressing their necks and shoulders was a grayish white so silky that, as with Howard’s back, my fingers yearned to touch it. A slightly fluffy brown-gray stripe resembling a mane slid down their heads and necks, enveloping their eyes. Their lower backs and tails were solid white. White and black played upon the folded wings. Their faces were kindly and quizzical. Their mannerisms projected a sense of vulnerability at odds with my conception of gooseness. I was hopelessly in love.

“Sweetheart, she says their names are Liza and Hailey, and they were raised with the ducks by the little girl.”

“Then we shouldn’t separate them,” I answered, after the pretense of a meditative pause. “It wouldn’t be right,” I said, frowning, secretly overjoyed that I was getting the last thing I had ever wanted.

A duck pen capable of comfortably holding three, four, or even five ducks proved woefully too small, once two African geese joined the flock. At first blush, the challenge seemed to be simply a matter of maintaining reasonable standards of cleanliness. The goose sisters profusely soiled the straw bedding at twenty-minute intervals, creating an ecological disaster every two days. Weary of hauling out armloads of soggy, smelly straw, I hatched a plan for a presumably maintenance-free waterfowl pen substrate. Unfortunately,
the solution demanded the two things of me I’ve hated my whole life: hard work and getting dirty. Decades parked in front of a computer screen had left me with the stamina of a petunia. Running the weed-eater around a few rocks ruined me for an entire day. Yet I still concocted a project that would have daunted even a healthy person.

For vague reasons that blinded me at the time with their brilliance, I decided to model a waste-disposal system based on the concept of the bed of an aquarium, even though an underwater ecosystem had nothing in common with our backyard. Nevertheless, I soldiered on with the idea, beginning with a trip to the hardware store and the selection of a dozen fifty-pound bags of sterilized white sand for the bottom filtration layer. Back outside in the parking lot, I was on my own conveying the sandbags from a wooden skid to my car trunk. The compact dimensions of the bags suggested that the manufacturer had printed the
50 LBS
. boast on the label with a wink. Nothing the size of a flour sack could be difficult to heft, I figured. But once I had locked my hands around a sack, the only thing that moved when I straightened my body was vertebrae slipping. Huffing and puffing in Sumo-wrestler fashion, I managed to transfer eleven of the twelve bags to my car before collapsing in the front seat. I decided to consider the abandoned twelfth bag a tip.

While my body toyed with a state of shock, I began plopping the sandbags into the old wheelbarrow, slitting them open, and trucking the loose sand down to the pen. Our clay-hard, rockstrewn backyard soil suddenly became as unstable as swamp muck, miring my wheels if I moved slower than a gallop. Dumping the sand was sickeningly anticlimactic. My backbreaking labors yielded a granular deposit slightly less substantial than that of confectioner’s sugar on a doughnut. I trudged on to the pea gravel,
nevertheless. Between the thoroughfare of Fulton Street and our barn, silhouetted against a troubled sky, loomed magnificent Pea Gravel Mountain. The mighty dome had been deposited the day before by Tip-Top Gravel Company, and like the mythical bird that given an infinitude of time grinds down Everest by swiping its beak against the cliffs, I commenced chipping at the base with my shovel.

The haul from the gravel pile to the maw of the duck pen—across the side lawn, around the pine trees, past the pump house, between the house and the milk house, through the backyard gate, across the cement deck, down the hill, amid a knot of disbelieving ducks and geese—became my own miniscule trail of tears. That day, I trucked just enough gravel to cover the embarrassingly unimpressive dusting of sand. The following day, I lay in bed, nursing my aching arms, rubbery legs, twitching shoulder muscles, and locked-up lower back. The third day, I complained about how much work was left to do as a substitute for doing the work. The fourth day, my mind mercifully overloaded upon its reminiscence of the initial wheelbarrow load, erasing the entire experience from my memory.

The next five afternoons after work, as soon as I let the ducks and geese out of their pen to frolic unemployed in the yard, I submitted to the slavery of the shovel. To ease the pain, I sang prison work songs under my breath. Depending on how high I heaped the stones, each wheelbarrow weighed between 175 and 250 pounds. Once I managed to set it in motion, it was loath to stop without banging me up in some fashion, especially during the thrilling plunge down the backyard hill, when I switched roles from cart pusher to dragging victim. When the task was finally finished, I had managed to transmute a mountain of gravel into a molehill-deep layer distributed across the pen.

Amazingly, the aptly named pea gravel functioned exactly as planned. No matter how vigorously or how often the ducks and geese exercised their digestive systems, a quick blast of the hose dispersed the pea-green blobs and sent the unmentionable molecules hurtling through the aggregation of pebbles. Huge boulders that had belched forth from the Earth during the Precambrian Era had waited patiently hundreds of millions of years until their girth had sufficiently diminished to adequately perform these toilet duties for our pets, and we were grateful to every last little stone. We looked ahead to years of trouble-free pen-cleaning, never dreaming of the strange permutations that the gravel bedding would undergo before long. Suffice it to say that three decades hence, when developers convert our property into a gravel pit, excavation will be halted by the discovery of a mysterious rectangular artifact more resistant to air hammers than any other substance on the planet.

Even with the pen flooring suddenly clean enough that a duck could—and would—eat a meal off it, the enclosure was clearly too small for its occupants. It was partly the sheer biomass of five ducks and two geese that caused overcrowding. But the main problem was the romantic interest the male Khaki Campbells started to demonstrate toward all five females, and we knew the situation would worsen as the young lads matured. There was no escaping it. I was doomed to enlarge the pen. Given the choice between hiring Dell to abuse my intelligence or abusing myself, I decided to undertake the construction of a brand-new poultry wing, assisted by my good friend, Bill Holm, the only person I knew whose mechanical ineptitude dwarfed mine.

I first met Bill after returning to the Grand Rapids area from graduate school in 1978. I was certain that my Master of Arts degree in English/Creative Writing would be a boon to any company, and the princely offer of $3.00 per hour from a textbook publisher
established the value of my education. When the publisher called with the job offer, I explained that I had anticipated a living wage. After careful consideration, he grudgingly raised my hourly boon to $3.01. Next stop was a newspaper, the weekly voice of a posh pseudo-suburb that offered me a better deal in the role of typesetter and layout artist, two positions about which I knew nothing. Bill was supposed to interview me, but couldn’t be bothered to keep the appointment. I ended up working at the paper for two years, worming my way from the composing room to the editorial office, where the magnificent Mr. Holm held court. On my first journalistic assignment, covering a school board meeting, when I asked Bill a question, he held me off, saying, “The writing window is closed.”

Despite this rough beginning, Bill and I became good enough friends that we ended up sharing an apartment that was complete with all the troubles old houses bring. One particularly cold winter day, the water spigot in the kitchen refused to spig because the pipe was frozen. On Bill’s suggestion, we placed a space heater under the sink and blasted the pipes with incendiary temperatures for an hour without effect. That we tried this in a second-story apartment when the frozen water line hid in the bowels of the basement demonstrated not only our profound ignorance of plumbing principles, but also a pitiful lack of common sense. Later when Bill and Carol married, they requested my help building a backyard shed from a kit. We managed to use and connect all the pieces, although the lean-to appearance of the finished product failed to represent the builder’s art. But helping Bill had put him in my debt. Anyway, I had no one else to ask.

In order to put Bill to his best use—lifting and holding things I was too weak to lift and hold without help—I did as much of the basic work as I could ahead of time, keeping every aspect of the project as unchallenging as possible. For example, I had decided
to expand the duck pen by exactly eight feet for the simple reason that eight-foot boards were a standard length. The fewer cuts I needed to make with my brand-new circular saw, the fewer were my chances of lopping off my fingers. Half of the expansion would be for the female ducks and geese. The other half would be a separate pen for the increasingly naughty male ducks. That meant putting in a second entrance. Duplicating the plank door that Dell had made didn’t seem complicated. I laid the cut boards side-by-side and connected them with crosspieces to eventually yield an approximate twin to Dell’s design. But while Dell’s door retained the same fixed rectangular shape at all times, mine formed a different parallelogram whenever I moved it, compelling me to add diagonal bracing that his somehow didn’t require.