Small Wonder (12 page)

I was trained as a biologist, and I can appreciate the challenge and the technical mastery involved in isolating, understanding, and manipulating genes. I can think of fascinating things I'd like to do as a genetic engineer. But I only have to stand still for a minute and watch the outcome of thirty million years' worth of hummingbird evolution transubstantiated before my eyes into nest and egg to get knocked down to size. I have held in my hand the germ of a plant engineered to grow, yield its crop, and then murder its own embryos, and there I glimpsed the malevolence that can lie in the heart of a profiteering enterprise. There once was a time when Thoreau wrote, “I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” By the power vested in everything living, let us keep to that faith. I'm a scientist who thinks it wise to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer's whip and chair, but with the reverence humankind has traditionally summoned for entering places of worship: a temple, a mosque, or a cathedral. A sacred grove, as ancient as time.

M
y daughter is in love. She's only five years old, but this is real. Her beau is shorter than she is, by a wide margin, and she couldn't care less. He has dark eyes, a loud voice, and a tendency to crow. He also has five girlfriends, but Lily doesn't care about that, either. She loves them all: Mr. Doodle, Jess, Bess, Mrs. Zebra, Pixie, and Kiwi. They're chickens. Lily likes to sit on an overturned bucket and sing to them in the afternoons. She has them eating out of her hand.

It began with coveting our neighbor's chickens. Lily would volunteer to collect the eggs, and then she offered to move in with them. Not the neighbors, the chickens. She said if she could have some of her own, she would be the happiest girl on earth. What parent could resist this bait? Our life style could accommodate a laying flock; my husband and I had kept poultry before, so we knew it was a project we could manage, and a responsibility Lily could handle largely by herself. I understood how much that meant to her when I heard her tell her grandmother, “They're going to be just
my
chickens, Grandma. Not even one of them will be my sister's.” To be five years old and have some other life form entirely under your control—not counting goldfish or parents—is a majestic state of affairs.

So her dutiful father built a smart little coop right next to our large garden enclosure, and I called a teenage friend who might, I suspected, have some excess baggage in the chicken department. She raises championship show chickens, and she culls her flock tightly. At this time of year she'd be eyeing her young birds through their juvenile molt to be sure every feather conformed to the gospel according to the chicken-breeds handbook, which is titled, I swear,
The Standard of Perfection.
I asked if she had a few feather-challenged children that wanted adoption, and she happily obliged. She even had an adorable little bantam rooster that would have caused any respectable chicken-show judge to keel over—the love child of a Rose-comb and a Wyandotte. I didn't ask how it happened.

In Lily's eyes
this
guy, whom she named Mr. Doodle, was the standard of perfection. We collected him and a motley harem of sweet little hens in a crate and brought them home. They began to scratch around contentedly right away, and Lily could hardly bear to close her eyes at night on the pride she felt at poultry ownership. Every day after feeding them she would sit on her overturned bucket and chat with them about the important things.
She could do this for an hour, easily, while I worked nearby in the garden. We discovered that they loved to eat the weeds I pulled, and the grasshoppers I caught red-handed eating my peppers. We wondered, would they even eat the nasty green hornworms that are the bane of my tomato plants?
Darling
, replied Mrs. Zebra, licking her non-lips,
that was to die for.

I soon became so invested in pleasing the hens, along with Lily, that I would let a fresh green pigweed grow an extra day or two to get some size on before pulling it. And now, instead of carefully dusting my tomato plants with Bacillus spores (a handy bacterium that gives caterpillars a fatal bellyache), I allow the hornworms to reach heroic sizes, just for the fun of throwing the chickens into conniptions. Growing hens alongside my vegetables, and hornworms and pigweeds as part of the plan, has drawn me more deeply into the organic cycle of my gardening that is its own fascinating reward.

Watching Mr. Doodle's emergent maturity has also given me, for the first time in my life, an appreciation for machismo. At first he didn't know what to do with all these girls; to him they were just competition for food. Whenever I tossed them a juicy bug, he would display the manners of a teenage boy on a first date at a hamburger joint, rushing to scarf down the whole thing, then looking up a little sheepishly to ask, “Oh, did you want some?” But as hormones nudged him toward his rooster imperatives, he began to strut with a new eye toward his coopmates. Now he rushes up to the caterpillar with a valiant air, picking it up in his beak and flogging it repeatedly against the ground until the clear and present danger of caterpillar attack has passed. Then he cocks his head and gently approaches Jess or Bess with a throaty little pickup line, dropping the defeated morsel at her feet. He doles out the food equitably, herds his dizzy-headed girls to the roost when it's time for bed, and uses an impressive vocabulary to address their specific needs: A low, monotonous cluck calls them
to the grub; a higher-pitched chatter tells them a fierce terrestrial carnivore (our dog) is staring balefully through the chicken-wire pen; a quiet, descending croak warns “Heads up!” when the ominous shadow of an owl or hawk passes overhead. Or a dove, or a bumblebee—OK, this isn't rocket science. But he does his job. There is something very touching about Mr. Doodle when he stretches up onto his toes, shimmies his golden-feather shawl, throws back his little head, and cries—as Alexander Haig did in that brief moment when he thought he was president—“As of now, I
am
in control!”

With the coop built and chickens installed, all we had to do now was wait for our flock to pass through puberty and begin to give us our daily eggs. We were warned it might take a while because they would be upset by the move and would need time for emotional adjustment. I was skeptical about this putative pain and suffering; it is hard to put much stock in the emotional life of a creature with the I.Q. of an eggplant. Seems to me you put a chicken in a box, and she looks around and says, “Gee, life is a box.” You take her out, she looks around and says, “Gee, it's sunny here.” But sure enough, they took their time. Lily began each day with high hopes, marching out to the coop with cup of corn in one hand and my twenty-year-old wire egg-basket in the other. She insisted that her dad build five nest boxes in case they all suddenly got the urge at once. She fluffed up the straw in all five nests, nervous as a bride preparing her boudoir.

I was looking forward to the eggs, too. To anyone who has eaten an egg just a few hours' remove from the hen, those white ones in the store have the charisma of day-old bread. I looked forward to organizing my family's meals around the pleasures of quiches, Spanish tortillas, and soufflés, with a cupboard that never goes bare. We don't go to the grocery very often; our garden produces a good deal of what we eat, and in some seasons nearly all of it. This is not exactly a hobby. It's more along the lines of religion,
something we believe in the way families believe in patriotism and loving thy neighbor as thyself. If our food ethic seems an unusual orthodoxy to set alongside those other two, it probably shouldn't. We consider them to be connected.

Globally speaking, I belong to the 20 percent of the world's population—and chances are you do, too—that uses 67 percent of the planet's resources and generates 75 percent of its pollution and waste. This doesn't make me proud. U.S. citizens by ourselves, comprising just 5 percent of the world's people, use a quarter of its fuels. An average American gobbles up the goods that would support thirty citizens of India. Much of the money we pay for our fuels goes to support regimes that treat their people—particularly their women—in ways that make me shudder. I'm a critic of this shameful contract, and of wasteful consumption, on general principles. Since it's nonsensical, plus embarrassing, to be an out-spoken critic of things you do yourself, I set myself long ago to the task of consuming less. I never got to India, but in various stages of my free-wheeling youth I tried out living in a tent, in a commune, and in Europe, before eventually determining that I could only ever hope to dent the salacious appetites of my homeland and make us a more perfect union by living
inside
this amazing beast, poking at its belly from the inside with my one little life and the small, pointed sword of my pen. So this is where I feed my family and try to live lightly on the land.

The Union of Concerned Scientists notes that there are two main areas where U.S. citizens take a hoggish bite of the world's limited resources and fuels. First is transportation. Anybody would guess this. I'm lucky, since I can commute from bedroom to office in my fuzzy slippers, by way of the coffeepot in the kitchen. We get the kids to school via bus and carpool and organize our errands so trips to town are minimized. I have lived some years of my adulthood without a car (it's easier in Europe), though for now I have one. I hope soon to trade it in for one of
those electric-hybrid station wagons that gets forty-eight miles per gallon. Ironically, my interests in conservation and the personal act as political have led me into a career that garners me hundreds of invitations a year to burn jet fuel in order to spread my gospel. I solve this dilemma, imperfectly, by sticking mostly to recycled paper as the medium of that gospel and turning down ninety-nine invitations out of a hundred, taking only the trips that somehow promise me a story whose telling will have been worth its purchase. So in the realm of transporting myself, so long as I can avoid the wild-goose chase of a book tour, I can live within fairly modest means.

Gas-guzzling area number two, and this may surprise you, is our diet. Americans have a taste for food that's been seeded, fertilized, harvested, processed, and packaged in grossly energy-expensive ways and then shipped, often refrigerated, for so many miles it might as well be green cheese from the moon. Even if you walk or bike to the store, if you come home with bananas from Ecuador, tomatoes from Holland, cheese from France, and artichokes from California, you have guzzled some serious gas. This extravagance that most of us take for granted is a stunning energy boondoggle: Transporting 5 calories' worth of strawberry from California to New York costs 435 calories of fossil fuel. The global grocery store may turn out to be the last great losing proposition of our species.

Most Americans are entangled in a car dependency not of our own making, but nobody
has
to eat foods out of season from Rio de Janeiro. It's a decision we remake daily, and an unnecessary kind of consumption that I decided some time ago to try to expunge from my life. I had a head start because I grew up among farmers and have found since then that you can't take the country out of the girl. Wherever I've lived, I've gardened, even when the only dirt I owned was a planter box on an apartment balcony. I've grown food through good times and bad, busy and slow, richer
and poorer—especially poorer. When people protest that gardening is an expensive hobby, I suggest they go through their garden catalogs and throw out the ones that offer footwear and sundials. Seeds cost pennies apiece or less. For years I've grown much of what my family eats and tried to attend to the sources of the rest. As I began to understand the energy crime of food transportation, I tried to attend even harder, eliminating any foods grown on the dark side of the moon. I began asking after the processes that brought each item to my door: what people had worked where, for slave wages and with deadly pesticides; what places had been deforested; what species were being driven extinct for my cup of coffee or banana bread. It doesn't taste so good when you think about what died going into it.

Responsible eating is not so impossible as it seems. I was encouraged in my quest by
This Organic Life
, a compelling book by Joan Dye Gussow that tells how, and more important
why,
she aspired to and achieved vegetable self-sufficiency. She does it in her small backyard in upstate New York, challenging me to make better use of my luxuries of larger space and milder clime. Sure enough, she's right. In the year since I started counting, I've found I need never put a vegetable on my table that has traveled more than an hour or so from its home ground to ours.

I should explain that I do this in the
places
where I live, because I am not I, but we. My husband and I met in our late thirties; he had already grown deep roots in a farming community in southern Appalachia. I had roots of my own, plus a kid, in my little rancho outside Tucson, Arizona. So our marriage is a more conspicuous compromise than most: We all live out the school year in the Southwest and spend the summer growing season in Appalachia. By turns we work two very different farms, both of which we share with other families who inhabit them year-round so nothing has to lie very fallow or stand empty. Eventually, when we've fulfilled all our premarital obligations, we'll settle in
one place. Until then I blow some of the parsimony of my daily bedroom-slipper commute on one whopper of an annual round trip, but it's a fine life for a gardener. In the mild winters of Tucson, where we get regular freezes but no snow, we grow the cool-weather crops that can take a little frost: broccoli, peas, spinach, lettuce, Chinese vegetables, garlic, artichokes. And in the verdant southern summers, we raise everything else: corn, peppers, green beans, tomatoes, eggplants, too much zucchini, and never enough of the staples (potatoes, dried beans) that carry us through the year. Most of whatever else I need comes from the local growers I meet at farmers' markets. Our family has arrived, as any sentient people would, at a strong preference for the breads and pasta we make ourselves, so I'm always searching out proximate sources of organic flour. Just by reading labels, I have discovered I can buy milk that comes from organic dairies only a few counties away; in season I can often get it from my neighbors, in exchange for vegetables; and I've become captivated by the alchemy of creating my own cheese and butter. (Butter is a sport; cheese is an art.) Wine-making remains well beyond my powers, but fortunately good wine is made in both Arizona and Virginia, and in the latter state I am especially glad to support some neighbors in a crashing tobacco-based economy who are trying to hold on to their farms by converting them to vineyards. Somewhere near you, I'm sure, is a farmer who desperately needs your support, for one of a thousand reasons that are pulling the wool out of the proud but unraveling traditions of family farming.