The Wisdom of the Radish (12 page)

Five hours after I plucked Hope out of her bloody, broken coop, I dialed the hatchery's phone number. Just my luck, they happened to have all of the breeds I wanted in stock today. Would I like them shipped out this afternoon?

Feeling just a wee bit emotional, I said yes. And the following morning, one month to the day after I picked up my first group of babies, I got my second call from the post office.

We picked up the box, brought it home, settled the new chicks into the brooder. Quickly, this time, quietly. Practiced. And then we drove back to the field for the funeral.

We buried three bodies and one wing. The bodies were unnamed: two Rhode Island Reds, one White Leghorn. The wing was Buffy's. Emmett marked the graves with pieces of abalone shell, and I placed rosebuds in their hollows: two reds, one white, one yellow.

It was then that I understood what poultry owners meant when they said that chickens didn't take up much of your time—unless something went wrong. The four-bird funeral didn't mark the end of the dying. Instead, it seemed to kickstart a streak of tragedies. It didn't rain but it poured.

The following day I went into the garage to check on the new chicks and found one tiny White Leghorn mysteriously dead inside the brooder. As I crouched beside the glowing plastic crate, the hairs along my neck rose and my chest tightened. I squeezed my eyes shut. When I opened them, the little
yellow body was still there, deflated and flat, eyelids closed, legs bent, and toes curled inward.

Worried that somehow it might be getting too cold in the garage—that she might have been smothered in a pile-up, despite the heat lamp—I moved the brooder into the house. During the following morning's routine check-in, I discovered a Rhode Island Red with a broken leg, barely able to hobble. I moved her into a tissue box inside the brooder to protect her from her overzealous sisters, checked on her constantly, splinted her broken leg with a toothpick, and adjusted the angle of the heat lamp to make sure she was warm, but not too warm. Splitting my caretaking time between her and Hope—who was receiving antibiotics, a microwaved heat pad, and brief social visits with the cannibalized sisters that had been kept back—I coaxed the tiny Rhode Island girl along for days, forcing her to eat and drink, waking twice a night to try and get food into her every few hours. But her appetite was weak. After a week, she hadn't grown one bit. The other chicks were twice her size. She passed away in the night after one of my checkins; Emmett found her in the morning. Another funeral.

The day after she died, I peered into the brooder and found the rooster—by far the biggest chick of the lot, a fat jolly fellow I'd dubbed Santa—unable to walk. His toes were curled up into balls, and he was half-shuffling his way over to the food trough.

Since I'd spent the past week nursing two sick chicks, I hadn't taken the time to hold each bird each day, like I had with the first bunch. So the second flock was flightier. When I opened the brooder lid all of the chicks spooked; the fat little rooster was bowled over onto his side by the onslaught. My heart broke just a little more and I scooped him up. At least I already had a hospital container ready.

Have you ever gotten one of those fortunes that tell you too little, too late? At a rare dinner out, I was informed by a shattered cookie: For better luck, wait until spring.

Fighting fate, I turned to
BackyardChickens.com
and found a possible solution: boots. While some farmers recommended culling chicks like Santa—the trait is most likely due to a vitamin deficiency in the mother hen, but could possibly be genetic—I was willing to do whatever it took to keep this boy alive. Up to and including fashioning chick boots out of cardboard and taping them onto the feet of the rooster in an attempt to straighten out his wayward toes.

Like it or not, this tubby little rooster was teaching me something about my relationship with my flock. While he may have been just the next thing in a long line of problems, the challenge reminded me of one of the reasons why I was raising birds in the first place: to give them a good home and a nurturing protector. And if I was a lousy protector, I was going to be make up for it by being one hell of a nurturer.

The average American chicken sorely needs a better life. More than 8 billion chickens are born each year
²⁶
into unnatural, degrading conditions. About 300 million of them lay eggs, while 8 billion others are bred for meat.
²⁷
Layer or fryer, they share in common a brutal reality: overcrowding, no access to the outdoors, de-beaking to avoid cannibalism, and remorseless culling of the weak. We have come to call this modern industrial agriculture. Before the 1950s, though, the poultry business was dominated by a different way of thinking: animal husbandry.

According to author and animal scientist Bernard Rollin, “In husbandry, we put animals into the environment best suited for them to survive and thrive ... and then augment their natural ability to function with provisions of food
during famine, water during drought, help in birthing, protection from predators, medical attention, and so on.”
²⁸
The traditional ethic of animal husbandry revolves around an unwritten contract between a farmer and his or her animals. A good husband(wo)man will care for the animals when they fall ill—or get curly toes—even if it is not economically profitable to do so. Rollin witnessed this attitude among Colorado ranchers who were experiencing an abnormally high number of calves being afflicted with scours, which is livestock-speak for diarrhea. “Every rancher I met had spent more money on treating the disease than was economically justified by the calves' market value,” Rollin recounts. “When I asked these men why they were being ‘economically irrational,' they were adamant in their responses: ‘It's part of my bargain with the animal.'”

In contrast, industrial agriculture places profit, productivity, and efficiency above animal welfare. If an animal is sick, it's generally more economical to kill the animal than to expend resources nurturing it back to health. The average dairy, for instance, knocks off over 30 percent of its herd
each year
.
²⁹
If a cow's milk production drops, or she contracts mastitis, a disease, or a physical injury, her time is up. This practice makes animals into little more than raw materials or production units—as opposed to the living, feeling creatures I saw darting across my brooder each time I lowered a handful of fresh feed.

In a confinement poultry operation, Santa probably would have been immediately killed,
^f
not given a chance at survival. In my operation, he was taking a little extra care and attention, but with a bit of luck he'd be on his feet again soon. The
opportunity to treat chickens with respect and care—to practice good animal husbandry—is part of why I ordered these chicks in the first place. I wouldn't eat factory-raised eggs, but I hadn't given up on eggs altogether. By taking the responsibility into my own hands, I could ensure that the eggs I ate—and the eggs that my customers ate—were raised according to the principle of animal husbandry, which dates back all the way to the biblical tenet that “the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep” (or in this case, the chicken owner giveth all her waking hours for her chickens).

If I happened to be in a positive mood—which, quite frankly, was less often than not—I could convince myself that my series of disasters up to and including Santa's curly toes were just nature's way of reminding me of my bargain with the animals. I was their caretaker.

For four days, I carried the baby rooster around in a small plastic box with me everywhere I went. The afternoons were sunny and warm; while I weeded the salad bed, he stayed in his box in the car. Three or four times an hour, his shrieks rang out through the cracked windows and across the open field. The sound let me know that he'd managed to get his clunky cardboard boots stuck behind him again—that he was lying rather pathetically on his fat belly, head tilted back to screech. I would go over, set him straight, and resume weeding. On the fourth day, after I'd already righted Santa a number of times, he started screeching again. This time, as I peered through the car window, I could see that he'd managed to hobble through his small water dish, soaking both of his boots.

Since nothing was wrong from his perspective—by the time I got over to the car, he was quietly sitting on his damp haunches, head down in his jar lid of food—I could only assume
that he was gloating over the fact that I had to cut a fifth pair of chick boots from my rapidly diminishing cereal box.

On day five of boot camp, my toil was rewarded: I removed the offensive footwear and Santa walked. To celebrate, I went down to the feed store and picked up two more chicks to replace the two I had lost. This time, I chose a Light Brahma—a little black and yellow fluff-ball with feathered feet—and another Silver Laced Wyandotte. Emmett expressed some consternation at my purchases; in turn, I accused him of killing my joy. Feeling that I might have spoken too harshly, I named the Light Brahma Joy, and told Emmett she'd be his chicken. Besides, I pointed out, the two new girls would keep Santa company until he was steady enough on his newly flat feet to handle all twenty-seven ladies.

 

 

 

It was nighttime and a full moon illuminated the hill behind the chicken yard. Some days it wasn't so bad, this inland thing; the wind could almost be an ocean breeze, the undulating grassland the Pacific. We walked up the hill, laughing at the clarity of our moon shadows, the way they stretched out like atavistic giants, wobbling drunk over depressions before disappearing into the darkness of an oak tree.

Three foxes materialized. At first I thought I must be imagining them, figment dolphins leaping in and out of a prairie sea. But Emmett saw them too: a mother, it looked like, with two kits weaving behind her.

City Lynda would have cooed over these foxes, the striking setting, the wild moment. But at that moment, I was torn between reciting Wordsworth and throwing rocks. Thinking of the chickens, Country Lynda picked up a rock. I wasn't raised
to think of foxes and raccoons as enemies; I wasn't groomed to be a farmer. I went to grad school, scribbled poetry in the margins of notebooks while listening to lectures on biology and ecology. But as much as I was an environmentalist—one who fully understood the value of apex predators in an ecosystem—I was also a farmer and livestock keeper. One who had a little bit of trouble letting go of that rock.

But I
did
drop it. And with Santa healthy—in fact, handily beating the entire flock to the feed dish—it was in the realm of possibility that things would be okay. I still teared up thinking about the lost birds, and my caretaking involved an unprecedented level of paranoia. But the new flock grew on me. They earned names. The Silver Laced Wyandotte with the stripes running down her back became Skunk. The slightly slow, bottom-of-the-pecking-order Ameraucana who liked to burrow under the other chicks became Dozer. The white chicken with blue feet was Booby. The Barred Rock, with her black bodysuit and white dot on her chest, was Tux—and she, not the new Buff Orpington, would carry on the spirit of Buffy, the first to fly out of the brooder just to see what was going on in the greater world. Later, she'd be the first to greet me at the coop and fly to my shoulder or stand on my foot, waiting to be picked up. There was our surprise Mo, too—a White Leghorn “she” that turned out to be a “he,” with a huge floppy comb (a Mohawk) and pendulous jowls far too big for his body. He became a chivalrous rooster, always hunting down tasty treats for the ladies or performing a courtship dance for them, flaring his white wings, head bobbing.

And, of course, there was always Hope.

Chapter 4:

 

 

 

 

 

In high school, a particularly cruel physics teacher forced me to construct some sort of bottle rocket launch pad. Lost as to how to accomplish such a task, I screwed up the courage to venture into the local hardware store. Blonde, bitter, and apparently hell-bent on playing up the role of incompetent female, I wandered lost amid hundreds of different types of nuts, bolts, and other small, shiny metal objects. At some point I even started humming Disney tunes. The crappy ones from
Pocahontas
. I was eventually rescued by my pragmatic female science partner, who had managed to find whatever small, shiny things we needed, but the trauma remains.

Now I found myself in a different sort of hell. It was one with the temperature and humidity of a New Jersey summer, and approximately sixty different types of tomato starts, which were mysteriously mixed in with pepper starts and other small, bright green things. Different setting, same overwhelming feeling of failure.

I was in the greenhouse of a wholesale nursery sheepishly buying tomato plants because, well, we nuked ours. I was well aware that real farmers grew tomatoes from seed and only fuck-ups bought them in six-packs. When we explained to the owner of the nursery that we were farmers, he was confused and figured we were buying the starts to resell at market. We had to explain that we were planning on selling the fruit, not the plants (in a couple of months, assuming we didn't kill the plants first). And while no self-respecting farmer would purchase tomato starts, no self-respecting farm stand would be without heirloom tomatoes—that farmers' market icon, that sure sign of summer, that nonspherical, nonconformist, tie-dyed, sweet and succulent fruit.

That one we
didn't
grow from seed. My ego was bruised and Emmett, cooing over tomato starts, wasn't helping it.

“Whoa,” he said, and pointed out a six-pack of Black Plums. “This tag says 7/11. Does that mean it was planted two weeks ago? The thing has to be six inches tall.”