Trauma Farm (5 page)
In some ways these bipolar voices mirror human history on the planet—the demands of our male and female natures, the hunters and the gatherers, each with its blessings and dangers. Wendell Berry talks about our schizophrenic nature as comprising the exploiter (hunter) and the nurturer. Together they can make a lovely marriage but also a potentially toxic combination, depending on whether they balance each other or not. Men hunt and women gather. Skewed cultural slanting of these tendencies can lead to an endangered world—the dominance of those who hunt like heroes and berserkers, or of those who protect our nest with all the implacable compulsion of a psychotic mother.
Hunter-gatherer cultures based on sharing survived for hundreds of thousands of years. Many of them were matrilineal, giving slightly greater power to the feminine side, but history has shown us that men gravitate toward technology. The word, the plow, the potter’s wheel—all changed our social structures. Once tools and record keeping reach a critical stage, sharing becomes a lesser trait—until this century, in the developed world, where the power of the feminine principle has finally begun to rise again in everything from writing to tool use. Women now run tractors and pottery wheels, drive trucks and program computers. This is going to make for interesting times, and new possibilities for cultural change as our species faces the increasing threat of an environmental endgame.
The naturalist Bernd Heinrich believes that “our well-being is tied not so much to the structure of our society and the politics that determine it, as to our ability to maintain contact with nature, to feel that we are part of the natural order.” While it’s dangerous to generalize too much, occasionally it’s impossible not to when you are living close to the earth. It’s my belief that, because of the miracle of writing, which allows collective memory to be retained beyond oral tradition, we haven’t evolved as quickly as our tools, and thus accidentally separated ourselves from that natural order. That’s why I find myself in the odd position of attempting to write myself back into the landscape where I live.
But not on this eighteen-year-long day in the life of our farm. I shut down the computer and stand up. Tuco flies back to his cage. Outside, the morning is fresh with promise. LaBarisha, the Arabian mare, lets out a loud snorting neigh by the paddock. For her it’s always breakfast time, and when you are a beauty of the world, as she believes she is, breakfast should come regularly, which unfortunately it doesn’t always if Sharon is at the hospital, where she works as an emergency nurse, and I am locked in my room. The sheep are moving down from the field behind the house, which they find more comfortable in the dark. Since I’ve opened up the cross-fencing between the two largest fields, they’ve developed a routine. Spend the night behind the house, with the dogs standing sentinel; then drift down to the dewy grass of the lower field for a leisurely morning, and finally move up to nap beside the ponds, tug for a while at the hayrack, and wait for dinner.
Most farmers do their chores early and return to the house for breakfast, but my best writing hours are in the morning, so I do only the essentials, such as feeding the animals or opening their shelters, before breakfast (more honestly, Sharon usually does them) and then return to write until my office grows hot in the afternoon. That’s when I work the farm.
The dogs are ready as soon as I pick up the horse’s feed bucket by the greenhouse. Jen, the older border collie, glances at me with her knowing eyes, as if to say, “I’m ready to organize the farm, Boss. What should we do first?” The feed bucket is the giveaway. They bolt down the walkway; Bella the puppy, eager in the morning, deflects off a fence post and misses a turn—sliding hockey style into the page-wire fencing. But she is so young and thrilled with energy she hardly notices this spectacular crash. The dogs brake at the pasture gate, staring up at the horse, who studies them with contempt. She’s interested only in her breakfast. I dump the feed into her bucket, hung on the fence, and toss a couple of carrots in, which she crunches triumphantly.
Returning in the cool, freshened air, surrounded by the dancing dogs, it’s hard to lose heart. I glance over at the koi pond by the back door and notice the empty insect shells. The dragonfly nymphs have already climbed up the stalks of the iris and cracked open like science-fiction monsters, allowing the blue or orange adult dragonflies to emerge and unfold their lustrous wings to dry—leaving their transparent, hollow exoskeletons still attached to the leaves when they leap into the air and begin to hunt. Everywhere there’s a magic show, and I’ve stepped out of the dawn into the day, ready to let the tricks of life unfold.
I
PASS THE KOI
pond and walk around the back of the house to the chicken run’s gate, which we leave open for the dogs to patrol at night and for the chickens to free-range during the day. The gate is only for emergencies. Then I unlatch the ramp to the coop. I love the thump of the hinged door with its little wooden steps when it hits the ground, and the fluttering exodus of the chickens, cackling excitement and joy. Every morning the chickens know delight. I wish I did.
As the birds rush toward the field a ruthless cock leaps onto the nearest hen, and she crouches dutifully, wings spread and trembling. The hens that escape the sex-mad roosters of the morning sometimes won’t stop for a hundred feet. I don’t blame them.
I open the side door and check the feed and the water. When I’m raising layers I carry a woven collecting basket that makes me feel like Little Bo-Peep.
There it lies in the straw. As fresh as it’s going to get. The egg. Despite its current sorry state in factory farms the egg remains one of history’s great cultural icons. From the cosmic egg to the primordial egg to the golden egg laid by that doomed goose, this marvellous creation has long inspired our imaginations. “Whiter than an egg . . . ,” Sappho said twenty-six centuries ago. This phrase, quoted from a rare Greek text known as the
Dinner of the Learned,
is all that remains of a poem written by a long-dead woman with a fondness for young girls. It’s taken on its own beauty over the years. Kenneth Rexroth called the fragment a supernatural gleam and a delusion. When I first encountered Sappho I was shocked by the evocative simplicity of this phrase, and the shock has remained with me for forty years. An egg can hardly be called white, but it’s a phrase that means more than it means; it can also describe a cooked and peeled egg, as firm and white as a young Greek woman’s thigh. It evokes purity, the qualities of whiteness, the mythology of eggs.
How lovely the egg—within it all the miracles of creation. Besides white, you can find brown, blue, speckled, grey, and even the legendary black eggs of a mysterious bird, possibly a honeycreeper, in deepest Central America. Pablo Neruda once talked of encountering eggs in the jungle that shone like a shotgun barrel.
Eros, that libidinous symbol of Greek mythology, was born from the egg laid by Nyx, the goddess of night. Leda met her swan, and the twins Castor and Pollux were born of her eggs. A multitude of cultures—Phoenician, Egyptian, Hindu, Japanese—insisted the world was either egg-shaped or hatched from an egg laid by the creator of the land. According to the Dogon people of Sudan and Mali, the cosmos is represented by the Nommo, a gigantic egg with two placentas. The Russians have a cruel wizard named Koshchei the Deathless, who can be killed only by destroying a magical egg in which the needle of his soul is buried. The Egyptian sun god hatched from an egg. And Sun Hou-zi, the divine ape of China, was also born of an egg, impregnated by the wind. The serpent-circled egg was a key symbol of the ancient cult of Orpheus.
GALLUS GALLUS, THE RED
jungle fowl, and its variant, the grey jungle fowl, strode out of the Indus Valley into backyards at least five thousand years ago, and was more famed originally for cockfighting than for its eggs or meat. Black-chested and black-legged, it has red-brown neck feathers that shine deep mahogany. The hen lays clutches of six to eight brown eggs, an impressive number in the wild-bird world, though some birds can produce more. The partridge can clutch up to seventeen eggs. The chicken is so prolific the world is now eating more than 78 million tons of chicken a year.
The original bird was noted for the brilliant red comb on the cock. The hen was combless, unlike the majority of modern varieties. I had a combless Rhode Island Red hen for several years—combless only because, when she was young, she was struck by a marauding Cooper’s hawk that ripped the tip of her head off. Instead of a comb, she grew back a punky tuft of feathers and had a cute, thuggish look.
A real chicken can fly like the wind, melt into the jungle, and crow at unexpected moments. The scrawny, two-to-three-pound wild fowl so won the hearts of fight enthusiasts that even today, in Java, a phenomenon known as “deep play” exists—where fanatical cockfighters will stake more money than they can win on their birds.
The chicken enjoyed pride of place in the land of the pharaohs 3,500 years ago. Egyptian lords stepped aside when the cock strutted about the court, and its cry was a conversation stopper. We can only imagine the aristocrats pausing in dilettantish delight at the crow of a great rooster before it shat on the marble floor and strode off.
The chicken is impressively attractive to human culture. Biologists have estimated its diffusion rate across the planet at approximately one to two miles a year. It made it from Asia to the Americas a hundred years ahead of Columbus. Before the electronic age the transfer of technologies and ideas moved at a similar speed. I like to imagine a scholar publishing a text in Düsseldorf and the ideas reaching Paris at the same time as a new variety of chicken from the same city.
WHEN I RAISE EGG
layers, I prefer a mixed flock. Bantams are the best brooders. Their broody hens will stubbornly hatch anything short of dinosaur eggs. If you place a smooth round stone under one, it will try and hatch that too. Leghorns give white eggs. The luminous-feathered Ameraucanas have blue-green eggs.
Rare, unusual varieties like the black-skinned silkie or the Polish chicken add an amusing diversity to the flock. The Polish chicken has an extravagant tussock of feathers that falls over its eyes like the furred helmet of medieval Polish soldiers—hence its name. It’s also an extraordinarily stupid bird. One collapsed in the yard, and I couldn’t understand what had happened until I picked her up. She was gaunt, starving. I took her inside and sat her on my lap. Sticking my finger in a slice of Sharon’s rich chocolate cake, I held it up to the bird’s beak. After a few minutes she was pecking at the crumbs in my palm. Once she got a dose of sugar, I fed her some grain. The poor hen had been so blinded by her extravagant feathers that she couldn’t find the scattered scratch (wheat and cracked corn) in the grass or the feed dispenser. I clipped her feathers back from her eyes, and within days she was in the pink again, fully fed and fleshed out.
Up until the middle of the twentieth century thousands of chicken varieties thrived. The advent of the factory farm and the trammelling of commercial fowl into a very few inbred varieties have led to numerous extinctions and have critically endangered more. In the United States alone there are twenty varieties that exist in numbers of fewer than five hundred. These include famed birds like the Andalusian, the buckeye, the chantecler, the Java, the Nankin, and the Sumatran. The red jungle fowl itself is near extinction. Only a few dozen birds have been discovered that show no genetic dna from domestic chickens—the common yard rooster is a promiscuous bird.
