Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer
Read Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer Online
Authors: Novella Carpenter
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Personal Memoirs
Table of Contents
THE PENGUIN PRESS
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First published in 2009 by The Penguin Press,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © Novella Carpenter, 2009
All rights reserved
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint “The Arrival of the Bee Box” from
Ariel
by Sylvia Plath. Copyright © 1963 by Ted Hughes.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Carpenter, Novella, 1972-
Farm city : the education of an urban farmer / Novella Carpenter.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-06017-9
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To my mother,
Patricia Anne Carpenter—you are my inspiration
PART I
TURKEY
CHAPTER ONE
I
have a farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto.
My back stairs are dotted with chicken turds. Bales of straw come undone in the parking area next to my apartment. I harvest lettuce in an abandoned lot. I awake in the mornings to the sounds of farm animals mingled with my neighbor’s blaring car alarm.
I didn’t always call this place a farm. That didn’t happen until the spring of 2005, when a very special package was delivered to my apartment and changed everything. I remember standing on my deck, waiting for it. While scanning the horizon for the postal jeep, I checked the health of my bee colony. Honeybees buzzed in and out of the hive, their hind legs loaded down with yellow pollen. I caught a whiff of their honey-making on the breeze, mixed with the exhaust from the nearby freeway. I could see the highway, heavy with traffic, from the deck.
I noticed that three bees had fallen into a watering can. As their wings sent out desperate ripples along the water, I broke off a twig from a potted star jasmine and offered it to the drowning insects. One bee clambered onto the stick and clung to it as I transported her to the top of the hive. The next bee did the same—she held fast to the twig like a passenger gone overboard, clutching a lifesaver. Safe atop the hive, the two soggy bees opened their wings to the morning sunlight. Once dry and warm, they would be able to fly again.
Just to see what would happen, I lifted the final rescuee to the entrance of the hive instead of the top. A guard bee stomped out from the dark recesses of the brood box. There’s always one on vigil for disturbances, armed and ready to sting. As the guard bee got closer to the wet one I braced myself for a brutal natural history lesson.
The waterlogged bee started to right herself as she waved a soggy antenna. Another guard bee joined the first, and together they probed the wet bee. She couldn’t have smelled of their hive anymore, which is how most bees recognize one another. Nonetheless, the guards began to lick her dry.
“Hey! Hey!” a voice yelled.
I peered down to the end of our dead-end street.
A new car, a silver Toyota Corolla, had arrived on 28th Street the night before, probably the victim of a joyride—Corollas are notoriously easy to start without a key. Local teenagers steal them and drive around until they run out of gas. Already the car had lost one wheel. By nightfall, I predicted, it would be stripped completely.
Amid the jumble of abandoned cars and trash and the shiny Toyota Corolla, I made out the figure of the man who was yelling. He waved vigorously. Bobby.
“Morning, sir!” I called and saluted him. He saluted back.
Bobby lived in an immobilized car. He switched on his television, which was mounted on top of one of the other abandoned cars. An orange extension cord snaked from a teal-colored house at the end of the block. The perky noise of Regis and Kathie Lee joined the sound of the nearby traffic and the clattering trundle of the San Francisco Bay Area’s subway, BART, which runs aboveground next to the highway.
Just then, a monk came out of the Buddhist monastery across the street from my house and brought Bobby a snack. The monks will feed anyone who is hungry. Next to the fountain in their courtyard there’s a giant alabaster statue of a placid-faced lady riding a dragon: Kuan Yin, the goddess of compassion. My bees loved to drink from the lotus-flower-filled fountain. I often watched their golden bodies zoom across 28th Street, at the same height as the power lines, then swoop down behind the temple’s red iron gates.
The monk who handed Bobby a container of rice and vegetables was female, dressed in pale purple robes, her head shaved. Bobby took the food and shoved it into a microwave plugged in next to the television set. Nuked his breakfast.
I heard the clattering sound of a shopping cart. A can scrounger. Wearing a giant Chinese wicker hat and rubber gloves and carrying a pair of tongs, she opened our recycling bin and started fishing around for cans. She muttered to herself in Chinese, “Ay-ya.”
I watched as Bobby jogged over to her. I had never seen him run before. “Get out of here,” he growled. His territory. She shook her head as if to say she didn’t understand and continued fishing. Bobby butted her with his belly. “I said
get
,” he yelled. She scurried away, pulling her cart after her. Bobby watched her retreat.
Then, when she was almost around the corner, as if he felt bad, Bobby put his hands to his mouth and yelled, “I’ll see you at the recycling center!” Just a few blocks away, the center paid cash by the pound for metal. Chuck-ling to himself, Bobby glanced up at me on the deck and flashed me a mostly toothless smile.
This place, this ghetto of Oakland, California, brings out the best and the worst in us.
Bored of waiting around outside, I headed back inside my apartment. A fly strip dangled from the ceiling, and ripped feed bags piled up near the door. A black velour couch my boyfriend and I found in the street sagged in the corner.
I guess the neighborhood brings out the best and worst in me, too. Sure, my chickens lay eggs—but the flock has spawned an occasional rooster that crowed loudly and often, starting at 4 a.m. Bees do result in honey and wax and better pollination—but they have also stung people from time to time. The garden: verdant cornucopia on one hand, rodent-attracting breeding ground on the other.
I flopped onto the couch and read the chalkboard tally that hung near the door:
4 chickens
30,000 bees [approximately]
59 flies
2 monkeys [me and my boyfriend, Bill]
That tally was about to change.
A
long-debunked scientific theory states that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” Basically that means that the order of development in an embryo indicates its evolutionary development—for example, a human embryo first looks like a fish because we evolved from fish. When Bill and I first moved from Seattle to Oakland, I was reminded of that theory, because somehow we ended up re-creating our old life in the exact same order as we had created it in Seattle. The first year in Oakland, we built the garden; the second year, we got the honeybees and then the chickens. In this, our third year of development, it was time to evolve to the next level.
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched through the window as the postal jeep turned down our street and pulled to a stop in front of our house. A man dressed in wool shorts hopped out, holding an air-hole-riddled box in his arms. I bounded downstairs. My neighbor Mr. Nguyen, who lived one floor below me, was sitting outside on the porch, smoke and steam from his morning cigarette and Vietnamese coffee wafting up together in the crisp spring air. In his sixties, Mr. Nguyen dyed his graying hair black, wore button-down dress shirts, and was surprisingly sprightly. He set down his coffee, stubbed out his cigarette, and walked into the street with me to receive the package.
The postal worker made me sign an official-looking piece of paper before he would hand me the box. It peeped when I opened it.
It was filled with puff balls. Fuzzy yellow ducklings called out desperately with their orange bills. Long-necked goslings squawked, and fluffy multicolored chicks peeped. Three odd-looking chicks with an unattractive pimple of skin atop their heads gazed up quietly from the box.
The delivery guy shook his head in disbelief. I could tell he had questions. Were we not in the city? Wasn’t downtown Oakland only ten blocks away? Who is this insane woman? Is this even legal? But years of working for the government had, perhaps, deadened his curiosity. He didn’t look me in the eye. He didn’t make a sound. He just jumped back into his postal jeep and drove away.
Mr. Nguyen giggled. For the last few years he had happily observed— and participated in—my rural-urban experiments. He knew poultry when he saw it: he had been a farmer in Vietnam before enlisting to help the Americans during the war. “Oh, yes, baby chicks,” he said. “Ducks.” He pointed a cigarette-stained finger at each species. “Goose.” His finger paused at the pimpled heads. He looked at me for a hint.
“Baby turkeys?” I guessed. I had never seen a baby turkey either.
Mr. Nguyen raised his eyebrows.
“Gobble-gobble. Thanksgiving?”
“Oh, yes!” he said, remembering with a smile. Then he grimaced. “My wife make one time.”
“Was it good?” I asked. I knew that his wife, Lee, was a vegetarian; she must have made an exception for Thanksgiving.
Mr. Nguyen shook his head vigorously. “No, tough. Too tough. Very bad.” I thought he might spit.
I closed the lid, and the peeping stopped. Mr. Nguyen went back into his apartment, returning to the blare of a Vietnamese-language television show.
In the middle of 28th Street, I held the box of poultry and waterfowl. The abandoned ghetto where we lived had a distinct Wild West vibe—gunfights in the middle of the day, a general state of lawlessness, and now this: livestock.
I glanced at the invoice connected to the box: “Murray McMurray Hatchery,” it read. “1 Homesteader’s Delight.” I didn’t think about it at the time, but looking back on it, I realize that “Homesteader’s Delight” does have a rather ominous ring to it.
Every second-rate city has an identity complex. Oakland is no different. It’s always trying to be more arty, more high-tech, more clean than it is able.
O-Town is surrounded by overachievers. The famously liberal (and plush) Berkeley lies to the north. The high-tech mecca of Silicon Valley glimmers to the south. Just eight miles west via the Bay Bridge is San Francisco—so close, but the polar opposite of Oakland. SF is filled with successful, polished people; Oakland is scruffy, loud, unkempt.
I’ve always chosen uncool places to live. I guess it’s because I was born in Idaho, rivaling only Ohio as the most disregarded state in the union. Then I lived in a logging town in Washington State whose big claim to fame was a satanic cult. By the time I moved to Seattle (living in the boring Beacon Hill neighborhood), the uncool, the unsavory, had become my niche. When I went traveling and someone warned me—speaking in low tones, a snarl to her lips—not to go to Croatia or Chiapas or Brooklyn, I tended to add the place to my itinerary immediately.
“Whatever you do, don’t go to Oakland,” a stocking-cap-clad guy at a Seattle barbecue told me when I confessed that I was going to check out the Bay Area on a long road trip/quest to find a new place to live. I made a mental note to check it out.
Bill and I took three months to explore the candidates. At his insistence, we brought our cat. Bill’s a tough-looking guy, with shaggy hair and a strut like he’s got two watermelons under his arms. His voice is Tom Waits gravel from years of smoking. He might resemble a Hells Angel, but he’s really just a love sponge who spends a great deal of time cuddling with our cat. We hit all the cities we thought we might like to live in: Portland (too perfect). Austin (too in the middle of Texas). New Orleans (too hot). Brooklyn (too little recycling). Philly and Chicago (too cold).
But Oakland—Oakland was just right. The weather was lovely, a never-ending spring. There was recycling and a music scene. But what really drove me and Bill away from the clean and orderly Seattle and into the arms of Oakland was its down-and-out qualities. The faded art deco buildings. The dive bars. Its citizenry, who drove cars as old and beat-up as ours.
Because of inexperience and a housing shortage, Bill and I wound up sharing a ramshackle house in the Oakland hills with a pack of straight-edge vegan anarchists. They wore brown-black clothes, had earth names like Rotten, and liked to play violent computer games in large groups in the common room. Sober.
At first I thought it was cute that anarchists had rules. No alcohol. No dairy products. No meat. Then the paradox started to chafe.
Forced by the strict house regulations, Bill and I would have to rendezvous in our travel-worn van in order to take nips off a contraband bottle of wine, gorge ourselves on banned cheese products, and remember the good old days when we oppressed chickens in our backyard in Seattle. And we plotted our uprising.
One night I unearthed an apartment listing on Craigslist that would set us free. I found it during video game night at the house, surrounded by a pack of anarchists in our living room. While they fired imaginary guns on their computer screens, I clandestinely scanned the ad for the apartment. It was reasonably priced and in downtown Oakland. Feeling subversive, we went for a tour the next day.