Farm City_ The Education Of An Urban Farmer Part 13

We sat in Grandma's kitchen and watched her cook as she told us fis.h.i.+ng stories. Carlos joined us at the table with a small bottle of Cisco, a red malt liquor, glad that I hadn't brought any Swiss chard. One time, she and Carlos caught one hundred catfish, Grandma said. They had to put them in the bathtub to be cleaned. Grandma showed us a photo of the fish in the bathtub.

"Hon, you want cake or cobbler?" she asked.

I began to salivate. To eat cake, something made almost entirely out of flour and sugar, a dense load of carbs, well, I would take that. Especially when the cake had pink frosting. Technically, based on my rule number five (Bartering allowed, but only for crops grown by other farmers), I was cheating. Grandma wasn't a farmer. She was a hunter-gatherer. But for me, after almost a month of the 100-yard diet, I started to see boundaries and categories in a different way. Farmers, who had lately become cult figures, were just trying to survive. My sn.o.bbery around food had evaporated. Plus, I really wanted some cake.

Bill and I returned home, lugging our almost bursting Styrofoam takeout containers down the dark street.

Then we saw Bobby.

He had relocated one block up. He looked good. He had clean clothes and was wearing shoes.

"They're taking care of me now," he said as we hugged, and he gestured to the big guys in front of Grandma's. I felt bad. Why hadn't I helped him?

Bobby told us he had a new place with a "million-dollar view"-of the highway. He pointed to his spot, and I saw he had built an altar on top of an electrical box to mark it.

"I love you guys!" Bobby yelled.

"We love you!" I yelled. And I meant it. We really missed Bobby.

I lived off Grandma's dinner for three days, like a cougar feasting on a deer. I was happiest about the fish, because I knew Grandma had caught it herself, and I remember the photos of her standing there, proudly holding up her mess of fish. The rest of the food-the homemade potato salad, the mac and cheese, the fluorescently pink cake, a dab of collards from my garden-it was good, too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT.

Two days before August 1, I saw a newspaper lying in our lot, in the duck area. It was early in the morning, and I didn't have my gla.s.ses on. I peered down but didn't see any of the ducks waddling back and forth.

When I walked out to the duck yard, I was greeted by silence. The birds had been ma.s.sacred. One of the ducks had been ambushed while he slept-he still had his head tucked under his wing. Another had made it-or been carried-over the pen's gate. The geese were dead, too, on opposite sides of the yard, as if they had tried to fend off whatever had killed them but had been divided, finally, and died alone.

It was a beautiful sunny day, still cool in the morning as I stood there looking at the gra.s.sy area littered with feathered corpses. White feathers on green-it was strangely peaceful. The animals had only a small puncture or two on their backs.

I kneeled down to touch their bodies in the gra.s.s. They were freshly killed, still warm. Peg, our hillbilly neighbor, walked past wheeling a bundle of laundry.

She called in, "Everything OK?"

"No," I said. "They're all dead."

"I saw 'em. A pack of stray dogs run outta here around six this morning," she said.

Stray dogs-this place was really getting third world, apocalyptic.

She continued on to the Laundromat down the street. And I got my pruners and cut off the birds' heads. I wasn't as sentimental as I had been with Maude or the duck and goose killed by the opossum. I let these birds bleed into the ground.

Later I carried the bodies upstairs and hung them from the shower rod by their webbed feet. I put some water on to boil. Even in my despair, I couldn't help but notice how beautiful they all looked, hanging there like bounty from a hunting trip. My bathroom had been transformed into a hunting lodge.

I had never experienced such abundance in all my time on the farm. Two geese and five ducks. What usually is a celebration of a farm animal's life, the melding of its body with mine, became a salvage job. I wondered if it was prudent to eat the meat at all. But I was hungry, and the work of processing them became a meditation.

I plucked until my fingers ached. The goose feathers were particularly small and difficult. Bill helped. He plucked his outside, setting the feathers free to swirl around the neighborhood with the tumbleweaves. I collected mine in a bag, hating to see anything go to waste. I planned to make a pillow or a down vest.

I placed the duck and geese bodies in the fridge. Luckily, there was plenty of room, as it was almost bare. Then I got out my cookbooks.

As I read Elizabeth David, Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn's Charcuterie, Charcuterie, and and The River Cottage Meat Book, The River Cottage Meat Book, I realized that the ma.s.s killing of my waterfowl, as tragic as it was, had opened up my culinary horizons. Usually with a duck, I would roast it, eat as much meat as possible, then boil the carca.s.s for broth. With the windfall on my hands, I could make some recipes that, because of frugality, I had never dared. I realized that the ma.s.s killing of my waterfowl, as tragic as it was, had opened up my culinary horizons. Usually with a duck, I would roast it, eat as much meat as possible, then boil the carca.s.s for broth. With the windfall on my hands, I could make some recipes that, because of frugality, I had never dared.

I sliced off the breast meat from a few of the ducks. Following the recipe in Charcuterie, Charcuterie, I re-created a gamey but delicious duck prosciutto I had had in France. To make it, I simply rubbed the b.r.e.a.s.t.s with salt, added a coating of pepper, and stowed them in the fridge for a few weeks. The geese I put in the freezer to make goose sausages at a later date. I re-created a gamey but delicious duck prosciutto I had had in France. To make it, I simply rubbed the b.r.e.a.s.t.s with salt, added a coating of pepper, and stowed them in the fridge for a few weeks. The geese I put in the freezer to make goose sausages at a later date.

Chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, the author of The River Cottage Meat Book, The River Cottage Meat Book, would be my guiding light. He inspired me, going on in his British way about duck confit: "Having a jar just sitting in the larder, bursting with savory potential, makes me salivate every time I see it." would be my guiding light. He inspired me, going on in his British way about duck confit: "Having a jar just sitting in the larder, bursting with savory potential, makes me salivate every time I see it."

A confit is meat preserved by storing it in a thick layer of rendered fat. First I had to render the fat. So the next day-after the usual twenty-four hours of rest for the meat-I turned the oven on low. I placed the breastless ducks in various cast-iron pans and cooking trays and set them in the oven. Every hour or so, I poured off the pan drippings. Once the legs were cooked through, I placed them in a jar and poured the rendered fat over them.

I wouldn't say the meat was the best I've ever tasted. Because the fowl hadn't been immediately bled out, it had too much blood in it to serve it to company. But I was a hungry urban farmer, and in saving the meat, I felt almost as if I had saved the birds.

The 100-yard feast (or fast) came to a close. I simultaneously wanted to suck down a cup of coffee and to never let the experiment end. I would miss that slightly hungry, spry feeling. I would miss having my choices limited. I would miss my intimacy with the garden. When I was eating faithfully only from her, I knew all of her secrets. Where the peas were hiding, the best lettuces, the swelling onions.

When I went back to shopping at the supermarket, all those choices would open up again. I could choose from forty-seven different kinds of French cheese. On a whim, I could eat pizza. Or gelato. These are the wonderful things about life-and I made them more precious by not partaking for one short month.

On the eve of July 31, I surveyed the kitchen cupboards. I was down to my last few bottles of plums. I had stripped the last corncob that morning. There were two eggs left. The last honey jar had three fingers of honey remaining. A little bit of sauerkraut marinated in the fridge. A few jars of jam lingered in the pantry. The vat of balsamic vinegar, made from the wine, quietly transformed in the corner. The duck in the confit jar burst with all that savory potential.

In the garden, I looked at the vegetables I would be eating in a few weeks. I antic.i.p.ated the dry bite of the orange-fleshed, strangely warty Galeuse d'Eysines squash, the crunch of the sweet corn, which still hadn't ripened. The Brandywine tomato that started green in June and turned only slightly pink by the end of July. The forming heads of the crinkly Melissa cabbage. My friends the zucchini plant, the bean vine, the apple tree, which somehow never ran out of fruit.

Hanging in the plum tree, the white rabbit paws danced in the wind. I walked over to the beehive and held my ear to the box. Whistling and rumbling. Who knows what the bees thought of their new home, but they hadn't left.

I had fed myself from my little plot of land, it was true. I had survived, thrived even, through a mix of luck and moxie. But I couldn't have done it alone-I had needed the help of the creatures and plants and people around me.

In the end, the brussels sprouts never formed heads; the stalks were lined instead with some frilly leaves, which I fed to the rabbits and chickens. Toward the end of the summer, though, I harvested cuc.u.mbers and tomatoes every day. These I distributed to Peg and Joe. They didn't seem surprised. Peg just said, "Oh, OK," when I handed her a bag of the drop-dead ripe tomatoes and crispy lemon cukes.

I wasn't monogamous with food distribution. We extracted honey in the fall, and I brought Mosed a jar. I foisted tomatoes on every neighbor, every pa.s.serby I encountered. The rest I took to the Commemoration Committee for the Black Panther Party and their literacy program. Boxes and boxes of tomatoes. When Melvin d.i.c.kson saw me walking through the door with one of the crates, his face broke into a wide grin.

The production of food is a beautiful process. Germination, growth, tending, the harvest-every step a miracle, a dialogue with life. But after the 100-yard diet was over, sharing became the main point for me. I could have h.o.a.rded all the food for myself-processed the tomatoes into cans and pickled the cuc.u.mbers. I would have had a groaning cupboard of homegrown food. But then I would have eaten alone.

The visitors to the garden kept coming all through the summer and into the fall, sometimes at night. They didn't need to come under the cover of darkness, though-when they plucked a tomato from one of my carefully tended vines, they had my blessing. I understood it more than ever: we were all just trying to survive.

PART III.

PIG.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE.

What's a barrow?" I asked Bill. He shrugged. We were sitting in some metal bleachers facing a sawdust-filled ring, feeling a little self-conscious. We were 150 miles from Oakland, up north in a town called Boonville. It was April and we somehow found ourselves at a swine auction.

I fiddled with the auction sheet. After almost ten years of beekeeping, vegetable planting, and chicken tending-and more recently turkey raising and rabbit herding-Bill and I were going to reach the pinnacle of urban farming: we were going to raise a pig.

I had discovered the auction while at the feed store buying rabbit pellets. The multicolored flyer, posted on the corkboard amid ads of horses for sale and rototillers for rent, had caught my eye. I stood looking at it as insane thoughts streamed into my mind. By the time I had finished settling up with the clerk for the pellets, I couldn't think of one reason not to go to that auction. I scribbled down the details.

Bill and I had followed the road that led to Boonville, a windy, tree-lined affair, with no idea of what to expect. Upon entering the fairgrounds, we were handed a sheet of paper on which each piglet for sale was listed by breed, followed by a number (which I deduced was weight), followed by a B or a G. Barrow or Gilt. I knew it had to be something about the gender of the pig. Could it translate as easily as Boy or Girl? That the basic terminology eluded me should have drawn my attention to the fact that, this time, we had really gotten in too deep.

Boonville was a sleepy logging town that smelled of Douglas fir forest and wood smoke. It reminded me a little of my hometown of Shelton, Was.h.i.+ngton. Here, though, if you breathed in deeply enough, you might detect a fragrant hint of marijuana, the area's number one cash crop. This made for a tight community, and clearly the other auction attendees knew one another. There were handshakes and hugs all around. We got vague smiles.

An auctioneer wearing a big black cowboy hat and tight Wrangler jeans held a microphone and was rattling off numbers on the sidelines. Near the ring was a ramp where the pigs made their entrance. A large woman wearing a dirty white T-s.h.i.+rt herded a pale pink piglet into the ring. He kicked up sawdust and squealed.

"That's a lively pig, a good pig, good pig, good pig," the auctioneer yelled. "One-fifty, one-fifty, do I hear one-fifty?" Then it started to rain-a cold spring deluge-on the tin roof of the auction barn.

The piglets were the projects of children from local 4-H clubs. The USDA-sponsored 4-H (Head, Heart, Hands, and Health) program was started around the beginning of the twentieth century with the idea that young people would lead the way for more innovative farming. In addition to encouraging kids to grow plants and animals, 4-H aimed to instill in them a connection with nature and to promote good old American agrarian thrift.

The pint-sized 4-H-ers wandered around, helped rustle pigs, and brushed the piglets before they scampered out into the spotlight for bidding. The trouble was, there were only about ten bidders sitting in the fairground bleachers and almost twenty-five weanling pigs.

Bill leaned over and whispered into my ear, "Are you going to bid?" n.o.body was bidding on the pink piglet in the ring. Too high-strung, maybe? I couldn't tell. The piglets so far all looked the same to me.

"Yeah. Well, I don't know. Which one should I get?" I felt panicked, like a cornered opossum. The pink piglet went unsold and was prodded out of the ring.

"Maybe this little one," Bill said, his brown eyes widening. A white piglet with a black stripe around its belly pranced into the ring.

"OK," I said, and held up my placard-a number 40 in black with red and white checkers around it.

"We have one-fifty," the auctioneer shouted. "Do we have two hundred? Two hundred?" A jolt of electricity filled my body. I had bid!

A man in a gray sweats.h.i.+rt sitting behind us waved his number.

"I have two hundred," the auctioneer said. "Do we have two-fifty?"

I had no idea a piglet would cost so much. I shook my head no at the auctioneer. We had heard it was best to buy a piglet from a quality place, so you could make sure its genetics were good and it would produce quality pork. Also, I was into supporting the 4-H kids. But we could have bought a $40 piglet from a farm-we didn't need a prize pig-I just didn't know that then.

"Let's go look at them again," Bill said.

We dashed through the rain to the back of the auction ring, where the pigs waited in pens before they were herded up the wood-shaving-strewn ramp that led to the ring. The pigpens were surprisingly clean, with fresh cedar bedding in each of the twenty stalls. Little children wearing cowboy hats and boots ran around in packs, surveying one another's piglets, which lolled around and napped together.

There were the cla.s.sic pink ones, deep smoky-red ones-the kids told us they were called Durocs-and Hamps.h.i.+res, black with a white belt across their shoulders. Four tiny red pigs with white faces nestled in one pen by themselves. "Herefords," a lady standing nearby told us. We asked if we could buy two of them outright, but she said they were spoken for. So back to the auction ring and the cold bleachers.

"Here's the one," Bill said, grabbing my knee.

It was a G, whatever that was, and G was cute. It had deep red hair and black hooves. A wheezing swineherd wearing a dirty T-s.h.i.+rt had lofted this piglet into her arms and cradled it like a toddler, with its hind legs almost wrapped around her waist, its head calmly gazing over her shoulder. The woman gave the pig a little kiss before she set it down.

A piglet in a large ring is, by itself, quite wonderful. This little one pranced out into the middle of the circle with a joie de vivre that I could appreciate. The piglet snuffed the ground with its snout, its curly tail flitting back and forth, its hooves kicking up wood shavings. Then suddenly the pig realized that everyone was staring. It let out a shrill scream and bolted for the door.

I suppose I could come up with some lofty reasons for what had gotten me here, to a swine auction in Boonville. To discover the American tradition of pig raising. To test my farmerly resolve in the face of an intelligent, possibly adoring creature like Wilbur in Charlotte's Web. Charlotte's Web. To walk in the footsteps of my hippie parents, who had raised a few hogs in their day. To walk in the footsteps of my hippie parents, who had raised a few hogs in their day.

But I'm not going to lie: this was all about pork.

From the moment I first saw the flyer for the swine auction I had thought about all the products of the pig. Smoked pork chops, which Bill and I loved to buy from the Mexi-mart. Pork ribs, slathered in spicy barbecue sauce. Bacon, that temptress, which we preferred cut thick and spiked with pepper. Ground pork, to be used in marinara sauce, or cl.u.s.tered on pizzas, or rolled in sage and fried for breakfast. Sausages, glorious food that feeds the ma.s.ses, I imagined snuggled up in buns, doused in mustard, and served to all our friends at a barbecue. Ham, of course, smeared in maple syrup and spiked with cloves, was part of my pork daydream. I would be able to make all of these things if I could find a way to raise some pigs. There were other more exotic items I fantasized about as well, like salami and prosciutto. But these were intimidating pork products; I wasn't sure what went into making these, but I knew they were expensive and I liked eating them. I knew that before I got too carried away with my pork-fest fantasies, I had to take the first step: buy a piglet.

Pint-sized pig wranglers waiting on the edge of the ring tugged on the piglet's ear to get it away from the door, and it yelped and moved back to center stage. No one was bidding on this adorable red pig. I couldn't tell if there was anything right or wrong with it. It was kind of small at thirty-eight pounds. The auction was nearly over, and the metal grandstand seats had almost emptied out-there were only three men left, wearing baseball hats and denim jackets, perched like crows in the bleachers. For reasons I couldn't understand, they were sitting out on this pig.

But I wasn't. I enthusiastically waved my number.

"One-fifty. Sold at one-fifty," the auctioneer called. He seemed relieved. The swineherd woman beamed at me. Clearly I had bought her favorite pig.

My first pig. Was it a girl or a boy? Why hadn't I prepared for this? "Excuse me," I asked a towheaded eight-year-old. "Does G mean 'girl'?"

He looked at me as if he might fall over from the sheer power of my enormous idiocy. Then he nodded, so stunned by my stupidity he couldn't speak.

Patting myself on the back, I watched them herd her back into her pen. The little red pig scampered back, as if she knew something good had happened.

A few more piggies were sold, and we neared the end of the list.

"Well, I guess that's it," I said to Bill, signaling that we should go.

"Wait-shouldn't we get another one?" Bill asked. His eyes darted back and forth. The look in his eyes conveyed a deep sense of panic, fueled by scarcity.

"Really?" I said, thinking about our small backyard. How exactly was this going to work?

"Yes, get two. Get two!" he yelled.

One of the 4-H kids had told us earlier that pigs like company, so it did seem like a better idea to get more than one. I didn't want some lonely porker snorting in the backyard.

The last pink pig trotted out. I didn't want it. I had overheard someone in the crowd say that the pink ones can get sunburns. Plus, I wanted a matching set of red porkers. No one bought the pink pig. The towheaded boy standing next to the bleachers wailed into his mom's arms. "They didn't buy it," he sniffled. Poor kid.

A pair of red piglets trotted into the ring.

"We got a brother and a sister here," the auctioneer yelled. "Prize pigs. Make a bid and choose which one you want."

Somehow this confused and attracted me. I held up my number. Sold: $150.

"Do you want the barrow or the gilt?" he yelled over at me.

"The boy," I answered dumbly. The barrow.

After we paid at a card table manned by 4-H parents, we were told to load up our pigs. The parking lot was muddy, and all manner of trucks-Ford F-250s, Dodge Rams-maneuvered to pick up their pigs. We had a station wagon. Bill eased our car closer to the pigpen and opened up the hatch. An iron cage someone had given us sat in the back, waiting for our piglets.

The owners of the pigs-one of them the woman in the soiled white T-s.h.i.+rt-gave me their phone numbers in case I had questions. "She's a real good girl," the woman said, holding the pig in one arm like a small dog before she put her into our cage.