Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  “How about we talk about it later?”

  “I’ll ask my dad. He shoots them in the head.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yes, that’s how he slaughters ‘em.”

  “Sometimes,” six-year-old Greg jumped in, “the head gets shot off the body, and one time it was hanging by just a little skin.” The three brothers giggled, and the four-year-old launched into another head-shooting anecdote, the bloodiest so far. More hysterical laughing.

  Kyle then assumed an authoritative pose again, shushing his brothers and pronouncing: “There’s two ways to kill a chicken.”

  “I thought you cut its throat,” I said.

  “That’s the other way. But it’s harder. I recommend blowing its brains out.”

  Feeling a bit stunned by this turn of events, I told the boys I needed to think about it. As I hustled back to the 12 × 12, I bumped into my furniture-maker neighbor, the forty-something José, from Mexico. He handed me a plastic bag of feathery seeds, explaining it was an herb for Mexican cooking that he’d brought from Michoacán for Jackie to plant. Enthusiastically, José invited me to his sanctuary, his woodworking studio. When Habitat for Humanity helped him construct this house — the ribbon was cut only a year before — this studio wasn’t part of it. He built it himself. He opened the lock on the front door and smiled as he led me inside. José’s shop was filled with the smell of fresh wood. Colorful paint was splashed on the walls like a Jackson Pollock painting. He proudly showed me his tools, the latest band saws and dowel inserters, and some of his furniture.

  It was beautiful work. Fine tables and cabinets, mixing his native Mexican folk art with contemporary style. He worked into the night crafting this furniture and sold it door-to-door in Siler City. When I asked him why he put in such long hours, he said, “It keeps me out of the chicken factories.” Hundreds of his fellow Latin Americans manned the blades, conveyor belts, and trucks of the Gold Kist factories not twenty minutes away. “I don’t like that much blood,” José added.

  But José had a problem. People in North Carolina were not used to buying handmade Mexican furniture from door-to-door artisans, so business was difficult. He’d been able to scrape a living together selling to other Mexicans, but now, with Wal-Mart in Siler City offering cheap Chinese-made furniture, selling his furniture was even harder. Scrambling, José found a job as a handyman for a Pittsboro based company that produced piping for various manufacturing processes. Still, José’s dream was to make beautiful furniture fulltime.

  He invited me into his home, Habitat for Humanity’s standard two-bedroom. José disappeared into the kitchen to fix something for us while I sat on his sofa watching his thirteen-year-old son, Hector, kill chickens with a shotgun and pitchfork. The computer game was called RuneScape.

  “I kill these chickens for their bones,” he said. “I need more bones.” He pronounced the word bones with a strangely elongated o.

  “You see,” he said, showing me the screen, “I’ve already got 3,200 bones.”

  “3,201,” I said with a gulp, watching him pitchfork another one.

  My eyes drifted to the open window, as the setting sun painted the sky orange and crimson over No Name Creek. The colorful rays illuminated the silk of several spider webs attaching the window to surrounding bushes, and as I watched the different-sized spiders labor — each in its own way — it occurred to me that my neighbors were trying to become the equivalent of free-range chickens: free-range people. They were extracting themselves from the most poisonous parts of globalization and were in the midst of an exciting, if quixotic, experiment to create a fruitful life on the margins.

  How difficult it is, and how elusive, I thought. A plump, half-dollar-sized spider grasped a cherry red flying ant in its pincers. In the neighboring web, not one but rather a hundred spiders the size of poppy seeds had spun an intricate, three-dimensional web. Two spiders, two strategies; nature splintering itself off, playing the odds. Both of the strategies worked. I looked over at José, who was running his hand gently along a gorgeous antique-accented dresser he’d made in his shop, and felt a tinge of pity: he could hardly sell such beautiful wares. Though he had escaped the industrial chicken factories, and the Thompsons had escaped a monoculture of doublewides, both families were still surrounded by a pervasive blight. “Look!” Hector cried out, showing me the screen of his video game. “I pitchforked five more chickens.” Out the window, the plump spider downed his cherry red ant while the pinhead spiders entombed gnats in silk.

  WHILE I WAS WALKING IN THE WOODS ONE DAY, a loud crack startled me as a branch snapped above my head. I cried out and covered my head; above, an enormous hawk took awkward flight. Branch and leaves fell to my feet, followed by something slower, fluttering down. I plucked it out of the air: a long white feather.

  I brought the feather to my nose. It had a gamey scent that triggered something primitive in a remote, rarely used part of my brain. The tip of the feather was still sweaty, as if dipped in invisible ink. I pantomimed writing cursive in the air, strange symbols in an unknown language, and then slipped the foot-long feather into my pocket.

  I felt tingly, sweaty from exercise. I hadn’t seen a person all day, lost somewhere in the deep forests around Jackie’s. Wildness. Feeling the feather, I smiled inwardly at the surprise of scaring a hawk from its sleepy perch. I took the feather out and again traced strange characters in the air, this time more slowly. I put it back into my pocket, walked a few more steps, stopped. What the heck had I been writing? And, beyond my feather-traced haikus, what a beautiful lexicon, all of this: feathers dropping from the sky into my hand; the first wildflower of the season; my neighbors’ wild mass of fowl; the great silence of the 12 × 12. I walked on.

  I crossed out of the woods again and onto a winding country road. Whistling, twirling my feather, feeling buoyant, except … there was that mysterious smell again, growing stronger, a smothered scent. I sniffed the feather in my hand; no, not that. The feather smelled like a night in the forest, a naturally pungent smell. This other, very different odor increased with every step until it was a full-throttle stench. The first vehicles I’d seen that day roared past. I’d arrived at a perfect railroad crossing gate with its red lights, complex hinges, and long straight wood. And then, to my left, I saw, like a nightmarish mirage, the source of the stench: a monstrous chicken factory.

  KEEP OUT. BIO-SEALED, read one sign in flaming red. Another sign: GOLD KIST POULTRY CENTER. Behind the signs was an absurdly manicured lawn, like an estate photo from Town & Country, and a dozen or more “houses” — long, rectangular warehouses for the poultry.

  By now the smell was almost unbearable. On the warehouses, circular fans blew out feathers and the stench of chicken waste. These chicken houses were identical to the others I’d seen on the drive to Jackie’s. They each “did” tens of thousands of birds a day, feeding the Gold Kist empire. (Gold Kist was the country’s third-largest chicken processor until it was purchased in 2007 by the even larger Pilgrim’s Pride. Gold Kist kept its name; the combined company is the world’s biggest of its kind, surpassing Tyson.) Mike Thompson told me that, in addition to mutilating their chickens through beak searing, tail docking, and ear cutting, Gold Kist was experimenting with featherless chickens to eliminate inefficient plucking, along with beakless chickens that couldn’t peck at each other, something they tend to do as they go nuts over being confined to a tiny dark space their whole lives. When chickens peck at each other, they spoil what they are to us: meat.

  Later, out of curiosity, I would visit an industrial chicken factory, one of a hundred throughout that part of North Carolina, nearly all of them producing poultry for giant companies like Gold Kist. The first thing I noticed was how dark they are. Factory farming began in the 1920s soon after the discovery of vitamins A and D; when these vitamins are added to feed, animals no longer require exercise and sunlight for growth. This allowed large numbers of animals to be raised indoors year-round. The main problem that occurred with thi
s kind of intensive confinement was disease, but in the 1940s the development of certain antibiotics took care of that. Unfortunately, factory farming causes suffering and pain for animals and is a scourge to the environment. I couldn’t believe the suffocating ammonia smell inside. Around me, thousands of birds were caged so tightly that they weren’t able to move; movement would make them more muscular and less tender to chew. And it was oddly quiet, as if these genetically manipulated creatures had been bred to hush up. Their silence was probably a side effect of all the hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals pumped in so that they could be, mercifully, slaughtered as 3.5 pounds of product in seven weeks.

  What chance did Mike and Michele Thompson — and their six kids — have against this? In front of the bio-sealed Gold Kist factory, I looked down at the feather in my hand, the wild quill that had fluttered out of the sky. The contrast between the freedom of that hawk, flushed out of an evergreen into the morning sky, and the industrial birds numbed by chemicals, deprived of sunlight and freedom, suggested a frightening metaphor for the way we humans have come to live in a flattening world.

  IT SMELLED LIKE CHICKEN at Bobby Lu’s Diner in Siler City, ten miles up the road from Jackie’s. As I walked through the restaurant to an open booth, I noticed that nearly all of the fifty or so customers were eating chicken. Broiled, fried, cordon bleu; fat chicken legs and breasts, chemically pumped-up Gold Kist pickings.

  Having seen, and smelled, the bio-sealed Gold Kist factory, I felt nauseous and skimmed the menu for something that wasn’t chicken. I ordered a cheese sandwich with taters and salad. The customers, nearly all of them white, seemed to have a nearly identical glow, or lack thereof, a kind of sheen. I wondered what the effect of eating chemically enhanced food over decades has on our bodies. Do we become like factory chickens when we avoid exercise, work and live most of our lives indoors, and eat chemically altered food?

  Also, is there an unconscious effect of being so close to the source of so much pain? Maybe I was imagining things, but I could almost feel the Gold Kist factory’s dread in the air, an invisible violence like radio transmissions.

  I had spent much of the past decade in places where humans still live in relative harmony with nature and one another, in the Global South where the land hasn’t yet been domesticated, nor culture industrialized. Sociologists point out that American kids today can identify a thousand corporate logos but less than ten native plants and animals that live around their homes. Are we, like Gold Kist chickens, evolving in artificially manufactured, rather than natural, ways?

  THAT NIGHT, UNDERT HE STARS, I made myself a second meal: over an open fire beside the 12 × 12, I grilled my five-pound broiler. In the end, I had decided that it wasn’t in me to kill a chicken myself, and Mike did it for me. Perhaps in the future I’d see it differently and be able to participate in that natural process: steward an animal’s healthy growth; take its life, with reverence; and ingest its energy into my own. I wasn’t there yet. However, it certainly was in me to support the Thompsons’ free-range agriculture. I sat down to eat, alone, with care.

  In each bite, all that flavor connected with the Thompsons. After seeing the Gold Kist plant and its chicken in Bobby Lu’s, I appreciated the Thompsons’ efforts even more. They were taking a stand and attempting, on their quirky little farm, to heal a ruptured relationship with the earth’s natural rhythms. In the fire and moonlight, I looked at each bite before I ate it, smelled it, felt the flesh on my tongue, exploring the texture and the taste.

  Mindful eating restored some of my balance, but not all. I was too aware of how complexly interwoven our society’s problems are. Each time I biked up the highway, I’d feel the asphalt harden inside. At the Quick-N-Easy convenience store, four miles from the 12 × 12, I sometimes encountered fights, nagging, and even viciousness between people, as if our factory-farmed Flat World causes us to go a bit nuts and peck each other. Once when I was shopping there, a man yelled at his wife in the parking lot: “Maybe if you didn’t pick on her she wouldn’t cry all the time!”

  “Well, I didn’t know she was in a picky mood,” his wife answered. Doors slammed.

  Another time in the parking lot, I watched a banged-up TransAm pull up beside my bike. A man, around thirty — with a Confederate-flag bandanna on his head, tattoos, and a torn, sleeveless shirt — flung his door open, slammed it, and yanked open the back door. He pulled out a small boy, who looked to be around six, and pulled down his pants. “Ouch,” the boy protested.

  “Just stand here and piss because you won’t fucking wait!” his dad said, and then: “Hurry up!” But now the boy couldn’t go. His dad shook his hips, and the boy’s urine finally flowed and pooled around the back tire of my bike.

  “Damn it, you don’t even say thank you,” the man said as he pushed his son, whose pants were still half down, back into the car. They hadn’t seen me.

  As I biked away from the Quick-N-Easy, my tire left a short trail of urine. I had a 12 × 12 permaculture retreat, but where did this family go? Tires squealed and the family’s car raced past me, the wife smoking a cigarette. Her son bawled, her husband fumed, and she cast a vacant stare out the window, all of us breathing the odor growing around us on a dull wind: the stench of chicken factories.

  5. WARRIOR PRESENCE

  WHAT IN THE WORLD DO YOU DO?

  This is the question I started asking myself at the 12 × 12. In Jackie’s permaculture paradise I felt increasingly energized by pulsing growth, humble simplicity, and the gentle sound of No Name Creek. But bike a mile up the road in any direction and it was Cormac McCarthy’s road. This dichotomy begged the question: How could I maintain Jackie’s level of positive energy under any circumstance?

  I wanted to talk with Jackie about it, but she was Grey-dogging west, without a cell phone. So I emailed her, and a few days later she replied with the phone number of a friend’s where she was staying, and I immediately biked to a pay phone and called her.

  It all gushed out. I told her not only about the chicken factories and the conflicts at the Quick-N-Easy, but about an inner dilemma: As an aid worker, I am confronted by global inequality all the time. Just as the Flat World chicken factories and industrial parks suck the presence out of me, so too does the pillage of the Global South’s forests, mines, and oceans in order to fuel our Northern economies. And many of the countries in the Global South try to replicate this awful example.

  At first, Jackie didn’t say anything. I could tell she was listening deeply. I continued, suggesting that perhaps I needed to do more, more to help those in need. This has been my typical response: join the battle; ship metric tons of food to internally displaced people; combine community ecotourism with political advocacy; research and expose corporate greed.

  Finally, I was all talked out. Still, Jackie didn’t say anything. In the silence I remembered what she’d told me when we’d first met, and repeated it aloud now: “Don’t do, be.”

  Jackie let out a little laugh. “Well … yes…” she said.

  I frowned and said, “But isn’t that what you told me?”

  Jackie began to speak. She spoke for a long while, and what emerged was a unique approach to living in today’s world, a blend of spiritual passion and secular practicality. I later came to synthesize her approach in very simple terms: see, be, do.

  First, she explained, see the problem. It could be anything: resentment toward a family member; a homeless woman by the curb; a government plan to fund a bigger nuclear bomb instead of better schools. Often we look away from problems — we’re busy earning a living, going to the ball game, or being depressed. This, Jackie told me, is a core error. Every one of these so-called problems is there to teach us. Either we face it, and grow toward that higher level of consciousness, or it comes back again and again, in one form or another.

  Once we’ve garnered the courage to see the problem, it’s not yet time to act. Jackie suggests that first we be. This is the hardest part: going to that solitary place that I’d
begun to discover in the deepest part of the woods beyond the 12 × 12. Some people call this place God, but others call it intuition, or the “still small voice,” or grace, or simply presence. The name doesn’t matter. It is merely a signpost for an experience we either understand directly or barely at all. For example, imagine you’d never tasted honey. I could describe “honey” for days and you still would have no real comprehension of it, but one taste would bring instant understanding. When we find a way — be it through meditation, music, prayer, your child’s eyes, a shooting star, anything — to become present, we can look at problems fearlessly and with clarity.

  Jackie’s final step — do — is then as natural as drawing breath. You hand the homeless woman a sandwich; forgive no matter how you’ve been injured; join a peace study group to confront the nuclear issue with others in your community. Or take one of a thousand other actions.

  As fascinating as all of this was, I resisted Jackie’s message. “But you’re a doer,” I said. “While doctoring for thirty years, you’ve also regularly completed the Selma-Montgomery march, done the School of Americas protest in Georgia, and so much more. And soon you’ll be marching across Nevada in a protest against nuclear weapons. You’re not about sitting around contemplating.”

  After a slight pause Jackie said, “Both Einstein and Jung said the same thing in different ways: the world’s problems can’t be solved at the same level of consciousness at which they were created.” She added that do-gooding, however outwardly noble, tends to bring the do-gooder into the blight: the same level of consciousness that creates problems like the global ecological crisis. Hence, the archetypes of the burnt-out aid or social worker, the jaded inner-city teacher, and the compromised activist. “There is someplace absolutely essential beneath the doing,” she said, “and it’s the most important part.”

  “How do I find that place?” I asked.