After a few hours, we had finally cleared enough space to plant some seeds. Just before I ripped open the packet of corn, Lana alerted me to a problem. “Ah, Novella,” she said, wiping sweat from her brow, “is this supposed to be in the shape of . . . ?” She trailed off.
“What?” I said, still unsure about Lana. My fingernails were caked with soil.
Lana laughed a big, booming cackle. “It’s like a crop circle,” she said.
Then I saw what she was talking about: following the ditzy plan, I hadn’t realized that we had built a garden in the shape of an enormous peace sign, which, viewed from the heavens, might be some kind of hippie signal to the aliens.
I was horrified.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Glad you pointed that out.” I erased one of the pathways with a few shovelfuls of dirt so that the peace sign became more like a Mercedes-Benz emblem. Leave the peace sign to followers of the Dead and wearers of tie dye, to my hippie parents’ generation. Even though Lana and I were vegetable gardening, we wanted to be clear with each other—especially so early in our friendship—that we were not, in fact, hippies.
As Lana watched I tucked a few kernels of corn into the dark clay soil, feeling strangely shy. I wasn’t used to being a squat-garden rebel, though on an intellectual level the idea of squatting, of taking possession of something unused and living rent free, had always held a certain appeal for me. In college I read about the Diggers (also called the True Levellers) in seventeenth-century England, who squatted in houses and planted vegetables on public land. In 1649, a scroungy group of men gathered at a small town southwest of London to plant corn and wheat on the commons. In the declaration they submitted—mostly a bunch of Bible talk—explaining why they were “beginning to plant and manure the waste land of George-Hill,” they expressed their belief that the earth was “a Common Treasury for All, both Rich and Poor, That every one that is born in the Land, may be fed by the Earth his Mother that brought him forth.” Almost 350 years later, the idea of planting food crops in common areas still makes a great deal of sense.
In America, squatting dates back to the very beginning of white settlement. Seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, let’s face it, squatted on Indian land. Pioneers in the 1800s continued the process by squatting on more Indian land during the Westward Expansion. In the 1980s, the tradition continued when abandoned buildings in New York City were taken over by squatters like crazy. In 1995, I was befriended by a squatter who lived in a building on Avenue B in New York. Though I was game to join and move in, in the end I wasn’t deemed punk-rock enough—maybe because I didn’t have tattoos or spikes on my clothing.
And then there was the famous bean sower Henry David Thoreau. He didn’t own that land near Walden Pond or even rent it. “I enhanced the value of the land by squatting on it,” he wrote in Walden.
That was my plan, too. I took a deep breath and plunged the little yellow seeds into the ground that was not mine. I snaked the hose around from our backyard and sprinkled water onto the bare patch of soil. Lana and I stood and watched the water soak in. What I was doing reminded me a little of shoplifting, except instead of taking, I was leaving something. But I was worried. Couldn’t these plants be used as evidence against me?
Within a few weeks of that first sowing, I grew more accustomed to the idea that the lot was temporarily mine. I transplanted a few tomato and basil starts. Sowed the lettuce seeds I had carried, pioneer-like, with me from Seattle. Planted a few cucumber seeds.
It wasn’t long before the vegetables grew and thrived in the blazing, all-day sun. Their success had nothing to do with my skill as a gardener—in California, it’s just-add-water gardening. The cukes scrambled; the corn lumbered toward the sky.
Lana told me that the lot had been, over the fifteen years she had lived on 28th Street, first a parking lot for the monks; then a storage space for a construction company, replete with shipping containers and Bobcats; and finally, for the last five years, the weed-filled, garbage-strewn dump we found when we moved in. The garden, by comparison, did seem like an improvement. But in the back of my mind I wondered what the owner of the property would think of all the new plants.
Upstairs in the kitchen a few days after the chicks arrived, I poured myself a cup of coffee, then went to the back stairs to throw some day-old bread to the big backyard chickens (a Buff Orpington, a Black Australorp, and two Red Stars), who had come, full-grown, from a nearby feed store.
A word about my backyard: Don’t entertain some bucolic fantasy. In the middle of it, Mrs. Nguyen’s exercise bike sat on a bare patch of dirt. The landlord had installed a rusty metal shed at the foot of the stairs a few years earlier, and it now held all the things we and the Nguyens wished we could get rid of. A shattered mirror lay between the fence and the shed.
In the very back of the yard was the chicken coop Bill had built from pallets in what had been a large dog run made with sturdy chain-link fencing now overgrown with weeds and volunteer trees. Abutting this chicken area was an auto-repair shop/junkyard, which hosted two dogs: a pale brown pit bull and a dark-eyed Rottweiler mix. A forklift often zoomed around the repair shop, dodging rusting transmissions and barrels of god knows what. A little beyond the auto shop, you could see downtown Oakland’s nondescript skyline. Not exactly a country idyll.
After feeding the backyard hens and checking (again) on the baby chicks in their brooders, I sat down to read the paper. After a few minutes I looked up and noticed a man entering the garden, wearing a black skullcap and a leather jacket. He wandered over to one of the beds and tugged on the green top of a carrot. An orange root appeared, streaked with dirt. The carrot, I could see, was small but edible. Throwing my paper down, I rushed to the garden.
People from the neighborhood harvesting food from my garden is a common sight. There’s Lou, a stooped man who helps himself to the lush crop of greens in the winter; a mute lady who carries a plastic sack into the garden and doesn’t stop harvesting lettuce until that bag is swollen—or until I open the window and call down at her, “OK! That’s enough! Leave some for everyone else!”
Some of the harvesters are annoying. One year, an unidentified person stopped by for what he thought was onions and picked some of my young garlic instead, then abandoned the small bulbs on the ground. In response, I made a little handwritten sign that said GARLIC, NOT ONIONS. READY IN JULY! and another, near a collard-greens patch, saying DON’T PICK ALL THE LEAVES OFF THE PLANT. These signs aren’t necessarily effective. They just fade and get buried by a pile of wood chips in the fall. But I feel the need to instruct nonetheless.
A simple solution would be to snap a padlock on the gate. Then again, I’m a trespasser myself—I don’t lease or rent the verdant lot, so I’d feel like a hypocrite telling others to stay away. But I did at least get approval for the garden project from the owner of the property, a man named Jack Chan. I met him when our first tomato ripened in the lot that first year. A wizened Chinese man walked into the garden. I could tell he was the property owner by the way he walked past the gate and looked at the plants—quizzically, as if they were a magic trick he couldn’t quite figure out. My heart pounding, I went down to talk to him. “Garden OK,” he said after we made introductions. Then he pointed to a few nongarden items that had made it onto the lot, like some old doors and a biodiesel reactor Bill had built. “Only garden.” I nodded, and that was the end of our exchange.
If I was trying to be Thoreau, I liked to think of Chan as a modern-day version of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the owner of Walden Pond and its surrounding fields. My fellow squatter Thoreau did have permission from the landowner, but he still liked to call what he was doing—just as I did—squatting.
Once I got Jack Chan’s terse seal of approval, I began enhancing the land big-time. The next year the whole lot sprawled with giant orange Rouge Vif d’Estampes pumpkins. I had a customer-service job at a plant nursery and got discounts on fruit trees, so in went an apple tree, a pineapple guava, a lemon, a fig, and an
orange tree. I bought bees to pollinate the ancient plum tree that stood guard in the lot. I acquired my four egg-laying chickens and grew dinosaur kale, a crinkly, dark green variety, especially for them. I planted carrots, which this guy was now harvesting.
I pushed open the gate and called out a hello to the carrot picker. He waved, holding the carrots in his hand. I know about the pleasure of pulling up root vegetables. They are solvable mysteries. I once pulled up a carrot unlike any I had seen before. It was a deep purple variety called Dragon, and it had wound itself around a regular orange carrot, so they looked like a gaudy strand of DNA.
Just as I was about to tell the carrot picker that he should come back to harvest the carrots when they were bigger, he said, “This place reminds me of my grandma.” His eyes filled with tears. “Everything’s so growing,” he said.
In our neighborhood, there was some greenery, mostly in the form of weeds. But when you walked through the gates into what I had started calling the GhostTown Garden, it was like walking into a different world. There was a lime tree near the fence, sending out a perfume of citrus blossoms from its dark green leaves. Stalks of salvia and mint, artemesia and penstemon. The thistlelike leaves of artichokes glowed silver. Strawberry runners snaked underneath raspberry canes. Beds bristled with rows of fava beans, whose pea-like blossoms attracted chubby black bumblebees to their plunder. An apple tree sent out girlish pink blossoms. A passionfruit vine curled and weaved through the chain-link fence that surrounded the garden.
I restrained myself from hugging the carrot picker for feeling exactly as I did about the garden, but I did get a little misty. I wanted to grab this man’s arm and give him a tour, show him what’s edible, what will be at its peak next week, which part of the mint to snip off for tea. Pull up a few of the French breakfast radishes. Explain that carrots are native to Afghanistan and used to be tough and yellow before the orange-loving Dutch got hold of them. Then I’d take him to the backyard and show him my four prized chickens, their straw-lined nesting boxes, the four eggs from that day—brown and still warm. Maybe I’d take him upstairs to admire the brooder box of baby chicks, the waterfowl, the turkey poults.
This, I wanted to tell him, is your birthright, too. Your grandmother, like mine, grew her own tomatoes, killed her own chickens, and felt a true connection to her food. Just because we live in the city, we don’t have to give that up.
But then I remembered that most people in our neighborhood have other things on their minds than growing local organic food and starting a revival. I know because when we first started, I knocked on doors to get other people involved with the work in the garden, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed about growing vegetables. I got stock responses: “I don’t have time” or “I buy my food at the grocery store.”
So I was just glad to be a reminder for the carrot picker. I muttered that he should come by and harvest food anytime. He smiled, exposing a glimmering grill of gold.
“Hey, my garden’s your garden,” I said, and patted him on the back. He left with a small bunch of carrots stashed in the pocket of his leather jacket. I never saw him again.
I picked a handful of kale leaves for the chicks and went upstairs. I cut them into a chiffonade and watched the chaos unfold when I tossed the green strands into the brooder boxes. A pure yellow chick grabbed the biggest piece of green and carried it around while making an urgent peeping noise. A few others gave her chase until she dropped it. Then another chick picked it up and ran and peeped. It was all about the having, not the eating. This went on for quite some time until the turkey poults, who had been watching the proceedings heavy-lidded, snatched away the greens from the chickens and gobbled them up. The ducklings and goslings, in their own brooder, inhaled the kale without hesitation. The squat garden would feed my meat birds, too.
CHAPTER THREE
Bobby!” Bill and I yelled toward the end of the dark street, not sure which car he was sleeping in that night. “We need your help!” It was Sunday, late, and we were on a gardening mission.
The door to a Chevy Colt without wheels creaked open. Bobby came out, sighing, and seemed annoyed, but I think he liked that we needed him. Two people weren’t enough to push one of Bill’s project cars out of the way.
Arms sprawled out, I heaved against the back of the marooned red Mercedes. Bill steered and pushed up front. Then Bobby pressed his back against the trunk of the car and leaned his weight in. That’s all it took.
“You gotta use your leg muscles,” he said, casually walking against the car as it rolled. It wasn’t just about technique, though. Bobby was astonishingly strong. I once saw him lift the transmission of a Ford truck from the ground to his shoulder and carry it for a city block, seemingly without effort. Bobby wouldn’t take money for his help; he would mutter, “Life of the Hebrews,” when we offered.
We first encountered Bobby during a 2-8 squabble. We had been living in our apartment for more than a year, long enough to have permanently tuned out the sound of the traffic from the nearby highway. The sirens no longer fazed our cat. We were making friends and had sussed out the best late-night Chinese-food joints. As former Seattleites, we were amazed by and thankful for spring’s sunny arrival in February.
We had also begun collecting stuff, one of our favorite hobbies. Our tables and desks were scrounged from street corners in Berkeley and Oakland. Most of our dishware came from free boxes set out on corners. There was something captivating about making something useful again—resurrecting the abandoned.
So we were in our element in Oakland, with its mammoth piles of junk placed on curbs, clutter dropped under overpasses and, sometimes, in the middle of the street. The junk piles became so bad that at one point there were billboard ads urging people to DUMP BOYFRIENDS, NOT APPLIANCES. It was a strange campaign—stranger when half the lights on the billboard went out, leaving only the illuminated command DUMP BOYFRIENDS.
GhostTown in particular hosted some huge piles. Most appeared near the beginning of the month, when rent was due. Sagging couches, black lacquer nightstands, mattresses, all stacked up on the corner—a surprisingly intimate life-size scrapbook of someone’s existence. Eventually city maintenance workers would mark the pile with a blast of orange spray paint and haul it away. If they weren’t fast about it, the pile would become a sprawling, multihouse, multiblock affair.
These piles were sort of like an ecosystem—a complete community of living organisms and the nonliving materials of their surroundings. Some individuals added to the growing mass, bottom-feeders harvested from the pile, and sometimes the items broke down into dust of their own accord. In this ecosystem, Bill and I played the role of bottom-feeders.
One night, Bill spotted a blue bicycle in a pile of junk on the corner of our street. It was a vintage affair, with three speeds and only slightly messed-up back brakes. He carried it upstairs and spent the evening tinkering with it.
Out for a victory ride the next morning, Bill heard, “That’s my bike!” It’s a common refrain on the streets off Martin Luther King Jr. Way. But the man who yelled it, standing on the porch of his warrenlike apartment building, didn’t mean it in jest. He walked toward Bill. A not quite elderly black man, only slightly grizzled, missing most of his teeth. Name: Bobby.
Seeing that this might get ugly, I walked downstairs to intervene: “Sir, you know the rules around here. If it’s in a pile, it’s up for grabs.” Bobby didn’t say anything. It was apparently a man thing, between Bill and Bobby.
“I fixed it,” Bill pleaded.
Bobby put his hand on the handlebars. “Uh-uh,” he said. Who is this asshole? I thought.
But Bill wasn’t going to fight about it. I could tell he had second thoughts. He looked down, then up. “I’ll give you $20,” Bill said, excited at the possibility of a solution. At that, Bobby took his hand off the handlebars and beamed. Bill passed him the bill. The matter concluded, Bill rode off on his bike. A beautiful friendship had—yes—blossomed.
Now Bobby helped us do thing
s like move cars around.
“OK, stop,” Bill yelled to me and Bobby. We let up. Bill jumped into the Mercedes and braked—Bobby and I had gotten a bit too zealous in our pushing. The red Mercedes barely avoided smashing into our neighbor’s Honda.
Bill swung open the gates to the garden. The F-250’s wheels spun as I jumped the curb and backed into the lot. Our friend Willy had loaned us his truck for the weekend, so Bill and I had spent Saturday and Sunday making runs to a horse stable fifteen miles away, up in the hills. The free rotted horse manure had been our ticket to gardening success.
Since most of the lot was under a one-foot layer of concrete, Bill came up with the idea of building raised beds. Most vegetables don’t require more than a few feet of topsoil, so it’s entirely possible to grow plants in large containers. We made open-topped boxes, filled them with composted horse manure, and planted the majority of our herbs and vegetables in them.
Bill, the ultimate bottom-feeder, wouldn’t even buy wood to build the beds. In the early days of the lot, Bill would return home, his dark hair mussed, a crooked smile of delight on his face, the borrowed truck filled with sheets of plywood and odd chunks of lumber found along the streets of GhostTown. In the massive abandoned piles, Bill found garden-building materials.
We learned that four chunks of a two-by-four made corners for boxes and connected everything. I got good with an electric handsaw. The only things we bought were screws and an electric drill.
Now in our third spring of gardening, we were still building new beds and topping off the existing ones. Every year, gripped by the fever of spring gardening, our mantra was always “More manure, we need more.”
A series of raised beds, like coffins, scattered the lot. That weekend, we had topped off the three existing beds and begun dumping the rest into new, yawning, empty boxes. I parked near the biggest one, cut the engine, and jumped into the truck bed.
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