My personal relationship to the Golden State is complicated by this additional fact: I walk to California now and then. Living at 6,000 feet in the extreme western Great Basin Desert means that California looms on our sunset horizon. Westward from our home the sagebrush ocean ripples out in a series of lovely, undulating foothills, then a sweeping, windy trough of valley, above which crests the ridge of our 8,000-foot home mountain. One of the many interesting things hidden among the mountain’s wildflower-strewn summit meadows and shattered granite palisades is the Nevada-California state boundary. From our home on Ranting Hill it is a walk of several hours to reach the mountain’s base, and then an 1,800-foot climb to gain its ridge. Once atop the mountain’s spine, something curious and wonderful occurs. A view homeward, to the east, reveals the infinite sea of dust-green sage, crumbling sandstone palisades, and expansive alkali flats that comprise the unmistakable skin of the Great Basin; but a view to the west features the exfoliating granite turrets and thickly carpeted conifer forests that bespeak the magnificence of the Sierra Nevada. It is an odd feeling to straddle the saddle summit of my Janus-faced home range, contemplating by turns the very different worlds it at once connects and separates.
The flora and fauna atop the ridge also reveal the mountain’s complexity, its rich hybridity and ecotonality. On the same slope, you will find desert tree species such as Utah juniper growing alongside mountain species like Jeffrey pine. The wildflowers, too, offer a wild combination of the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada, with desert buckwheat and tower butterweed growing together in a sweeping summit valley where balsamroot and mule’s ears also mingle, and even columbine may be found hiding in the dappled shade of coyote willow and trembling aspen. Most of our desert birds are here—raven, magpie, harrier, golden eagle, meadowlark, pinyon jay—but they share the mountain with western outliers such as the spotted towhee. This ridge is the annual highpoint for pronghorn antelope, which prefer the drier, lower valleys but also use the mountain’s springs, near which, during autumn, pronghorn bucks hide their harems of does in the rocky niches of the summit valleys. Yet this is also where our largest herd of mule deer crosses while moving in the opposite direction each fall, the animals clambering from Sierra blizzard country down into the dry valleys, where they can nibble bitterbrush and avoid becoming snowbound prey of the mountain lions that frequent this range. And while this mountain and its Sierra deer do keep cougars in the area, it is also a place where I once tracked a black bear—an animal so alien to the desert that it must have snuffled the rabbitbrush and sage and turned for the sunset again.
In a gridded world that is incised by arbitrary yet often limiting artificial boundaries, our home mountain represents a real and meaningful boundary, for its backbone is the far-eastern or far-western frontier for many species that simply cannot endure a life that is any higher or lower, colder or hotter, wetter or drier. My home mountain is like a nameless saloon at the end of a long, dusty road in the remote outback of the Intermountain West: a place where all manner of desert rats wash up for the simple reason that this is the last place to patch a tire or check a baseball score, to get that hot coffee or cold beer we’ve been thinking about for hundreds of dusty miles.
The unreal boundary separating Nevada from California is on the mountain, too, and though I may unknowingly crisscross this invisible line a dozen times during a long day’s walk, I never sense it as I pass. If I pause to ruminate on this transparent border—and on the incendiary identity politics it ignites in the inhabited valleys below me—it is only to recognize the spectacular irrelevance of the distinction it attempts to signify.
IN A LIVE RECORDING of his song “Canned Goods,” the American folk musician and hillbilly existentialist Greg Brown offers some midsong patter commenting on Pablo Neruda’s wonderful poem “A Certain Weariness” (“Cierto Cansancio”), in which Neruda memorably wrote:
I’m tired of chickens—
we never know what they think,
and they look at us with dry eyes
as though we were unimportant.
Brown first paraphrases these lines and then adds, “It’s true…they do…and we are. But it’s hard to take that from a damned chicken.” I can’t help but agree that I would rather be looking into the starry night sky than into the hollow eyes of a hen when I experience the profoundly ennobling epiphany of my own cosmic insignificance.
And yet I, too, have become a keeper of chickens. I should confess that I find the growing popularity of chicken keeping a yuppie fad that I am not entirely comfortable being associated with. I am certainly no yuppie: I am not young, I am as far from being urban as I can manage without moving to Alaska, and I am professional only in the sense intended by Hunter S. Thompson, when he offered the shrewd observation that, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” (This, in fact, is the insight that inspired my career as a professional writer.)
Like many of my follies, this keeping of hens is the fault of my young daughters, who were sure that raising chickens would be fun, because “they’re so fluffy and yellow and cute.” As a father, I have discovered that invocation of the four-letter word cute is usually a signal that trouble is brewing. I explained to Hannah and Caroline that the fuzzy-yellow, springtime stage of a chicken’s existence lasts about forty-five minutes and is soon followed by protracted cohabitation with a feathered beast so vicious and scaly that keeping one is akin to having a pet baby dinosaur.
“Baby dinosaur?” exclaimed Caroline, “That’s epic!”
All fathers of daughters come to learn the futility of resistance to anything deemed cute. So, in early May, we made the momentous trip to the feed store, where the girls chose four yellow fluff balls, whose best quality, I thought, was how incredibly cheap they were. But we also had to buy a big plastic tub to keep them in, plus a screen to cover the tub, a bag of shavings and some chick feed, a little water bin, and a spendy clamp-on heat lamp. The total cost of this outing was something like ten bucks for the chickens and another hundred to accessorize them, a thing-to-its-stuff ratio disturbingly reminiscent of Barbie dolls—another cute purchase that had left a sizeable dent in my hip.
We brought the baby birds home and set them up in the garage out of reach of our old dog, Darcy, and the girls had fun playing with them. Hannah named one “Henrietta,” which was as sweet as it was inevitable, while Caroline insisted on “Eggcellent Chicken” for another. Eryn named the third chick “Susan Henimore Cooper” after the novelist James Fenimore Cooper’s daughter, Susan, who wrote Rural Hours, the 1850 paean to the virtues of country living. I dubbed fluff ball #4 “D. B. Cooperetta,” in honor of the aerial outlaw and American folk hero D. B. Cooper, who in 1971 hijacked a Boeing 727, extorted the airline for cash, and then parachuted out into the rainy darkness somewhere over the Pacific Northwest, never to be seen again.
Despite their cuteness and their clever names, the little chicks had pretty active business ends, and it inevitably fell to me to clean out what quickly became a bucket of dust, shavings, and fowl turds. The birds grew so quickly that it soon became necessary to acquire a coop and attached run, which I scored for two hundred dollars from an old man hawking them out of the back of his battered pickup in the parking lot of the only gas station in our valley. When the chicks grew large enough, we transferred them to their new home, which now required yet more shavings and an even larger water dispenser, not to mention a ridiculous amount of feed that the baby pterodactyls soon began to gobble up. There went another hundred bucks. Within forty-eight hours the coop and run were invaded by ground squirrels, which necessitated lining the entire bottom of the run with plywood and reinforcing the poultry netting around the whole operation, at a total cost of another C-note. When the first frost fell in autumn, I also had to add a device to prevent the birds’ water from freezing; this, along with the heat lamp, required a heavy-duty extension cord, power strip, and timer.
After a few months, I had done a who
le lot of coop cleaning, and we still had not a single egg. It was time to reckon the damage. Over a tumbler of sour mash, I determined that, although I was only out a ten-spot on the birds, everything they had needed to stay warm, healthy, hydrated, and out of the intestines of coyotes had run me a staggering seven hundred bucks. At fourish bucks a dozen for free-range eggs at the supermarket in town, the seven Benjamins I had shelled out on Susan Henimore and her chick quartet would buy more than two thousand eggs. I then calculated the likely lifespan and laying productivity of these squawking featherballs and determined that, even if a bobcat didn’t eat them, these ladies could never squat them out at a rate that could approach the break-even point.
Then there are the chickens themselves, which attract coyotes and constantly require feed, water, and fresh shavings. There is nothing like coming home from a long day of work, pouring a few fingers of glowing hooch, parking my keister on the hearth in front of the woodstove, and then remembering that I have to pull on my snow boots and tramp out into the freezing wind to serve the chickens. It takes all the paternal sympathy I can muster not to “accidentally” leave the coop door open—a simple mistake that would allow Old Man Coyote to quickly solve a problem forced upon me by my daughters.
Worse still is the psychological trauma induced by looking at those small monsters, with their weird, bulbous heads and their scaly legs and scrabbly claws, their vicious beaks clacking as they squawk and strut around mindlessly. Those terrible eyes—so beady, shifty, devious. Dark pinpricks of nothingness! Is it any wonder people have so long questioned the motives of chickens crossing roads? Like Neruda, I’m tired of chickens. Like Greg Brown, I suspect that if there is any message concealed within their empty eyes, it has something to do with the Sisyphean insignificance of our own existence. Yet somehow, even while scraping up frozen chicken shit in ten-degree weather, that insight still strikes me as funny—even useful.
Although the hens at last began to lay a few eggs, they are still a reminder of why I am destined to remain a land-poor rural hobby farmer whose quest for pastoral bliss, if reckoned by the dollar, amounts to little more than an elaborately maintained affectation. I was reminded of how my own mother had once demonstrated the poor returns on a fishing trip I had taken with my dad by calculating the price-per-pound of the few fish we caught relative to the considerable sum we had spent to try our luck. But we were not buying fish, of course. We were buying an experience together, which Mom knew perfectly well. I am not in the chicken game to produce eggs. I am buying a shared experience with my daughters, and I consider that a fair deal, even if it comes at a high price.
The eggs we buy at the store are eaten, and nothing more. What does not end up in the septic tank may lodge in our cells, but there is no other payoff from the experience, no sense in which that store-bought egg will also lodge in our memory and imagination. But the small, beautiful, pointed, bluish egg left by Eggcellent Chicken is a different thing entirely. That is the product of something more than a chicken, purchased with something more than money, and enjoyed with something more than the need to chow down and race to town. When the girls crunch out through the snow to harvest that bluish gem—talking all the while to the birds, who also talk back to them—they are being nourished in some way that will not be reckoned by the dozen. Living up here on Ranting Hill will never pay, but I consider it a bargain just the same.
IT ALL STARTED when I made a small mistake on Mother’s Day. It was an honest mistake, one anybody might have made. As a gift for my wife, Eryn, on her very first Mother’s Day, I bought a garden gnome, which I presented to her along with a romantic expression of my love and appreciation. So complete was my naïveté at that time that I honestly believed I had done something wonderfully thoughtful. The gnome was not plastic but rather cast iron, a seventy-pounder the size of a small child that had to be moved with a hand truck and had set me back serious coin. This was not a gnome that said, “Hey, enjoy this until it breaks or we divorce, whichever comes first,” but rather, “Honey, this gnome, like our love, is built to last.”
Also in my defense, the weighty gnome was not standing, in that awkward lawn jockey pose into which so many gnomes are unhappily forced, but was fully supine, cradling a cork-topped bottle of hooch in the crook of his arm. He was sprawled out with feet crossed, reclining coolly on one elbow, with his head cocked, while his bearded face wore a mischievous, come-hither grin. In fact, the gnome looked kind of sexy, which seemed perfect. Having been married eighteen years, I now see the error of my ways, but I still maintain that the gnome, which to this day reclines, rusty and drunken, in the stippled shade of a bitterbrush bush, is a quality gnome.
For our young daughters, every year is a necklace strung with the sparkling beads of holidays—holidays I find both annoyingly frequent and often unforgivably obscure. For example, I am no longer happily ignorant of Hoodie Hoo Day, which is celebrated each February 20 by people who go outside precisely at noon, wave their hands over their heads like fools, and shout, “Hoodie-Hoo!” And how can I support Middle Name Pride Day on March 10? Can we not simply agree to be ashamed of our middle names, which should remain unspoken, except when parents chastise children for their abominable behavior? I see now that holidays were invented primarily for elementary school teachers, for whom the year would be impossibly tedious without them. In retaliation, I have begun insisting that my daughters help me to celebrate some obscure holidays that are more compatible with my own sensibility: Do a Grouch a Favor Day on February 16 (I receive rather than give), Defy Superstition Day on September 13 (my answer to evangelicalism), and Hermit Day on October 29 (which I desperately need to celebrate after having been subjected to so many ludicrous holidays throughout the year).
Recently we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday everyone in my family can get behind. While I am not entirely comfortable commemorating a guy who killed innocent snakes and talked pagans out of their perfectly serviceable native polytheism, I do recognize the solid common sense in appropriating religious holidays for the noble purpose of drinking whiskey. This year Caroline, having noticed the garden gnome, asked, “Is it a Leprechaun?” I explained that it was instead a quality gnome, adding that Leprechauns only sneak around on the night of March 17.
“Do they come all the way from Ireland?” she asked.
“Well, they’re descended from Irish Leprechauns, who came to Nevada during the 1840s looking for a pot of gold,” I replied. “They’re all over the Great Basin now. Pretty much westernized, too—roper boots, big belt buckles, buckaroo Stetsons…green Stetsons.”
“Does Old Man Coyote eat them?” asked little Caroline, who is obsessed with predation.
“Nope. Leprechaun is a trickster, like Old Man Coyote, so they just play tricks on each other.” Now she frowned. “But,” I continued, trying for a quick recovery, “mountain lions love to gobble up Leprechauns.”
Caroline flashed a wide grin. “Cool! I bet they crunch ’em right in their little necks and shake ’em hard!”
Big sister Hannah, whose credulity is matched only by her nerdiness, chimed in enthusiastically, “So, Leprechauns are invasive exotics!”
“Exactly,” I said. “Just like your mother. Mommy came over the Sierra from California, trapped me, and then started having you mischievous little Nevada babies.”
Hannah, who has seen me live-trap everything from field mice to ground squirrels, now asked, “Can we trap a Leprechaun?”
“No problem,” I replied, “but you girls will have to help me build the trap.”
The next week was incredibly fun. Hannah used graph paper to devise a floor plan for the Leprechaun trap, which we would construct from the cardboard box left over from the recent purchase of a shop vac. Like the native Nevadan she is, Hannah also insisted that we call the trap the Leprechaun Lounge, which, she observed astutely, sounded more welcoming. Hannah included in her architectural design a porch, which seemed a thoughtful addition to a
trap. Caroline was also generous, suggesting that we add a potty. (“You know, Daddy, just in case,” she whispered discreetly.) Each evening the girls added something new to the trap: a pile of gold coins, which they made by wrapping quarters in aluminum foil and coloring them with a yellow highlighter; a little doll’s bed, in case the incarcerated sprite got drowsy; and, of course, green things, which are not easy to come by here in the high desert. Ultimately, the girls settled on a juniper twig, a small plastic dinosaur they call Braucus, and a cup full of mini-marshmallows soaked overnight in green food coloring.
At some point in our discussions of Leprechaunalia, I mentioned that the wee fellows are awfully fond of Irish whiskey, which prompted the girls to beg that I raid my liquor cabinet on their behalf. I soon discovered, however, that I had no Jameson or Old Bushmills, only fifteen-year-old Redbreast, a whiskey so fine and rare that I once declined to share it with my own mother, whom I love dearly. Yet here were these kids demanding that I put my liquid gold into a cardboard box while we snoozed away the night of March 17. Because their track record with cups of other liquids suggested that my quality hooch would end up watering the dust, I insisted upon being the one to place this delicious bait into the trap. Just before bedtime, we set up the Lounge just outside the slider door. Reluctantly, I poured a short glass of the precious Redbreast and carefully slid it into the Leprechaun trap while the girls looked on enthusiastically. We then nestled into our sleeping bags on the living room floor, where we began our stakeout of the trap.
After twenty minutes of vigilance both girls fell soundly asleep, and I got to thinking. The trap was cute, the girls were cute, the three of us snuggling in the mummy bags—all very cute. But now the girls were asleep, and my quality liquor remained in serious danger. The wind ripping down off the Sierra might upset the trap, and it was a cinch that field mice and kangaroo rats would scurry in and stick their whiskered snouts into that glass. Even evaporation—the beautifully named “angel’s share”—seemed too cruel a fate for such quality booze.
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