Jason sounded hollow, defeated.
I wasn’t sure how to comfort him, as I knew each chicken lost was an emotional blow to him, as both a steward and a businessperson. When anyone starts a new venture there’s always a certain amount of claiming a title and growing into it, but with one’s own farm, the learning is less curved and more a vertical endeavor. One day you’re a guy standing in a field, the next you’re the caretaker of hundreds of needy critters. If Jason had worried about this transition, he hadn’t let on. Looking back, I probably hadn’t created the space for him to have doubts, being so worried myself.
I made plans to meet up with him at the farm a bit later and spent that early morning shoring up the domestic front with groceries and laundry. I’d also contributed to our family’s financial health by turning in another magazine article. It had been hanging over me, the way most everything had been hanging over me. I had found it difficult to write because it meant jumping off the “readying for the farm” treadmill of trips to the hardware store and afternoons stapling chicken wire under coop floors. And when I stopped, I thought. Terrifying thoughts like, What the hell are we doing with our lives?
I’ve read about people choosing wild journeys, folks who join the Peace Corps or go off grid to start a commune, individuals who don’t care that they’ve deviated from the anticipated path or what you think of them. I am not one of those people. It has struck me more than once that I should be reading about this venture rather than writing it. But to be honest, alongside the distress of living outside social expectations, it can be exhilarating. Truly. Like we were getting away with something—a valiant, lionhearted something.
Until the next moment, when it was again terrifying and I felt the mocking shroud of grocery-cart-living loserdom descending on our household. This continual swing between these extreme poles made it difficult to shepherd words into magazine articles. Or breathe.
Before turning the minivan toward Locally Laid, I quickly threw together a care package. Jason had supposedly been eating at one of the two restaurants in Wrenshall, with humorously similar names, the Boneyard and the Brickyard, located not even a block from each other. But in actuality, Jason wasn’t eating at all. When the children and I drove out we had clean clothes, snack bars, fruit, and, here I puffed up with my ingenuity, a plug-in kettle to heat water. With hot water, Jason could make himself the high-end instant coffee I picked up from Starbucks.
Coffee has always been a connection point for us, as we’d long spent lazy Sundays reading books, convening at the Church of the New York Times, or taking travel mugs on strolls around the lake. And now I was proud to announce that the prairie was caffeinated.
Later, when I walked him through his box of goodies, he nodded his thanks, grabbed a banana, and walked back out on the field.
“Wait!” I said, gracelessly jogging after him, the pot and dangling plug still in my hand. “Now you can make coffee out here.”
“That’s great, Bird, I just don’t have time,” he said with scarcely a backward glance as he walked toward the barn.
I stood there wondering who the hell this man was, but shook it off and moved after him. There’s always so much work to do.
“I’ve been watering birds since sunup,” Jason said. “It’s incredibly slow.”
He wasn’t joking. The process was to fill two fifty-five-gallon drums on the back of the four-wheeler from a garden hose spigot attached to our landlady’s house. It would take about forty-five minutes to top up, and then he’d drive over to the fence, getting out of the vehicle to open and relatch the two sets of metal gates, then jostle the ATV about an eighth of a mile out to the first hoop coop. From there, it was a tedious gravity-fed process via hose into the eight-gallon plastic waterers he’d gathered up in one location. Once they were full, Jason had to reposition the waterer stations, each weighing some seventy pounds.
This one task alone had taken Jason hours—and keep in mind, it was for half of the flock. The rest of our birds were due in a month.
Before we jumped in with chores, the kids and I took a few minutes to cross the pasture to where the hoop coops’ doors remained shut. Myron had advised us to leave the birds inside their new structures for a day so they would identify the coop as their home and acclimate to their new surroundings. As we approached, the birds closest to us moved back, causing a ripple of movement throughout the tarped building.
We clicked our tongues gently at them, sounds that stimulated our five chickens back at home to approach, tilt their heads engagingly, and gently peck at our shoes, hoping for an apple core or some other fine treat to fall from above. But these birds were clearly different. They had none of the languid, relaxed behaviors I’d come to expect in hens but rather gave off a palpable anxiety from their staccato personalities.
We hoped feeding them would help. The sun was hot and the prairie felt exposed as we approached the feed bin. Abbie and I worked together to wiggle open its hatch—a little like freeing a bulk item at the co-op, only on an industrial scale. It was a good-sized vessel, the bin, some sixteen feet tall and holding four tons of a blend of corn, soy, and alfalfa.
I went to lift the first full pail and it quickly became a physical comedy sketch out of an old black-and-white movie. There was grunting and spilling, staggering, and a near fall. The children, not sure how to read the situation, swallowed their laughter.
You know you’ve been a glorified typist for most of your adult life when you try to hoist a thirty-eight-pound bucket waist high onto the back of a four-wheeler. I started filling pails only halfway. Repeating this eight times, we were then ready to drive over to the first paddock. The kids switched off at the wheel. In addition to being good driving practice, it was the closest thing to actual fun they were going to experience today. Not to say they didn’t think chickens were cool, or the farm neat—in theory.
When we got to the first paddock, the first thing we did was disconnect the electric fencing. Even though the birds were not out, the fence is as much to preclude predators as to keep chickens in. That involved unplugging it from what I call the Box of Zap. It looks like a brown vintage suitcase with a futuristic solar panel built on to its smooth top. Though it might have looked harmless enough, it could deliver a swift jolt. Not the kind that’d knock you off your feet, but you’d likely jump in pain and perhaps use some creatively foul language. Once unhooked, the fencing was a harmless, pliable plastic netting on easy-to-move stakes.
In these early days, I would carefully open up a little space in the fencing to slip through. But as I got more efficient (and stronger) I learned how to step onto the fencing, caving it into the paddock and stepping off it once inside. It would reliably spring back up to place.
As I made my way in with the buckets, Abbie and Milo wandered off to the chicken infirmary, leaving me to approach the coops alone. I steadied myself with a breath and quietly begin singing as I opened the door.
“Mi-chelle, ma belle, these are words that go together …” I was shrieking before I could finish the first line.
As I’d stepped inside, there was a frenzied burst of clucking and wing flapping that cascaded into a swell of riotous movement. I fumbled with the bucket and instinctively slumped into a crouch, making myself smaller and less imposing.
“All right, all right, all right,” I whispered.
I inched my way to the feed pans we were temporarily using while the girls were cooped up, causing a small kerfuffles of wings and clucking as I moved. Tentatively, quietly, I shook out feed. There had been some left in the pan, but the sight and smell of a fresh meal perked a few up. Some even let out a bit more of a happy ca-caw noise.
“There you go. See, Lucie’s not so bad, no,” I prattled on to hold my nerve.
As I slunk out, back first, into the full sun, I sat on the grass and exhaled a ragged breath.
The kids were heading my way now. Abbie’s face was red under her fashion cap, built to frame her face rather than shield it, while Milo slumped alo
ng after her, generally carrying the look of the oppressed. Jason, our field expert, didn’t have the mental bandwidth to engage with them like he typically would. He likes to talk through things as he works, be a hands-on teacher to the kids, but today he was too busy being schooled himself.
I sighed, pushing out thoughts of what a great beach day this would be. I couldn’t allow myself to think that way anymore; this was our life now. We were making a choice away from a life of steady paychecks, paid vacations, and weekends off for this, the unpredictability of the pasture.
When the children and I returned the next day, we saw Jason in the distance heading up the rise to the coops. Out of our six structures, each a good 250 feet apart, three were filled with these new birds awaiting their first introduction to pasture. After they had spent a full twenty-four hours getting to know their coop, it was time to expand their world by a few hundred feet of green prairie.
Walking up the slight incline to where the coops were, it would be hard to overstate how beautiful the pasture was, thick with clover and tiny flowers. I half expected Julie Andrews to leap out in her peasant outfit and belt out “The Hills Are Alive.” By the time we got there, Jason was ready to open the door on the first coop, freeing the chickens into more space than they’d ever enjoyed. From being raised and transported in confinement, this, right then, was the point of the whole saga, theirs and ours.
As Jason unlatched the screen door, opening it wide into that gorgeous summer morning, the chickens backed up. They wanted no part of it. Absolutely none. It took us over an hour to shoo them all, crouched low to shepherd them out the door and to catch those trying to sneak back in. Over an hour later, three coops were emptied and all of the surviving hens (an approximate 775 surviving of our original 900) were out, doors shut behind them.
They stared at us.
Our home flock of five chickens are mighty foragers, and when they strut out in the morning, they’re on the job. They score and scratch the earth with their reptilian claws, then hop their whole chicken bodies back to survey what they’ve turned up. Pivoting their heads a full ninety degrees to get a side eye to the ground, they’re merciless with bugs and can scoop one up with blurring mechanical speed.
They’re peckers, all right.
But the farm flock in front of us was, well, stupefied. They didn’t seem to know what to do. Our entire pasture-raised concept was predicated on their grazing, but they were looking at us as if awaiting instructions.
Jason and I went quiet. We stood there, watching the chickens. And the chickens stood there, watching us, until one hen put her head to the grass and, as though in painful super-slow motion, she … pecked.
Gradually, the behavior rippled through the flock and the birds commenced ungainly foraging. Over the day, as we slung feed and filled the waterers, their skills developed. By afternoon, some flies had gathered on the sunny side of the coop, warming themselves against the tarp. A bird or two approached and clumsily snapped at the insects. Eventually, they caught a few.
The children and I stood in the field with the birds, watching them figure it out. If we leaned in close enough, I felt we might see the virtual lightning bolt snap through their little chicken cerebrums, like they were remembering something they didn’t even know they knew.
After we’d worked our way through the daylong chores, it was getting late and I needed to get the kids home. But I wanted to see the Poultry Butlers in action. I had a soft spot for these hilariously named solar-powered products. They’re hen doors that sense the sunrise and open—letting birds out. After chickens follow their natural instinct to seek shelter at dusk, the doors shut behind them. This would button up the girls’ house for the night. The combination of ridiculousness and practicality made me smile. Actually, at $170 each, these little doors even made it into the business plan. Because of them, we felt we could live away from the farm and know that the chickens would be protected against predators.
“The sun is really dropping now,” I’d observed, shifting weight from one hiking boot to the other.
But these hens were not going inside. They stood there, eyeing us.
“Huh,” Jason said as he rubbed his hands down on his dirty jeans.
The children stood quietly watching the chickens half-peck at grass in the fast-fading light.
Nothing happened.
And then it snapped into place … for me.
“Jason, they’re not going to go in.”
“Just give them a chance,” he said, slightly irritated, though not really with me.
“No, see … they’re not responding to night, because they’ve never actually experienced day before—ever.”
His eyes widened and we turned our attention back to these birds that could not make sense of a world without fluorescents. I realized something even more unnerving: we were going to have to get hundreds of hens into their coops.
I muttered an obscenity. One of the really bad ones. You may think, “How fast can a flightless bird be?” Consider the Rocky sequel. In it the boxer hones his speed and agility by trying to catch a chicken. It takes many segments of grueling montage before Mr. Balboa can overtake the sprinting hen. Of course, the crappy parts of my life refused to compress into a neat segment scored with inspirational music. I suffered every minute of the next hour, bent over attempting to rush birds, while getting a fluster of wings in my face.
Many hopped back out, until we had the good idea to station Milo at the door to act as sentry.
When the last bird was in, I leaned against the coop and felt all motivation drain from my muscles. We’d never be able to trust the chickens to put themselves to bed, nor, I was sure, could we count on them to come out in the morning. There would be long days here or we’d have to hire locals to do these tasks. Either way, this was not good news for Locally Laid. I was ready to go home and indulge in my second self-pity bath of the week. Then I looked inside.
“Jason,” I said with new alertness, “they’re all on the floor.”
It was completely dark now as Jason flipped open his cell phone and illuminated the hundreds of hens’ eyes, which reflected red and green. Not one bird was on a roost.
Now if it was instinct that drove a bird to shelter at dark, it was that same sense of self-preservation that would tell her to seek height.
A roost is nothing more than a highly placed stick or a branch that a bird clutches her feet around when at rest. It’s likely a throwback to their jungle heritage when chickens escaped to the trees for night safety. The practice still serves them well here in the heartland. It allows an opportunity to air tail feathers, tamp down bacteria, and perch close to each other for warmth and protection and out of their own fecal matter. (Chicken shit happens, but no one wants to bed down in it.) More important—it’s a real estate issue. We’d based the footprint of the shelter on vertical use of space. To say this another way, it was like we built a high-rise apartment and everyone was racing to live in the ground-floor unit. The danger of suffocation was real.
Jason sent us home and decided to wait a few minutes until the birds were fully asleep. Chickens sleep hard. Whoever came up with the saying “dead to the world” probably first uttered it in a henhouse at night. Whereas walking among hens in the day will cause a flustery ruckus, the night coop is peaceful with only the occasional coo sound emitting from sleeping birds, heads tucked so far under their wings they hardly look like they have heads.
That was when Jason walked in wearing a headlamp. He gently picked up each sleep-immobilized chicken and hand-placed them on their roosts, one by one by one. The birds instinctually wrapped their chicken toes around the stick despite their heavy-lidded slumber.
Because it was summer, the sun didn’t fully drop until nearly ten p.m., meaning Jason was either sleeping on the cot in the egg-washing building or coming home around midnight, only to be out the door again well before six a.m.—his new wake-up call.
Although it took over two weeks, the birds did come to roost on their
own as Jason managed to rewire their walnut-sized brains back to their instinctual state. (My friend Deb joked that each bird likely woke up in the morning thinking, “It happened again!” And looked over to her nearest roost buddy and said, “You too, Delores?”)
But our hens weren’t the only ones with new realities to adjust to. I began to see that our lives had shifted as well. Jason was now a farmer, and I was a married single parent.
Chapter 8
I am not a risk taker by nature, and there’s a case to be made that I’m just a plain weenie. In the section of my heart reserved for stout entrepreneurism sits a shirking pinto bean or maybe an eraser head. And it’s probably, counterintuitively, because I came from a business-owning family.
What I remember about my parents’ building construction venture was that it employed nearly a dozen crewmembers and was both successful and filled with stressors—or as I call it, succestressful. In my memory, I see my father shoveling dinner into his mouth at the kitchen table while talking on a telephone stretched to the end of its curly cord. It was often a conversation steeped with worry about subcontractors or a foundation not setting up properly due to a cold snap. He’d often get out of bed at night to check a job site.
My father had very little time, heavy thoughts, and ulcer trouble. My mother worked nonstop to keep a lovely home and then, after dinner was put away, hunched over wide ledgers and a metal-handled check embossing machine.
It was a few weeks after the first batch of chickens arrived that I went to see my parents, now retired, in Maine. When I visit my home state, I almost always finagle a writing gig to at least partially morph my annual visit into a business trip. The most amenable has been Cabin Life, a “lifestyle” magazine featuring glossy spreads of luxuriant second homes on breathtaking properties—real estate pornography.
I took my father along on that day’s adventure to Cundy Harbor, a seaside fishing village so obscure that GPS simply gave up. The Maine coast is tricky that way, a collection of crooked and curved land fingers constantly washed by the Atlantic. We had just emerged from the hairiest of this driving, my seventy-eight-year-old dad at the wheel. Our chatter had been about the restored Swedish-style cabin we’d just toured when he turned his head and asked what had clearly been on his mind for months.
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