Jason tried to make socially appropriate noises but tripped into a loaded silence.
I sighed. “The inspection?”
“Yeah,” he croaked, looking away. While he took a minute before going on, my stomach launched into free fall. Jason explained that when the inspector saw our rustic egg-washing building, he asked the location of our commercial sink, stainless steel counters, plumbed bathrooms, and septic. Our facility was, in essence, a shed on a field with a hose.
Jason had held up his binder, showed him his Xs, the notes, the highlighting. The inspector took it in his hands, squinted at the paperwork, and said, “Oh, I think someone sent you the wrong regs or maybe you’re missing some pages, but yeah, this won’t work.” He handed Jason the binder and began writing out our denial paperwork.
Although we’d technically done everything the state had asked us to do, we still couldn’t sell eggs to the public.
“Lu, I’ve been corresponding with them since last September and not once had any of this been mentioned. They want water testing, a sewer, a hand-washing sink, an equipment-washing sink—even though I have no equipment to wash—and all the plumbing has to be installed by a licensed plumber, with plans submitted to the Department of Labor and Industry,” he rambled.
“There’s a Department of Industry?” was all I mustered.
“Until all this happens, we can’t sell anything,” he said with an expression so pained I worried he’d vomit. “I’ve worked so damn hard for so long and I’ve kicked down every obstacle given to me but this one. I just don’t know.”
The reality was that we had rented this particular property based on its ability to meet regulatory requirements, built a building that would satisfy these specific rules, and became stewards of some sixteen hundred living beings with a particular set of constraints in mind. What the state was now requiring was a commercial kitchen with a low-end going rate of forty thousand dollars.
And with the hens starting to drop more eggs every day, we needed it now.
Seeing Jason so low, I somehow became the strong one and moved him to our patio table, setting food in front of him. He pushed it around his plate as I got the children ready to go to the movie, telling them their father was too tired.
“It’ll just be us tonight,” I said, managing a smile pulled from the well of parental strength.
As I was getting the kids’ coats (an essential every month of the year by Lake Superior), I finally gave Jason that beer. I’d lost track of it during the off-kilter moment of the news.
“There are four more in the fridge,” I told him. “Play your video game, sleep, we’ll talk in the morning.”
Though he hadn’t made the time in months, Jason liked to play an empire-building game called Civilization. His version is from the late 1990s, slow, and hardly animated at all. When he elects to build something in the game, like a road or a mine, a little pixilated guy will walk onto the screen and shovel for several minutes, while the game catches up. But he doesn’t mind the low-tech graphics; Jason’s in it for strategy and distraction.
And boy, did he need a distraction.
“Invade ancient Mesopotamia; you’ll feel better,” I said with a weak smile, my hand on his shoulder.
The rest of the night was one foot in front of the other. The film ran on the screen in front of me, but I only saw the drama of my life playing out inside my head, with no idea if it was a comedy or a tragedy. A thousand-foot freighter, a dot of lights, cruised past on the water, slipping behind the big movie screen on its way to the docks in Superior Bay. It knew where it was going, what it was doing, and that its day would end in safe harbor. That was what I wanted.
When I got home, Jason was asleep, snoring loudly on the couch. When I woke before four the next morning, he was gone.
Chapter 11
Groping with my cell, I located Jason’s speed-dial button. It rang a few times as I walked a tight circle from the kitchen to the dining room through the living room and round again.
There was clicking and then, “Hey, Bird.”
I heard road noise, suggesting travel at highway speeds.
“Where are you?” I demanded. “It’s like”—I looked over my shoulder at the microwave clock—“three forty in the morning.”
“Headed out to the farm early to get the minimum chores done, then I have some ideas about this inspection thing I want to check out.”
“Ideas?” I haven’t even had coffee and couldn’t imagine thinking fresh thoughts yet. “What ideas?”
“I’m not ready to talk about it yet.” He was annoyingly calm. “But I’ll let you know how it goes.”
Jason had returned to his unflappable self, which gave me leave to be my utterly flappable self, complete with wild hand gestures.
“Yeah, okay,” I sighed. “I can’t believe how crazy maddening this whole inspection business has been. You can’t give out incomplete rules, have us build a business around them, spending real money, like big money, and then be all ‘My bad.’ I bet we wouldn’t have even rented this particular farm had we—”
Jason cut me off. “This really isn’t helpful thinking right now, Lu. I can only look ahead and make the best of the choices in front of me.”
I pulled my hand back to stare at the phone. Now I was mad at Jason.
Past eleven p.m., I heard the creaky swing of the porch door. Jason looked tired, but better. I let him start the talking.
“It’s been a good day,” he said, unlacing his boots. “Been out making friends.”
After chores, he’d driven the minivan around the straight roads that hem in the enormous fields in Wrenshall. When he found an ag operation, he’d drive up the long driveway to the farmhouse. These were people, locals, who’d know where unused spaces were.
“How did you even start?” I asked, marveling at Jason’s ability to segue into any conversation.
“I’d knock on a door, say I’m the new chicken farmer up on Route 102A, and the government just screwed me,” he said, smiling. “It’s amazing how fast a mug of coffee appears in your hand with that opener.”
It’s probably fair to say that most farmers, steeped in a profession predicated on getting things done by one’s own hands, have at least some libertarian streak in them. But whatever their political leanings, these conversations, nearly half a dozen altogether, yielded two unused dairy parlors (sterile rooms where cows are milked) near Locally Laid. With floor drains, water, septic, and large basins, these old milking barns might satisfy the egg-washing needs of the State of Minnesota.
I smiled at his genius and thought I might be a little libertarian myself.
The dairy parlors didn’t pass inspection.
To his credit, the inspector got out to these neighboring farms and looked at the milking barns within a couple of days. But given their years of disuse, it would have taken too much effort and money to bring them back to current code. But as one inspection was going south, Jason was already on the phone lining up the next.
“I’ve got another lead,” he said, calling me from the minivan as he pulled out of the dairy farmer’s driveway, just ahead of the inspector.
“When I took that business class, I met that guy with the store,” he said. “He’s interested in renting part of his back room.”
Jason rarely leaves a room without knowing everyone in it, and that’s lucky for Locally Laid. While taking entrepreneur classes at the university, he’d met a man named Shane who, like us, was going into business in his forties. He’d purchased a country grocery store, but unlike us, he’d been working in his field for years and this was a natural progression, a scenario I greatly envied.
But what Jason had recalled from their conversation was Shane’s lament that the store was overbuilt for its rural setting and had more space than the business could support.
“Isn’t that, like, way far?” When stressed, I hemorrhage words.
Shane’s place was in Rice Lake, a solid forty-five minutes from the farm.
&nb
sp; “Yeah, it’s not ideal,” Jason said. “But it’s a place willing to take us and we’ll just store eggs in the farm’s cooler and wash every other day.”
That could work. Rod had built a beautiful little refrigerated house on our farm, standing at twelve by fourteen feet. I’d painted it barn red that spring while listening to books on tape for graduate school. I’d marveled at its highly buffed, stainless steel door that we’d bought used from a refrigeration company. That heavy door was likely the nicest thing in the whole operation. I tried to get everyone to call the cooler Egg-arctica, but my family only rolled their eyes at me.
Things moved ahead slowly. It was August before papers were signed and we were able to disconnect the plumbing at our farm facility, nervously transport it down the highway in an open trailer, and bring in the licensed (and very expensive) plumber and electrician to do their thing. Then, before even pushing one salable egg through the egg washer, we had to get the whole deal reinspected. Days quickly added up.
When the inspection problem first began, the oldest flock was just starting to crouch. When someone (preferably a rooster someone) walked past, our rusty brown birds would bend at the knees a bit. That’s chicken speak for “Come hither.”
Before owning this egg farm, I had only a vague notion of the workings of chicken reproduction. Honestly, I think I was fully an adult before I understood that fertilization wasn’t required to produce an egg. Put another way: no rooster needed. (It’s a common misconception; if you didn’t know, don’t beat yourself up.)
Here’s a quick run-through on poultry love. While an egg is laid (nearly) daily, it will become a chick only if a rooster’s sperm was ALREADY inside the hen before she started forming the egg. So, if a rooster comes into a flock of lady birds on a Saturday and starts right in with, forgive me, the “bow-chicka-bow-bow,” a fertilized egg could not be laid until Sunday. Eggs “in process” during copulation will not be fertilized.
Hens have sperm host glands inside the body, which will hold and release a tiny bit of a rooster’s reproductive goodness just as the egg is being made, making one encounter’s virility extend for nearly two weeks of viable eggs.
While our initial flocks were only hens, we were later gifted a few roosters. They have utility. As hens are busy, head down, foraging, a rooster will watch the sky. At the first sight of a hawk, he’ll sound the alarm with his worried crow and send hundreds of chickens sprinting to shelter.
But a rooster will also be there for the romance. Some of the more dramatic males will approach a potential mate flourishing their wings in sultry ways, like a flamenco dancer. Others less inclined to courtship will just wait for an opportune moment when a distracted hen is squatted over a meal and hop on.
To understand what happens next, you need to know that hens and roosters both have only one point of exit, the one-stop shop of orifices—the cloaca, commonly known as the vent. It’s the point of waste elimination, laying eggs, and the transfer of sperm. And despite our referring to the male of the species as a cock, they don’t have one. (Wait till you trot that nugget out at the next cocktail party.) What they do have is more like a nubbin, called the papilla, located just inside their own vent. Bereft of a functional copulatory organ, there’s no penetration in chicken sex, more of an aligning of vents during a piggyback-style mounting, called treading, during which the roosters spray their sperm. For most egg farms with a rooster or two, there’s little worry of selling eggs with a forming chick inside the shell. Any fertility in an egg is arrested once it hits the refrigerator, which typically happens within just a few hours of being laid.
All this talk of poultry love is to say that the crouching behavior we were seeing in our hens was a sign of sexual maturity and, more importantly, a precursor to eggs.
That July, the flock was indeed starting to lay. It wasn’t the full production we’d been expecting back in late June, but there had been factors. The birds may still have been acclimating to life “on the outside,” so to speak. They’d lived through their own Matrix movie moment, learning that their entire world, their cage-free warehouse space where they were raised, was not the world at all. That alone could have explained their late laying.
Or it could have been their early brooding, which would set the blame somewhere south at Myron’s door. The birds were small for their age, which meant that either they weren’t really as old as he claimed or they were developmentally behind due to malnourishment. And let’s not forget the wild ride they had to get to our farm. Of course, there was the terrible third option that no poultry professional seemed to be able to confirm but we never could shake: was it something we were doing wrong?
We’d fiddled with the feed ration, set out additional waterers, fussed over spacing in the coop and access to shade—really, anything we thought could make a mature bird happy enough to produce an egg.
Though now, we couldn’t legally sell.
Even with only the first flock starting to lay, that was then some 775 birds, and if only 50 percent were laying, that’s over 2,700 eggs in a week. Eggs we had no homes for.
Jason started bringing them home at an alarming rate.
“Hey, could you give these a wash?” he said, handing me another of the wire egg collection baskets he’d recently purchased. They would look old-fashioned if not for the blue rubbery coating over the wire.
While Jason leaned on the banister to get upstairs for a nap, I headed downstairs to our motherin-law apartment. Fortunately, we were between college student renters, giving me a full kitchen to turn into the washatorium. There I sterilized the sink with a spray bottle of diluted bleach water. For the next hour, I’d scrubbed farm life off the eggs—mud, straw, fecal matter, the occasional spots of blood. The small kitchen smelled, well, eggy.
I placed the eggs in the reused cartons I’d been gathering from friends and opened up the refrigerator door to face a wall of stacked eggs.
Legally, these couldn’t be sold even at a farmers’ market. Plenty of people do, but as we had ambitions to work with grocers and restaurateurs, we were dedicated to following all the rules.
Soon I was shaking Jason out of a loud, openmouthed nap. “Hey,” I repeated. “We’ve got sailing tonight.”
He sputtered awake, using his entire palm to rub up and down his face, which appeared rubbery with the unfinished business of rest. He stared, unseeing, into middle space.
“We’re a little late, but we can make most of it,” I said, talking over his obvious, unspoken preference to stay home. “I’ve got bread and cheese and beer in the cooler, ready to go.”
While we were all tired, I knew rest was not the only thing we needed. All this time spent on the farm was changing us, and I was losing my footing on how to function as a family or even be Jason’s partner—not just business partner. We were withering from lack of diversion and shared experience. Plus, we needed to remember why we lived in this brutal, beautiful place—on purpose.
The kids and Jason slumped in the minivan amid an air of mild contempt. I looked in the rearview.
“You remember Windbreakers?” I asked. A notable aspect of our destination, Park Point, was that this seven-mile sandbar jutting into Lake Superior can turn cold without warning. Winds shift over the cold lake and, as my sailor friend Dale says, lips pursed over his open palm, “It’s like blowing over an ice cube.” A northwest bluster can make a July day suddenly require a wool hat.
Summer is simply different here.
Driving to the sailboat launch, one must pass over the shipping channel via the area’s iconic Aerial Lift Bridge, rumored to be the most photographed road structure in the Midwest. Or maybe that’s just a rumor Duluth is trying to start. It’s an enormous steel girder apparatus, which raises the roadway over the water so ore-carrying freighters, gravity fed their iron cargo from railroad cars on a high trellis, can access the Saint Lawrence Seaway and, ultimately, the Atlantic Ocean. Looking at this whole dance of international commerce—the rail cars, the cargo chutes, the fre
ighters, the tug boats, the lift bridge—it’s like a Fisher-Price city operated by hand crank.
Once at the end of the Point, my friend Britt, whose kids go to school with ours, put a glass of wine in my hand and embraced me so tightly I felt more collected than I had in days. Over her shoulder, I saw that Jason was already involved in animated conversation and laughing, Milo was clicking shut a life vest, and Abbie was two-thirds up her favorite tree, a paper plate of lasagna in one hand, a book tucked under her arm.
“How’s the chicken biz?” Britt asked.
I dropped my smile and fell into the sad tale of the inspection and before long, a group gathered to hear. Even though I had, over the past few days, grown to a place of acceptance, our friends had to fight their way through the anger, the disbelief, and the urge to fix it.
And it was that fixing urge that became “Outlaw Eggs.”
“I’m going to sell them,” Britt said. Our mutual friend Maria joined in. True to their word, they took boxes of cartons, getting the buzz started using word of mouth and social media. For nearly two weeks, they ran ovum speakeasies out of their homes.
Later, I would find out that both Britt and Maria were buying dozens and dozens of eggs from us, and mostly giving them away. If I think too much on this kindness, it still makes me teary all these years later.
At the time, I struggled with it. I mean, how do you repay people for that?
Abbie says I should just pay it forward.
A few weeks later, in early August 2012, our egg-washing facility was blessed by the State of Minnesota and Jason dropped off a flat of eggs at the Duluth Grill. That evening I posted a photo of owner Tom Hanson with Abbie holding Locally Laid’s very first check. Now with our processing facility set, Jason was free to go out and close deals. He’d pack up our beautiful, brown-speckled eggs and walk in the back doors of grocery stores and restaurants. It’s a little ballsy to show up unannounced, but it’s also hard not to be at least a little interested in the smiling guy in the dirty ball cap, holding an open basket of dappled eggs.
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