On the cold drive home, uncomfortable in my moistened jeans, I caught myself thinking, “This is a little like working a factory job,” and then realizing it was exactly like working a factory job. I tried hard not to count how many years of liberal arts education Jason and I have between us, instead concentrating on the hot shower waiting for me at home, followed by a jelly jar of wine. Maybe two.
The next morning, after getting the children off to school and after Jason was long gone to the farm, I set to family errands, starting at the grocery store. While pushing the cart and hamhandedly tearing coupons from the supermarket circular, I was prioritizing my day. Milo had occupational therapy in a couple of hours, and while the contract copywriting for the ad agency had mostly dried up, I still had a couple of freelance gigs to get out the door. And there was always plenty of reading and writing to do for graduate school.
At the checkout, I watched my items flow down the conveyor belt and was coming up with my bagging strategy—what to put in the cloth ones I’d brought from home, which meats to slip into plastic bags, when the cashier announced (a little too loudly, I thought) that my card had been declined.
“Declined?” I said back, like I was suddenly a foreigner and unfamiliar with the term. In a way, I was. There have been times when we’ve forgone trips and home improvements because of finances, but there had always been money for basics. And there’s nothing more basic than food. Plus, I had always been keenly grateful for it. I’d long performed a post-grocery-shopping ritual. Walking to the then Toyota minivan, now busted-up Honda, I’d put a hand to my heart, offering gratitude, a shout-out of thanks to the universe for allowing me to feed my family. And now as this woman handed me my useless card back, I wanted to say, “But there’s some mistake; you see, I’ve been appreciative.”
Doing quick accounting in my head, I tried to discern what had happened. Then I remembered: health insurance. We were back to buying our own. That bill was nearly the size of our house payment, and I was guessing that through the magic of electronic funds transfer (and my poor planning), it had scooped the remaining money out of our account.
“Oh,” I said.
The cashier was not unkind, but I was nervous anyway. Quickly working through my disorganized wallet, I saw the company credit card—the one I’m not to use for personal expenses, ever. Jason had been resolute and clear on this.
I handed her the card. It worked.
As I walked to the car, my breathing was off-kilter, but I forced myself to slow down and somehow be grateful anyway. The Lake Superior beach stone I wear around my neck, an artistic gift from Gail, was clutched in my hand. It served as both a warm comfort object and talisman.
Hours later, long after I’d fed the kids, I stood by the kitchen window watching for the egg van to pull into the alley. When its lights illuminated the garage, I ran outside to meet Jason. It was cold, with some snow on the ground, and while I preferred to talk inside, I didn’t want the children to overhear. The garage’s motion-sensing light popped on and we met in the spotlight, where I blurted out my checkout story.
“What’s going on? What’s wrong with the farm?” I asked. “I keep going back to our initial projections.” I said this knowing all the factors that knocked those numbers off track months ago.
Jason could barely hold a facial expression through his weariness, his clothes smeared with filth, and me, at this moment, asking for his comfort.
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “It’s … so much harder than I’d thought.”
Though I’d long suspected, this was the first time he’d said it aloud. I imagine he felt duped by the seemingly simple nature of the pasture system. I flashed back to his “Itsy Bitsy Spider” hand gestures at the Mexican restaurant, representing the beautiful cycle of sun, the grass, and field rotation. The imagery did not align with the dirty, nearly broken man in front of me. He felt betrayed by the sustainable models based on warmer climes that ran, at least partially, on intern labor.
“But nothing really bad is going to happen. I mean, we’re not going to lose the house?” Our house in the Cities had finally sold a few months back, and now that we were down to one home, I was keen on keeping it. But I’d really only asked to hear him refute my doubts. I mean, we were having a tough moment, but we were still of middle-class stock; things would work out. They always did, right?
“I don’t think so.” Jason repositioned, swallowing. “I guess, I’m not sure.”
Standing in the cold, I saw the world through a Jell-O fog. The goose bumps that had sprung up on my arms and legs seemed to be pulling my whole essence upward and out of my body. If I’d had eaten dinner with the children, I would have surely vomited.
“I’m sorry, Lu. It’s just so hard.”
That night in bed, I couldn’t shut my mind off. I tumbled the realities of the business like pouring sand from cup to cup, trying to get our Big Gulp–sized expenses not to spill over the sides of our Dixie cup income. That was when I saw it. On the wall was a spider, about the span of my palm, with a full and round abdomen the size of a fifty-cent piece.
Spiders make me lightheaded in a way other insects don’t—the way their robotic scuttle is always faster than anticipated, and how at once they’re angular and pointy and bulbous, promising an explosive, wet splat if met with a bluntly wielded phone book.
The spider skittered across the wall and launched itself onto the bed, legs extended. The sharp breath I’d gulped exhaled as a forceful, unbroken scream.
As I rocketed now to a standing position on the bed, six eyes took me in—though not arachnid ones, but the anxious human eyes belonging to my family. They were filled with concern for me, but also, no doubt, for themselves.
Because night terrors were back.
They’d last visited me just as the chickens arrived, back when I was having trouble eating, an unusual condition for me. Typically stress is a call for ice cream and hot, buttered cinnamon-sugar toast served with tea and cream. But this wasn’t that kind of tension.
It sat in my gut, a palpable mass of anxieties leaving little room for food and displacing bitter stomach acids that seemed to enjoy the ride up my esophagus, given the frequency of my acid reflux. I knew I was losing weight because both my pants and my peers told me so.
But there was nothing to do, other than to ride through our rocky startup.
Chapter 14
January swept in, bringing Canadian air masses and frigid temps with it.
“It’s stupid cold, and my phone’s going to die,” Jason shouted over the percolating bird chatter. “The wellhead froze again this morning.”
After bantering about the foolishness of digging a well on rented land, we’d decided that a few thousand to save Jason’s back and solve a myriad of farm headaches was worth it.
Until it wasn’t.
“How can the well be frozen? Isn’t it heated?” I was incredulous.
After we had spent the money to punch (that was the preferred verb of our well digger—to punch) an artesian well and then protect it with an insulated fish house and space heaters, how could the hoses have the audacity to freeze?
Last fall, when the drilling company was finally ready to attempt a borehole after weeks of scheduling conflicts, we’d rocked on the balls of our feet, hoping for water. It was anticipatory agony. We were paying for this hole in the ground whether anything flowed through it or not. The truck’s giant piston had been cranked into the sky, standing erect like a fire truck ladder, and the auger bit, the width of a salad plate, was set in place. They were willing to drill up to two hundred feet and if there wasn’t water then, well, that’s just tough luck and thank you for the check.
After two hours, they ground through the eighty-foot mark and finally, mercifully, hit flow. Water came gushing forth from the ground and we were happy as the Clampetts, packing the truck for Beverly Hills.
But that was weeks ago, before winter bit in.
“Bird, you can’t really complain about it free
zing. The thermometer here says minus thirty-three.”
“Oh.”
This sank in. Not only was Jason working outside in these inhumane temps, but the squawking members of our investment portfolio were currently huddled together with only tarps and hay keeping their tiny hearts beating against the cold, never mind keeping them laying eggs. It was like never-ending winter camping on the prairie.
And as one might expect, egg production dropped. It fell well below the modest dip we’d anticipated, and what eggs we did find were often frozen in nests, despite us collecting every few hours.
We were working our winter plan, feeding our northern gals scratch, keeping their coops buttoned up against winds. They’d be fine. It was what we did with our backyard hens with solid success and what every piece of sustainable ag literature preached. Plus, we lit the hoop houses. When the sunlight shortens in the winter, chickens get less action from their pineal gland, which releases the hormone that triggers egg production. It’s all part of their circadian clock. On the farm, we use commercial poultry LED lights, but a simple twenty-five-watt bulb on for some seventeen hours a day is enough to keep birds laying through the season.
Prior to Locally Laid, I understood the dark season as much as any office worker could, having run from one climate-controlled building to the next, until I bundled up for a few hours on the ski hill or trudged through the woods on snowshoes. But nothing could have prepared us for our first winter outdoors with our fifteen hundredish chickens. Coincidentally, the 2012–2013 winter would go down as one of the coldest, with strings of days below zero, and the snowiest on record with a series of late-season snowstorms. It felt like a season actively trying to kill you. The last major accumulation was on April 22, a full seven months after our first flakes in September.
And it wasn’t just cold and snowy. It was disheartening. That time of year, the sun is sluggish, and it scarcely backlit the low, white sky that covered the Northland. It felt like an overturned Tupperware bowl had descended over the entire Twin Ports region, ensuring that no excess light or joy leaked in. But the mild, seasonal depression I suffered was nothing compared to the farm challenges.
Although the well was a huge improvement over our old water drum method, we still didn’t have underground piping to the coops. This meant using a hose, pressurized by the well’s electric pump, to fill five-gallon buckets, and then towing those buckets on a trailer pulled by the Kubota to the coops.
But when the longer hose from the wellhead would freeze, Jason had to fill each bucket directly from the flexible piece of three-inch-diameter plastic piping through which the well was channeled. This was an onerous task that stretched out for hours in the cold. The shortness of the plastic pipe meant he had to take the water containers off the trailer to fill, then lift the forty-three-pound buckets up and back onto the trailer. This action was repeated over fifty times a day, meaning Jason was literally moving a ton of weight.
He gave up on using lids for the water containers because the thin plastic would simply shatter in the extreme cold. That meant that as the water was pulled along in the trailer, it would slosh. As it sloshed, ice would form on its floor, which, trip after trip, increased the weight. And the heavier the trailer, the more likely it’d get stuck.
Freeing it often took a half hour or more of shovel and sledge work, hauling snow and whacking ice. As winter wore on, Jason stopped using our standard trailer, opting for a smaller one, really more of a cart. It carried fewer buckets and required more trips but was lighter and less likely to get mired. Later, when even that small trailer would become too weighed down with ice, Jason could haul only a couple of buckets at a time in the small back area of the Kubota.
Once he finally arrived at the hoop coops, Jason would pick up the heavy buckets, one in each hand, and carry them with careful steps over the flexible fencing—avoiding the slick patches—and into the chicken paddocks to fill the waterers. Despite his care, Jason did fall a few times and ended up back at the chiropractor. It was Chicken Antics on Ice, Poultry Capades on the Prairie.
The other difficult task was keeping the water from freezing. We’d purchased warmers and changed out our plastic waterers for old-fashioned steel poultry founts that could sit on the electric heating discs. Picture an overturned metal bucket on a big saucer. There’s a handle on the flat top of the inverted bucket that, when lifted, reveals a water-holding metal tube inside. These two sections, the tube and its bucket sheath, can often freeze together as water creeps up the metal sleeve and freezes there. To get them apart, Jason clanged them vigorously with a hammer, a tool often covered in frost itself.
There was no winning at the farm that winter. It was a race to keep the birds alive, calling on Jason to dig in with Shackleton-like tenacity, just as he did all those cold hockey mornings. Even the county extension agent, a government-paid farmer resource, shook his head during a courtesy call and said, “No one should have to work this hard.”
During this time, unbelievably still in early winter, Jason would come home hours after dark, vacant inside his body. He was still losing weight and wore exhaustion like a rubber mask, making him prone to lulls of silence when eating dinner. Conversational banter was beyond him.
At one meal, Jason managed to say, without looking up, “We do all this work to have them on pasture and the chickens won’t even go outside into the snow—even on the warmer days.”
On days above freezing, it’d be good for a chicken to get some exercise, stretch a bit, and relieve some of the stress of being “all cooped up.” Otherwise, cabin fever would inevitably circle back to the bird aggression we’d been trying to tamp down for months. Jason explained that the hens would come to the edge of the coop and gaze out, as wistfully as a chicken can muster.
“Well,” I ventured, “can chickens see snow?”
I had a theory that chickens, with those reptilian eyes and jungle brains, simply couldn’t register that white swath the way we do. My guess was that for hens, it’s perceived as the end of their world and no good would come from stepping off. The next weekend I was at the farm, I laid some straw on the pasture, putting an especially generous heap by the door, where they’d be making that giant first step. And surprisingly, it worked. Something during that ugly winter started going right.
In other attempts to do what I could, I started cooking like a 1950s farm wife. Jason, out in the January cold, was wasting away before me and clearly needed a heavier diet. I went online to learn how to prepare pork loins or brisket or whatever was on sale in the meat department.
Jason came home one gray winter afternoon and looked more forlorn than his standard-issue level of downcast.
“What’s up?” I asked, seeing him hunched in the entryway.
“Oh, LuBird, I … I lost my wedding ring,” he said. “Must have slipped off my finger on the pasture.”
I could not suppress my groan. I was angry at LoLa, irked that she’d managed to work Jason into such a thin little nub that he couldn’t maintain a ring on his finger. Also, I fought against reading too much into it, seeing it as a clear sign that the farm was nullifying my marriage. In all likelihood, it was gone forever. A bird probably saw a shiny on the prairie and ate it.
While part of Jason’s weight loss was the incredible physicality of it all, it also came from the stress of disappointing customers. The eggs had gained a certain popularity. The Duluth Grill wanted everything we could get them, while cartons were also in demand at the handful of retail outlets selling Locally Laid. The birds were using everything they had to simply stay alive.
Though I knew the girls weren’t in full production, it was during a Wednesday night egg washing that I truly understood how little they were laying. It was just Jason and me. We’d sent our helper home early and it struck me that the task was getting done in no time at all. I looked at the skimpy number of baskets on the metal cart.
“Jason,” I shouted over the whir of the AquaMagic, “how many eggs were we getting a day last fall?�
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“I don’t know,” he said, not looking up from his task of sorting eggs on the other side of the machine. “Sometimes fourteen hundred?”
As we washed roughly every other day, that meant over twenty dirty baskets filled the cleaning floor.
That night I could count the two days’ worth of egg baskets on one hand.
I did some quick math and took a sharp breath. According to my multiplication, we were bringing in about a hundred dollars a day—before paying any of our expenses. Feed, rent, workers, electrical, insurance—the list went on.
“Jason, we must be losing thousands every month.”
“Yeah,” he said, still not looking up.
“Jesus, Jay, you’re killing yourself and we’re hemorrhaging our life savings,” I said, panic now elevating my voice. “Honestly, there’s got to be an easier way to make NO MONEY.”
This business was going under.
We were going to fail big in front of my family, his family, and our community, which had rallied around us and the farm. I thought of the volunteers building in the spring rain. We would disappoint our children, whom we’d gotten so excited about this venture. How would they ever trust us again? How would we trust ourselves?
“Laying just went to hell, Lu. I don’t know what to do,” he said. His tone was flat.
“There’s got to be something to do. I mean, everyone is making money on this but us.” I gestured around this rented washroom and mentioned our feed supplier.
Locally Laid Page 13
