by Manny Howard
It seems the first two will be the hardest tilapia to produce.
The next morning I awake in The Zero. A black mood—yes, I know, leave aside clinical diagnostics—that, most often, leaves me defenseless against even untethered fits of hopelessness and self-doubt, never mind specific, identifiable failure. This morning, though, my confidence about laying hands on tilapia brood stock torpedoed, rather than succumb to The Zero, I am moved by an uncharacteristic fit of prudence. Before my second cup of coffee, sitting in front of the computer, I reach out to members of the meat-rabbit community. As a group they are enormously accommodating and many patiently answer all my questions. By lunchtime, rabbits have joined tilapia among my best hopes for animal protein. These are early days. No decisions have been made. No reason to get Lisa involved just yet.
WHEN THE GOING
WAS GOOD
This will never do. I’m going to need a second shopping cart. I haven’t even hit the hydroponics store yet and I am dragging one hundred feet of four-inch PVC pipe; five pounds of drywall screws; a few hundred pounds of gravel (not nearly half of what I will need); a flat of full-spectrum lightbulbs; I don’t know exactly how many aluminum clip lamps; and a bramble of extension cords. Where am I going to stow the weed cloth and ten of those just-add-water, peat-moss seed-starter trays?
If I am ever going to kick my home-improvement retail habit, it is not going to be today. This is the second big-box trip in five hours, and from the looks of things, on the first trip I forgot more stuff than I purchased. These surveyor’s flags will come in handy; I should probably buy two packs just to be safe. Hinges, I need more hinges.
First step, extant clay must be manipulated so that water will drain from on top of it, otherwise the topsoil I plan to import will surely wash away during the first aggressive rain. Flipping through the latest issue of some home improvement porn mag on the subway a few days ago, I saw an item about something called a French drain. A graded trench filled with gravel, it is used to eliminate swampy spots on lawns. I extrapolate.
The notion of digging a dry well springs fully formed from my enthusiastic desire to tame the yard. All that is required to drain my clay swamp is some plumbing. I need to dig a drain and some graded trenches. The trenches will border the field and originate at all the outflows from the various roof gutters that border the perimeter. The French drain is a straightforward application of hydrodynamic theory. To understand the mechanics of this device, really just a channel, it is only necessary to know that topsoil contains a lot of air and is therefore exceedingly porous. Like everything else, water is pulled toward the center of the earth by gravity and always takes the path of least resistance. The French drain simply gives the water somewhere to go as it percolates through topsoil and flows down a drainpipe, a hill, or, in this case, the grade of the trench.
A traditional French drain functions best when it is installed on a naturally occurring slope of some kind. Because our yard is as flat as a pool table, it will only work if I use the French drain in combination with a dry well. I begin the project by determining how many drains are necessary and staking out the paths they will take to the well almost in the center of the yard at its lowest point. The first trench runs from the outflow of the garage-roof drainpipe, the second begins at the outflow of the gutter on the patio roof. The third runs along the border of the back fence on a grade of one inch every one hundred, where it meets at a T-junction with the garage trench. From there the two channels join, making a ninety-degree turn down a steeper grade to the point where I will dig the dry well.
The trenches will be a foot across. The longest run is eighteen feet. The plan is to line them with gravel. On top of the gravel I’ll lay four-inch pipe made of the plastic polyvinyl chloride (or PVC) that I have cut lengthways. These half-pipes are the trenches’ main channel. I will bury the lengths in gravel until they are four inches below the level of the yard and tack on landscaping cloth, a fine-weave nylon fabric. The cloth allows rainwater but not topsoil to drop off the clay substrate and into the drainage system.
If the trenches are graded correctly, rainwater that the soil cannot hold will seep through the topsoil and make its way along the surface of the almost impermeable clay into the trenches. Once in the system, the excess water roils through the gravel and into the half-pipe, following the grade toward the dry well.
My first efforts at digging the dry well reflect the self-congratulatory mood I’m in. I’m impressed that I have dreamed up the scheme. I fetch the brand-new posthole digger and ask the kids if they want to play in the dirt with me. I bought kid-size shovels for them, and when they enthusiastically throw their support behind my proposal to play in the dirt, I present them each with their own scaled-down shovel. “There’s a tool for every job,” I explain, overly serious, as if this might be the only chance I get to impart this pearl. “You always gotta have the right tool for the job.”
Bevan Jake and Heath nod knowingly and begin digging up the flower bed we are standing next to. “Hang on!”
When I redirect them to the site of our dry-well excavation, they work hard for ten minutes, then Lisa presents them each with a juice box. “Don’t work them too hard, honey,” she scolds, hugging them both tight. “It’s sunny out here.”
All the same, the kids are excited by all my talk of building a farm and eager to help. We dig about two feet into the clay and call it a day. Enthusiastic high fives all around. I hide my grim concern: this is much more difficult than I anticipated; digging through this clay is just like digging through meat.
The real work begins the next day after the kids are in school. While walking Fergus, I pass Josh’s house. The cement contractor working on his driveway is overseeing his crew and collecting a check from Josh. The three of us get to discussing my dry well. The cement guy comments that for the dry well to function properly I must puncture the layer of clay and reach the sand below. That is the missing piece in my plan. Until that moment I was not certain how a hole—even one three feet deep—would drain all the collected water. “Is there definitely sand down there?” I ask guilelessly.
“Yes,” insists the cement contractor. Like so many basic agricultural facts, the geological truth that sand always lies beneath clay comes as a complete surprise.
On the farm of the blind, the one-eyed neighbor is king. I heed the words, immediately return home, and begin to dig. The next day, standing in a five-foot-deep hole not much wider than a trash can, I ask Carlos, the foreman on G&D Landscape’s local crew, if there is any hope of finding sand beyond the clay. “In my country,” says the El Salvadoran immigrant, “sand always follows clay. I’m sure it is true here also.” I flash to the two-hundred-or-so-feet-high clay cliffs of Gay Head, now Aquinnah, on Martha’s Vineyard, smile weakly, and continue digging.
Lisa seems increasingly distant during the excavation. I am so concerned with the planting schedule I never take the time to explain why I spend two entire days in a cylindrical hole and eventually disappear into the bottom of it. She knows nothing of my search for sand and has little interest in my energetic explanations of the powerful forces at work that will suck water from the surface of the earth. She clearly considers my behavior manic. She begins to complain regularly about the ring of filth that I leave around the bathtub.
At seven and a half feet I strike sand, but do not believe it and continue to dig for an additional four inches. Two full weekend days have come and gone. Lisa feels my absence more acutely on the weekends. During the week she can just about manage getting the kids to bed before she collapses.
Once convinced that the posthole digger is finally picking up sand, I sit cross-legged at the bottom of my spider hole. I have nothing to do down here anymore, and because nobody knows I am here, no one will ask me to do anything else. This is a good place. Dazzling sunlight rims the top of the hole, but it is cool and damp down here. Fergus stands tentatively at the mouth of the spider hole, staring down at me. His whole life I have ferociously discouraged
him from digging holes in people’s gardens.
Not until I scramble out of my spider hole does our neighbor Jane Feder, who has been watching the work intently from her kitchen window for two weeks, call out to me. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” says Jane, standing somewhat tentatively on our driveway, “but what are you doing back here?”
When I tell her that I am building a farm and plan to live off it alone for a month come harvesttime, she says, “I knew it. I told Al”—her husband—“that you were gonna build a farm.” Jane is instantly excited, and she stays excited. Jane isn’t put off by the growing mountain of refuse, nor is she concerned when I tell her about the necessity of earthmovers in the driveway. The introduction of farm animals doesn’t bother her one bit. She is thrilled to learn that squirrel traps will probably be required. She occasionally brings friends and neighbors to the back of the house to show them the progress I am making on The Farm. On a few occasions I am inside for these visits, and I overhear her explaining the project, repeating verbatim all the grand plans I have shared with her. She is proud of me. She is a witness to my hard work and is impressed by it. I am grateful for her confidence.
The Feders’ generosity and patience overwhelm me. Their casual response to my encroachment across their property line is a constant source of worry for Lisa, however. I store lumber and building equipment of every description by leaning it against our garage in their yard. I also use their yard to abandon a vintage bicycle rickshaw from China that I purchased months before in which to convey the children to school every morning. I rejected this plan before I even arrived home with the three-wheeled bike. I’m still not clear why I continued to pedal the gearless, poorly balanced heap up the moraine to Howard Hall from Cobble Hill, where I purchased it.
The Feders, like a number of my neighbors a generation or more older than Lisa and me, inherited their home from a parent, Jane’s mother. “The one good thing about moving back into your mother’s house as an adult,” quipped Jane during one of our first conversations years ago, “is that you don’t have to change all the toilet seats.” I develop an immediate, and enduring, crush on Jane and, at the same moment, try to recall if I have ever changed a single toilet seat in any of the homes I had moved into.
As a lifelong city dweller, I bring the right perspective to my new project. Eight hundred square feet is a spacious one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. I employ this organic metric as I proceed and rarely feel oppressed by the limits. Rather, like any good New Yorker, I start looking around for unoccupied or underutilized square footage and equipment to commandeer. The Feders’ garage, I know, is empty except for a rusting exercise bike, an American flag, and a rotting armchair. I can double the usable space in my own garage if the Feders will let me use it to store the seventeen-foot sea kayak I started building six years earlier for the duration of this project. They will. In an instant their garage is full. When Lisa hears about this arrangement, she struggles to conceal her annoyance. The kayak was a Valentine’s Day gift from Lisa. She gave it to me hoping that it would transport me across the East River, thereby accomplishing my boyhood ambition. The kit, the instructions for which estimated that construction could reasonably be expected to be complete in sixty hours, seemed like a manageable project when I excitedly opened the eight-foot-long cardboard box and began work. Six years later, watching while I tuck the half-built hull safely away in someone else’s garage, Lisa shakes her head slowly and turns back toward the house without saying a word.
When the Feders leave for their annual retreat from summer in the city to the ocean breezes of Long Beach, Long Island, I miss Jane terribly. She has been the only witness to my tireless work to bend my naive plans to reality, and as such my only comrade.
While digging my spider hole, my hands became increasingly numb. I complained to Lisa. She did not seem particularly concerned—strange for a woman who passed out cold upon seeing me anesthetized in the recovery room after a simple hernia operation. All the same, fearing the unidentified worst, I consult my primary-care physician; he refers me to a respected neurologist. The neurologist says my hands are numb—and shaking slightly—because I drink too much. I protest, “Can we consider other contributing factors here, Doc? I mean, have you ever dug a seven-foot-deep hole straight down into the earth—the clay!—using just a posthole digger?”
“No,” he replies, and writes me a prescription for electromyography. Electromyography, or EMG, vindicates me. I may drink too much, but I also have a pinched nerve in my cervical vertebrae, and that’s causing the numbness in my hands. My hands get better after a few months, but the day will come when I shall beg for the return of numbness to my hands. I buy a second bottle of wine on the way home.
THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY
After two weeks of delay a delivery truck with the material for the new fence arrives. There are a dozen panels and corresponding crosshatched caps, and fourteen cedar fence posts. I demolished the existing fence weeks ago and it lies in chunks on the refuse pile under the living-room window.
Joining the two incarnations of our back fence are nearly one thousand linear feet of PVC pipe and a dozen elbows and T-sections, a few dozen fifty-pound sacks of gravel, a short stack of plywood, and countless boxes and bags brimming with all the various fasteners, adhesives, and doodads that the projects ahead of me require. I draw great satisfaction from the refuse pile. The bigger the pile of garbage, the more incoherent its contents, the more like a proper farmer I feel. I’m delighted to find the enamel coat on the fridge in the garage/barn showing the first signs of rusting out—like acne spreading across the ivory skin of a preteen. Things rust on farms, garbage piles up. But on a farm nothing is garbage, everything might have a secondary use.
This is what makes installation of the new cedar fence so problematic. The new fence is a beautification project. Every other job on The Farm is about increased utility—or, at least, is planned that way. The arrival of the new fencing provides what Lisa describes as the one bright spot of her entire week. She considers the completion of the fence the only remaining measure of my commitment to her and our marriage. Ever since I agreed to build the new fence, it is the only aspect that she has demonstrated any curiosity about—even offering, after delivery of the material is delayed a second time, to call up the fence supplier to “light a fire under his butt.” Like an increasing number of inanimate objects out back here on The Farm, the fence is now the symbol of Lisa’s and my competing interests and concerns, and that, predictably, makes the work pretty slow going because, now, while erecting the new fence, I am working for the boss; everything else is, well, mine.
During a break navigating the fence-construction project and finishing the French-drain and dry-well project, I visit the urban tilapia farmer. This will be my fourth and, I have determined, final visit.
When the urban tilapia farmer sees me pulling up, he turns on his heel and double-times it to his trailer. I follow and pull the door open before he dead-bolts it. “Good morning,” I announce cheerfully as though I have not been stalking him for two weeks.
“No fish!” he insists, tugging on the doorknob.
“C’mon. You have thousands of fish. I don’t even want twenty.”
“We are closed today. Sorry.”
“You’re not closed,” I say, trying to empathize. “Ten fish at retail and you’ll never see me again.”
“I’ll call the police,” the urban tilapia farmer threatens.
“I am the police,” I respond reflexively. It’s an unusual response, I know, but it’s one my friends and I have overused with little success ever since we were old enough to convince anybody that it might be true. Why I might think it appropriate to, even casually, impersonate a lawman at this moment has less to do with getting fish than recovering a measure of respect. A cop of some kind—Fish & Wildlife, FDA, Sanitation, who knows how many different regulations his curbside fish farm violates?—is what the urban tilapia farmer had suspected from the moment he fir
st saw me. Since then his estimation of me has plummeted. I release my grip on the brass-plated doorknob. The door slams shut. I turn and walk out of the warehouse. Standing alone on Butler Street, with no tilapia and no respect, I am two weeks behind on my meat-production schedule.
What was the name of that rabbit breeder across the river in New Jersey?
Back at The Farm, with hands still numb, I dig a series of graded channels all leading to that seven-foot-deep hole. I cut the bottoms out of a pair of thirty-eight-gallon Rubbermaid garbage cans, place them bottom-to-bottom in the hole, and fill them with rocks and stones unearthed during the excavation. The graded channels are lined with gravel. The PVC pipes are sawed in half lengthwise and perforated using a drill; they are then filled with gravel. The channels, now filled with pipe and gravel, are covered with weed cloth. This will allow water to drain into the system but keep silt and dirt from clogging it. An additional five hundred pounds of gravel is purchased to cover all the trenches.
The underpinning for my field is complete. All that remains is to take delivery of five tons of the most fecund topsoil that eastern Long Island has to give, which I ordered from Joe and his son, Angello, at G&D Landscape, and dump it right on top of all my work. Angello says it should not be too long now. Spring is a busy season—his busiest—and he’s got too much work to let one of his two trucks go all day to get my soil. “It’s too much, Manny,” he explains.
“It’s gotta be worth the three grand you’re getting from me, Angello,” I reply, stepping through the back door and into my barren yard.
“Manny, please, I am working on it. Three days, a week most.”
“A week’s too long, Angello.” I scrape at the mud with the toe of my shoe. It’s as hard as a tennis court.
