by Manny Howard
Of course, I’ve become the guest breakfast chef. Likely will become the dinner chef too but last night we had dinner with a corporate Merc at the Kabul Inn. Bob Shepherd was SAS 1 Regiment and part of the team that, in Gulf One, discovered the, until then, undreamed of SCUD missiles pointed at Israel. The 16-man team spent 6 weeks marking all the targets and fighting the baddies with no air support to speak of and even took what Shepherd called “blue-on-blue” fire. The Americans dropped a bomb on them (well near them) and all escaped, only some with shrapnel wounds. He’s 52 and retiring in the beginning of the year. Very sound, sensible fellow, he works for what I’ve heard is a very reputable British private military contractor, or PMC (Control Risks Group), and his—and his 6-man team’s—mission is close personal security for the Japanese Ambassador here.
We return from dinner and Jay has two more lady GIs in his room. He has set to drinking the entire bottle of Johnnie Walker Black that George and I delivered as a gift for his hospitality (and he really has been a wonderful host). We are not allowed to walk around the city so he comes to pick us up. He’s loaded. Can hardly speak and in an effort to stop the enormous up-armored Chevy Expedition he is driving in front of the compound gate he drives into a mature tree and uproots it. Though he doesn’t seem to notice. All he has to say is, “Good thing that was a short drive.”
After being introduced to his new lady friends, I comment that he must be using one of those fine body fragrances marketed to teenage boys that are, so say the marketers, chemically designed to make you irresistible to women. He replies, “Nope all you need here in AFG is some booze and some privacy and you’re in business. You can have all the lady GIs you want.”
This is a very large world we live in, there’s room for all sorts.
This was to be my only contact with Lisa for over a week. The next would be a desperate call to her when, semiconscious, suffering the humiliating effects of a brutal dose of giardia—a pitiless parasite that lived within me well after my return to Brooklyn—I called her for comfort.
So much for protecting Lisa from the reality of my excursion.
I am doing just as good a job protecting her from the mayhem in the back of our home.
Lisa has long since left for work when I pick up the phone and dial Ray Damiani’s rabbit farm. If she had been home, I might well have discussed my decision to expand the meat-rabbit operation. But, if my yard is to sustain me for thirty days, I must be strategic; it is going to have to be planted with hardy produce such as collard greens, not arugula, and somehow this farm is going to have to yield meat. I rule out chickens immediately; a month’s worth of chicken will be way too much trouble. I’m not opposed to the slaughter, but picking that many chickens—no self-respecting agrarian (not even a rank amateur such as myself) plucks anything—is out of the question. The propaganda generated by the meat-rabbit folks is compelling: chicken reproduction is “light sensitive” (whatever that means), while rabbit reproduction is what meat-rabbit people and maybe even biologists call “opportunity sensitive.” I determine that rabbits are the only alternative. I figure I will need three does and one buck. Each doe will yield one litter of eight kits in time for The Harvest.
Ray Damiani is a recognized expert in the field of rabbit husbandry, specializing in the monster strain known as the Flemish giant. He has either acquired the moniker or baptized himself Sugar Ray The Rabbit Man; no matter the honorific’s origin, it is clear he delights in the title. In a retasked dairy barn on a stretch of road lined by newly developed grand homes in Litchfield, Connecticut, Damiani’s warren contains nearly two hundred rabbits. He raises rabbits for show, not for meat, but is not above selling off a few homely or retired show rabbits as breeders for my meat rabbits. After I’ve acquired a cursory understanding of the ins and outs of raising meat rabbits, it’s clear to me that, though rabbits are, of course, masters of reproduction, even an avalanche of baby rabbits won’t do me any good at The Harvest if they are not big enough to eat. What I need for The Harvest is a respectable number of fryers. This late in the season, it is not mathematically possible for me to generate any fryers within six months unless I front-load the process with a pair of outsized adults.
This strategy is not without controversy. While everyone in the self-described meat-rabbit community agrees that the Flemish giant is extraordinarily large and gets that way staggeringly quickly, some question the breed’s value as a meat source. Rabbits are not officially recognized by the USDA as agricultural livestock intended for human consumption, and the backyard butchering of any rabbit within city limits is illegal, but even the meat-rabbit community (aggressive advocates for a change in these policies) does not recognize the Flemish giant as a suitable source of meat. Of the forty-five recognized rabbit breeds in the United States, just fourteen are both the proper meat body-type and large enough to be suitable for the renegade rabbit-meat industry. Of these, the breed New Zealand white rabbit is the hands-down favorite, followed by the Californian. Members of the American Rabbit Breeders Association go to great pains to make it clear that, though popular, Flemish giant rabbits are not included in their commercial classification because they have heavy bones and a low meat-to-bone ratio. Not a single one of the fourteen recognized meat breeds will grow to fryers on my schedule.
Flemish giants have what is known as a semi-arched spine, resulting in a long, unattractive, and bony carcass. Unlike the membership of the American Rabbit Breeders Association, I could not care less if the carcass is attractive or not. To my mind, the most telling indicator of the value of the Flemish giant is that even the most dire warnings against using Flemish giants are accompanied by the caveat that, though it is preferable to select for size within an accepted meat breed to achieve faster growth rates, it has long been the practice to raise a “shortcut” strain by crossing the prized New Zealand white with the lowly Flemish giant.
After explaining my scheduling conundrum to Sugar Ray on the phone, he assures me his rabbits will provide a solution. I invite myself up to his farm to have a look the very next afternoon. Over the phone Sugar Ray is clearly intrigued by my project and enthusiastic in his offer to help. When I arrive at his barn, I discover that the enthusiasm Sugar Ray had expressed for my project extends to just about everything in his life. He is broad-shouldered and handsome, much younger than I imagined a breeder of prize-winning Flemish giants to be—not that I have ever imagined how old a breeder of prize-winning Flemish giants would be. He is vigorous and robust, neither of which are qualities I associate with a rabbit breeder, not, that is, until I step into the cool concrete barn and stand surrounded by hundreds of twenty-pound caged rabbits.
Sugar Ray extols the virtues of his breed and the waft of rabbity purpose is overwhelming. Low wire cages stand on four-foot-tall metal scaffolds—rows of wire beach homes on stilts. In the cages, either aloof or staring, curious, skipping gingerly over wire floors or sitting stony on tiny paw-preserving plywood beds, are Sugar Ray’s prize-winning rabbits; some white, black, gray, or sandy, some spotted, a few mottled. All the adults are larger than spring lambs.
Some of the does keep company with their litters, untroubled by the kits tumbling around and over them. Just a month or so old and even the youngest offspring outweigh the biggest guinea pigs. Sugar Ray, it appears, has solved my problem.
We are standing by a cage holding a black doe that Sugar Ray ballparks at eighteen pounds. He explains that the doe has won all the prizes she can win—in each competition a rabbit can only win a blue ribbon once, and all show rabbits have their ears tattooed for easy identification. He has already bred her once, but not a single champion was among the litter, so he has given up on her. Essentially, Sugar Ray observes, to his operation this doe constitutes a waste of perfectly good food. He is certain that she will more than suit my meat-breeding purposes. Overwhelmed by optimism about the future of my project and the place of Sugar Ray’s rabbits in it, I interrupt his sales pitch to explain just how desperately I need to produce enou
gh baby rabbits to feed myself for a month. I tell him I know that I have come up to collect just one buck and one doe, but I am curious, does he have a second female he might part with? Sugar Ray scans the room, his fecund inventory, mostly for effect it seems. “I can do you one more,” he says, lighting out for the far reaches of the barn, the afternoon sun through dusty windows cutting swaths across the cages in the barn. “What’s more, they’ll be a matching set, one black, one white: ‘Ebony and ivory together in perfect … ,’” he belts, in an impressive church-choir tenor.
Now, an hour later, stuck miles behind some unknowable automotive cataclysm on the Grand Central Parkway with a pair of blue-ribbon does for company, I am joyfully recalling all the propaganda I have read or heard about meat rabbits. Every year, each of the does behind me will produce nearly one thousand times her weight in fryers.
Unlike meat birds (chickens raised as food), rabbits can be raised in confinement. In the sky above the traffic, two news choppers recording the tragic pile-up ahead are joined by a police helicopter hovering in the top right corner of my windshield. Because my rabbits live in cages, the raccoons that live behind the Kentucky Fried Chicken on Coney Island Avenue won’t get at them, and neither will the neighborhood cats—not that a mere house cat would stand a chance against my giants.
A second ambulance rattles past me on the gritty median; a Mercedes SUV follows close in the dust cloud like a pilot fish. The propagandists assert that even I can dress and butcher five rabbits in the time it takes to process just one chicken. Hell, I can even trade the pelts of the slaughtered animals if I wish. In my rearview mirror a ribbon of vehicles abandons traffic codes and the Grand Central Parkway, now essentially a parking lot, for the grassy spaces on its verge. They rattle their way over hillocks and around dusty depressions toward an exit ramp fifty yards distant that leads onto the streets of The Bronx. I follow dutifully, making a yawning detour behind Yankee Stadium and southwest through The Bronx on the Grand Concourse.
Upon my return to The Farm I realize that I have neglected to build partitions in the FEMA Trailer and so deposit one of my prize does (the white one) in a cardboard box and the black one in Fergus’s travel box.
This is the second time that I have returned to The Farm with rabbits and no place to house them. My repeated lack of foresight, of planning, appalls Lisa. She says so. What I consider the ingenious use of found objects as cages looks to her like ill-considered, reflexive decision-making without a proper support edifice. She thinks giant rabbits housed in appliance boxes is animal cruelty.
I set about building stalls for them, further subdividing the FEMA Trailer. Finally, The Farm has its breeding stock. The relief is palpable as I stand, a Red Stripe beer in my hand, watching the rabbits acclimate to the FEMA Trailer. It is time to build these meat rabbits a proper hutch because they have work to do.
Each pen within the hutch measures eighteen cubic feet. In the meat-rabbit community, little consensus exists about anything. One of the more inflamed debates is whether to house the largest-breed rabbits in cages with wire floors. One school says it is vital in order to maintain cages free of the parasites drawn to feces and the diseases these parasites cause. The competing school asserts that rabbits as heavy as the Flemish giant walking on wire causes such horrific damage, most often characterized by open sores and wounds, that any sanitation benefits provided by wire floors are eclipsed.
Advocates of wooden floors are quick to note that this style of hutch architecture requires vigilant cleaning of the cages—as often as twice a day. In addition to my having a serious disinclination to breed hobbled, possibly blood-soaked, giant rabbits, I find the plywood floor is a valuable design with another specific benefit. The Farm is getting smaller by the day, especially as the garbage piled at the southwest corner of the house grows arithmetically. With wooden floors I can stack the cages. The result is that a home for nearly 120 pounds of rabbit has a footprint of just thirty-six square feet.
As a further innovation, I stack the cages on a sturdy wheeled frame, allowing me to move the rabbit husbandry headquarters wherever conditions are optimal for breeding and, when the time comes, kit-raising. The shelves built into the wheeled frame mean I can store all the rabbit supplies right there. I am proud of the hutch: two stories high, capable of holding six twenty-pound rabbits, with ventilation fans and automatic watering dishes. The modern conveniences incorporated into my hutch shame the amenities of any models I have researched. The cages are larger than most design specs call for, and they are well ventilated. I install a tandem fan at each end of the hutch so that air is both projected into and drawn from the cages. The floor plan is designed so that each buck will have a doe as a neighbor. According to information gleaned from meat-rabbit chat rooms, this will increase pheromone transfer, keeping the brood stock in a constant state of sexual frenzy.
THE CITY IS A CRUST
Five tons of blue-black earth arrive in a G&D Landscape dump truck at ten thirty in the morning. The only sound on the street is the trilling of the warning Klaxon as the truck reverses off the street, beyond the sidewalk, and onto the driveway, and the payload glides upward pivoting on its hinge. The dirt begins to tumble onto the foot of the driveway. Moist, somehow obviously fecund, and as dark as a slice of devil’s food cake. Joe Gallo stands beside me, wordlessly ordering his crew to begin taking the soil to the backyard. They move quickly with their heavy wheelbarrows, faltering only after the first three tons of loose soil have made the footing unsure. When Joe begins to level the soil, skimming the soil with a rake, I run to fetch mine from the garage. Too eagerly I ask where I can start. Joe waves me off—“Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried. I want to help, this is a big moment in my project.”
“It’s better, quicker, I do it alone.” Joe emigrated from a town outside Naples, Italy. His son, Angello, who gave up the physical part of the job to answer the phone five years ago, worries that Joe will work himself to death.
I don’t see it.
I take a photograph of the dump truck backed into our driveway just having unloaded the mountain of earth and e-mail it to Lisa, who’s on a business trip in Chicago. I never get a response. Teams of three men with wheelbarrows move the soil from the driveway to the back of the house, depositing patches of soil nine inches deep. Standing useless, leaning on my rake, I watch while Joe grades the topsoil on the lifeless clay surface of the yard with the same certitude that a painter moves oil on canvas, maybe that a cook spreads red sauce on a pizza. I just stand and stare, mute with joy while our yard becomes The Farm.
As excited as I am, I also know I’m losing the last excuse I have for not being able to create a self-sustaining environment in my backyard. The dirt is here, it’s better than I could have hoped for, and as much as I’ve read about planting, as many questions as I have asked, I have next to no idea what to do now. People are joined to the land by work, says Wendell Berry, announcing his presence. Is that him standing in the shadows of the back porch? Land, work, people, and community are all comprehended in the idea of culture. These connections cannot be understood or described by information—so many resources to be transformed by so many workers into so many products for so many consumers—because they are not quantitative. We can understand them only after we acknowledge that they should be harmonious—that a culture must be either shapely and saving or shapeless and destructive. To presume to describe land, work, people, and community by information, by quantities, seems invariably to throw them into competition with one another.
Joe and Carlos, the foreman, stand next to me by the garage. I don’t think they can hear Berry; still, we all take a moment to admire the black earth. “Well,” says Joe, “you’ve got your dirt now.” He smiles briefly, grips his rake at midshaft, toting it in one hand like a hunting rifle, barrel down, and strolls up the driveway.
Carlos smiles broadly; his kind, wet eyes wish me well. After Lisa has returned from Chicago and the kids are tucked in for the evening, I
drag a twin mattress from the basement. Lisa, standing in the threshold of the back door, one arm against the jam, looks out at the soil, impressed by the transformation. The black earth has entirely covered up the nerve-crushing dry well and the weeks of my soil and water engineering. I am proud of the results, but I know that the ramshackle system of plastic pipes and gravel impressed her as entirely anarchic, possibly half-assed. She clearly much prefers the uniform earth. Its loamy promise still hangs in the air. She watches while I roll a sleeping bag out over the bare mattress. “What are you doing?” she asks, already knowing the answer.
“It’s going to rain really hard tonight,” I explain earnestly, smoothing the green sleeping bag out over the uncovered mattress. “I’ve got to watch, make sure the gully is gone for good.”
“The what?” she asks, smiling momentarily.
“Nothing. It’s gonna rain really hard tonight.”
“So you’re going to sleep out here with your dirt, not in our room?” she says, flirting just a little bit.
“There’s room in this bag,” I suggest, turning to face her, patting the mattress.
“Not for me, there’s not.” She turns to advance the laundry.
The rain starts at midnight, a storm as strong as forecast. It hammers the rooftops and the water runs through the drainpipes where, at their terminus, my system is waiting to carry it away, down into my seven-foot-deep dry well. After twenty-five minutes of listening to the rain I make a barefoot inspection of the field in my underpants. These are the first steps I have taken on my new soil since it was delivered. It is soft, gives way to each step, cool and wet under the balls of my feet, squishing up over my toes. At the linkages where my system joins the drainpipes there is some overflow, but nothing that concerns me. I may have done this right, after all.
