These days most of the food in our freezer and the eggs in our skillet do come from our own little farm. But nope, I’m not really a farmer. I’m a self-employed storyteller with part-time pigs. And if I get home tomorrow and find out all they’ve all croaked, well, it’s not the end of my career. It’s just a bad weekend.
And one more story to tell.
HAUTE PIG FEED
I try to feed my pigs on the cheap. With the price of corn these days, that’s a challenge. We do buy them a little hog feed, mainly because I like to hang out at the feed mill and pretend that I’m a farmer too. As if I owned five hundred pigs, not five. Right above the honor system candy box they’ve got a television monitor where the weather report always runs with the sound off. I like to stare at it mournfully, because that’s what farmers do: they stare at the weather report mournfully. When the other farmers complain about the price of pork bellies, I nod in agreement, then as soon as I’m in the pickup I check my smartphone to figure out, what exactly are pork bellies again?
Mostly our pigs graze. People forget sometimes that pigs are grazers. They love to eat young nettles and fresh crabgrass. And most of all, of course, they love to root around. They’re organic bulldozers. Mostly they go after roots, but I’ve also watched a two-hundred-pound pig tease out an angleworm using his almost prehensile lower lip. When the worm was balanced just right, he sucked it down like spaghetti.
But they won’t be fat by October on worms and crabgrass alone, so we supplement wherever we can. They get our table scraps, of course. We collect them in a bucket. My poor daughters may be children of the digital age, but they are very familiar with the old analog phrase, “Slop the hogs.”
We plant patches of field peas and rape, the plant used to make canola oil (it’s like cabbage that doesn’t roll up), and feed it to them by the wheelbarrowful. We also buy them expired baked goods at the local bakery outlet. Our neighbors who raise goats give us the leftover milk; we mix it in with the bakery castoffs and the pigs gobble it right down. We store the excess goat milk in plastic carboys. We don’t refrigerate it, we just keep it right out by the pen. By the time you get to the bottom of the barrel, things are getting mighty cheesy. I get the gaggers, but it doesn’t slow those pigs at all.
Unfortunately, the baked goods have lately become scarce. Back in the early days of my pig-raising career I could sometimes score an entire pickup truck bed full of hot dog, hamburger, and bratwurst buns, bagels, and the occasional crate of chocolate frosted mini-doughnuts, all for around twelve bucks. These days that’s next to impossible. Part of the reason is that bear hunters buy up a lot of the sticky buns and doughnuts and such and use them for bait. Also, more and more people are raising their own pigs and chickens, so competition for the expired goods has increased. And finally, times are tough: although the expired goods are clearly labeled ANIMAL FEED ONLY, as a guy who has fished more than one mini-doughnut out of the pile I can tell you that expired or not, that food will still do a human just fine.
So we’ve had to expand our reach to scavenge free pig food. Last weekend I was able to swing a deal with a coffee shop that does a big high-end breakfast business on the weekends. Late Sunday afternoon, after the restaurant portion of the shop closed down, I pulled up with my pickup truck and the kitchen crew helped me carry out three bags of delicious food garbage. When I dumped the bags in the trough, what spilled out was a buffet: fresh diced vegetables, raisin bagels, rye bread, chunked fresh fruit, blueberry syrup, leftover three-cheese omelet, and—best of all—several lemon ricotta crepes.
Boy, those pigs dove right in, snout first, feet to follow. Every now and then they’d jostle around and trade places, wedging themselves into a new spot, perhaps hoping to get a scrap of blueberry buckwheat pancake or a scallion.
When it was over they retired to the pig hutch and flopped in a pile like a friendly cluster of overstuffed bratwurst. They looked so comfortable I felt I should offer each of them a double cappuccino. Happily, they are pigs, and pigs’ tastes run on a sliding scale; as soon as the crepes wore off they went right back to eating worms.
SKUNK WAR
I got done with work real late the other night—sometime after midnight—and when I walked across the yard toward the house I noticed a light coming from the open granary door.
I decided to check it out, because we have chicks in the granary. They’re kept beneath a protective screen, but a good strong coon or an industrious chicken-craving critter might still get at them. Plus, after feeding and watering them this afternoon the absent-minded writer who plays at being a farmer may have forgotten to weigh down the screen with the standard three bricks and two chunks of firewood.
So I detoured over there. As I approached the doorway I remember thinking, Smells like skunk, but it didn’t really register until I stepped inside and there he was.
He was a beady-eyed little feller, blinking at me from behind the pitchforks. I’m told that skunks have very poor eyesight. (I’m not sure who’s in charge of officially checking these things. Are there volunteer veterinary ophthalmologists who head out into the forest with miniature eye charts? I’m seeing the skunk reclined against a stump holding that little black plastic paddle over one eye while the ophthalmologist stands there in a white smock very patiently saying, “Okay, let’s try that top row one more time.” And the skunk is squinting real hard and thinking to himself, Y’know, I’ve heard a lot of good things about this Lasik surgery …)
The point is, I regarded that skunk with no ill will, but knowing full well he could not see well enough to discern my intent, I figured I’d just back off and let him work it out. Sure enough, he headed across the granary, but just as I thought he was going to exit the open door he hung a right and headed for the old horse stall where the chicks are kept.
Now, we keep the chicks in a stock tank under a heat lamp. And because of the weighted screen, that skunk isn’t going to get to them. But the chicks were cheeping nervously, and I didn’t want to close the doors and leave him in there to fumigate the place until morning. I also didn’t want to leave the doors open all night, as there are raccoons about.
Here is the thing: how do you get a skunk out of a horse stall? Clearly the direct approach was no good. Whenever I eased toward him his tail went up, and ten seconds later I’d be beating feet out the door for a gulp of fresh air. I tried tossing pebbles and empty feed bags, but although this made him jump a few times, in the end he just hunkered down. At one point I left the granary and gave him five minutes to himself, but when I returned he had curled up next to the wall and was gazing steadily—if blindly—at the tank of chicks. Eyeing them with bad intent, as Jethro Tull would have it.
The impasse finally broke when I let myself into the adjacent stall and banged on the divider. The divider is constructed of solid boards, which allowed me to be right next to the skunk but shielded from his perfume shooter. Unsettled by the noise and seeing his opening, the skunk ambled out of his stall, across the granary floor, and out the door.
I checked the chicks one more time, battened the hatches, and headed for the house.
I guess my favorite part of that whole story is how when that skunk finally made a break for it, he just toddled along. I realize skunks can’t sprint any more than they can read an eye chart, but it still was kinda neat to see that of the two of us, it was the big human that was the flummoxed one. And how you would have chuckled to see me peering around the corner of that stall, reeaaalll slow and tentative, and ready to go sprinting into the night.
Varmints are varmints—especially when they’re eyeing your eggs and egg-makers—and I make no promises regarding future relations, but for that one night I was happy to see the skunk go, and go easy. I got off pretty light, scentwise—although I did stand in the midnight wind for a bit before crawling into bed with my wife—and no one has complained, but I do have visions of that skunk back at the little skunk tavern after a hard night of foraging and all of his skunk pals blinking blindly and wrinkli
ng their noses, and then finally someone says, “Hey, who smells like scared human?”
E-I-IPO
Out back on the farm the other morning I was thinking this is quite a world we live in, because while I was feeding the pigs a particularly pungent trough of swill I was simultaneously listening to an international business news show on my telephone. One could draw certain parallels between the international business scene and a pig trough, but that is not my point and furthermore, let’s play nice.
I wish I could tell you I listen to international business news shows because I’m making some really big moves in Malaysian Manganese futures or preparing for a treble-trillion-dollar IPO of my new social media site for lovers of exotic cheeses, but the truth is I like to listen to the international business news for the same reason I like to listen to John Coltrane or Lenny Bruce: I’m not sure exactly what I’m hearing, but it plays smoothly on the ear.
The thing is, I have only the most superficial understanding of what the hosts and guests are discussing. I hear them say things like “knock-on-effects going forward,” “multiple equilibria,” “earning beats,” “the bar-belled approach,” “short-end paper,” and “snap-back,” and I have no idea what it all means. But man, it has this great word-jazz groove. There I am slogging away with my five-gallon plastic buckets—the ones my buddy Mills rescued from the dump—with five pigs stomping on my toes and nibbling at my kneecaps, and in my ear some corporate captain or economic seer is purring confidently in the fluency of basis points, ten-year Treasuries, the fluctuations of NYMEX crude, the VIX, the S&P, and QE3.
Esoteric language—especially when used as offhand shorthand—always has its poetry, even if your understanding is pidgin. One of my favorite things is when my eighty-two-year-old neighbor Tom gets going on how he makes things on his lathe. He starts talking about babbits and collets and boring bars, and I don’t quite follow, but the rhythm is mesmerizing. (Obviously I am not allowed near the lathe when it is actually turning.)
It isn’t just the jazz of the business news I love, it’s the sideways insight into what’s happening in the world. All that economic esoterica speaks to subterranean backroom churnings and machinations and invisible rivers of power and money humming along, but even more importantly this talk can give you a sense of where the world is heading no matter what the politicians say. For all the shark-feeding and voodoo of the big whale investing world, on a daily basis—for better or worse—your bloodless stock analyst power broker will speak truths few folks seeking election will utter. You may learn why pig futures stand as they do, even though it won’t change what you do with your own homegrown bacon. And yet, as the hosts and guests trade their jargon-y riffs, I feel like I’m being given a penny-stock peek through the smoked-glass window obscuring how the world really turns.
My favorite time to listen to this business talk is on deep winter mornings when our farm feels comfy, insulated, and isolated. After the chickens are fed and the coffee is fresh and I am early at the desk, I tune my phone to the live stream while I check the calendar and my email and maybe peck away at an essay or sort the bills.
The last time I listened a correspondent reported that Greece was wider by 32 basis points. That might be good, but probably not, because the follow-up interview included the terms currency debasement, forced restructuring, and—this’ll really make you grab your pants—adverse exogenous shock.
I had one of those last year while checking the electric pig fence.
Sitting there in my little room over the garage, I envision the interviewees solidly desked in dark-paneled offices, comfortably corner-windowed in a gleaming tower, or discoursing over a cell-phone from the back of a Lincoln Town Car, and I contrast their life to mine. Sometimes I do wish I was being driven to work in a limousine, but looking across the yard I find I am fairly satisfied with the arbitrage of fresh eggs and firewood. Your average international businessman might see nothin’ but chickens and a chainsaw, but I see means of re-capitalization.
COCK-A-DOODLE-EGO
I had a little run-in with our rooster again.
We’ve just got the one rooster. It’s him and about fifty-nine hens, so I figure he’s either plumb happy or plumb tuckered or both. Actually I’m pretty sure he’s not happy, because roosters just don’t ever seem very happy. They’re so busy strutting and fluffing and crowing and stomping around and generally doing everything they can to let you know they’re the big boss man (while simultaneously trying to subjugate every hen within three square miles) that they never really seem to let their feathers down and just hang out.
The thing about a rooster is, if you’re a man, sometimes when you’re out there throwing cracked corn and you see the way that ridiculous bird sticks his feathered chest out and tries to stand taller than he is—especially when he just rares back and crows at nothing—this uncomfortable self-recognition thing happens. I mean, I’ve hit that stage in life where I’ve settled into a relatively mellow groove, and I’m certainly not looking for a fight, and yet sometimes I watch that rooster and recognize I am not completely cured of the strut and cock-a-doodle-doo.
When I was a kid we had a big white rooster. He used to home in on my sister like a heat-seeking beak missile, and she was forever screeching through the yard at sixty miles an hour with that rooster flapping and pecking all around her. Sometimes when we thought she needed a rest, my brother John and I would tackle him, and then we’d hypnotize him. The most artistic means of accomplishing this was to put him on the ground with his neck stretched, then draw a line repeatedly from his comb down his beak and about six inches straight out in the dirt. We’d do that a dozen times, then back slowly away, and that rooster would sit there, beached on his breast and blinking like he just crawled out of a mile-long mine shaft. Generally if you didn’t disturb him he’d be out of commission for a good five or ten minutes. Then pretty soon you’d hear a howl and a cackle and that bird and my sister would be doing the Daytona 500 around the chicken coop again.
Sometimes for variety I’d peel the rooster off my sister’s left calf and haul him up the ladder clear to the top of the feed bin, where I’d stand on the bin cap, tuck his head beneath one wing, rotate him in a circle, and pitch him into the air like a football. He’d usually be about ten feet off the ground before his head popped out and he got to windmilling. He was never injured—although he may have scuffed his beak—and furthermore this did nothing to deter him from attacking my sister, but for purposes of safety and so that I don’t get angry letters, I cannot in good conscience recommend this to the subsequent generations.
All in all I am not a fan of male chickens. That said, I do like to hear a rooster crow in the morning. Twice. Then I wish he’d give it a rest. If you’ve ever had roosters, you know they crow at sunrise, they crow at moonrise, they crow at each other, they crow at their reflection in the coop window, they crow as soon as you turn your back to leave the chicken run, they just crow, crow, crow. Sometimes I crow back. And I stomp toward the rooster and keep crowing until he runs behind the coop. And then I look at the hens and stick my chest out a little bit and bounce my shoulders like I’m fluffing my feathers, and sure enough right about then that rooster sticks his head around the corner of the coop and crows again, and as I whirl to march back at him, I suddenly realize it is not the rooster who has the problem here.
SNOW PLOW TROUBLE
I recently had to recalibrate my attitude regarding snowstorms. I am compelled to admit that over time I have taken to making sport of those who get all ginned up over what we in Wisconsin should consider normal (and, in light of recent droughts, welcome) weather. Let there be the slightest whiff of snowflake, and the red alerts start popping up on your cellphone and crawling across your television screen while apparently terror-stricken reporters deliver headlines the likes of “Snow-Based Snowstorm Likely to Include Snow, So Watch Out for Snow” and “How to Choose Your Mittens.” For the love of rock salt, I say, chuckling with disdain, it’s just a little snow.
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Then came a snowstorm I shall call the Great White Humbler.
It arrived early on a Sunday and stayed all day. The Green Bay Packers were playing a night game, and I wanted to clear the driveway at least once before settling in on the couch. Well, before I watched a single down of that football game, I was sacked by the snow, I was pinned deep in my own territory by the snow, I was taunted in the end zone by the snow, and, after establishing an insurmountable lead, the snow continued to run up the score.
Let’s check the stats:
3:52 p.m.: Time I jumped in the plow truck and ran down the hill to help someone get up our hill in a mini-van.
1: Number of times I slid into the ditch with my four-wheel-drive plow truck while “helping” someone in a mini-van.
15: Factor by which I was stuck worse after “gunning it” to get out of the previous predicament. (“Gunning it” is known in some circles as “Rammin’ on it.”)
.2: Number of inches by which my plow blade missed hooking the telephone company’s junction box when everything came to rest. (Time was called in order to count blessings, yea, even in this moment.)
1: Number of caps borrowed from mini-van driver in order to make long walk back up hill to fetch the tractor in driving snow because I was “just gonna run down there and back” and had thus dressed myself in the manner of a distracted seventh grader, meaning no jacket, no cap, and just one glove—which somehow seemed worse than no gloves at all.
500: BTUs of necessary warmth generated during hike back up hill during which the coals of self-loathing were fanned by gusts of futile rage.
17: Degrees required to measure the new angle of the bumper after the neighbor and I got done yanking the truck back on to the road.
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