The $64 Tomato

by William Alexander

  Finally Zach tore himself away from the window and the strange dance he was witnessing and called, “Mom, did Dad remember to turn the fence off?” Cory, ever the good sport, did not walk off the job and did not sue me. I was mortified, but he was just relieved that his truck didn’t have an electrical problem.

  Reasonable people may wonder why I had a sixthousand-volt electric fence around my orchard.

  PICTURE A COUNTRY WHERE herds of twohundred-pound animals roam freely among the peasants. The animals destroy all of the peasants’ gardens, eat their food, and defecate on their lawns. The animals also carry disease: one particularly nasty disease that can be difficult to diagnose and debilitating if not treated. These animals also injure and occasionally kill the peasants. The peasants complain but take no action. The government does nothing except continue to enforce policies that ensure the continued propagation and health of this species. If a peasant tries to kill one of these beasts himself, he will be arrested.

  What country would tolerate this, placing the welfare of the animals over that of its citizens? Why, the United States, of course. The animal in question is the whitetailed deer, Odocoileus virginianus, and the disease is Lyme. Nationwide, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, there were 1.5 million deer crashes in 2003, resulting in $1.1 billion in vehicle damage and a startling 161 deaths. Not to mention up to $76 million in commercial crop damage in New York State alone. This is remarkable: 161 people killed in collisions with deer and undoubtedly thousands of deer killed by cars, and this mutual slaughter doesn’t even make the news!

  Lyme disease is caused by a bacterium found in infected deer ticks. In its adult stage, the tick’s preferred host is the white-tailed deer, which provides not only transportation for the immobile tick but a blood meal for the female’s three thousand eggs. In 2002, over 23,700 cases of Lyme disease were officially reported nationwide by the Centers for Disease Control (90 percent of that in the Northeast), meaning the actual number is likely several times higher. And yet, one eighty-five-year-old man dies of West Nile virus, and state and local governments shift into panic mode, blanketing the region with tons of insecticides with no prior discussion of policy, study of efficacy, or analysis of safety. Go figure.

  My theory is that no one takes Lyme disease seriously because it’s named after the quaint little town in Connecticut where it was first discovered, while West Nile virus sounds exotically Nubian, excitingly dangerous, and, most of all, very, very foreign. So despite the fact that it had only killed a handful of people, and that they were nearly all very elderly people who were going to die from whatever illness they got next, be it a common cold or West Nile virus, New York treated it like the return of the Black Death.

  Which is why I scan the morning newspaper every day, hoping for, praying for, news of a deer carrying West Nile virus. Lacking such a discovery, it seems that Bambi and family are here to stay for a while, because the government seems totally stymied. Just why is a bit of a mystery, since this is not, after all, a seemingly unsolvable problem on the scale of the Middle East conflict, world hunger, or AIDS. This is deer. Deer that typically do not, during their lifetimes, roam more than a mile from where they were born. This fact alone would seem to narrow the problem down to a simple reduction or elimination of a contained population of deer, and the town would not have to be overly concerned about deer from other areas moving in to fill the void. To make the solution even simpler, the deer have gotten so tame (or so bold) that you can approach them very closely. Or to put it less delicately, you don’t have to wait to shoot until you see the whites of their eyes. Why, Marshal Dillon, I reckon a team of sharpshooters could clean up this town in a couple of days and make it safe for the God-fearing good people again. Who could possibly object to such a simple and effective plan? Just about everyone in my town, that’s who. These are some of the arguments I hear:

  The deer were here first. Nonsense. The deer population on the East Coast of the United States is an order of magnitude greater than when the Pilgrims landed. The deer were not here first; we have created an ideal environment for them with our azaleas and lawns, while considerately removing all of their natural enemies. Except one. And that one is only allowed to hunt them for a couple of You May Be Smarter, But He’s Got More Time [105] weeks out of the year, and only in designated areas, and is restricted by a host of regulations.

  Oh, they’re so cute. The flowers that used to be in the spot now occupied by stubs and deer turds were cuter.

  People and deer can coexist if people will plant deer-resistant plants. Take my word for it, there is no such thing. Not in my neighborhood, at least. And even if there were, why should we be restricted to growing only 1 percent of the available plants just to accommodate this oversize rodent?

  I don’t want guns being fired in my neighborhood. I admit, it takes some getting used to, but towns have brought in professional sharpshooters for several days and reduced the herd with no public accidents.

  We need to keep the deer population up for the hunters. This argument is only heard from the hunters. The ethics of hunting aside, this is a bogus line of reasoning. The nearest hunting preserve is miles from most suburban towns. The deer in my neighborhood have never set foot on hunting ground and never will. Unless, of course, we bring the hunters to them. But there is a larger problem here. Deer management in New York comes under control of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, which still views these vermin as a resource to be carefully managed and protected, not as a pest. The state strictly regulates how many deer can be taken (especially females), requires hunters to drag eachone to an official station to be weighed and inspected, and keeps detailed statistics on the annual take and population. This is all for the benefit of the hunters, so that, God forbid, the poor weekend hunters (who on any given day are mistakenly shooting more cows, dogs, and people than actual deer) won’t have to go home empty handed.

  It’s just wrong. And of course there are many who feel just plain uneasy about slaughtering animals—and stripped to its essence, that’s just what I’m proposing. These people fall into two camps: animal-rights proponents and everyone else. There is no point in even trying to discuss this with the animal-rights people (except to say that if they would divert just half the energy they spend on animal suffering to reduce human suffering, the world would be a far better place). To the others, I say I sympathize. I feel uneasy about it, too, but would suggest they open their eyes and think about how the chicken, beef, pork, and fish they are eating got on their plate. If we find a better, more humane way to reduce the deer population, I’ll be all for it, but in the meantime, the rifle is all we have.

  With no hope that anything would be done about this problem anytime soon, I was left to defend my own turf. This was complicated by the fact that Larry next door started feeding the deer a few years after we’d moved in. He said he did it to lure them into eating the deer food, rather than his shrubs, but in my opinion this only resulted in attracting many more deer than we had before he opened his buffet. Deer aren’t stupid; when food is around, word spreads. They may eat his feed instead of his shrubs for dinner, but they’re having my garden for dessert on the way home.

  Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, new neighbors moved in on the other side of us and announced their plans to put up a salt lick for the deer, leaving me—and my garden—stuck in the middle between two feed troughs.

  Clearly the neighborhood was not sympathetic to my cause. I would have to buttress my defenses.

  The first volley of the Battle of Bambi was lobbed when I planted the small orchard: half a dozen apple and peach saplings, not much more than twigs really, with young, tender shoots. Without a fence of some sort, the orchard would be no more than a snack bar for deer. I decided to construct the electric fence.

  For deer, which can jump a seven-foot fence, a short and permeable electric fence functions as a psychological barrier, since the deer, if they choose, can easily jump over
or between the wires. Nevertheless, for the first few seasons my fence was about 90 percent effective—not perfect, but boasting a higher rate of success than any psychiatrist I know of.

  When I first constructed the orchard fence, I used only two strands of a thin, slightly stretchy wire rope, placed about two and three feet above the ground, and a highly visible half-inch plastic-and-wire tape for the top strand, at five feet. I dabbed the tape at intervals with peanut butter. The goal is to train the deer that this fence—and what lies beyond—represents pain. Their fur, particularly in winter, is such an effective electrical insulator that brushing against the fence may not give enough of a shock for deterrence, but contact with the lip is another matter. Later, once word had gotten around the local herd that the orchard was off limits, I replaced the somewhat obnoxious-looking tape with another strand of wire.

  And word does get around, or so it seems. One good shock to the mouth or nose seems to deter not only the victim but the entire clan for weeks. That suggests that there is at least some communication between deer, or perhaps they always follow the leader. Occasionally a deer will wander in. This most often happens in winter when a dry, heavy snowfall prevents the earth from serving as the electrical ground, rendering the fence less effective. Inevitably the deer, which somehow entered the orchard painlessly, gets zapped and turned back on the way out, eventually choosing to bolt through the wires, snapping them in the process. But the wire is easily patched, and the deer returns to his family with a horror story bound to keep all of them away for a while. Every so often I will go around with strips of aluminum foil and a jar of peanut butter to counter a new incursion. During one particularly bad winter, I watched the huge animals splay their legs and, incredibly, squeeze in under the bottom strand, white-tailed calypso dancers. So I added another, lower strand and some fresh peanut butter.

  And so it goes. They get in, you buttress the fence, and they stay out for a while. They get back in, and you bait and buttress some more. With the deer pressure increasing dramatically, whether because of my neighbors’ game-farm mentality or just because the herd is growing in size, the electric fence has been proving less effective over time. Recently the fence was shorted out for two weeks while we were away on vacation, and the deer not only ate everything to the ground but kept stubbornly coming in, jumping between the wires, even after I had repaired the short and baited every few feet, the psychological barrier having been broken. Feeling a bit like a circus trainer, I switched to a different bait and covered the electric fence with a seven-foot mesh to provide a physical barrier until the psychological one could again be established. Eventually we may end up installing a tall mesh fence around the entire yard, but that seems such a drastic step that we keep putting it off.

  WHEN BUILDING THE FENCE for the kitchen garden, I had to contend not only with deer but with an even bigger threat, the groundhog, aka woodchuck. Groundhogs are like deer in that they have thick, dense fur that is an effective insulator against shock. Ground-hogs, often more of a nuisance in the garden than the white-tailed deer, are so destructive and so difficult to deter that they have been known to drive gardeners to give up their gardens altogether. To keep the groundhogs and the deer out of the kitchen garden, I built a fence similar to the orchard’s, with the addition of two low wires for groundhog deterrence. I ran those wires alternating positive and ground so as not to have to rely on moist earth for a good ground. Deer may jump, but a groundhog will dig under a fence to get into your garden. Conventional wisdom holds that surface fences don’t work; the rule of thumb is that the bottom of your fence has to be buried eighteen to twenty-four inches underground. Try finding a fencing contractor to do that job.

  But oddly enough, the groundhog does not attempt to burrow under an electric fence. Perhaps the shock is enough of a deterrent to dissuade it from persistence. Or perhaps the way the groundhog passes under a conventional fence is by feeling its way down underground until it finds the end of the fence, or tires of digging, somewhere around the eighteen- to twenty-four-inch mark. Obviously it would not want to feel its way along an electric wire pulsing six thousand volts every second.

  Conventional wisdom also states that an electric wire at two inches and another at twelve inches is sufficient to deter a groundhog. And for years it was, until I met the groundhog I named Superchuck.

  Superchuck and I should never have crossed paths. In a sense, I created Superchuck. Ever since I had replaced the broken concrete slab in our little barn with a raised wood floor (when I converted it to a woodshop), the nether land of the barn had been home to groundhogs, skunks, and even foxes. But mainly a series of groundhogs. Otherthan the fact that they smell up the barn, they weren’t bothering me any, so I had been letting them be. Until the day a voice startled me as I was coming out of the woodshop.

  “Those groundhogs are going to cause you trouble,” the voice chanted.

  “Hi, Larry. Nah, I don’t think so.”

  “You want to borrow my trap?”

  Larry let me know he had just chased a groundhog out of his garden and watched it scamper under the barn—my barn.

  That made me an accomplice. So to be a good neighbor, and also because I’m no fan of groundhogs (not to mention that it would be nice to be free of that odor), I started continually trapping and releasing them miles away on state property. But groundhog homes are apparently like Upper West Side apartments. Word travels quickly when one is free, and within weeks, a new groundhog has moved in. (No, it’s not the old one returned through some Incredible Journey. Trust me.)

  Eventually I would realize that by constantly removing easy-to-trap groundhogs, I had created my own little Darwinian universe. Each time I got rid of another dumb, easily trapped one, a replacement soon moved in. But a smart, wily one would avoid the trap and find a way into my garden. In other words, the groundhogs I trapped and removed were precisely the ones I should have been keeping under the barn. They were the ideal tenants!

  But this nuance didn’t register with me until much later. So I kept trapping and replacing groundhogs until, inevitably—Darwinianly—I found Superchuck living under the barn.

  I first heard about Superchuck before I saw him. Anne told me a groundhog was eating the tomatoes. I had so much faith in my fencing that I was a little skeptical at first. I picked a blade of grass and touched it to the fence. Ouch. The fence was working.

  “Maybe a large bird,” I suggested.

  “Then we better keep the kids inside until you capture it. Look at the size of this bite,” Anne said, displaying a tomato with a huge chunk missing.

  It did look like a groundhog bite. Then visual confirmation: over the next few weeks, we occasionally saw him lounging and eating in our garden. I hauled out a Havahart trap, baited it with apples, and set it in the garden. No luck, of course. After all, why would he go into a little cage for food, when he has the entire bounty of the garden spread before him? For several days we observed him eating, sunning, and just generally hanging out in the garden like Brigitte Bardot on the Riviera. I never saw him enter, but when startled, he dashed between the electric wires as if they weren’t there. I spent a morning adding a few more strands of wire close to the ground. My wires were now about three inches apart. There was no way he could slip between them without getting shocked. Nevertheless, the next day, there he was again, munching on the lettuce.

  This didn’t make sense. I checked the voltage on thefence. Only three thousand volts. It should have been registering at least six thousand. Ha! A rational explanation! His thick fur was insulating him from the “mere” threethousand-volt current. After the fence company’s technical people walked me through some tests, they determined that my charger was bad. Rather than repair it (and be without it for a week), I opted to buy a new, more powerful one with a ten-thousand-volt charge.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Anne said, noting the escalation into five-digit voltage. “Is this safe?”

  Now, that was an interesting question. The cat
alog naturally insisted that fences were safe for humans, but it did include a disturbing disclaimer. There was indeed, out of the thousands of chargers and fences they had sold, a single case of a human fatality. I told Anne the story as she blanched.

  At this point I would have put up a fence with a hundred thousand volts if that’s what it took to protect my Brandywine tomatoes, so I forged ahead and phoned in the order. The new charger arrived in the mail two days and a half-dozen tomatoes later. I hooked it up and waited for the remaining tomatoes to ripen.

  As did Superchuck. He was coming into and going out of the garden so frequently now that it wasn’t uncommon to see him penetrating the fence as I watched from my kitchen window. Once, I actually saw him crawl through, jerking violently from a shock, and continue on. He was willing to absorb a ten-thousand-volt shock to get a tomato! This was not supposed to happen. The whole idea of an electric fence is deterrence—pain—and it is based on the science that animals do not like shocks. But Superchuck had figured out that the shock wasn’t going to kill him, and after all, I was growing heir-loom Brandywines.

  At least he had good taste. Brandywine tomatoes are one of the best-tasting tomatoes in the world and are nearly impossible to find at farm stands. The Brandywine was first introduced by Amish farmers in 1885 but has only become well known to gardeners and gourmands in the past decade or so. I think they would be more widely sold were it not for the fact that they are prone to cracking near the stem, a visual defect only, but as with apples, a near-fatal one in our image-obsessed society.