I started lopping away at the vine with a chainsaw and garden shears. The lawn had been watered earlier in the day, so I quickly became covered in mud. Sharp branches poked me at every opportunity. The coop, the fence, and the vines were conspiring against me. It was a classic case of resistentialism, a word coined by Paul Jennings in a 1949 essay for The Spectator about his theory that things have a secret agenda to make us miserable by fighting back against our efforts to use them. Resistentialism, he wrote, is encapsulated in the old French saying “Les choses sont contre nous” (“Things are against us”).
While Jennings’s essay is a humor piece, there’s some truth in it. Inanimate objects don’t have intentions, of course, but people often react as though they do. Have you ever cursed at a snagged garden hose or smacked a cabinet door that pinched you? If you have, you are a resistentialist. I wonder how many people have sworn off DIY because they have the feeling that things are against them.
Carla came out to see where I’d disappeared to, and when she saw me, she asked me what I was doing. I explained that I was fix-ing the coop.
“But the coop is over there,” she said, pointing to where it stood, ten feet away.
“Things are against me,” I explained.
She went back in the house.
Several hours later, I was sweaty, mud-caked, and tired, but I had finished clearing the vines away from the shack, and the fence was free to move. Richard kindly offered to push against the fence from his side while I fastened it to the shack’s sturdy vertical posts.
With these preliminary matters out of the way, I had a blank slate to work with. I inspected the shack and made a to-do list: 1. Build a new door to replace the rotten one.
2. Remove the worn-out roof shingles and replace them with a galvanized-tin roof.
3. Tear the rusty chicken wire from the vertical posts.
4. Add wood siding to the lower part of the shack so dead leaves and dirt won’t blow in.
5. Add new chicken wire to the upper part.
6. Paint.
7. Build nesting boxes.
8. Add trim wood and do final touch-up painting.
9. Buy hay, chicken feed, troughs, water trays, etc.
10. Buy chickens.
The door was disintegrating. Pieces of wood at the bottom were crumbling apart, making the door wobble when I opened or closed it. Not only that, but the design looked ugly to me. Why had it been braced with pieces of wood forming an H inside the frame? It didn’t appear especially sound. I was eager to get rid of it and make a new one from scratch.
I took the old door off, laid it on the ground, and measured its dimensions. Then I went to Home Depot to buy some lumber and wood fasteners. Wandering down the lumber aisle with my shopping cart, I came across some appropriately sized pieces called “furring strips.” I didn’t know what a furring strip was, but it looked like a good choice for a lightweight chicken coop door, so I bought enough to make the frame plus an extra 50 percent to allow for screwups.
I also bought a rectangle of plywood, screws, and some metal Land T brackets.
I used a clamping miter box to cut the 45-degree angles for the frame and used the brackets to join the pieces. Things were going surprisingly well until I tried to attach the fourth piece and discovered that the furring strips I bought were so twisted that I couldn’t complete the frame without seriously warping it. The wood was against me.
Fortunately, I had that extra piece of furring strip, and it seemed straight, so I cut it to size. But again, the frame wouldn’t fit together! Each piece was apparently twisted just a little, and when I put the four together, the twistiness was multiplied fourfold. I didn’t want to make another trip to Home Depot unless I absolutely had to, so I forged ahead with the less-than-perfect materials at hand, forcing the pieces into position.
I screwed the old hinges onto the finished door and attached it to the shack. The door was still warped, but it turned out that the warping worked in my favor, giving the door a springiness that kept it tight against the jamb when it was latched shut. I felt as though I had tricked the warped wood into submission. Its orneriness had backfired on it. Take that, wood!
All said and done, it had taken a couple of days to build and install the door. Next, I went to work on the roof. When I was in the third grade, my classroom was a corrugated-metal Quonset hut on the agricultural plains of Colorado, and ever since then I’d longed for a building of my own with a corrugated-tin roof. The chicken coop would be my chance to realize that dream. Home Depot had what I needed: roof panels and a tin piece that fit along the peak. (I also bought a roll of screened wire to replace the rusty chicken wire I’d ripped out.)
While I was on the roof tearing off the old tiles (more junk for the junk pile), Richard came over to chat. He told me that the people who used to live in my house had used the shack as a rabbit hutch. One by one, the baby rabbits would escape and dig under the fence into his yard, where they’d fall in the pool and drown. He’d find them in the filter basket.
I assured Richard that my chicken coop was going to be the Fort Knox of poultry enclosures.
The grimy business of removing the disintegrated shingles was delayed by a piece of wood screwed into the roof at a crazy angle. I’m guessing that the rabbit tycoon used it to patch up the plywood under the shingles; eventually the plywood became so rotten it split.
I thought about removing the entire panel of plywood and replacing it. I decided against it, though, because it measured about six by seven feet and was very heavy. Instead, I used my jigsaw to cut off the rotten part, then replaced it with a couple of fence slats from the gate I’d torn down a day or two earlier. This marked the first of many trips to my junk pile to scavenge for materials. I eventually came to the realization that my projects tended to supply themselves as I tore down the old to build the new.
I was having an easy time screwing the lightweight galvanized-tin panels into the roof. I didn’t even have to use tin snips, because three panels made a perfect fit on each side of the roof—at least they did on the front side. I hit a snag on the back: After I’d screwed down two panels, I laid down the third and was surprised to see that a wedge-shaped area of the roof plywood was exposed. Had I placed the other panels down at an angle so that they weren’t square with the roof? I checked carefully and decided that I had indeed messed up. I unscrewed the panels and started again, trying as much as possible to keep everything square. But the third panel still didn’t cover the roof. I had to conclude that the roof wasn’t built square.
In his book A Place of My Own: The Education of an Amateur Builder, Michael Pollan writes about the nearly disastrous repercussions of accidentally skewing a corner away from a perfect right angle in the frame of a small office-house he was building in the woods near his house. Because of that one mistake, he had to make custom angle cuts for every window and door frame, for the floor, for the roof, and for almost everything else. It was a nightmare. He finished the house, but it took much longer than it would have if everything had been square to begin with.
Now I faced the same problem. I saw three options: (1) I could try to rebuild the roof to make it square, (2) I could buy an extra tin panel and trim a wedge-shaped section to cover the exposed area, or (3) I could cut the overhanging portion of the plywood to match the edge of the tin roof panel. I went with option 3. I figured, if it looked terrible, I would go ahead and rebuild the roof to make it square.
I got on a ladder and used a jigsaw to cut a wedge of plywood from the roof. The overhanging wood almost touched the roof beam at the lower end of the roof slope. My hopes weren’t high that this would work out, but I went ahead and screwed the final roof panel onto the plywood. What do you know—it went from ugly to barely passable. I asked Carla to come out and take a look. I didn’t tell her about the problem, because I wanted to see if she would notice it on her own. She’s pretty observant.
“It looks great.”
At this stage, my chicken coop had been clea
ned out, given a new door, and topped with a tin roof. The next step was to add a fourth wall. The previous owner had run chicken wire from floor to ceiling on one side instead of building a wall. This allowed dust and leaves to blow in. I don’t understand why he did it that way. His rabbits must have been dirty and miserable. I wanted clean, happy chickens.
My first thought was to go to Home Depot and pick up some plywood, but, as Mister Jalopy once told me, as soon as you cross your property line, you might as well write off the possibility of getting anything else done that day. Remembering this sage advice, I opted to use whatever scraps I had lying around the yard. I found a nice, solid piece of plywood left over from a remodeling job done on our house the previous summer. That took care of the first vertical foot or so. What would I use for the next couple of feet?
I suddenly thought of the fence slats from the gate. The wood was weathered and gray, but it was rot-free and straight. I used a trash can as a workbench, pulled out the jigsaw, and cut the slats to length. To fasten the plywood and slats to the shack’s framing, I used coated drywall screws, which are guaranteed not to rust. (I prefer screws to nails because I don’t like the loud noise a hammer makes, and it seems to me that wood always works its way loose from nails.)
With the siding out of the way, it was time to paint the shed. The previous homeowners had left a five-gallon bucket of brilliant white semigloss interior/exterior paint, and it was about two-thirds full. It seemed a little thicker than it should be, probably because it was getting on in years and had started to coagulate, but I diluted it with water. Jane, who had become intensely curious about the chicken coop, insisted on helping me paint as soon as she saw me with the brush and bucket. I put her to work on the back. She got about half the paint on the coop; the rest went on her hair and clothes. She got bored after painting a small scrawly patch. I had to wipe her down before she went back in the house.
As I painted the beams and the siding, it became clear to me that a lot of the original lumber that was on the shack, especially the plywood, was rotten, and that no amount of paint was going to make it better. I had to replace those spots with solid wood. This ended up being one of the most time-consuming parts of the job.
It took almost the entire summer to finish the coop. I didn’t work on it every day, but I spent at least a couple of hours a few times a week on it—finishing the paint job, adding the wire screen, building the enclosure where the chickens would sleep, and making the little inclined ramp they would use to climb into the enclosure to sleep. But far from finding it drudgery, I enjoyed the time I spent working on the coop. I often got lost in a museum of memories. There was no telling where my mind would wander—an afternoon as an eight-year-old stringing up a wire-and-tin-can telephone between my bedroom window and the kid’s next door; seeing one of the guys in my college dorm sitting cross-legged on the concrete plaza by himself in the middle of a rainstorm; standing on a deserted street in Japan more than twenty years ago and having my arm pinched by a very old homeless couple who were fascinated by the way Carla and I looked. Memories that I’d long forgotten were somehow dredged up by the activity of making the coop. I never tried to direct my thoughts; I just let them parade through my mind. One of my favorite cartoonists, Seth (he goes by his first name only), wrote an essay for the Canadian magazine The Walrus about his similar experience when he draws cartoons: When I’m breaking down a strip or hammering out dialogue, I’m using that writer’s focus. But drawing and inking are different. They use different parts of the brain. I often find that when I’m drawing, only half my mind is on the work—watching proportions, balancing compositions, eliminating unnecessary details.
The other half is free to wander. Usually, it’s off in a reverie, visiting the past, picking over old hurts, or recalling that sense of being somewhere specific—at a lake during childhood, or in a nightclub years ago. These reveries are extremely important to the work, and they often find their way into whatever strip I’m working on at the time. Sometimes I wander off so far I surprise myself and laugh out loud. Once or twice, I’ve become so sad that I actually broke down and cried right there at the drawing table. So I tell those young artists that if they want to be cartoonists, the most important relationship they are going to have in their lives is with themselves.
I wonder if one of the main reasons people garden, or knit, or retire to their garages and basements to tinker, is because they enjoy this unusual state of consciousness. Some people might be able to achieve it by meditating, but using your hands seems to do the trick, too.
MAIL-ORDER CHICKS
I finished the coop at the end of August. In September, I got a phone call from a clerk at my local post office. She told me that a box containing live chicks had arrived and was waiting for pickup. I’d ordered them a couple of weeks earlier from MyPetChicken .com, which had sent them by overnight mail from Oregon. At the time I got the call, I was two thousand miles away, giving a talk about blogging and online media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, so I immediately called Carla at home and asked her to pick up the box. The kids weren’t in school that day, so the three of them went to the post office.
Roughly the size of a shoebox, the package was surprisingly small, considering that it had been home to six birds during their trip from Portland to Los Angeles. The half-dozen Barred Plymouth Rock chicks were peeping loudly inside. When my wife opened the box, the tiny two-day-old chicks were huddled together in a nest of straw. Before I’d left for Illinois, I’d prepared a large cardboard box in the room next to my office with pine shavings, an infrared heat lamp, a watering station, and a chick feeder. Carla and the kids placed the chicks in their new home and called to tell me they looked fine. They were no doubt hungry and thirsty, but they weren’t in danger of starving or dying of thirst: Chicks are born with enough nutrients and moisture in their system to keep them going for forty-eight hours without suffering. Carla dipped the beak of each chick into the water to teach it where to get a drink, and within moments they were all happily eating and drinking.
For the next several weeks, I took frequent work breaks, pulling a chair up next to the box to observe the chickens. I built a perch for them out of bamboo screwed to blocks of wood. When I set the perch down in the box, the chicks skittered to the far end of the box, huddling so tightly together they looked like a single ball of feathers. After a few seconds, they started stretching their necks out to get a better look at the invader I’d introduced into their sanctuary. A moment later, as their curiosity overtook their fear, they crept toward the perch. One brave chick, reminding me of the australopithecine in the monolith-encounter scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, walked over and pecked it. This emboldened the others, which scuttled over in a pack to investigate. By the end of the day, they were hopping on and off the perch without fear.
At six weeks, my hens still weren’t close to being full grown, but the twenty-five pounds of chick starter feed they’d eaten had turned them into healthy teenagers. They were ready to be moved to their coop. First, though, I had to line its concrete floor with litter. I didn’t relish the thought of mucking out the chicken coop every couple of weeks—in fact, it was one of the things that had previously discouraged me from getting chickens. I was already the designated crap remover of the family: The task of regularly cleaning our cats’ litterboxes and our guinea pig’s cage had somehow fallen on my shoulders. Now it looked like I was going to be the one who shoveled piles of chicken poop, too.
When I complained about the prospect to my friend Kelly Coyne (coauthor of The Urban Homestead with her partner, Erik Knutzen), she told me I ought to practice the “deep litter system.” Kelly and Erik adhere to the appealing urban-homesteading notion that “work makes work” and that the best way to deal with a problem is to set it up so that it takes care of itself. Deep litter is just such an example. The idea is to cover the coop’s floor with about twelve inches of bedding material (like wood shavings) and let the chickens scratch their manure deep
under the surface; there tiny microbes break it down and convert it into nutritious chemicals and minerals, which the chickens ingest as they peck around for the bugs that are attracted to the droppings. Other than the need to add new bedding material once in a while, this ecosystem is nearly maintenance free. The smell isn’t really a problem, because the bedding absorbs moisture from the chicken droppings, so they dry up quickly. After a year, you can shovel it out and use the stuff as garden fertilizer.
Deep litter isn’t a new idea. The April 1, 1909, issue of a magazine called Gleanings in Bee Culture ran an advertisement that praised the deep-litter system as “a wonderful new discovery that will revolutionize poultry-keeping: A ‘system’ whereby you need not feed, nor clean out the pens oftener than once a month, and yet the results will be far beyond any other method. Only one dollar for the great secret.” It goes on to offer some extracts from the booklet to explain how it works, but not in enough detail, of course, to keep the curious poultry farmer from sending in his dollar for the secret.
On the last day of November I let the chickens out of the coop to run around freely for the first time. I was surprised by how quickly they took to it. As soon as I opened the door they bolted out and started scratching in the grass and dirt, grazing on different tree and bush leaves, weeds, blossoms, and blades of grass. They stretched out in the sun and gave themselves dust baths. How amazing that this behavior was already encoded in them! How do they know which things are good to eat, I wondered? Jane and I set up a couple of chairs in the backyard and watched them for two hours in the afternoon sun. When the sky turned to dusk, the chickens lined up and walked back into the coop and up the inclined ramp into their cozy sleeping compartment.
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