by Doug Fine
By this point, bloodied and increasingly purple, I was losing faith, but Herbie reminded me of the noble purpose of the project when I hopped down to help him patch the wall he had mauled.
“Hey, would you plug in the coal and gas for the drill?” he asked me, and I knew exactly what he was trying to say: that I was working to get petroleum out of my life by banishing the grid. If there was some noxious purple stuff clouding my pristine vision in these early stages, I could deal with that in the future. One step at a time.
And so it was with a light and appreciative heart that I went for a run with Sadie when my breadbox collector was finished and Herbie had left (after declining my offer of a swim at the new Rattlesnake Pond). I shut down the old seven-thousand watt electric heater, because I knew I was coming back to my first solar shower. Or I thought I knew. On my return to the house, as soon as I clicked off the iPod, I sensed something was terribly wrong.
I swore I could hear what sounded like a fountain coming from somewhere inside. It certainly wasn’t raining outside. It hadn’t for months. It was a pleasant enough sound, conveying a sunny day at Versailles. But I hadn’t designed any fountain.
I checked to see if the kitchen or bathroom sink was on, but neither was. Then I thought maybe the noise was some odd, soft Laurie Anderson song coming out of my subwoofer. Nope. Well, it might not have been raining outside, but when I finally opened my bedroom door, I saw I was midway into a steady, early spring, eighty-gallon downpour on my new four-figure mattress. Water (granted, hot water) was streaming from the ceiling through the smoke detector and light fixture. Just as a sort of icing on the cake, I had stripped the bed to wash the sheets that morning.
Maybe I should have been paying more attention when Herbie had advised me not to yank the incompletely fused water pipe too hard during my purple primer freak-out. I smiled, and took it as a cosmic lesson to use non-fossil-fuel-produced, nontoxic piping and cement in future projects. I donned the Haz Mat suit and climbed into the attic to repurple my fingers. Then I dragged the mattress outside to dry, where the goats used it as a trampoline to gain rosebush access for several days. Me, I camped outside in my sleeping bag, watching for coyotes. Other than constantly sensing phantom rattlesnakes, it was kind of fun.
* * *
A Finnish company called Uponor (http://www.uponor-usa.com/) makes a piping material called Aquapex that “doesn’t leach toxics into your water” according to New Mexico solar design engineer Tom Duffy (www.thesolar.biz).
* * *
I was so distracted by the cartoonish mishaps associated with my solar-hot-water effort that, by the next evening, when the pipes had dried, I had forgotten that the breadbox collector might actually work. I discovered this at the same time I learned what a restaurant lobster’s last moments are like. The shower was at least a hundred eighty degrees the instant I stepped in. Herbie had drastically underestimated the power of the breadbox. Sure, as Jimmy O’ had predicted, I had to take a few laps around the bathtub just to be absolutely sure the water was on, but when I did, it was so hot it was cold. I was screaming so loudly as I streaked outside, skin bubbling, that I found Natalie and Melissa cowering in a corner of the rosebushes.
At least catching the Pan Sisters once again massacring my favorite golden roses allowed me to replace burn pain with blind anger.
“Hey, get out of there, you cud-breathed Houdinis!” I yelled, which had roughly the effect of urban votes on a Diebold machine.
These rosebush assaults were really getting to be too much. The smaller stalks of all four bushes were nearly stripped of leaves, and I didn’t like what it all meant about who was actually in charge of the Funky Butte Ranch. On this evening, I noticed, Melissa’s means of access was a mocking dispersal of the horseshoe-shaped “garden nails” I had used to fuse fake plastic chicken wire to the sandy soil around the ranch house. She had flung these aside with her teeth, one by one, and then limboed under the fencing. Natalie had, as usual, followed her sister in. I had to say, they sure could make thorny green stems sound delicious. They crunched them like they were Oreos.
Witnessing this, naked and burned, was one of the few times I recall wishing that I had searched under “meat goats” instead of “dairy goats” on Craigslist. At least then I’d get the last laugh. I didn’t even get dressed from my shower. Still wet, I snatched one goat under each arm and frog marched them down to the corral for Time Out and weekly fence repair. Hollywood edits it out of the John Wayne and Clint Eastwood movies, but this is the life of the green rancher. At least Lupy wasn’t around to witness this moment. I suspected it would come across as even more bizarre than goat-milking yoga moves.
After the solar breadbox installation, my fingers were vaguely purple for weeks, and my favorite pair of Carhartts still carried psychedelic plum paisley blotches following a dozen washes. But these served as fond memories of the project with Herbie, who was still going strong and terrifying local politicos, months after the breadbox was up and running. I saw him biking around town on the Fourth of July, and soon after that I got an e-mail he sent to a community mailing list in which he exposed a Silver City council plan to give local water to a developer in a sweetheart deal. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he beat back whatever was attacking his prostate.
With the heater up and running, my showers became instantly hot (saving a lot of water). They also became scalding to the point that they nearly removed my entire epidermal layer, leaving me looking like one of those medical models of the musculature system. Still, between the new well pump and the breadbox collector, my grid electricity bill went down 40 percent the following month, even before I threw up eight more panels on my roof, and turned the rest of the ranch’s power over to the sun. At this rate, my solar equipment might pay for itself in only seventy years.
* * *
After going solar, the Funky Butte Ranch used 86 kilowatt hours of grid energy in June 2007. The average American household uses 888 kilowatt hours per month.
* * *
PART FIVE
GROWTH
It is not enough to fight for the land. It is even more important to enjoy it.
—EDWARD ABBEY
THIRTEEN
SMILES, EVERYONE: AN ON-SITE INSPECTION OF THE FUNKY BUTTE RANCH
The Funky Butte Ranch was supposed to be a farm. That meant producing food, and the first surplus food that the ranch provided went to a bribe. Well, let’s call it a political contribution. No, no, a friendly gift to a neighbor. One blazing afternoon, while I was cooking the usual batch of grease in the barn, with the usual syringes and green, leafy material spread all over the kitchen, I noticed a plume of dust rising from my black diamond half-mile “driveway.” Someone had braved El Otro Lado Road. That was an event in itself.
Through my binoculars, it looked like, yes, it was an official government SUV. I had a brief moment of panic that all my innocent medicinal paraphernalia had spurred an investigation. But then I remembered that I had applied for rural status for the Funky Butte Ranch, which meant a drastic revaluation of the property’s tax value. At least I hoped that’s what this visit was about. I was relieved to see that there were no support helicopters overhead.
* * *
Two percent of Americans are farmers.
* * *
I had to prove to the county that I ran a working ranch. And I wanted to: I’d just heard on the radio that 80 percent of fossil fuel use is embedded in transportation and personal products like carbon miles in food. I was in good shape on the transportation end, with the VegOil ROAT. Food was next.
Plus, there was this pleasant fringe benefit: if the local government bought my story about trying to be a legitimate local food producer (which I was just starting to buy myself), it’d mean a savings of probably a thousand dollars per year over what the previous owner had been paying in taxes. And, it turned out as the approaching vehicle resolved into focus, the county assessor had actually come by personally to check out the situation. This is not Los
Angeles County. This is not a place where investment bankers can write off “farms” as tax breaks. The assessor probably knew every property owner’s name, especially those who voted.
I chuckled softly, like a maniac with a plan. His timing couldn’t have been better. The goats were out of the corral, foraging just out of sight of the driveway, and the moment he and his staff appraiser stepped out of their rig and we shook hands, the four-legged animals of the Funky Butte Ranch sprang into action. The assessor didn’t even have time to utter the words “So where are these goats you mentioned in your application?” before he was mobbed by two smelly, horned creatures as rural as rural gets. They jumped on him and nibbled his pressed pockets and I said with almost passive-aggressive indifference, “Here are the goats I mentioned in my application.”
The assessor wiped something distasteful from his shoes on a rock, and we began our tour of the ranch. First I showed him my new monster array of solar panels on the roof—something out of the movie Contact. I kind of felt like I was on trial here, so I thought I should display some knowledge of the workings of the equipment.
“Solar power is really nuclear power, but the reactor is ninety-three million miles away,” I said, pointing at the sun. “It charges these twelve golf-cart batteries, which in turn power my fridge and subwoofer. No Enron brown-outs here.”
* * *
Americans throw out 179,000 tons of batteries every year.
* * *
“Even in winter?” he asked. His expression said, “So what’s all the war about?”
“Oh, yeah, everything’s on solar year-round, except for my electric range. I’m thinking of replacing that with a methane stove—you harvest the gas right from your composting toilet. It’s all the rage in India.”
* * *
Solar ovens (sunoven.com) can heat food up to four hundred degrees.
* * *
The assessor wasn’t saying much, but something I said appeared to have made him feel slightly ill. He was also sweating a good deal, I noticed. He looked like he could use a beer, but I thought it would be unprofessional to offer him one. So I led the way across the Funky Butte Ranch to the barn, where my dozen new chickens were laying more eggs than I could eat. As we toured the heavily scented enclosure, the assessor made marks on his clipboard and then asked, “Are you going to use these goats and chickens in commerce?”
“Oh, for sure,” I said, with what I hoped was casual confidence. “I already tip contractors with chicken eggs. Next year it’ll be goat’s milk, cheese, and double-chocolate ice cream. It’ll be big for the local economy.”
The assessor broke into a smile. I had uttered the magic E word. “I’m gonna approve your application,” he said, pocketing his pen inside the chicken coop.
I blinked. The man had just saved me a grand a year, and this was just sinking in, when he added, “If you’re ever in town—I’m sure a big fan of fresh eggs.”
Now I eyed the official closely. He was dressed in an out-of-place button-down shirt and appeared to be using hair product. This being a county not known for its strict interpretation of most law books, I had no way of knowing if my assessor was just a scrambled-egg aficionado, or if he was trying to tell me something. Was he soliciting a campaign contribution?
To be safe, I said, “You bet. I always like to share the bounty.”
And it was in the best “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” mind-set that a couple of weeks later I sauntered into the county offices with a carton of Funky Butte Ranch Grade AA Large under my arm and told the secretary, “I’m here to see the assessor on the matter of the eggs.”
She wiped the alfalfa from her desk and waved me back. The assessor wasn’t in, but I imagined myself overacting, nudging the carton into his appraiser’s palm while looking in the other direction, the way that people used to slip twenties into their license and registration at traffic stops in Alabama. If it was my first ever bribe in North America (and I later found out that our assessor is actually known as a pretty honest fellow), at least it was an organic one. The Funky Butte Ranch was officially Rural. And I liked the idea of paying my property taxes partly in produce.
FOURTEEN
THE FUNKY BUTTE RANCH OPENS A CHICKEN BUFFET
I couldn’t keep up with the chickens’ production. Within a month of picking them up from Lacy’s sister, whose flock was getting out of hand, I had five dozen local, organic eggs stuffing my fridge. (My new chickens themselves immediately got out of hand in the truck on the drive home when their box opened during a Dukes of Hazzard jump near my river crossing. The final-mile drive was like something out of a Hitchcock movie.) And this abundance came despite my eating ever more elaborate omelets, quiches, and frittatas three or four times a day. I was running out of cartons. And I could almost feel my arteries clogging.
These chickens were unstoppable: they were, in fact, the low maintenance delight of ranch life. On eight dollars a month of feed, they trooped around the Funky Butte Ranch in a jaunty line, pausing only to raise my cholesterol level with daily deposits in little nests in the barn. The actual egg laying was a pretty big event to the chickens, by the barn-rattling sound of things. Were they killing each other in there, or just ejecting eggs? There were always feathers all over the place when I went to gather the ova in the barn. The least I could do was fry them up. The chickens also ate all of my organic garbage, greatly reducing what I had to cart out to the landfill.
* * *
Farmers in Virginia are testing poultry waste as a biofuel.
* * *
I hadn’t even been sure that I wanted chickens, associating roosters in particular with violent pecking to the shin area. But Lacy’s sister convinced me that I wouldn’t regret it.
“And take one of my roosters—chickens are happier in a mixed gender environment,” she said.
“Who isn’t?” I agreed.
And so I brought Avian Flu one step closer to my life. Almost immediately I was providing my own protein. It was one more notch toward true local living. And it was nearly effortless. The rooster was chivalrous to his hens, and deferential to me (perhaps because he witnessed me manhandling goats out of the roses once a week).
Still, by May, I was starting to understand how the Chinese economy felt. I was experiencing uncontrolled growth. I dreaded the egg hunt awaiting me in the barn every morning because I was suffering an acute lack of storage capacity. If you are what you eat, I would have to peck my way out of bed in the morning. I didn’t know what to do with them all. Distribute them to local delinquents in advance of next Halloween?
* * *
POTATO, PEPPER, AND ONION FRITTATA
1 potato, diced
2 teaspoons olive oil
1 onion, diced
½ red bell pepper, thinly sliced
5 eggs
1 handful fresh basil, thinly sliced
1 handful fresh parsley, chopped
½ cup Parmesan cheese, grated
3 shakes crushed hot red pepper
3 dashes salt
Over medium-low heat, sauté potato in olive oil in a skillet until golden brown, 5 to 7 minutes. Add onions and peppers, and sauté another 2 to 3 minutes.
In a bowl, beat the eggs, and add basil, parsley, cheese, hot pepper, and salt. Pour the egg mixture into the skillet with the sautéed potato.
With a fork or spatula, gently nudge the egg mixture from side to side, to ensure that it cooks evenly. Do this until the mixture starts to solidify and a crust begins to form around the edge, for 5 to 8 minutes.
Jiggle pan handle. When the eggs have set, remove the pan from the stovetop and place under broiler for 3 to 4 minutes, until the top begins to puff up and turn a golden brown.
Allow to cool, slice, and serve.
If shortness of breath ensues, schedule appointment with physician for cholesterol test. Or increase exercise regimen.
In the unlikely event of leftovers, the frittata can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to a w
eek—makes a great cold Italian-bread sandwich.
* * *
Lupy helped me solve the overabundance problem when we went on one of her prebreakfast half-marathons one lovely spring day. After we finished and sat down to a meal, I desperately pushed a dozen eggs on her, and she tried to offer me money.
“Yeah,” I said, laughing. “Thanks for the sex and the friendship and all we’ve been through. That’ll be $1.25 for the eggs.”
“Hey, don’t knock it—they’re $3.89 at the co-op in town.”
I nearly choked on my egg salad. “You’re kidding. Really?”
And just like that I was a commercial farmer. Or would have been if not for the Patriot Act. In early June I found myself at the Silver City Co-op with two dozen eggs. I thought manager Katherine might want to sell them.
Katherine looked my cream-colored exports over, seemed to approve of them, and told me that before she could take them I first had to fill out some state security form to register as a food producer. On account of the world falling apart and everything. I didn’t like the sound of that, so instead I started selling them to the new co-op we had in Mimbres—it was within walking distance of the Funky Butte Ranch and down the street from Sisters Restaurant. I could drop off eggs and pick up grease in one trip. Plus, the manager there didn’t make me fill out any government paperwork and I didn’t ask any questions.
