07 December 2011

Harvest Time

Twelve harvest seasons have come and gone and every time they hit me like a 2x4. Call me a slow learner, but somehow the harvest sneaks up on me at exactly the same time every year. No amount of list-making or desk rearranging can soften that moment of terror when D walks in and proclaims, “WE’RE PICKING!”

Growing up, all I knew about mandarin oranges is that they came in a can adorned by a woman in a kimono and tasted like the corn syrup they were swimming in. Imagine my surprise when I ate a fresh mandarin for the first time. I gulped down so many my stomach burned and my teeth tingled. Now they’re everywhere: hanging from trees, carted on trailers, stacked up in crates and packed in bags and boxes. But all that’s outside where the action is. My job is in the office, answering phone calls, responding to emails, taking mail orders and preparing hundreds of shipping labels. I gaze out the window every once in a while at the bustling workers and silently mouth, Hey look! I’m farming!

It’s weird having a crop that ripens in winter. While everyone else is busy with holiday gift shopping and party planning, we get lost in the demands of the harvest. We manage to set up a Christmas tree every year, but it’s plastic and stored in a box and permanently wired with lights. All we have to do is pop it open like an umbrella and plug it in. Voila, merry merry.

Fruit and summer just seem to go together. But here we are in early December, worrying that all our eggs in one basket could freeze overnight. And no one eats frozen eggs. Our only option is to turn on the sprinklers at night to protect the trees and hope for the best. We’ve had calls from well-meaning customers suggesting that we throw a bed sheet over each tree, or we light little fires under the trees and tend them through the night. Folks, there are 1500 trees out there. There aren’t enough sheets for sale in this small town, and it would be a recruiting nightmare to round up even a handful of people willing to risk hypothermia to huddle around a campfire in 30-degree weather. For minimum wage. And the bed sheets dangling over the campfires... I don’t even want to think about it.

It’s 6:30 a.m. Time to get to work.

16 October 2011

Chicken Nuggets

Angel was the sole survivor of the scrub jay attack. We found her the following morning running through the yard in panicky zigzags. D bent down and scooped her up in a baseball cap as she ran past, returned her to the coop and bird-proofed the fence. I ran right out and bought four more chicks to keep her company. Ruby was red, Daisy was white, and Sophie was golden and grew up to lay blue eggs. The fourth was black and beautiful, and I named her Shaniqua, a solid urban name. It was also a private joke. I couldn’t wait for one of my neighbors to ask, “What’s a Shaniqua?”

I had never felt any maternal urges before, but these chicks brought out the mother hen in me. I set them up in a big cardboard box lined with wood shavings and equipped it with a heat lamp. The musty smell of sawdust and the gentle sound of peeping soothed me. I hovered as the chicks tripped over each other to peck at the crumble in their feeder. In the evenings, I knelt on the floor beside the box and watched for long minutes as they quieted down and fell asleep. A friend who also raised chickens once told me, “Maybe I’m a simpleton, but I can sit and watch them for hours.” I understand completely. It’s pure entertainment without an ounce of intellectual effort.

A few months went by as the chicks adjusted to living in the coop. Under Angel’s tutelage they learned to return from free-ranging at sunset so we could lock them in, and every morning we let them out again. One spring day D opened the door as usual. Daisy flew down from her roost to land in the doorway, puffed up her chest and flapped her wings, and belted out a hearty “COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!” What’s a shocked parent to do? I renamed her Tyrone.

As he matured, Tyrone became more and more neurotic. Crazy amounts of chicken hormones running through your veins will do that to you. I’d look out the back window at a lovely pastoral scene of blue sky and flowers and hens serenely pecking in the grass, and suddenly a blur of white would whizz past, head down and wings straight up, madly clucking like his tail was on fire. But there was never a sign of an actual threat. After a while the hens didn’t even bother to look up from their grazing. Tyrone was predictably ridiculous.  But we stopped laughing the day he confronted 2-year-old Sofia with a belly bump that knocked her to the ground. Shortly afterward while I was away on a business trip, D called to break the news: Tyrone ran away. That was his story and he was sticking to it. Now, I’ve never heard of a rooster running away, but I simply asked D to promise that Tyrone would not appear in any of my meals. And Tyrone was never heard from again.

01 September 2011

Old Farmer Stories

A big part of adjusting to life on the farm is adjusting to living with farmers. My first roadblock was that many of my neighbors looked interchangeable and I couldn't for the life of me tell them apart. They were all about the same age, same height, had white hair, dark glasses, short sleeved shirts, jeans and a cap. Was this some kind of joke they played on the new kid? Apparently not. Any one of them could show up at any moment and catch me off guard. It sometimes took me a few minutes to figure out who I was talking to. It didn't matter if I was about to jump into my car and rush off somewhere, these old guys had all the time in the world to chat. But one of the great things that they all have in common is their skill for storytelling.

One summer evening Lamar sat on the front porch and told stories while we sipped iced tea.

"Ellabelle was a tough old gal. She lived alone in a house down on Road 32, you know where the ferry used to run? Well, so one night Billy Ray Derryberry..."

I had to interrupt. "Wait, are you making these names up?"

Confused. "No. Why? Anyway, Billy Ray Derryberry's girlfriend used to live in that house before Ellabelle ever did. So one night Billy Ray gets good and drunk and goes to Ellabelle's house looking for his girlfriend. Well, Ellabelle has a .38, and when she sees Billy Ray climbing through her window, she grabs that gun and shoots him right here, between his nose and eye.

"He lived through it. Spent a long time in the hospital and still has that bullet lodged in his head. When the sheriff gets to Ellabelle's house she complains that her gun isn't working right, 'cause she meant to shoot him right between the eyes! In fact, she made such a fuss, what do you know if that sheriff didn't give her a brand new gun!"

14 August 2011

Living the Dream

It was sold as a 3-bedroom double-wide manufactured home, but let’s face it, we were living in a trailer. The walls were paper thin and there was never a moment when I didn’t know which room D was in. We could practically hear each other breathing from any room in the house. One night we were awakened by a critter chewing on something in the ceiling above our heads. Its snack kept slipping and rolling away, and the animal chased after it, all night long. The first time I turned on the heater, I heard whistling under my feet and discovered that the carpet had been tacked down right over a heater vent. Why bother to cut out those pesky rectangles when the heat will blow right through the carpet, anyway?

So I did what came naturally under the circumstances. I bought some baby chicks and set them up in a box in the family room. They were messy and stinky but oh, so cute. Every morning they’d greet me with hungry peeps, and every night they fell asleep huddled together in a corner. 

At four weeks old, they were big enough to move outside into the coop. But I didn’t realize that they were still small enough to squeeze through the holes in the chicken wire. All those feathers were deceiving. A few days later I noticed a chick on the ground outside the coop, not moving. I looked around and saw two more chicks lying in the driveway. And then I spotted two scrub jays inside the coop, eating from the chicken feeder. As I approached, the jays slipped through the wire and flew away. 

Jays are territorial gangsters. From what I could gather, they had entered the coop and chased the chicks out, then pecked them to death so they could have the food all to themselves. It was a gruesome scene. But shortly thereafter, West Nile Virus reared its head and nearly wiped out all the jays in the neighborhood. Karma? You be the judge.

07 August 2011

In The Beginning

So I was saying.

As D settled into his new surroundings, the stories kept coming. There was the time he wandered onto a neighboring property and got chased down by a man in a truck waving a shotgun. Then he discovered a rat living in his oven (I try not to think about it). There were freezing winters with no heat, 100-year floods, and an evacuation by the National Guard. Did I mention the rat in the oven? Finally, after five years of roughing it indoors, D bought a mandarin orchard and happily got back to his farming roots.

Meanwhile, I blandly pushed paper in my sterile downtown office and wondered if I would ever see any of the conservation I was supposedly working on. So I set my sights on finding a job in the field, away from the city. No matter that I knew diddly squat about botany or habitat restoration or hydrologic geomorphology. I was going to be one with nature, dammit. Word reached a manager in northern Northern California who needed an Operations Manager, and suddenly I was moving.

Well, it just so happened that I landed in the same town where D was living. Maybe it wasn’t coincidence but a mixture of fate and a matchmaking manager. Whatever it was, if you asked me, it was all about the JOB. And I lived stubbornly on my own for all of a few months before moving into D’s house. So much for being an independent woman.


23 July 2011

Fish Out of Water

I’m a Chinese-American woman who spent my first three decades trudging through the concrete jungle, wearing varying shades of black and avoiding eye contact with strangers. But one day I found myself packing up my apartment in the city and moving to a farming community where people name their dogs after firearms and hang dead coyotes over fence posts. Where the two households who believe in climate change and organic food and gay marriage are suspiciously known as “The Liberals” and “The Artists”. And where people drive trucks and tractors, or they don’t drive at all. I couldn’t have been more out of my element, yet I’ve never felt more at home.

I’m what’s known in legal circles as “risk averse”. I unplug appliances and shut valves before going on vacation. I never send my dog outside without his ID tags. I mail my tax return in March. I prefer activities that don’t involve deep water, soaring heights, or high speeds. (Who could possibly live with me? you may ask. We’ll get to that in a minute.) So I would have been perfectly content to spend the rest of my predictable little life within a 50-mile radius of my birthplace. But in my 38th year I was yanked out of my comfort zone. It was somewhere between the call of the wild and a midlife crisis. Okay, maybe a man had something to do with it, too.

D and I had been friends for years. We worked for the same environmental company, doing our small part to save the world. Some would call us granola-eatin’ bleeding heart tree-huggers. I prefer the term “conservationist”. I was based in San Francisco and he was assigned to a small rural town in Northern California. If you think San Francisco is in Northern California, think again. There are miles and miles of farmland and old farmers between the Bay Area and the Oregon border. D’s first hint of trouble was the handwritten street sign reading, “This neighborhood is protected by Smith and Wesson”. The second hint was the neighbor who introduced himself and cheerfully announced that the creek behind D’s house was called “Nigger Sam Slough”. Oh, did I mention… ?














Yup, that’s D. Talk about your awkward moments.