From Peep to Pan

Please forgive me if some of you find this difficult, but we raised six birds from tiny chicks to freezer fillers. I butchered them myself--quickly and surely--and our second roaster is coming out of the oven tonight. These fat birds never had names but were still hand fed worms and bugs, given sunshine and playtime.

Blame it on the post office workers

This hatchery seems to enjoy writing captions for its chicks. Make sure you scrowl down to the pics on the bottom, including the quail chicks.

"Little Dan" the quail, as mentioned in yesterday's blog, is doing very well. After calling the hatchery we order from and finding that they don't "do quail at all" the best guess is that he escaped from someone else's shipment and a harried postal employee caught him and plunked him into our box. Beleive it or not, this is the time of year when thousands of hatchling chicks are zigzagging around the country in cardboard boxes with airholes. It's true. For being flightless babies they really get around.

Falling through the cracks

Even with my new summer job I still get to work in the chick barn at the feed store on Friday and Saturday. The demand for broiler chicks is so high this year that each week 800-1000 chicks come in, boxed in sets of 100, and each week they’re sold out before Monday. Broiler chicks are the classic yellow-fuzzy palm-size balls of cuteness. Imagine the surprise when, inside a box of dozens of disoriented 3-day-old broilers, a thumbnail-sized quail chick popped up! When I went in this morning he was sharing the brooder with the other chicks, but running along their fuzzy backs like a little brown bug. How he got shipped from New Mexico with the group is anyone’s guess. I like to imagine some bored packaging employee keen for a gag. It’s more likely that, just as they show in the YouTube videos, the chicks are conveyered along on belts and dumped into boxes by weight. Occasionally they are even packaged with pieces of eggshell stuck to their rumps.

So, how is your new summer job?, you ask. Well, I have a golf cart, a radio, keys to most corners of Pioneer Park, and three (four starting next week) teenage boys for 40 hours every week. We clean bathrooms and picnic areas. We shovel gravel and rake leaves. We make up rap songs about toilet paper and hijack the lyrics of other rappers trying to rhyme things with “Chlamydia” and “Gonorrhea”. They eat. They eat and eat and eat and these kids come back from lunch eating a second lunch. Getting them back in the golf cart after breaks and lunches often involves (literally) pieces of cold pizza and hot Salisbury steak flying behind us: “Dude! The five second rule won’t work for that one . . .bummer!”

I’m their supervisor so I’ve had to be a grown-up about a few things. Cycling to McDonald’s on your fifteen-minute morning break doesn’t allow you to blame “slow service” for your tardy return. Nor does falling asleep in your inflatable raft off the dock of the Chena River on your lunch hour allow you to come back later than everyone else. But I feel certain that overall we’re having a good time. They help me out and cheer me up, too.

I like the kids. I like being outside all day. The rest will remain undisclosed. The whole shindig ends on August 20, when high school starts up again.

And my really big news? In service for my love of farming, hard-work and writing, after more than a year of difficult career explorations, I’m running off to New Zealand for six months. I will be a guest on a vacant farm in Kaitaia, Northland. My hosts live in Auckland, four hours south. I’ll be immersed in all things agricultural in addition to working on my novels.
More on all this to come.

Alaska Agriculture in the Classroom: sent to me via e-mail

Just a quick reminder about the Alaska Agriculture in the Classroom agricultural literacy courses this summer: July 30-Aug. 1 in Fairbanks; Aug. 5-7 in Palmer. Both are available with up to 2 pro development credits. See more at www.agclassroom.org/ak
This is cross curricular and adapted to all grades.

Also, time is running out to use your $20 allotment for Alaska teachers from the Washington Dairy Council for 2008. Each school year each Alaska educator gets a $20 allotment with no shipping fee. It's a great opportunity to add to your ag literacy and/or nutrition materials. I highly recommend the food models, which are $20. See the URL here or start at www.eatsmart.org

Victoria Naegele, director
Alaska Agriculture in the Classroom
907-746-2172
www.agclassroom.org/ak

Stories

My work at the feed store here on college road has been a tenure based on the "chicken season" and its passing. I've expressed great interest in taking on more responsibilities, even aspiring to some management tasks, but I have remained a helpful and capable chicken woman out in the barn instead. After six weeks, I'm, not even authorized to use the computer in the store to 'ring people up'. My understanding is that this is a reflection of their recent merger of two stores into one and an overstock of actual "clerks" that take care of the money stuff--and the fact that the chick barn stays busy enough that dividing work this way is the best. My job there has been about talking to people and about bird care. What I will miss most (I may be able to stay on a single day/week after my new job starts tomorrow, but I don't know) is listening to people talk about their memories: the swoon of delight on a man's face at the memory of being a boy and chasing birds, waiting for the beheaded birds to run into each other, waiting for the big meal at the end of a hard, dirty day, or the story about accidentally flushing a pheasant hen with the tractor and finding someone with a broody chicken to hatch the remaining eggs, the story of hiding ducklings in the bathtub, and (macabre as it sounds) hearing the litany of Alaskan carnivores that got to the birds before the people did (the dog, the bear, the eagle, the fox, the bobcat . . .). I once had a family come back in the same day because one of their huskies ate the batch of chicks. Husky dogs are like that. And just the other day I had an older man bend down in front of a brooder of pheasant chicks and make the soft, solid cluck-call of a pheasant hen and I watched fifty tiny birds scramble to this bent man, crawling over top of each other and trying to rush the front of the cage to get to him. "Well look at that, I can still do it." The man said, satisfied with himself.

We can discuss animal health issues, humane slaughter, the global economy, food science, and the green revolution. But the animal products we buy at the grocery store have never given us memories purely from their production. They are without context or history, uprooted and packaged. What a tragedy to eat something that can't make you laugh or smile or cringe or gasp. And how much less nourishing.

At the Yak Ranch

I'm unsure why I've put off writing a full report of my three days in Delta at Sawmill Creek Ranch. I think it just gave me so much to think about, and so many images and realities, that sorting and qualifying the experience has given me pause. My hosts were people of great honesty and heart. Everyone I met there just seemed to enjoy being their unique selves and that in turn frees you up to respond in kind. We are who you are--and we are lucky to be so.

Though Delta is only about 100+ miles from Fairbanks, it is much more "rural". It's been one of the farm hubs in Alaska (the other is Palmer/Wasilla 200+ miles south) since white folks decided to stay here. Everything in Delta is Big, and the acreages in particular. But between the mountains, grasslands, people, and of course the headiness of sunny spring days, it's impossible not to feel truly blessed to be in Alaska.

Yak ranching is not as obscure an enterprise as you'd think, but nor has it reached a popularity where it no longer has the intrigue of the exotic. Yaks are a cold climate bovine, native to Northern Asia, where they are not just "the family dog" but a lifeline for villagers. Meat, milk, manure, muscle, material (hair/down/hides) and more, all come from this well-adapted animal. In the States, it first piqued the interest of health-conscious gourmet meat connessours. Yaks wear their fat around the periphery of their bodies, not marbled into the muscle, so once the cuts are trimmed, you're looking at a red meat with a fat content of well under 2%. The fact that yaks are VERY "feed efficient", requiring a fraction of the nutritional input that beef cattle require, make them an excellent choice for small farms and hobby ranches. After the fineness of the meat, spinners, weavers, and knitters have become fond of the yak down, a material with a micron size that matches cashmere, and a softness and warmth that does as well. It's possible that gourmet yak butter and cheese could be marketed next in the States. Butter particularly would be an enterprise for such high-fat milk that coagulates much faster and better than traditional dairy cows'. The practicalities of managing a dairy and fiber herd involves years of calf-rearing and human imprinting to socialize them to be handled. This can be fun, frustrating, and slow work. Yaks are relatively slow to mature and don't reach reproductive maturity for 2-3 years.

I will write more throughout the week, but I'll leave you with the image of 20 # calves being dip-netted out of a field of untamed cows. Yes, fellow Alaskans, I said DIPNET. You drive up in the truck and just scoop up the calf . . .

Out of the Brooder

No, that's not MY hand with the pheasant chicks, (just one of those fun 'stock' images from the I-net) but they are that small and that cute. I went into the chick barn at the feed store this morning to clean and one of these little chickies was standing in the middle of the floor. It reminded me of the kid on the field trip who forgot to use the 'buddy system' to stay with his classmates. The manager told me a story from a few years back where one of the peacock chicks got out of the brooder and no one could catch him -- until he got the tip of his wing caught in one of the mousetraps set next to the bin of chick crumbles. Dragging a piece of balsa wood loaded with peanut butter slowed him down enough that he was sent back to chick jail.

Spring is here. Notice the lovely picture of my beleaguered truck and the dirt for the garden at Karl's house. I took the bed liner out years ago. And I stopped waxing the paint job a few years ago, too. From this photo you can tell that I am literally driving the thing into the ground.

Heritage Breed Turkeys

We have turkey chicks at the feed store. We also carry heritage breed turkeys -- turkeys that can breed naturally and produce fertile eggs. Unlike our traditional thanksgiving birds, they haven't been bred for the double musculature that created the need for us to aritficially inseminate. This article explains more without being too inciteful and extreme (in my opinion).

From snow (and chickens in the guestroom) to the first sunny day . . .

Windstorm

This past Monday I worked in the chick barn at the Alaska Feed and then went to work at the Hutchison High School teen parenting daycare. For a single day I was the one pushing the six-pack stroller through the high school hallway and singing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” until they fell asleep. Today I have a mild case of the flu. For all the hand sanitizer and the bleach-wash we use on the toys at the end of the day, nothing beats little wet hands on your cheeks and snotty tissues that cling to the underside of the table. But they like me there. That is nice.

While I’ve tried to differentiate the blogs, my nature is one that ascribes abstractions and lessons from the most banal things. I have no new classes or workshops of seminars to announce here. A “good” head cold always slows me down just enough that I’m almost relieved. I was reading a book last night where a polar expedition of four people was forced to stay inside their tent for five days during a blizzard. The author did an excellent job of tracing the descent of the conversation into what, on the final day, became incessant observations of the sound of the wind on the tent material. Discussion had ceased. Almost like a form of Turret’s Syndrome, the four of them litanized the forces outside, their direction and strength. When I am ill, it is far easier for me to do that—to sit still and listen—though I continue to cultivate my way into the space during healthy times.

I’ve been saving an image for an essay. Good writing always begins that way for me, with a single, festering image. But I’m increasingly called to draw on this inner photo as I navigate and articulate the career changing I’m still in the process of. I have been a licensed veterinary technician for eleven years. Every stranger who finds this out –from hairdressers to teachers—is jealous, and for every piece of this jealousy I feel I owe and explanation as to why I no longer do it. I didn’t discover the easiest answer to this until recently: I’m reaching my maximum lifetime dose of radiation scatter. Sure, you wear lead aprons, but you also wear a dosimeter because the rays are absorbed through your retinas and everywhere else. To extrapolate from my measured dose five years ago, this is it. I’m glowing. People like this answer. But I feel like I’m lying.

Here is a different answer.

I'm far afield, this day, May 18, 2007, in rural Massachusetts. Twelve miles east is Worcester, a town I keep spelling with extra syllables like the sauce because I'm not from here. The rain isn't cold. The downpour has passed for the moment, but the aluminum sheen to the sky says more is coming; it's not over yet. Right now the rain is like a fine sweat on the trees, steaming up from the grass. I run my wet hands against my temples, combing back moist hair that keeps against my head in thick strands and reattaching the ponytail elastic. The cattle are in the backfield, behind the Shoney’s house and the vegetable fields, a long walk from their night shelter. My knee-high boots make sucking noises in the mud and new grass, grass that’s lime-colored in the spring sun when it isn’t raining, a color that means it’s high in magnesium, that means the animals can’t take a full day grazing and must be brought in before true dusk. Our sheepdog broke his tailbone chasing a car. Other people are very busy. There are only eleven cattle to bring in. I’ll do it.

There isn’t a gate to that backfield, just a ten or twelve-foot wide- embedment of rocks in the earth between where one fence ends and one begins. To watch the cattle go over this on their way out to pasture in the morning, you can tell from the way they walk, the way they pause, that the feel of their hooves on the rock is enough to give them pause; it’s all the gate they need. Footing, if you’re bovine, is all you’ve got, really. I go over the rocks my self, zipping up my windbreaker. I see them out there, the motley assortment, randall lineback crosses, dexters, an angus calf still on the teat at ten months and big as his mother; they’re black and white and brick-red. The two older milkers have udders that threaten to lick water off the grass, though they never seem bothered by this anchor. All of them are head down, one front foot out, almost imperceptible, for balance. The rain has settled on them as it has on the grass, on the trees, on the tips of billions of tiny hairs against their backs and inside their ears.

I’ve done this before with them. Once I get close enough I open my mouth wide as it will go, I expand my lungs and open my chest “HUP! HUP!” I yell at them in an enormous baritone hiccupping sound. I find a stick I put over my head, and I circle the group from the corners I no longer want them to be in. Nicole, the oldest milker, always hears me first. She starts to move. I circle and wave. The calf is a bit stubborn today and I have to slap his rump to tell him I’m there. We start to move. I can even say I never really learned to walk until I learned to walk behind cattle. Like what must happen to my voice to communicate with them, the expansion and the deepening, the pulling down and slowing—walking becomes the unknowing of your progress, until you’ve arrived where you need to be.

We single-filed over the rocks and entered the adjacent pasture. We now had to get through this field to get to the shed. But here is where I lost them, lost the calf first, then the lineback, then two dexters, and finally Nicole. It was new grass here, not yet grazed. They fanned out with their interest, sampling and sampling. I put my hood up. Rain. The thundering was starting again. I was also very hungry. “HUP! HUP!” I tried again, becoming increasingly animated. I went from rump to rump, leaving maudlin handprints from where my palm took the mist from their hair coat. As you can imagine I danced more and more manically, my stick over my head, my calls louder and more desperate, only the rain responding in thicker and thicker sheets. Rain began to run through my collar, down against my shoulders and clavicle. Angry. I was hungry enough to be angry, and angry enough to kick them—big 900-pound bodies, cattle with no respect.

The farm steward was in his clean, dry office. His window looked out over the pastures. Dale had lived on this farm for more than a dozen years. He is pulling away from it these days, but he is kind. And you can go to him for help. The trouble in asking for help is that in order to get to the office you have to go through the mudroom—essentially stripping yourself of your outdoor-ness, removing gloves and hats and coats and jackets and boots with carefully tucked in socks. Going into the office before the true end of a farm day was lying to your body that it could spend the rest of the evening tramping about in socks and drinking tea, not to mention the wild hairdo you brought in with you that made you feel like an imposter with all the office ladies.

But I went there. I told Dale I was frustrated. No problem; nothing was a problem with him. Nothing ever really was. He got up and went to get his things, encouraging me to have a cup of coffee, which I did, with lots and lots of cream to quell the hunger.

And so, there I am, on May 18, in rural Massachusetts, standing in my mismatched socks, a cup of coffee in my hand, looking out the wide, wide window that frames the pasture I left the cattle in. Rain is sheeting down from the clouds now, gray and tough and noisy on the back stairs to the office. A big man, solidly roped with muscle from throwing hay bales, is in boots and a yellow raincoat. His hood is up, his head is down. He is cattle walking, that galumphing way that gets you there in the end. He is being followed by eleven cattle. They follow him like a flock of birds, the oldest cows in the front, the others in ‘v’ formation behind, following, following, each with their eyes on the yellow raincoat. Dale is not yelling anything. He’s holding no stick. Later, he told me, there is a word he uses to tell them it’s this time. I tried the word once myself but it stumbled around in my mouth. It isn’t the word, it’s the relationship that causes the coordination, the consistency of the dance, the mutual respect.

While I was on that farm, there was that massive pet food ingredient scare. An ingredient from China was causing acute liver failure. It was, to say the least, a crisis, in the veterinary and consumer community, and one that continues to be addressed a year later. We love our pets. We weigh our moral goodness against our ability to provide excellent care for our pets. They provide us with unconditional love, they lower our blood pressure, they may guide us if our sight is impaired, warn us when we’re having seizures, uncomplainingly wear Halloween costumes and more. They are worth it. But what of these other animals? What of these animals that have literally clothed and fed us, fueled our Fourth of July picnics, topped our ice cream cones, covered the seats of our cars, put the milk solids in our Doritos and Cheetos, are packaged into half-pint cartons and spun through America’s school lunch programs? What have we forgotten about them? And, in doing so, what have we forgotten about ourselves? I eat meat, and I drink milk. I am responsible to the animals that make this possible. I’m responsible for the remembering of this. We all are responsible for knowing where our food comes from. It’s our FOOD. We put it into our bodies. It makes us; we are made by it. Somehow, with the schism of pet ownership and never having to witness our food sources, many of us choose to label our love and respect for farm animals through complete abstinence—something along the line of “I love the forest so much and I’m so concerned about it that I’ll never walk in the woods again.”
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I want to develop this essay more