Chicken Nostalgia

I dashed into the hardware store the other day, looking for niger seeds for my finches, and, this being Vermont and almost spring, I walked by a display of sugaring supplies. Next to them was a forty-pound bag of chicken feed, and the sight of that bag pierced me like a sword. 

It’s been six years now since I took my little flock to be killed, in preparation for our move to the retirement community where we now live. My hens were big, affable, butter-colored Buff Orpingtons, the golden retrievers of the chicken world. They were, as hens go, unflappable, and they made it through Vermont winters in their unheated chicken coop. They were not egg-laying machines, like those sad, nervous Leghorns favored by factory farmers. My hens’ egg production waxed and waned with the seasons, as God intended it to. 

On the other hand, they were composting machines, and my garden depended on them for its fertility. All year round, hunting for seeds, they scratched and shredded the layers of old hay that lined their coop, and deposited nitrogen-rich droppings into the mixture, which I periodically hauled to the garden to work its miracles. 

As thrifty as Depression-era housewives, my hens consumed every wormy apple and rotten tomato I threw into their yard. They even ate their own eggshells (after we’d eaten the eggs), thus recycling the calcium. I admired them for their usefulness, but I loved them for the eagerness with which they rushed out of the coop in the morning, for their cozy go-to-roost purrings in the evening, and because they knew and trusted me, and would let me sit with them in the sun while they pecked at the grass, and sometimes at my shoelaces. 

I have a long history with chickens, from the ones that my grandmother used let me feed when I was barely old enough to walk, to the live capons that she sent by train to Barcelona for our Christmas dinner, and the little lame chick that she sent to keep me company as I lay in bed recovering from measles. 

Now, as my autumn declines into winter, I would like nothing better than a couple of hens (you can’t have only one, because they get lonely) to comfort me. But as Vermontish and progressive as the community where I live is, chickens are not allowed. And so, whenever I run across a bag of feed in the hardware store, or drive past the “Chicks Are Here!” sign in front of the Tractor Supply every spring, I practice the art of letting go. I’ve read that this is important preparation for the ultimate divestiture, and makes it easier. 

I practice letting go of the idea of keeping hens, and of raising my own food, and of being who I was all those years ago. And in my mind I also practice letting go of Bisou, who is fine right now but who will be my last dog, and whom I’ll inevitably have to let go in another three or four years. 

On the other hand, carpe diem! we are told. Live in the moment! But how to do this while simultaneously practicing letting go is the emotional equivalent of rubbing one’s stomach while patting one’s head. The two things keep leaching into each other. No sooner do I enter fully into the joy of taking Bisou for a walk than I’m overwhelmed by the thought that someday we’ll be taking the last one. And I can only recapture the enjoyment of the walk if I firmly put out of my mind the inevitability of loss. 

It’s at moments like these that a couple of pasturing hens would come in handy, to turn my mind to dirt baths, grass, earthworms, compost, and the cycle of life.

My grandmother and I, feeding chickens

 

The Wolf's Last Gift

Some years ago, a couple of biologists living in the northern wilds rescued a wolf cub. For the next decade and a half, the man and woman devoted themselves to giving the wolf, a female, the best, most wolfish life possible, and to documenting it.

If, like me, you have entertained fantasies of what it would be like to have a wolf of your own, the documentary that the couple made would nip them in the bud. The inside of their cabin looked like a war zone. Cushions were ripped out and strewn everywhere. The rustic furniture had been chewed to pieces. There were holes in the floor where the wolf had dug.  It’s not that she was in the least aggressive; she was simply…active.

Winter and summer, every single day, the couple hiked endless miles to satisfy their protégée’s compulsion to roam. Whenever they weren’t trudging up and down mountains, they were scavenging for road kill and other sources of meat for the wolf, who flourished under their care. The couple, however, looked more haggard and worn with each passing year.

When the wolf grew old and died, they didn’t bury her. Instead, they carried her body to the top of a nearby hill and laid her on the ground, the way a wild wolf’s remains would have been left. Then they set up a camera nearby and made a stop-action video of the ensuing months.

In late summer and into the fall, as flies and beetles crawled over it, the wolf’s body seemed to flatten and sink slowly into the ground. Scavengers made off with a few bits and pieces, and then the snow came and covered everything.

In the spring, after the snow melted, the carcass had disappeared, and in its place there grew a thick, bright green patch of young grass, in the shape of a wolf.

Zero-Sum Game

Remember those stories, from what seems like a century ago, about dolphins swimming in the canals of Venice? I fell for them, even though they were absurd. Why would dolphins want to enter those narrow canals when they have the entire Adriatic to disport themselves in?

But the reason that so many of us fell for the story is that it corroborates the consoling idea that Nature, given half a chance, immediately begins to recover. In fact, many cities are seeing cleaner air as a result of stay-at-home rules. Here in Vermont, with traffic noise drastically reduced, I’ve never heard so much bird song. It’s an anything but silent spring.

While coyotes roam the empty streets of San Francisco and Chicago, around our cottage the foxes are flourishing. Yesterday evening I watched one kill a squirrel right under our bird feeder, and head up the hill to his den across the road. I told myself that his wife and four children would eat a good dinner, but the violence of the killing, although it was over in seconds, stayed with me.

I stood at the sink washing my hands for the umpteenth time and repeating my hand-washing metta: may all beings be safe, may all beings be healthy, may all beings be content, may all beings live with ease. But for whose safety and contentment was I praying, the fox’s or the squirrel’s? I couldn’t have both: if the squirrel is safe, the fox goes hungry; for the fox to live with ease, the squirrel must die. And it doesn’t stop there: when the squirrel eats the acorn, the future oak perishes. When the fox dies, its flesh melts into the earth and feeds the tree.

Everything comes at a cost. The clean air of the city is paid for by the cab drivers with no fares, and by the mountains of packaging materials overflowing the dumps. In factory farms across the country, thousands of pigs are being reprieved, while the workers who would have butchered and processed them at the now-closed Smithfield plant in South Dakota sicken and grow poorer by the day.

Is there no way out of this zero-sum game? Not, I think, as long as there are so many of us on this earth. And even if by some miracle all the visions of Margaret Sanger, Bill McKibben, Al Gore, and Rachel Carson were to come true at once, death would still be the necessary condition of life.

But to be human means, almost by definition, living with the illusion that we are exempt from the turning of the wheel. In our frantic culture, normal life allows us to maintain that illusion. But in this spring’s eerie silence (except for the birds), distractions are harder to come by.

And so between watching the fox on the prowl, and worrying about the sick and the unemployed, I strive to accustom myself to the image of my flesh dissolving and my molecules gently dispersing for the benefit and nourishment of something or someone. Does this seem morbid and medieval? I don’t think it is. Rather, I suspect that getting comfortable with this vision is where true ease and contentment lie.