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"Farm
City: The Education of an
Urban Farmer
" by
Novella Carpenter
; Penguin (277 pages,
$16
paperback)
———
Novella Carpenter
wells with tears to see her turkey mourning his mate,
ripped by a rottweiler in the
Oakland, Calif.
, ghetto she calls home. Harold circles what's left of
Maude, puffs and preens as if asking her to mate, then
thumps his head by her side.
So much
meat wasted. But she still had Harold for the
Thanksgiving
feast.
That's
how it is with Carpenter, who loves animals, in lots of
ways. She's a complex character, like none you've likely
met — part foodie, part greennik, part
hunter-gatherer. A farmer by nature. She defends animal
rights, but not as you might imagine.
In
"Farm City," originally published in hardcover
a year ago and now out in paperback, she tells of the
urban farm that she and boyfriend Bill started on a
weed-choked lot next to their apartment in GhostTown, a
neighborhood of thugs and crackheads. A shattered mirror
leans against a rusty shed, next to a junkyard.
Carpenter
begins with herbs and vegetables, adds a beehive, then
chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese. Rabbits. Pigs. What was
desolate now brims with bounty. The homeless pilfer her
produce by night, usually with her indulgence. Other
creatures pilfer her livestock, not exactly with her
indulgence.
Shovel
raised, she stands over an errant opossum:
"Don't." Clang. "Kill." Thud.
"My." Whump. "Ducks." She severs its
head and considers putting it on a spike or tossing the
body into the street to be flattened. But she pauses:
"Like
the junkyard dogs who killed Maude, this beast was just
following instinct. ... The dogs, the headless opossum
— they were not the biggest killers. I was. Compared
to what I had planned to do — roast the goose, confit
the ducks, and truss the turkey — this opossum was a
small-time player." She feels like a murderer, not
for killing but for how. "Caught up in protecting
my babies, I realized, I had become a savage."
She
thinks of her parents, who embraced the back-to-the-land
movement of the '60s. Her hippie mother became lonely on
an isolated
Idaho
homestead as her mountain-man father went feral, leaving
for long hunting trips. They divorced when Novella and
her sister were young. Her mother's self-sufficient
ingenuity sustained them.
"My
parents had, by my age, built a house from scratch, had
two children, and fed themselves from their land,"
she says, then looks at her own life. "My peers
were homeless people and freaks."
In the
alley outside her window, an addict squats on a bucket,
pants down and sleeping. She could live anywhere, she
tells herself, besides this squalid place, this Wild
West of gunfights and lawlessness with the nation's
highest murder rate. No rules here. Anything goes.
In a
place like this, you could live in an abandoned car for
months, like her friend Bobby, who combs the city for
junk and deposits it at the end of their dead-end
street. Here, you could squat-farm on a scruffy lot you
don't own. And in that she recognizes a paradox: Only
this slum would tolerate her.
To her
landlord, an immigrant from
Benin
, an urban farm seems normal. Her Vietnamese neighbor
tosses scraps to her pigs, like back home. The Yemeni
shopkeeper is thrilled to get live chickens and honey.
Bobby gives her tips on pig butchering that he recalls
from another world he once knew,
Arkansas
. And not far away, in a posh Italian restaurant in
Berkeley
, she befriends a
Tuscany
-trained butcher and gourmet chef to help her make the
prosciutto and salami and more that she craves.
Meanwhile,
growing pigs get hungry. They need far more than the
weeds she collects for her fowl. Where better to fill
the slop buckets than in the garbage bins behind the
restaurants that increasingly are gentrifying her part
of town? She and Bill dive in the Dumpsters,
"laughter wafting out of the open windows above us,
the smell of cigarette smoke mingling with the odor of
fetid fruit."
Seeing
her groping for fish guts, a homeless man offers her a
dollar. But using the city's waste stream is part of her
philosophy of self-sufficiency. Her use of things that
others discard is born of nature, not necessity. No need
to throw out a bunny's brain — you can use it to tan
its hide. Scrounged pallets and old plywood make a fine
coop. Together, she and Bill find treasures amid the
piles of debris that rise at curbside around the
neighborhood early each month, at eviction time.
By book's
end, you know this woman. She lays out her heart, one
that embraces life's moments so dearly that she mourns
their passing, even while they're here. "Farm
City" finds her in her prime — when "I felt
young and healthy, and nostalgic for the present."
And that,
too, is how it is with
Novella Carpenter
. Deeply reflective, though earthy. She'll rail against
injustices toward animals, then take you on an intimate
tour of their innards. She cusses and quotes poetry. She
is, in short, honest about herself. She feels genuine.
In
slaughtering an animal, she comes to understand, one
must respect it, honor it. Livestock have struck a
Faustian bargain with humans, she says. They offer us
their lives in exchange for shelter, feed, and an
opportunity to pass on their genes. They would not
otherwise exist. Yet an animal's slaughter is a sacred
moment, a transfer of life forces, and death should come
in a familiar place, by familiar hands. It's a gift we
must not waste.
But all
is not well on Carpenter's tenth of an acre, down home
with her homies. Nearby, development is creeping in.
Storefronts are unshuttering, condos are rising. There
goes the neighborhood. A for-sale sign appears on the
lot, and she worries for her little farm.
Like her
honeybees, she could leave. At swarming time, some bees
set out to find a new hive. Humans, smart as we are,
don't know why some choose to go while others choose to
stay. But wherever she and Bill go, she knows, they will
have bees. Then they will build a garden, and raise
chickens. "It's just what we do."
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