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The continuing confessions of a newborn redneck

Actually, my neck's been red for about a month now, because I keep forgetting to use sunscreen and I cut my hair off last summer when the heat finally outweighed the benefits of pretending I hadn't begun to have a comb-over problem.

Generations of ancestors who tried desperately to free themselves from the toil of the soil would probably be saddened by how I've been spending these last few weeks, but the sunburn and the work boots and all my talk of chickens and worry about the weather. For most of my 49 years I have changed channels when the weather came on, and ignored its presence in the newspaper. In part this is because I spent 30-odd years in Seattle, and there's really no point in having a weather forecast most days there. It's gray, and dripping, and I miss that soothing sky. I look at the weather every morning, now, trying to guess when it's going to be dry enough to plant beans.

Still, I have been thinking some about that pejorative, "redneck," and not so much about the Randy Newman song (although some of the silliness being spit at Barack Obama does remind me how desperately we could use Newman's wit just now; his old wit, that is, not the elder statesman making soundtracks). My neck got red because I was out in the field, really only for a couple hours for a series of afternoons, trying to get the ground ready and the plants in the ground so that we could eat local food grown without pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Maybe there's something effete in all that, but it's harder, and it's work, and it tastes good when it's done.

Point being that the neck only gets red when you're outside working, because if you're playing you probably have suntan lotion on, and if you're dozing it's probably in the shade. And there's been a lot of talk during this inning of the presidential election about the white, working-class voter in Appalachia. I can't pretend to be one, but a lot of that talk was still hurtful and shamefully ignorant.

Doubtless all my chat about chickens and crops seems odd, particularly on a music site, particularly coming from a middle-aged child of the suburbs. Fine, it's odd. But when I listen to Larry Sparks sing "John Deere Tractor" (as I have been; Rebel sent out a compilation disc that's been spinning in the little red pickup, once I brought Duffy's debut back inside to write about it), I have a little more context than I did the first few times I heard the song. Sparks has a lot of nostalgia in his songs, a lot of looking backward. I'm not immune to that temptation, but it's far more useful to look forward.

I spent most of today out in the barn, waiting for a chicken to die. It didn't, at least not yet. I got there early this morning, caught up with Dan while he was walking from the little pen where the motley assemblage of month-old roosters live, cradling an almost unmoving bundle of feathers. He set it down in one of the compartments in our unfinished chicken condominium, and shrugged. The night before he'd turned the heat lights off on the little ones, and, in their scrum to stay warm, this one had been hurt. He didn't figure it had long, but on the chance that it was sick (and not hurt), he wanted it segregated.

So we sawed and built and stapled chickenwire over the second set of condos, and the little rooster kept breathing. We moved the half-grown hens into their new quarters, and I spent a few minutes chasing the one that got away with a fishing net, which works better than bare hands. And then we moved the month-old roosters into their remodeled quarters. Which meant I held a bunch of chickens today, on purpose. And then we fed them, and, since it hadn't died yet, Dan fed and watered the bedraggled rooster. My guess is it got pecked on its back something fierce, or stepped on hard, because it couldn't raise its head. But, to our surprise, it drank, and then ate. So maybe it'll make it.

Dan looked at it eating, and shrugged again. "If you live, I'll kill you," he said.

I live -- we mostly live -- pretty isolated from death. Death happens in hospitals and hospices, and I've been very lucky that it hasn't been a presence in my family for a good long time. I am far from the first to note that there's something about knowing what you're eating, where it came from, and how it lived. What it ate. How it died.

I find it easier not to be a vegetarian now that I'm involved in some of the meat we eat. It's a little more honest, anyhow.

And ferrying the little birds, it made me smile. Scared, timid little things, with sharp feet and beating hearts. If they live, we will kill them. That's a hard truth for a life-long pacifist to embrace, but I'm getting there. It comes with obligations, that food. Our food.

Posted by grant on May 14, 2008 8:10 PM | Permalink

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