Granted, not a real farm; not the source of dad’s income or the family’s living. However, growing up on it wasn’t so different for a kid than life might have been on a real working farm. I knew enough real farmers’ kids to know that. I would get up early, after hearing my mother stirring in the kitchen below through the vent in the floor of the room I shared with my older brother, pull on heavy coats, gloves, hats and high rubber boots in the cold “mud room” to slog through mud or ice or deep snow drifts or otherwise battle my way to the barn against the unrelenting east wind. That wind which must be experienced to be believed, accelerated through the great wind tunnel of the Columbia River Gorge. Even on calm summer days, big heavy Douglas Fir branches bore witness to our wintry predicament, facing only west at right angle to perfectly straight trunks, all 100 feet of them like big combs into the sky. Years later I would learn exactly how the wind carves these unnerving sculptures out of the otherwise symmetrical, license plate perfect symbol: it blows the tender buds off the trunk before they can ever become branches. Rounding that one most brutal corner of the shed, where the wind never failed to hit with full force, yet a wooden gate had to be opened and closed behind, was a major feat on days when buckets of hot water had to be carried from house to trough. Once that threshold was crossed I could press on to the relative calm of the barn to finish morning chores in peace. After chores I would shed the boots and simply lean backwards, holding my coat open out to the sides to be blown effortlessly down the long driveway to catch the yellow school bus, Douglas Firs pointing the way west. I never saw my dad in the morning, he would have already left for his commute into Portland by the time I woke to brave the morning chores in that spiteful wind, perhaps that’s what was meant by “gentleman farmer,” but dad was no country gentleman, either in land or manners, though he did command us, his workers.

The wind is the single most memorable feature about that little farm on a hilltop between the villages of Springdale and Corbett Oregon at the gateway to the mighty Columbia Gorge.  However,  summers were much less daunting, even gentle, even as the work itself got much harder: tilling, planting, picking fruit, shucking corn, snapping beans, hauling hay, butchering the occasional animal we would eat, while fully enjoying those we didn’t: horses and dogs. And, when the littleness of our place coupled with long summer days left too much time our hands, we were “farmed” out to neighboring farmers to haul hay for the dairy and pick berries for the berry farmer. It was during the summers, working alongside the sons of real farmers and eating “suppers” prepared by their mothers—always at noon sharp in order to catch an episode of Perry Mason while we ate—that I realized that my life wasn’t very different from theirs, the real farmers. I suspect this had been my father’s intent all along, for his boys to be instilled with a good moral work ethic and to understand the value working hard for money—neither lesson took. Luckily the kind of farming around us had very short bursts of demand for extra workers, leaving lots of time for play, mostly alone, except for the dogs and horses. Then I was free to roam and ride the countryside with no boundaries or rules other than the rule of darkness.  As young as eight or nine no one would have worried about me being out along the country roads on horseback or deep in the woods on foot all day long, especially if accompanied by the trusted family dog Bruno, who would prove his valor more than once.

Our place was really more akin to “Green Acres” than anything productive, that fictional farm on a silly TV sitcom that ran from 1965-1971, years that almost precisely sync up with the first chapter of our little farm. We watched it without grasping the irony. We had a little bit of everything in the early years: a single dairy cow, goats, pigs, chickens, ducks and rabbits; beef cattle and horses came later. Unlike the fictional Green Acres, my father was no big city lawyer, and my mother was no fem fatal. Though she might be found midday in a night gown and wouldn’t walk down the driveway to the mailbox without lipstick. She was a good deal tougher and smarter than Eva Gabor’s ridiculous character Lisa. “I just adore a penthouse view” however, always struck a chord with me in that catchy opening song from the show, and while I didn’t then know what a penthouse was, it certainly looked like a better life to me in that opening scene before she gets dragged off to Hooterville with one last cry of “goodbye city life.” I identified with Lisa, and as soon as I was old enough and able, I fled to the city and a fourth floor walk-up studio apartment; my own roach infested “penthouse,” but Portland is no New York and that is another story.

I never really knew or thought to ask why our family made the move from 39^th and Grant Court in Southeast Portland to a rural hilltop 20 miles east of the city in 1963. I suppose my parents were pioneers of white flight in some regard. Many more would make that outward move in the following years until Oregon’s famous urban growth boundary law was signed by beloved environmentalist and notoriously anti-Californian governor Tom McCall in 1973, requiring a very large parcel of land to build a new home in the hinterlands, thus concentrating growth in the urban centers. I suspect that what it really did was retard growth all together, as the large three county area with Portland as its capital is still relatively tiny at only 2.3 million inhabitants. Farmers largely backed that legislation originally out of protectionism. I wonder now if the farmers in our little hamlet did, as it also required them to allow access to the Sandy River through their farms, and of course their land would now be worth a large fortune if it could be subdivided. In fact all the new houses built on our little country lane during my childhood were carved out of three large farms, built by members of three farming families. Three families that I believe were related to one another to begin with. Still it only amounted to a dozen or so families within a mile of us, mostly related to each other but not us; it was a lonely place for kids.

There was some tenuous connection between my family and the local dairy dynasty that went unquestioned, and my dad certainly spoke “farm” so we were not considered outsiders the way other former city dwellers were. I think my mother—the true city girl—had grown up friends with the wife of one of the heirs to a carved off chunk of the dairy farm, his own mother being the sister of the two remaining commercial dairy farmers and his father being a misfit Italian immigrant who never lost his thick accent. Pokey and Dordy Pomante started their own tightknit little clan all living next door to each other in an enclave that looked more suburb than rural. My family and the family with the oft mispronounced Italian last name closely paralleled each other: parents married around the same time, and each with three kids of similar ages. I don’t think the two sets of kids were ever as close as we were meant to be, the lovingly boisterous Italian clan vs. the ungregarious family with the Swedish last name. In the one it seemed nothing went unspoken and in the other (mine) nearly everything that mattered remained so. My dad wasn’t unfriendly and he was a loyal friend to many throughout his life, but my mom was infinitely more social with not a drop of cold Swedish blood. Years later she would find the perfect job to match her outgoing personality and penchant for gossip: secretary of the local high school. We did take family vacations and fishing trips with the Italian clan though, and I was closest with the boy who was my counterpart in age, on and off, sharing some “Stand By Me” moments along the way—a movie filmed, incidentally, in Oregon—including some late night skinny dipping “sword fights” and one fairly brutal hazing by a couple of older boys who caught us fishing on their property. The matriarch of the Italian clan kept a few cows that she milked by hand to supply a few families in the neighborhood, including ours, while giant stainless steel trucks hauled away the daily take from her brothers’ commercial operation. I can still smell her dingy farmhouse kitchen where she pasteurized the milk before loading it into a refrigerator in an unlocked garage where those few families in the know would deposit 50 cents into a glass for each gallon of very whole milk. By whole I mean the top 4 inches of the glass jugs would separate into thick yellow cream. My friend’s Grandmother, whom everybody simply knew as Dordy, was a sweet and generous woman who spoiled her grandchildren with drawers full of candy. She was hard working and weather worn in a way that only a true farm-raised woman can be. I suspect she was much younger than she looked. She and I even worked side by side through one or two raspberry picking seasons when I was I suppose around 12 years old, and I came to be jealous of my friend, and would gladly have traded my own grandmother for his. They liked each other though, our two grandmothers. Mine too had a rural upbringing, a hard life that started in Africa as a missionary’s daughter and sister to many, but by the time I came along there was little grandmotherly love left in her, only bitterness. Luckily she lived in town. My mother’s dad died when she was just 16, and grandma remarried an odd younger man with lava lamps and a drinking problem. Grandma outlived two husbands, but otherwise started her “waiting to die” period at a rather young age, and when she did die it took only a fall off of a low porch, a broken hip and little will to live to do her in. I had a certain amount of pity for my mother being her only child, tinged with resentment for Grandma not being more grandmotherly and specifically not teaching any of us French, her native tongue, including her only child. I was generally envious of other kids’ grandmothers.

As for my father, his roots were deeply rural. Born on a farm in Minnesota, the youngest child of a large poor clan of farmers—the kind with stories of walking five miles in the snow to a one room schoolhouse, or keeping your feet warm in fresh cow manure while going shoeless. Both my parents were depression era children, but my dad was part of the great Dust Bowl era and subsequent “Grapes of Wrath” migration west. With the death of his father, the whole clan, mom, seven kids (those who survived childhood disease) and some cousins all ended up settling in Oregon, California and Washington. I never heard anything about that journey, just like my dad’s tour in the Korean War, I never asked and he never offered any stories at all—forever the true swede. His mother died while my parents were on their honeymoon on the Oregon Coast, leaving me with only the one bitter grandparent.

Ours was, we were told by the neighborhood old timers, the oldest farm and farmhouse around. The house had a kind of weathered stately façade facing the country road a few hundred yards up a gravel drive, which became two parallel rivers after a quick thaw or hard rain and created much grief for my father, and as much fun for us kids. Two gables, one taller with three tall windows, two down and one up, and one single story peak with a large brick chimney flanked symmetrically by two more tall windows, created a well-proportioned front view, later destroyed by my dad’s remodeling and “storm-proofing.” There were three parts to the house representing three distinct eras, though none seemed to have been truly finished, which is not at all unusual in the country. The oldest was the kitchen and bath, which seems to have originally been a one room cabin and was pushing 100 years old back then. It was held together by square nails, but we were otherwise unable to date it precisely. Next a two story addition, including a dining room, three bedrooms and the stairway were added in early 1920s. We know this from old newspapers found in the walls during the replacement of the proportionally correct vertical windows with more energy efficient but aesthetically questionable horizontal aluminum picture windows in the 70s, forever destroying any of the former stateliness. Oh the 1970s remodeling twin aluminum sins, windows and siding. Luckily the old farmhouse was spared the latter. Finally a large living room and fireplace had been added sometime post WWII. It’s much more difficult to date farm houses than it is to date city houses. They are often conglomerates built over generations by their owners. Much of the house’s hardware, doors, doorknobs and hinges were Victorian and so older than most of the house. The basement could be accessed either from outside or through a creepy old door in the bathroom. The foundations were different under each of the three sections of house with a full basement only under the kitchen, dirt under the largest piece from the 1920s “wing” and cinder block and crawl space under the living room. In perhaps the largest DIY project imaginable my father dug out and finished the whole thing. Only many years later after moving to San Francisco and experiencing a few earthquakes would I again hear the sounds a wood frame house can make while being slowly jacked up one corner at a time. My dad did this project virtually alone, which I always thought fearless of him, and a little crazy. I hated almost everything about this house even as a young child, and not just for sharing a room with my older brother. I would retreat to the barn for many hours, which became my sanctuary, or even pitch a tent in the yard during summers as no privacy could be had inside that house. I lived there for ten years, give or take, as my departure wasn’t a dateable single event, but a gradual trickling away. My parents would stay another 10 years before moving even farther away from anything I would deem civilized, including an airport.

I was 3 years old when mom said “goodbye city life, Green Acres we are there,” according to the date on an old black and white photograph of me holding my fourth birthday cake, a molded cake in the shape of a lamb, cleverly transformed into a Hereford calf with red and white icing by my mother—sheep being one animal we never kept. My first memory of the farm was picnicking in the big shed garage, probably before the sale was final, as I don’t remember going inside the house on that visit. The grass was long and wind silently turned the blades of an old columbine left parked in the field opposite. Everything was gray and weathered, the many farm buildings and the house hadn’t seen a coat of paint in years—if ever—and some were collapsing in on themselves.  Remnants of orchards, pear trees, cherries and apples were gnarled and twisted in the throes of death, though a few would continue to produce huge crops for many more years, keeping my mother busy with a long canning season. An overly ambitious campaign of unused building demolition and tree removal started early and continued relentlessly for two decades until only the house and garage remained, rendering the place at last a sterile suburban home on a large piece of land rather than a farm. The stated reason for my parents selling the place and moving to a remote corner of the state was the dreaded high rate of property tax they were burdened with in their retirement years. This brings me back to Oregon’s famous urban growth boundary laws, and what my economist friend might call “unintended consequences.” Surely one of the drivers of that law originally was protecting farm land and farmers from the pressures of development, yet the result has been anything but that, preserving large parcels of land only for a kind of landed gentry of commuting professionals. I don’t pretend to understand all the variables, and there are many including Oregon’s lack of any sales tax, but the consequence is that today only relatively affluent families can afford to buy a property in rural Multnomah County, while at the same time village business life in the small towns scattered throughout the area has all but disappeared, as have most of the farms. I used to walk to the Springdale country store for my candy cigarettes, and get my haircut by the barber who was once my first crush and best friend’s dad, just next door to the tavern (the one survivor to this day). On my walk home I’d admire the big green Lincoln with the first personalized license plate in town parked outside our one gas station and wonder why anyone would want the word “Gross” on their car, even if it was their last name.

In the early 1960s dad built great fires that reduced whole buildings to ash and nails, fires started with gasoline and old tires, which were strewn about the place in abundance. These fires were awesome sights and major events for us kids, but rather unbelievable now that such a thing was ever allowed. The black smoke clouds were enormous. As for the trees, there were many dead or dying rows of fruit trees, which had once given the farm its architectural structure. They too had to go. I never asked my dad if he outright hated trees, though I know of at least one in particular that he did for certain hate. As a young teenager I planted a Weeping Willow in the front yard, an entirely inappropriate tree for a hilltop site as I know now, but a visceral reminder to my dad of being beaten by his father with willow branches back in Minnesota lake country. It disappeared shortly after I moved out. The majestic row of 30 or so 100-foot Douglas Firs was also an enemy that my dad finally vanquished. Besides being precariously weighted to one side, in the direction of the house, the wind also had the nasty habit of propelling needles at high velocity at the roof where they worked their way under the roofing shingles and began prying them loose. So for an entire summer logging became the family vocation, a scary and grueling business it was taking down those trees and a sad emptiness remained in their place. The tree house and tire swing were of course casualties too. While studying landscape architecture years later I drew up a “what if” management plan for reforestation of the farm, but it was much too late. We did plant the entire back two acres with forest seedlings one year in the hope of creating a serious windbreak, but forgot to inform a certain member of the dairy dynasty who had license to cut our hay every year and, invisible in the tall grass, sadly those saplings became bailed up in bovine fodder.

Hay

Life on the farm revolves around hay, its smells and its modularity are central to my memories. Hay was always there, sometimes resting in the background, sometimes at the center of a rush of hard sweaty work and sometimes the stuff of play and fantasy. It is the closest thing I can think of to a basic building block, against which all else could be measured in scale and time; food formed into a bale with the same proportions as a Lego brick—and often used in the same way—while marking out the course of a single year. The stuff, in its many forms, was ever-present, from fields of blowing grass so tall that it hid the house from the road—as well as me and my dog from my mother—to monstrous piles of horse manure and straw bedding to be spread back onto the fields and vegetable garden. It dominated work on the farm at every phase of its production and use, and it seemed always to be in motion, constantly divided up and transported from one place to another. You were never quite finished with it before it started all over again. The size of those rectangular bales, created in the field by baling machines pulled behind tractors, is simply based on a reasonably fit man’s ability to lift it, throw it onto a moving truck bed, toss it onto a conveyor belt and then stack it into huge “Lego cities” 20 or 30 feet high inside every farm’s great wooden cathedral—the hay loft. I can still imagine the particular weight of a bale, the initial bite of the twine into my gloved fingers as I snatch, clean and jerk; first to the knee, then chest, and the final push to throw it high above my head. Alfalfa was a different matter altogether, the bales being much heavier than ordinary grass hay and often bound with metal wire. Those dense green bales of heavenly scented high-energy goodness were the symbol of a more elite farmer, but no fun at all to handle. The dairy next door trucked it in from sunny irrigated fields of Eastern Oregon, and we also used it, though sparingly, just for horses. As young teens my brother and I would make that trip over Mt Hood sitting silently for hours in the cab of a big flatbed truck with the eldest son of the dairy dynasty at the wheel on our way to haul a load of the green bullion back to feed the prized black and white Holsteins. It would already be stacked in a line along the road like big green rail cars so loading onto the truck was easier than lifting the bales in the field and tossing them onto a moving target, however, looking back now the idea of having to lift each 70-pound bale one at a time seems a bit silly. Presumably we were paid some paltry sum of money that never seemed to add up to anything—or did my dad sell us into labor? Those giant round bales one sees today, a symbol of agribusiness, created by machines and moved by machines, have relegated the quaint rectangular bale to boutique farms, most likely for horses. I remember the first time I saw those monster wheels of hay in a field was in Scotland in 1976. Perhaps the technology was a European invention, the American farm being a sweatier place with ample teen labor. Haying season was a tense time in Oregon, with constant attention paid to weather reports, as any rain after the grass has been cut can spell disaster. When all went well, haying could be a festive social time on our little country lane. Families shared labor to put in each other’s crops—it indeed “took a village.” It’s where I learned to drive at a very young age for the simple reason that as soon as you’re capable of lifting a hay bale you “graduate” from driving to throwing or stacking. Farm trucks have clutches of course and the best ones have a “granny” gear—a first gear so low that the truck will creep along through the field driverless while a crew of three or four hurry to throw bales up onto it at a rate that hopefully keeps pace. Someone is designated to stay close to an open driver’s door at all times and watch for fences and hills. There’s an art to stacking a pickup in a way that allows the load to go quite high while interlocking all the bales together, especially important if any road travel is required. Unlike Legos there are no little pegs and holes, and spills did happen. Only rarely did these spills include the kids riding atop the load to keep it stable—while also having a super fun ride. I don’t remember anyone getting hurt in one of these accidents, though now I’m sure someone would be calling Child Protective Services at the sight of kids riding atop moving hay bales 15 feet above the roadway. I did once have a big flatbed truck wheel roll over my foot, but the ground was soft. It’s a weird feeling though to be pinned in place waiting for that huge tire to slowly let go, but otherwise I was no worse for the wear, if anything I became a good deal stronger after each season. “Haying” was extremely hard dusty work. Looking back it’s even hard to believe I ever worked that hard, yet the memories are mostly fond. Now days if I want to reminisce about hard work back on the farm to the sweet aroma of Alfalfa and grain, I make my way up to Point Reyes Station in Western Marin County to Toby’s Feed Store, where I can sip on a cappuccino or visit the art gallery and where the “boutique” rectangular bale of organic Alfalfa is readily available for transport home in the back of one’s Mercedes SUV to feed one’s purebred whatevers. My best friend even did floral arrangements and merchandising for Toby’s back in the 90s. Marin ain’t Oregon.

Once the hay is stacked high and neat in the loft the real fun begins, as it gets transformed over the coming season into forts and tunnels and passages while the big stacks slowly dwindle to reveal their secrets. My older brother and his friend were particularly good at building maze-like dark crawl-through tunnels, leading to private club-like lounges deep inside the huge stack, leaving no trace on the outside.  Adults rarely stepped foot in our hay loft, as the feeding chores were left to us kids. We were lords of that realm, unless an owl was in residence in which case the work would be done very swiftly while watching out over one’s shoulder for the scary thing to take flight over head. I don’t ever remember my mother in that loft, ever—or the treehouse for that matter—maybe it was to do with ladders. Some of our hay fort creations were no doubt engineering disasters waiting to happen, though none ever did—at least to us. However, the odd Seventh Day Adventist kids who lived across the road built such a fort in their grandfather’s barn one year and used it for secret smoking getaways. I had joined them a few times. One day they blew the barn up by igniting the trapped gasses in their fort from decomposing hay that had been put up too wet. It was a sight to behold when firehoses blasted what looked like lava that poured out of what was left of the loft onto the ground below as the sky grew dark. They gave up and let it burn. Was someone killed or injured? You’d think I’d remember a detail like that, but again they were a weird family of religious zealots ill prepared for country life. They even smelled funny and disasters did seem to follow them around somehow. One morning at the school bus stop their little white poodle was run over by an older high school boy who I think was actually their cousin. He was something of a macho idiot—I mean slow—with whom I’d briefly been friends. He was five or so years older than me, but about the same intellect, which can work out fine when you’re 11 or 12. We rode horses together through the raspberry fields next to our place, getting into a great deal of trouble with the farmer as we were spotted bobbing up and down while flying through his carefully tended rows, ripping up vines as they scratched our bare legs in revenge. I remember feeling his hard-on against my back, and mine against his, once or twice when we rode together bareback on my horse, and he talked a lot about his balls as we galloped along, which got me quite excited. He was what I would now call “stupid hot.” However, by that fateful last day for the poodle at the bus stop he was probably a senior in high school and had graduated from horses to muscle cars, as is the way in the country. Only gay boys stick with horses I would find out later. In a huge ape-like move of showing off, he and his big Chrysler something screamed around the corner at our bus stop, burning and grinding both rubber and a small white poodle. Along with the usual white smoke, a spray of white fur and blood shot out behind one of those big fat treadless tires while the six or seven of us young kids stood paralyzed by the sight for several seconds. As the roar of the car died away the silence was finally broken by the youngest Seventh Day Adventist neighbor girl screaming and shaking in a fit of hysterics until her brothers carried her home. The stupid hot high school senior raced away in his Chrysler something, never looking back if he even knew he’d hit anything. There was nothing much left behind to pick up off the asphalt. The bus came and we went to school.

Killing

Death and sex are obvious lessons of the farm, though a less than useful understanding about sex is gained from watching animals do it than one might imagine. It’s really only large mammal methods that are translatable at all to humans, and that is a much rarer site. The whole business of heat cycles further complicates things in the mind of a young boy. Listening to a heifer bawl through the night is disturbing enough, but when the explanation is “oh she’s just “in heat,” only more confusion results.  A 1200-pound mare backing you into the corner of her stall with her tail raised and her vagina dripping is also a pretty scary sight—what does she want from me?—and there’s lots of boy on boy and girl on girl humping going on in the barnyard, so there’s that. I once “helped” a young stallion find his way in for the first time—yes with my hand—and on that same occasion learned what a “teaser stallion” is: a male of “inferior quality” but nevertheless horny.  He’s never allowed to breed, but his job is to get everyone all worked up without the valuable stud getting hurt. Maybe there’s something like Viagra for horses now days, but back then this method worked perfectly well. Apparently even horses like to watch. Afterwards if the teaser is lucky his handler will jerk him off. We used to wash horses dicks too as they can get a bit crusty. The farm is a very gay place. Those animals that are doing it all the time (rabbits, chickens, ducks ) and don’t mind who’s watching tend to do it in ways and with body parts that are truly mysterious or just plain difficult to see and not the least bit helpful as a sex-ed lesson. All-in-all barnyard sex is pretty ugly and brutal. Blood flows and lumps and bruises form. No horse is allowed to be shod (steel shoes) during breeding for example. Chickens are the cruelest and most mysterious; the hen left a bloody mess afterwards. Birth also doesn’t offer much insight into the human condition, as for the most part farm animal births are quite easy. Mares typically foal standing up and can have quite a look of surprise at what just slid out of her in a graceful little summersault to land gently on the deep straw bedding, before instantly setting about her task of getting the foal dried off and on its feet—remarkable. Cows’ entire back ends seem to come unhinged just prior to a similarly easy expulsion of the slippery calf-in-a-sack. If there is trouble at all, it tends to be serious life threatening trouble that requires help. Some mysteries of farm animal reproduction are almost too horrible to contemplate for a child. That nasty habit rabbits have of eating their young—one day there’s a whole litter of new bunnies and the next day they’re gone. Brutal lessons are learned young on the farm. I never got a sex talk from my parents. I suspect even if they had intended to provide one it would have been too late—I started young—or maybe they somehow thought watching all those animals was enough, which would be absurd, but at least every farm kid knows where babies come from.

However, dying on the farm is the same for everybody and there’s a lot of it going on, though it’s never the result of old age or other “natural causes.” Today I took a drive in the country, which from here is wine country, not entirely comparable to Corbett Oregon, but also not a complete stretch. My new GPS is Google Earth (car is a Wi-Fi hot spot or something that I don’t remember the dealer saying). It’s useless in the city because why would you want to see building roofs? However, in the country it is fascinating. As I passed into Sonoma County I saw that classic of mid-century modernism, the blue kidney-shaped pool of the Donnel House with its Tommy Church designed garden. Resting a couple hundred feet above the road up a long private drive, it’s completely invisible to passersby, but having been there I know where it is. I was also fascinated by how Google Earth includes 3-D views as well as an unintentional nod to the fourth dimension, time. It occurred to me that the views on the screen were not matching what I was seeing in the fields that were racing by the windows. In fact the colors were opposite. Vineyards now bright green were brown on the map view, and hay fields now brown were bright green on screen, all determined by when the aerials were shot. Not that it’s useful information in any way I can think of now, but it did have me wondering if one day such aerial photos will be views in real time rather than captured moments of seasons past. Perhaps a drone hovering over every car could do the trick?

On the radio as I drove was a discussion of veganism with someone from “Farm Sanctuary” and some callers in what seemed like an overly friendly, uncontentious conversation about going vegan and treating our animal brethren with greater respect and compassion in the process. I say it seemed overly friendly because while the Bay Area may consider itself enlightened ethically, it also loves its food, including meat. These kinds of discussions aren’t new to me, I even pretended to be vegetarian for several years while at school in Eugene and for a while after moving to San Francisco. It was when I started dating Rikk that my conviction was called into question, as were my choices of restaurants for dining out, and I quickly gave in, forgetting why I’d done it in the first place. Of course, like so many others will attest, I instantly began to feel better, which is not of course an indictment of any vegetarian diet other than my own. As the conversation rolled along on the radio, the guest said something that really grabbed my attention. He said that there’s no way to avoid the reality that killing for food is a violent act—bad for the animals killed, but also bad for us. He said he’d never met a farmer who enjoyed the process of slaughter. I can concur with that, having done it with my own hands. I used to get terribly upset as a kid when a steer had to be wrestled into a trailer bawling and kicking to be hauled off to a slaughter house—a place where fear hangs in the air. The kill shot might have been clean, but the animal’s experience up to that moment was anything but. It was profoundly disturbing. Smaller animals were easier to reconcile. I don’t think there’s any point suggesting that all animal life is equal. We can see that a chicken and cow are worlds apart intellectually and emotionally—especially after watching a cow give birth—and our bond with each is different. I wish I could say that as a young teenager we always treated every living thing with respect, but a chicken’s head comes off very easily and there are several unsavory ways to accomplish that. My uncle taught me how to butcher a rabbit, which became my job from that moment forward, perhaps 10 or so a year. Rabbits are not silent creatures as often thought, but scream terrible screams. A board was mounted to a post outside the barn, customized for this one grizzly task. I would do it alone in great earnestness, as I knew from previous chicken slaughters that killing in groups could quickly turn to ugly blood sport, and yes chickens really do run around without their heads in a sickeningly comic spectacle. I took my job as rabbit executioner seriously and worked as quickly as possible, hoisting each bunny by the hind legs, bashing its skull with a heavy blood-stained pipe and lashing its legs to the big spike at the top of the flat board with leather straps all in one smooth quick motion. Next I cut its throat over a big plastic bucket and the dark blood would either slowly run into the bucket or shoot out in spurts, a sign that my blow with the pipe needed to be more forceful next time. The precise butchering sequence after that is a fuzzy memory. Does the skin come off first or the guts out? Hose down, repeat. Chickens come with the additional nastiness of plucking the feathers from the cold grey flesh, a task that fell thankfully on my mother and grandmother. There’s no pretty way to do any of it, and it is indeed violent even when done with love and not out of hate. However, the guy on the radio was going a bit too far for me not to want to laugh at the assertion that farm animals should be rescued and treated like friends rather than eaten—even if that is exactly what they were bred, by humans, to do. I fumbled around trying to find the call-in number for the program to ask just one rather simple question, the one that always comes to mind above all the other obvious ones about the health aspects of going vegan, or that a pet cat can’t go vegan while dogs can, or the fact that animals kill each other in equally brutal fashion, especially after the barnyard gates are opened, leaving the moral dilemmas only to us. My question would go something like this: if every Californian went vegan tonight, and beyond that each of us offered a single cow sanctuary for the rest of its life—never mind the cost—what would happen to the rest of them? California after all is home to more cows than people, not to mention pigs, goats, chickens etc. It’s not that I even necessarily disagree with the premise that a vegan lifestyle would be healthier for us and our planet, but orchestrating the transition boggles my mind, and conjures all sorts of dystopian imagery of cows and pigs breeding unchecked until wolves reclaim whole regions of the state and a slaughter of epic proportion plays out over generations—or maybe a quicker horror of mass starvation would play out. Farm animals are weak, bred for only one purpose over many generations so they would likely die off relatively quickly, but however I play out this scenario in my head, it doesn’t look very humane. At some point back on the farm we discovered mobile slaughter (exactly what it sounds like) and my view of the end of life, at least for our cattle, changed dramatically. Our cows were typically quite tame, sometimes bottle-fed as calves, and the executioner could approach them without so much as causing them fear while pumping a single expert bullet into each one’s brain, at which point each 1000-pound body drops straight down, no resistance from buckled legs, no teetering, no staggering, straight down with a big thud. The first time I watched this it was clear we’d entered a new paradigm of humane beef growing. As I remember this sight now I can’t help but contrast this end-of-life scenario with that of my father who spent his final weeks in agony in a hospital undergoing multiple useless surgeries. I have no doubt which death was more humane.

Beyond the murder for food there were the accidents. All sorts of perils face everyone and everything living on the farm. Pets seemed to fair the worst, or perhaps their higher emotional value made their deaths more memorable. A neighbor once brought a litter of kittens to our house, the mother cat having died, to see if our cat would nurse them as she had a small litter of her own. Our Little Miss Muffet did take them in, and one little fearless striped kitten named Stitches became a favorite. Unfortunately the kitten’s fearlessness extended even to horses and one day it came running over to me and my big bay Flash as we walked along the gravel driveway where I saw it disappear under a hind hoof just as I pulled Flash to a halt. I clumsily pulled the horses head in a direction that I hoped would have him pick up that foot, but he ended up pivoting on it instead, grinding little Stitches into the gravel. Another kitten met its fate under me in sleeping bag where I used to spend most summer nights sleeping outside. It was just trying to stay warm apparently, but by morning was a cold damp lump under my back. That one sent me screaming in horror into the house, though I think I exaggerated my reaction for fear of being blamed for killing my sister’s new kitten. I was never a cat person. Dogs got distemper and had to be shot. One joined a pack of dogs that terrorized the dairyman’s cattle and had to be shot. However, worst of all was the fate of Bruno the wonder dog. Known around the neighborhood as a hero for his Lassie style rescue, running to the neighbor’s and barking for them to follow where they found my brother stuck in mud up to his armpits. Bruno was a true childhood friend whose photo now sits behind the glass door of my hall clock. He protected us as kids and followed me everywhere around the countryside and through the woods. Twice he came home with Porcupine quills all over his face and in his mouth and sat motionless while I yanked them out with bloody plyers. Even in all that pain he would never think of biting me. I once trimmed a claw too short, cutting into the quick and blood began to squirt everywhere. I was home alone and all I could think to do was heat a screwdriver on the stove to cauterize the open wound. It worked. I felt horrible for hurting my best friend, but got only licks for it in return. In his old age Bruno got slow and deaf and I got my driver’s license. I wasn’t even living at home on the rainy afternoon that I stopped to borrow my dad’s car. It was 1977 and I was heading all the way to Beaverton to see Star Wars. Whatever car I was driving at the time wasn’t reliable enough for that long a journey so I got dad to let me take his VW Rabbit. There were some old friends visiting, friends I didn’t know, mom wasn’t there; all around it was an awkward exchange but I emerged from the house with the keys to the VW. Old Bruno was asleep behind the car in his normal spot in the garage. I said something to him as I got in, started the car, waited the normal amount of time and started to back out. Ten feet or so out I realized something terrible had happened—scratching sounds and squeals from under the floorboards. I jumped out and realized that Bruno was trapped under the car. The wheels hadn’t touched him but his body was bigger than the ground clearance of the VW. What happened next is somewhat of a blur, but I truly believe that, with the car in neutral, I lifted the front end and pushed it backwards off the dog, sending it rolling into a fence. Poor Bruno was mangled. Legs were jutting in wrong directions and he was in massive pain and distress. When I tried to comfort him, he began biting me hard, uncontrollably, which I felt was my duty to endure. I ran to the house where the awkward gathering of friends I didn’t know and my dad was taking place. I know I must have been hysterical, but don’t remember saying anything at all. Dad got up and headed for his bedroom, emerging with a rifle. No one followed us outside. Dad fired a single shot from a large caliber hunting rifle into Bruno’s head without wasting a second, walked into the garage without a word and began to cry. It is the only time I ever saw my dad cry. I set about digging a big hole in the pasture and buried my best friend in the rain. It seemed like the whole thing had transpired without a single word passing between me and my dad. I did in fact go on to see Star Wars that night, as I could hardly stay there, though I didn’t like the movie at all that first time and had a pounding headache. Bruno had been a rescue from the local animal shelter. We had saved each other many times before I ultimately let him down—as teenagers will do.

I haven’t seen Star Wars in years and thought about watching it to see what memories it might jog. I was shocked to find that an on-demand cable rental would cost more than $20. So I tried Apple TV, again $20., this for a mediocre movie that is almost 40 years old. Maybe I’ll just take the dog for a walk around the Lucas Studios Campus instead, but alas Ripley (herself named for a Sci-Fi heroin) is afraid of the Yoda statue, so I’ll probably break down and pay the money in honor of Bruno the wonder dog.

The Acre

In Oregon there’s no excuse for not having a clear spatial and visual understanding of this standard American unit of measure. Fully half of the state’s population lives in or near Portland, a town famous for its sweet little 200-feet-on-a-side square blocks—yes just about one acre each (43,560 square feet). I learned it a different way at first; the central four level acres of our little farm was bisected by the driveway right up the middle with two even parcels on either side, each of about one acre. Buildings, including the house were at the center with two more acres of flat ground at the back. In one of our early years after moving there my dad got the crazy idea to plant an entire acre in corn; crazy because one family can’t eat an acre of corn, and caring for it, picking it and shucking it was a monumental task that summer. It was something of an event though with neighbors and extended family invited to take as much as they could with some late night party-like work sessions in the back yard; late night because Oregon is far enough north that sundown in July is around 10PM. Something that surprised me about moving to San Francisco is how much shorter the days are just this much farther south, and then of course there’s the fog, making a hot summer night almost unheard of. Another big surprise after starting my first job in San Francisco’s South of Market is what a city block means here. Once I set out to pick up a printing job from my office at 4^th and Folsom just seven blocks away. It was a hot day and I did make it back to the office, but with the realization that I had to change my point of reference radically as that seven blocks one way turned out to be about a mile or equal to a Portland walk from the Burnside Bridge to the Hawthorn Bridge and back again.

People did come for the corn, and the atmosphere around the harvest was pretty festive. I always had the sense that my dad’s side of the family brought much of depression era Midwest porch culture with them in the move to Oregon. Some of our aunts and uncles were truly hillbillies. The back yard was outfitted with big water troughs for washing the ears, and the women folk sat around gabbing and shucking, and my grandma taught me how yummy raw corn on the cob can be. To what end all this effort I don’t exactly remember. Was the corn canned or frozen? It must have been both. In the aftermath it fell on my brother and me to clear the field of stalks. I don’t know why this was so important, and I certainly didn’t then. As we were really just little kids this seemed an impossibly difficult assignment, pulling each one by hand and beating the soil off the roots so it could go… somewhere. The only thing that was important to me then was that I not be as big a lazy complainer as my older brother—a life-long competition may have been born that summer. This epic agricultural blunder only happened once. Never again was so much of any one crop planted, but that year I learned intimately and from all aspects—size and effort—exactly what an acre is. The other side of the driveway was always in pasture or hay. For us kids that meant for riding horses, flying kites or for hiding low in the tall grass to have a long chat with the dog. That acre never had the negative associations of the other. Of course for some time now, this automatic, ingrained understanding of the unit of measure acre has proved utterly useless in my work as a landscape architect, having worked mostly outside the U.S.

 

A proper fence, but not a fancy one, enclosed the farm; split wooden poles, soaked in creosote and dirty motor oil tamped firmly into the ground held a woven grid of taught wire topped by a single strand of barbed electrified wire. 50-gallon drums of the gloppy creosote mix lined the wall at the back of the garage and the smell permeated the large space, though it had no doors. The electric fence controller also hung high on the garage wall, a 10 inch gold box with a pulsing light and a reassuring rhythmic click counted off the seconds as pulses of pain were sent out over acres. A single strand of stretched electrified wire held on metal stakes by little plastic insulators was all that divided the land up into separate pastures of roughly one to two acres; easy to build and easy to move. Only the odd young calf would make a break by slipping under it, ending up in the human realm of the farm before being returned to mom with some gentle handling. I was always amazed that one little pulsing box could send a shock so far away through an uninsulated strand of wire, though some childish experimenting and the occasional accidental contact proved that Tesla was indeed right about AC—it travels. Some acres were circumscribed with a single taught strand of wire, nearly invisible without the white strips of cloth we tied to the wires between posts to make them visible to livestock and to which they became quickly familiar. It was really more of a teaching tool, and could be left turned off most of the time. Most any animal once having experienced an electric fence could be fooled by a piece of string with similar white rags—they would not test it. As kids, we of course had to, and any visiting city kid would be initiated by dares to touch or pee on the fence with assurances that it didn’t actually hurt; you start by touching with dry grass, then green, then the bare hand. The rarely brave or truly gullible would even grab hold and try jumping off the ground in one-second intervals to avoid being shocked at all, which really was impossible, regardless of what we told them. Others would be told not to grab it because you won’t be able to let go—a childhood myth that we believed. The sensation is quite different depending on conditions, contact time and footwear, from a tingle to a painful full body-stiffening jolt. Once I leapt over a section of live wire that I had jumped many times before. The section was a “gate” that I chose to jump that day because it was pouring rain and I’d learned that the plastic insulated gate handle could sometimes give a mild shock when wet. Slipping on wet grass I fell over the wire with my legs caught directly on it just above the rim of my tall rubber boots and my hands grasping ahold of an old metal piece of farm equipment, its tireless metal wheels buried in mud. I was trapped hanging there and while I wasn’t touching the ground I was completing the electrical connection with it though that old mower for what seemed like an eternity. I remember counting at least 10 full-on jolts before freeing myself, fully understanding afterwards how I was not like a bird on a wire; you know: “Dad, why can birds land on electric wires?”

Fear of pain is a powerful deterrent for animals including human, and working on the fence-lines even when you know for sure that it’s turned off takes some bravery-build-up time, testing and tapping before you’ll take hold firmly of the wire. The major downside of these fences is also fear. There are many things for example that can spook a horse into flight, and while the electric fence wire is a pretty heavy gage, it will snap like a piece of spaghetti when hit by a 1400 lb running horse, having been spooked by lightening or any one of the myriad things that spook horses. This is why the simple electric wire fence is good for interior demarcations only, lest you find yourself down the road, mom in her robe, searching for escaped animals. The other downside is aesthetic. I used to be embarrassed by our electric fences, a true symbol of white trash farming and impermanence. As it turned out, none of the romantic characteristics of land holding applied to our little farm. No inheritance, no tree-lined drive, stone walls or whitewashed fence rails. In that way I suppose it was actually very American. Whatever the reason for living there, my dad’s whims, lessons he wanted his kids to learn, whatever, it was short lived. My parents stayed there about as long as I’ve lived in my current apartment, though for certain rent control did not figure into their motivation.

Chemicals around the farm ranged from toxic, to lethal, to who knows to this day what they even were. DDT was banned when I was 12, ten years after Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring blew the whistle on dangerous chemicals in use at the time. I know there was still some around our place for years after that though whether it was ever used or just impossible to dispose of I don’t know. Roundup was the wonder chemical in use all around the farm throughout the 70s. Ironically I even used it during my “organic raised bed gardening” kick period to clear pasture for planting. After all it was “systemic” and didn’t “poison the soil,” though we had some of those around as well. I practically bathed in Roundup in those days and it’s still in wide use in agriculture. It was “100% safe” after all. 40 years later, potential links to Crohn’s disease (which I have) are beginning to emerge. A mysterious compound, almost mythical in the 70s, was DMSO (concentrated millpond water or something) widely used on animals and secretly used by people. Vets had it, doctors didn’t, and it was prescribed for every kind of animal ailment. When my mare got kicked in the side, cracking a rib and resulting in a bowling ball sized lump on her side I was given a big bottle of the storied stuff by the vet. Later on a sprained ankle gave me the perfect excuse I’d been waiting for to try it on myself. I was 13 or so and felt somehow naughty about doing it, like I was smoking pot or something. So alright I thought, I’ll just apply it to my swollen ankle over my dark blue sock and no one will be the wiser. Anyone who knows about DMSO will already know what happened next. It is commonly used to carry other medications through the skin, very quickly. It is famous for creating a strong garlic taste in the mouth the instant it touches the skin anywhere on the body—which it did—and it also carried all the dark blue die from my sock into the skin of my ankle. Tween panic set in instantly. Now I know DMSO would have worked nicely on the sprain and I would just keep using it, without socks, but then it was as mysterious as a first wet dream. I ended up at the family doctor who gasped at the site, at first thinking it was a weird colored bruise. I made up a ridiculous story about accidently stepping in the water trough, afraid to mention the self-administered forbidden DMSO. I used to pride myself on my lying, but in this case the doctor was an idiot who years later would lecture me on the kind of women I fucked while treating me for an STD, like some old army doctor, which he was. This was several years after I started fucking only men, but he was also the doctor who delivered me, which is just too freaking spooky to begin with, so I endured the misogynistic lecture. Now the blue ankle belongs to the list of many secret stupid things I did as a kid alone and unsupervised out in the barnyard, the country version of the locked suburban bathroom where adolescent boys are concerned.

…to be continued

The trick—riding lawnmower

The waterfall

More about Bruno the wonder dog

School you chicken fat

Fantasy life of a lonely farm boy

The grass is greener and other families are more interesting