Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm (24 page)

But I do know how to manipulate people sometimes, and this just happens to be one of those times.

“I thought you said you could get
anyone
a mortgage,” I taunt.

“Well,” the broker says, giving me a big sigh, “if you could come up with some decent collateral, something easily liquidated, I could resubmit.”

Right
, I think.
Hold the line and give me just one sec and I’ll pull that stuff right out of my ass
.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I tell her.

“Super!” she sings back and clicks off the line.

We are not, as Will just observed about our new baby chicks, safe and sound. Not even close.

I’ve done everything I can think of to bring in extra money. I’ve sold the pasture fencing and the wood and hardware from the horse stalls and even the few remaining bales of hay that were still stacked in the barn. I’ve sold some furniture I was storing in the garage. My parents are buying a new minivan and have offered to give me their old one to replace the one I just lost in the divorce. I accept it with relief and gratitude, and then sell off my truck, Cookie, too. All this brings in a few thousand dollars and helps catch me up on my bills, but it’s not enough to be considered any kind of collateral.

I’m speeding through my ninety days now hell-bent-for-leather. Time’s a runaway horse and I’m strapped on.

Funny thing, but it’s actually easier to plan a chicken coop than it is to find decent mortgage collateral, which is maybe why I spend the next week in chicken-related denial. If I really accepted the possibility that we could lose the farm, I wouldn’t be adding to the population of beings who live here.

But I cannot and will not accept that possibility. And so I plan a permanent home for the chickens instead, as if this will somehow make the Big Valley our permanent home, too.

Plus, the chicks don’t care about my credit rating and just continue to grow regardless. They are quickly outgrowing their cardboard condo and within ten days of their arrival, we can even tell the meat chickens from the egg chickens. The egg chickens are still small and cute. Still lemon yellow, though they are bigger now and their tiny wing feathers are starting to grow. The meat chickens have turned a dirty white, are beefed up, and they lumber around the box like fat children. They dwarf the egg chickens and crowd the food trough. They are bullies.

“That one looks like this one kid in my class,” Will says, pointing at a big white chick that is cocking its head and staring us in the eye.

In the next two weeks, the meat chickens triple in size and the egg chickens grow a little bit, too. We move them first into a blue plastic kiddie pool the boys have outgrown, and then into an empty refrigerator box I find next to the recycling station at the township dump.

Then, we name them.

The meat chickens we just call “the Meats,” because they are not individual beings, they are a pack. Plus, the plan is to eat them, and after our experience with Rocky, naming them doesn’t seem right.

But the egg chickens are more like separate beings, we aren’t going to eat them, we’ll hopefully have them for a long time, perhaps several years, and they deserve names. There are Alice, Cher (tall and the longest-legged), Mrs. Donahue (named after my long-ago kindergarten teacher), Fluffy, Clucker, Pink Ranger (of Power Ranger fame), Missy, Prissy, Gladys, and Star.

For ease of care and so it can be seen from the house, the coop will be built in a corner of the vegetable garden. We are three miles south of the east arm of Grand Traverse Bay, and without regular enrichments our soil is still like beach sand, and so I’m also thinking free fertilizer. Chicken manure is the richest poop of all, better in nutrients than dairy cow, horse, steer, rabbit, or sheep doo. It’s so rich that it has to be composted first or it will actually burn your vegetable plants. I want me some of that.

On a windy and cold day in late May, Luke and I stand side by side on the rise next to the driveway and look down at the garden. We will need to build a shelter for the chickens to roost in at night and during bad weather, nesting boxes for them to lay their eggs in, easy access to the nesting boxes so we can collect the eggs, and a fenced-in yard for exercise. The exercise yard will have to have a roof of chicken wire to keep out hawks yet be tall enough for us to walk inside of and clean.

Luke sets down his toolbox and stares silently at the building site. He is almost as tall as I am now and, of my three sons, is the one that people are most likely to say looks like me. He has long fingers, and there are gold flecks in his green eyes. He is wearing
a Metallica T-shirt under his camouflage jacket. His light-brown curls show below his black knit cap. He is architect, builder, boy.

“Got any ideas?” I ask.

“I’m thinking,” he says, without looking at me.

A minute later he suggests calling into use an old wooden playhouse he and his brothers have long since abandoned. It’s heavy, it’s an eyesore, and it’s stuck back at the edge of the woods. But it is the right size and has another obvious advantage—it’s already built. I like the idea, and the job changes from one of building to one of moving. He knows the drill.

“I’ll get some kids,” he says.

Luke has always been good at getting kids here to help us with big jobs like this. Quite an accomplishment, considering how far we live outside of town, with no neighbors, sidewalks, or bike paths. But somehow, he still gets them here.

Kids arrive on their bikes, on foot, and even get dropped off by their busy parents in their SUVs. One friend of Luke’s has a flock of chickens at his house that range free, and he doesn’t understand why we are building a coop but comes by to help out anyway. Maybe it’s the curiosity factor.

Then Owen catches wind of what we’re up to, gets on the phone, and Aberration shows up to help, too. The project, the band members say with utter seriousness, has songwriting potential, and I can’t help it, I think “Armageddon Chicken” has a nice ring to it. Perhaps that’s just my desperation talking.

These kids do not ask to be paid for their labor, which I couldn’t do anyway, but only expect macaroni and cheese from a box, homemade cookies, cheese quesadillas, and, depending on the season, Kool-Aid or hot chocolate, plus plenty of admiration, which I do have.

The kids and the rock band arrive and we gather at the playhouse. There is a lot of pushing and lifting and groaning, but the playhouse is just too heavy to move.

“It’s built too well,” I say. “The wood is too heavy.”

Luke not only looks a little like me, he has my stubbornness. Tell him something can’t be done and he has an irresistible urge to floor his internal accelerator. But where I tend to bulldoze, he problem-solves.

“We could roll it,” he says, “like a ginormous snowball.”

And that is what we do. We tip the four-by-seven-foot wood playhouse on its side and roll it out of the woods, up a little hill, around the barn, and down another hill toward the edge of the garden. Just exactly like a ginormous snowball.

There is something silly about a small building rolling down a hill on its side. And I can’t help it, this image reminds me of my own ridiculous effort over the past several weeks to obtain a mortgage. You wouldn’t think so, but a weather-beaten, waterlogged wooden playhouse somersaulting, picking up speed, and tossing off paint chips and loose boards on the way down does call to mind principal and interest.

Once it’s at the proper location, though, we right the playhouse, shove it back and forth until the door faces the garden, and cheer. The younger boys bend one knee and shove their fists in the air like the soldiers of Iwo Jima. Will’s best friend, Joey, puts his cupped hand to his mouth and makes a bugling sound.

Thank God for boys
, I say to myself.
Thank God for comic relief
.

“Hot chocolate and cookies for the coop brigade!” I say out loud.

While they’re snacking in the kitchen, I come back outside and take another look at the thing. It is crooked, the door is broken
off, and it’s two and a half feet out from the garden shed. It would look better and be a more efficient use of space if the two buildings were in line with each other. Two feet is too small a distance for another roll, but too far to push the heavy thing.

“Got any ideas?” Luke asks, chewing on a cookie.

“I’m thinking,” I say.

After a minute, I walk to my new used minivan, start it up, drive it off our paved driveway, over the grass, and down the hill toward the garden, until the rubber bumper just touches the side of the playhouse. I gently press on the gas pedal and the playhouse and the minivan and I move forward. I keep this up until the two buildings are even, then I drive the minivan back and park it in its spot in the driveway.

When I get out, Luke is grinning at me. I go fetch the roll of chicken wire and he holds up his staple gun in salute. We study what is no longer an abandoned playhouse but, in our minds, a respectable coop.

“Not bad lodging,” he says, “if you’re a chicken.”

Over the next several days we finish the coop, move the chickens in, and I turn my attention from animals to plants. It’s time to plot out the garden beds, and I sort seeds like the Big Valley is already ours. Growing a garden is a sign of permanence. Of faith.

What’s the point of planting at all if we’re just going to lose the place? There isn’t one. Even though planting makes me feel grounded to this spot, to my land, to my home; even I know that it isn’t an assurance of anything.

The spinach, lettuce, and radishes are in, but I’m running late with the sweet corn and the tomatoes. These tender-stalked heavy
feeders each need a long season to mature—seventy to ninety days for the corn and about fifty to sixty-five days for the tomatoes if you plant seedlings instead of seeds—and time’s a-wasting.

The Big Valley is located in the USDA’s Hardiness Zone 5, which means it doesn’t usually get colder than twenty degrees below zero in the winter. It also means that the last day that gardeners here can expect a frost is June 9, and the first day we need to start worrying about frost again is September 17. In between is time to make hay—and tomatoes, broccoli, corn, lettuce, spinach, and all the rest if we want to eat this winter.

Our official growing season is approximately one hundred days long, but I’ve got to extend it if I want to grow enough food to sustain us. Where will we be in one hundred days? Here, eating our own sweet corn and our own chickens, if I have anything to say about it.

By mid-May, then, the corn seeds should be soaked, planted, and covered over with a tarp to protect them from the crows until they germinate. The tomato seedlings should be in the ground now, their roots turned out at a right angle to stimulate good growth and a big root system. And each plant should be buried up to its neck in compost and crushed eggshells.

I use ingenious little individual greenhouses called Wall O’ Water to extend our growing season. These are a simple invention, just bands of vinyl tubes you fill with tap water and shape in a cone around tender seedlings like tomato, eggplant, pepper, and herbs. They soak up the warmth of the sun during the day and keep the plants from freezing at night. Time it right and even on the cold edge of Zone 5, you can have ripe tomatoes by the end of July or the beginning of August.

That’s always been my goal—tomatoes by July 31. Some years I
make it and some years I don’t, but like most deadlines, in order to have a chance of meeting this one you have to calculate backwards. And my seedlings should have been hardened off and planted, like, yesterday.

“Making the earth say beans instead of grass—this was my daily work,” writes Thoreau in
Walden
.

By the end of May, my daily work should have been making the garden say spaghetti sauce and salsa. Making it say corn fresh from the cob stuck in my sons’ teeth at dinner, canning jars hot-packed with dilly beans and cucumber pickles.

But this week I’ve been busy with writing assignments and filling out mortgage paperwork and I’m behind schedule, and instead of saying beans, the 60-by-140-foot patch of compost-and-horse-manure-enriched dirt where I am supposed to be growing our breakfast, lunch, and dinner is saying, “Rototill me.”

And it’s when my mind has gone slack and is focused on worms that I figure out how to deal with the mortgage company. The day is warm and steam rises off the soil as I walk behind a borrowed garden tiller. Dead leaves, brown pine needles, compost from our compost pile, calcified horse turds from Major and Pepper, food scraps, my own sweat, and the soy-ink newspapers I used as pathways last season all grind in. I watch my soil turn from a dusty and overwintered gray to a lovely black, rich and moist as devil’s food cake.

Tilling this large plot makes planting easier, but there is a downside to it: you destroy the worm casts—tunnels of worm poo that make terrific fertilizer and also aerate the soil so it holds water better—and cut up many of the helpful worms that made them. Because of this, I only till every third year. This is a tilling year, and worms are going to suffer for it. Most of them will grow into full
worms again, but some will die, and as I watch pieces of worms come to the surface I have my first helpful thought.

Like the worms, this land was also once in pieces too—on paper, anyway.

The house sits on a two-and-a-half-acre piece, and the pasture and the woods were once divided into two additional two-acre pieces. I had all three parcels resurveyed into a single one again when we built the barn, because in order to keep horses in our township, there’s a five-acre minimum lot size.

But the horses are gone. That girlhood dream is over, and I can’t bear the thought of ever having horses here again. So it’s possible that I could have the lots resurveyed, replotted back into three separate parcels, improving my on-paper finances. The current mortgage was written back when the property was in three pieces and it was written only on the farmhouse’s parcel. I own the other two vacant parcels outright. They are unmortgaged real estate. And it’s possible that I could get approved for a new mortgage just by resurveying my property and using the vacant land as collateral.