Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (19 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I pulled my honey extractor out of the car and lugged it across Jennifer’s yard. Past the fava beans, past the stout kale soldiers, toward the apple tree. Jennifer, just as I had hoped, felt sorry for me in my beeless state and had invited me over to extract some honey.

When I reached the apple tree, I suddenly noticed a strange hum filling the air. Jennifer stood behind her beehive, and when she saw me, she said, “It’s happening again.”

Swarming is a perfectly natural event in the hive. When the worker bees start to feel that their quarters are cramped, too filled with honey, or simply unsuitable for a variety of reasons that human beings don’t understand, they make arrangements to move out. First they construct one or several peanut-shaped queen cells on the outer areas of the frames. Then they place a worker-bee egg in the cell. The workers feed the growing bee royal jelly, which contains hormones that create a queen. When the queen hatches, a group of the worker bees departs with her for new digs.

Jennifer and I now had front-row seats for this dramatic departure. Each bee that had volunteered to join the new queen flew out of the hive and began flying in a circle around the yard. At first it was just a few bees, then more, then more, until the air was thick with them. Jennifer and I stood very still. As the minutes went by the circle got wider, so that every inch of Jennifer’s backyard seemed to contain a bee. Somehow they avoided us, two dummies standing still next to a stainless-steel extractor. The noise was unbearable. I noticed I was holding my breath.

I wasn’t scared, but it was the same feeling I got when I opened up a bee box for an inspection. You must be fearless. You retreat to a strange, calm, empty place in your mind. Now that I thought about it, I had retreated to that place when I was almost-mugged by the gun-toting kid, and when I was finally able to walk around our neighborhood. Was it facing fears? Giving myself up to the fate of the universe? The bees had definitely taught me how to let go.

At some magical signal, the bees fell in together, flew in a cartoonish pack toward a lemon tree, and landed on a low-hanging branch. It was my lucky day. If I could catch the swarm, I could become a beekeeper again.

The only problem was that the lemon tree they had landed on grew in the neighbor’s backyard. And the neighbor’s house was for sale. And there was an open house going on right at that very moment. I peeked over the fence and saw the blond, lipsticked real estate agent looking at the throbbing swarm with an expression of utter horror.

Though they are intimidating, swarming bees aren’t dangerous at all. They don’t have anything to defend, and they are too enraptured by the scent of the queen to sting anyone. Queen pheromone is the stuff that beekeepers and exhibitionists use to create “bee beards.”

Fearing that the agent might try to annihilate these sisters of goodness and light with some insect killer in order to sell a house, I vaulted over the fence and walked close to the swarm.

“See, no problems!” I tried to communicate with body language. I waved to her. Jennifer snickered behind the fence. Time was of the essence. Once they settled into the tree, scout bees from the swarm would fly off to explore possible new homes. I figured I had an hour.

I rushed to my home in a state of total panicked glee, driving the two miles like a madwoman. If the bees left the lemon bough and flitted off to some inaccessible place, they would go feral, return to nature—and I would remain beeless. I screeched to a halt outside my door, left the car running, waved at a surprised Mr. Nguyen, thundered upstairs, pushed past the rabbits on the deck, and grabbed the vacant bee box, which hadn’t moved since the day of the drug bust.

Back at Jennifer’s within ten minutes, I saw with relief that the swarm hadn’t moved. Jennifer set up a ladder into her neighbor’s backyard. I schlepped the bottom box over the fence and set it under the tree. Then I tried to entice the bees into this honey-scented place.

This involved a stick. I gently prodded a few of the bees down into the box, but they flew right back to the cluster. Glancing over my shoulder to make sure the real estate agent or potential home owners wouldn’t disturb me, I started firmly shaking the tree. A clump of bees tumbled into the box, crawled around, then returned to the cluster. The tree was a small one—it looked like a dwarf Meyer lemon. The branch they had landed on was too big to cut with pruners. It would require a chainsaw.

While I contemplated who might have a chainsaw and considered the fact that bees hate the sound of engines, I gave the branch another shake. A big chunk of bees fell into the awaiting box. The queen must have been part of the chunk, because suddenly all the bees abandoned the branch and cascaded into their new home. Having caught them, I triumphantly slapped a lid over the box and stuffed a T-shirt into the hive entrance. Then, feeling like a pirate, I clattered up the ladder and climbed over the fence with my new treasure.

Like a bad parent, I left the bees in the car with the windows rolled up as I went back to extract honey with Jennifer. I reasoned that they would be fine—as I worked, they would be crawling around their new home, making plans for redecorating. The former occupants had left a good foundation for building a new colony: Most of the frames had pulled honeycomb—the wax cells within which the bees store honey and pollen and house their young—some pollen, and a little bit of honey.

Bees expend an enormous amount of time, energy, and nectar on making pulled comb. They have a feedback mechanism that determines when to make honey or wax. After a day of foraging for nectar, the field bee transfers her load, via her tongue, to a house bee. This bee then ferments the nectar into honey. However, if there isn’t enough comb in which to place the honey, she just digests the nectar longer, creating wax. It’s an elegant and simple feedback loop.

Back in Jennifer’s yard, while the bees hung out in the car, we extracted Jennifer’s honey. That her bees were swarming meant that her hive was too full of honey. We spun out two full supers of honey. Since I was helping and loaning her my extractor—which had become a communal device, shared by Willow, Joel, Jennifer, and me—I was awarded two quarts of honey—a huge bounty for a 100-yard dieter.

As I drove home I felt a slick of sweat on my back from the hard work of extracting, the hot day, and nerves. This was my first swarm capture, and I was giddy. I looked into my rearview mirror at the thrumming white box and spoke to the bees about my garden and the merits of their new home. I felt a little proud of my bees. They were, after all, taking a risk by leaving the comforts of their safe, honey-filled home. Why did these particular bees choose to leave while others stayed? There are some things we don’t know about bees. My wager was that they simply liked the way this new queen smelled. They were like immigrants, following a new future.

Once we were home, I proudly placed the box on a scavenged old-fashioned schoolchild’s desk in the middle of the squat garden. I was tempting fate and the owner of the lot, but I knew the bees would be happier down in the garden. Plus, they probably would have stung the new resident rabbits on the deck. I removed the T-shirt from the hive entrance and watched happily as the golden specks investigated their surroundings, landing on my carefully tended garden, then flying into the sky for a better view.

A few days later, I walked by Brother’s Market on my way to get weeds for the chickens, ducks, and geese. Bill and I hadn’t gone Dumpster diving lately. Mosed, the shopkeeper, was outside enjoying the sun. When he saw me, he pointed at the buckets. “What do you do with those?” he asked.

“They’re for my chickens,” I said.

“Where are these chickens?” he asked, sure that I was quite insane.

“At the farm down there,” I said, and pointed at the lot, which you could see from Mosed’s doorway.

“Where?” He peered.

“Come on,” I said, “I’ll show you.”

As we walked the half block to the garden I explained that I had chickens, ducks, bees, and rabbits. His ears perked up when he heard me say bees.

“In Yemen, we have the best honey,” Mosed declared. “The best beekeepers in the world are Yemeni.”

I nodded. Most of the liquor-store owners in GhostTown and West Oakland were from Yemen. I was told they were able to avoid being robbed because it was well known that they were armed to the teeth. And, indeed, a few months later, when a drive-by shooting occurred at Brother’s Market, Mosed and the other shopkeepers returned fire.

“You’ll have to try our honey,” I said.

“Where are you from?” he asked suddenly. He didn’t mean which town or region in America, he meant my roots.

Usually white people like me don’t have to talk about “where they come from.” I wanted to answer his question, but I wasn’t sure: I’m an American; I’m from nowhere and everywhere.

I thought of my mom—a liberal ex-hippie born in Newport Beach, California, maiden name Schultz, who now lives in the Pacific Northwest. My dad—a hermit from the wilds of Oregon who now lives in the woods in Idaho. All my grandparents were dead; I had barely known them. I was a slurry of German, Norwegian, and French stock. The question stumped me. I shrugged.

Mosed and I reached the garden, and the ducks and geese erupted into a burst of enthusiastic quacking. Their run ran along the fence next to MLK, and they usually spent their days calling out a similar greeting to all manner of passersby. I planned on mating the goose and the gander. I hoped to mate the ducks—white Pekins—with Willow’s Muscovy ducks, the goal being Moulards, the ideal cross, popular in France for making foie gras.

Mosed seemed noncommittal, certainly not impressed by my ducks or the garden. But his eyes lit up when he saw the beehive. A cloud of bees hovered near it, some coming, some going. While he watched their labors I brought him two kinds of honey from our cupboard.

The fall honey, harvested from my bees before they died out, was dark brown and tasted a bit of eucalyptus. “We call it red honey,” Mosed said, and sampled it. “And this is the white honey,” he added, pointing to the thinner version—what I called fennel honey—which Jennifer and I had harvested a few days before. He liked the red honey very much and offered to buy some. But the 100-yard-diet experiment was fast depleting the honey supply, so I had to say no—I didn’t have much left. I promised to sell him some from the next harvest.

As I finished the tour of the garden Mosed pointed to a fava bean plant. “We call this
yaell,
” he said. I yanked up the stalk, heavy with fat green pods, and handed it to him.

“Thank you,” he said, and hugged the plant.

Mosed disappeared down the street. He expressed an interest in some of the chickens, for meat. It was important that he got the chickens live, so he could kill them as the Muslim tradition dictated. I nodded and promised to look into it.

I didn’t know what I was or where I was from, but I did know that I would be happy to be Mosed’s farmer.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

On day seventeen, in the car, Bill made an announcement. “I don’t want you to get upset, but ever since you started this experiment,” he said, “well, your breath stinks. Really stinks at night.” I had just picked him up from the BART station, and he had moaned that he was hungry, so I agreed to go to our favorite El Salvadoran restaurant just to keep him company.

“What does it smell like?” I asked as I focused on the road. We had just been talking about how it’s good to admit mistakes, and I was trying to take this new, somewhat unpleasant information in stride.

“I don’t know, I can’t describe it,” he replied.

“Sour? Like death?”

“Kinda dry-like.”

I’d wondered why he hadn’t been very cuddly lately.

“Maybe you should brush your teeth,” he said.

“I do brush my teeth!” I said. Toothpaste was allowed in the 100-yard diet.

“Oh. Well, don’t get mad.”

I wondered what could be causing this halitosis. If Bill said my breath stank, it must. He’s a low-maintenance guy who rarely brushes his teeth and washes his hair with bar soap.

Coffee—it had to be the coffee missing from my diet. “Maybe the acids from the coffee kill off the bad bacteria in my mouth,” I said. I really missed coffee.

“I don’t know.” Bill had been against coffee ever since he had quit two years before and started drinking green tea instead.

In addition to the halitosis, the experiment was taking a toll on how we spent time together. As with most couples, an intrinsic part of our relationship was eating—foraging, dining out, and cooking together. The sad fact was that the 100-yard diet was tearing us apart.

We used to eat out about three times a week, both of us exhausted after work and too tired to pull vegetables out of the garden to cook. I missed this connection, so I agreed to watch Bill eat at Los Cocos. The place was a hole-in-the-wall in a mostly Latino part of town. Little ladies patted corn masa full of cheese and beans, then slapped it onto the grill. Within moments, a delicious fat tortilla full of runny stuff—a pupusa—was served.

That night, the place was packed, and all the customers were grouchy and hungry. The little ladies behind the counter looked stressed out. Not being part of the exchange, I observed the place in a new way. It all seemed like a ruse—the tables, the chairs, a made-up world, a piece of theater.

Bill didn’t get his food for half an hour. I sat and watched the process of the restaurant as if I were in the bleachers of a tennis match. Someone ordered, sat down, ate chips, slumped over. When the food arrived, they gulped it down. I remembered the feeling. You’re so hungry you can’t enjoy the food—you’re just fulfilling a bodily urge.

Since I was subsisting mainly on grated pumpkin, stewed plums, and a steady dose of wine every night, I wanted to tap on the shoulder of the man in the corner who was done eating but had left half of his pupusa on the table and tell him how lucky he was to have enjoyed something so complicated and, from what I could remember from past visits, so delicious. I would point out that the corn that had made the masa had been pulled off the stalks, then ground into precious cornmeal. Or the beans, the glimmering black beans, had been threshed, gathered together, then stewed for hours in a pot, with a generous helping of lard, no doubt. “Cows have been milked for your meal,” I would shout, “so finish your food!” Yes, I had become totally obnoxious. Luckily I managed to keep all these thoughts to myself.

Restaurants weren’t my only problem. The Dumpsters were killing me. The Chinatown green bins, which Bill and I visited twice a week, were starting to smell extremely good to my food-deprived body. If I found an apple, I would pause to stare at it for several long minutes, trying to figure out why someone had thrown away a perfectly good piece of fruit. This apple—cousin to those I had been plucking from my own tree—had started off as a blossom; a bee had landed and fertilization had happened; then the fruit had ripened through the spring and summer, until it was picked, washed, sorted, and shipped to the store. There it sat on the shelves, caressed by many hands, until it was tossed in the Dumpster. A baffling trajectory. Then I would hold up someone’s discarded takeout container and marvel at the full portion of kung pao chicken lying in a pool of orange goo. The goo looked so tasty, so forbidden. Why was so much food being wasted?

As I grew dizzy in the pupuseria thinking about the intricate, wasteful food spiral in which we all take part daily, I remembered M.F.K. Fisher’s
How to Cook a Wolf,
about cooking during the food rationing of World War II. After Bill shoveled down his beans and rice, we went home, and I dragged out my copy of the book.

I read the introduction a loud to Bill: “Butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted. . . . And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself.” I paused for dramatic effect. “When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts,” I finished triumphantly, trying not to direct my bad breath at Bill. He rolled his eyes.

My bad breath, my righteousness, my unwillingness to share—after only seventeen days, the 100-yard diet was really putting a strain on my relationship.

The next day, from my living room window, I watched a man shoot up. He hunched over in the vestibule of the abandoned brick building. It’s generally an area where people dump items they don’t want, and it sometimes becomes an impromptu bathroom for the desperate. I hadn’t seen it used as a shooting gallery before. The guy wore a hooded sweatshirt and sat on a bucket.

He stood, pulled his pants down, then sat back down. I was queasy. I suddenly felt ashamed about my foodie righteousness at the restaurant. There
is
something more shameful than carelessly eating or wasting food: wasting people. All the crackheads and the prostitutes, the junkies and the homeless, in my neighborhood—they are evidence of far bigger problems than mere nourishment.

To the chalkboard tally—

25 rabbits
4 ducks
2 geese
4 chickens
10,000 bees
68 flies
2 monkeys

—I added: 1 junkie.

When I was done writing, I peeked out the window again. The druggie was still out there, sitting with his pants down, asleep.