Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (6 page)

I received a desperate phone call from the post office when they arrived.

“Ms. Carpenter?” the lady on the other end of the phone panted.

“Yes, speaking.”

“We’ve got a—what do you call it?—a box of bees, and they’re freaking everyone out.” It was the Oakland postmistress calling from the Shattuck Avenue office. “Can you come collect them right now—before we close?” she begged.

“OK, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” I said.

“They’re outside. They’ve attracted all kinds of bees.”

When I pulled up on my bike, a few stray bees were bobbing around the post office, undoubtedly attracted to the powerful pheromones the queen emitted from the mesh box. It was April in Northern California, arguably the best month in terms of weather. I filled out some paperwork regarding my identity, then went around to the back and picked up the humming box.

“Now, I wouldn’t mind some honey next time you come by,” the postmistress yelled from a safe distance. Yup, that’s most people—scared of bees but drawn to honey.

The package fit perfectly in the basket mounted on the front of my bike, and I proceeded to ride down Telegraph Avenue, laughing out loud at the bees who tried to follow us amid the traffic. At stoplights I looked down at the mesh box, the bees churning around, and told them to get ready for GhostTown.

Back at home, I placed the package of bees on the deck, then got to work setting up the new hive. (The garden would have been a better location, but I worried about the reaction of the owner of the lot, Jack Chan, to a box of stinging insects.) I placed the stand and bottom board on a table, then added the bottom box with its ten empty frames. I positioned the hive facing east, toward Highway 980, the BART trains, and, farther out, the Oakland hills. Then, wearing just a T-shirt and shorts, I casually shook the bees into their new home, fished out the queen, and placed the lid on top of the hive.

The next morning, I monitored their progress from my desk in the living room. They were circling, figuring out the new coordinates of home.
The ABC and XYZ of Bee Culture
calls these “play flights”; they establish where home is in terms of the orientation of the sun and sky. As they returned for the evening the bees were like flecks of gold, backlit by the sun. One night a few days later, I went out to the box and heard strange noises—blips and buzzes, whines and hums. When I touched it, the hive was warm, like a body.

CHAPTER FOUR

A year after getting our Oakland hive, Bill and I sat in the living room and paged through the Mann Lake catalog. “The electric one is $799!” Bill exclaimed. We were hunting for a stainless-steel, hand-cranked honey extractor. In Seattle we had used a bucket and gravity to extract the honey, but the ants in California made this impossible. Normally foes of catalog shopping, we made exceptions when it came to gardening and beekeeping supplies.

“We don’t need an electric one—this hand-cranked looks good,” I said, reaching over his shoulder to point to the most inexpensive model.

“Looks cheap,” Bill said, his big hands curled around the catalog. He pointed out that the handle on top might break off.

I moved my foot from the couch to the floor. I heard the crunch before I felt the sharp pinch on the soft pad of my big toe. My favorite description of a bee sting comes from Maurice Maeterlinck, who writes of a sting in his hilariously dramatic
Life of the Bee
as a “kind of destroying dryness, a flame of the desert rushing over the wounded limb, as though these daughters of the sun had distilled a dazzling poison from their father’s angry rays.” Yes, my bee sting hurt. No one was safe in our living room. Bill had gotten stung on the head. A visitor had had a bee fly down her dress and sting her bottom.

I yelped, and Bill, knowing immediately what had happened, shook his head. I curled my foot up onto his lap, and he found the stinger. The flattened bee lay on the ground where I had stepped on her. He scratched off the stinger and showed it to me. It was black and pointed, with a clear sac connected to it. It was still pulsating.

Every night in the summer, five to ten bees would sneak into our house, hell-bent on reaching the blazing lights on the fixture mounted on our living room ceiling. They came through a crack in the door to the deck. Once inside, they flew straight into the light fixture (which they might have mistaken for a cheaply made, four-headed sun). Then, stunned by the impact, they plunged back to earth. On the floor, they would crawl around in circles until they regained the strength to try again. Like the poor Icarus I had just stepped on. These nighttime escapades were an argument against keeping bees on the deck. But during the day, I liked watching them come and go as I worked at my desk.

I held a piece of ice on the sting. Bill, barely taking notice of the swelling on my toe, circled a midpriced stainless-steel hand-cranked extractor in the middle of the catalog. “Let’s get that one,” he said.

We were moving up in the urban farming world. The honey extractor would soon be ours. There’s a saying: No gear, no hobby. The longer we lived in Oakland, the more garden-related gear we seemed to accumulate.

Later, with Bill’s help, I hobbled over to Lana’s for her weekly variety show. Lana’s warehouse was dim and cold with a warm center. The exterior of the building was lined with corrugated metal painted a dusty yellow. You walked past the chain-link gate, through a thick metal front door, then squinted or felt your way along a dark concrete corridor that smelled like vermin. Lana, a vegetarian, loved all animals and refused to put out rat traps. Turning the brass knob on the second wooden door to the right, you fell into Lana’s rowdy Wednesday-night speakeasy. Music blasted from the room, which was a riot of color, with half-finished art installations leaning against the walls. A collection of characters—old guys who grew up in Oakland in the 1950s, sculptors who worked for Pixar, buskers, and hustlers—sat at the long wooden bar.

A woman known as Bunny sat on the white leather couch. She was explaining to a sharply dressed man wearing a 1940s suit about her female wrestling troupe, the FFF. “It stands for whatever,” she said, “fierce, fabulous fighters, maybe.” Maya, Lana’s guinea pig, sat in Bunny’s lap. The guinea pig had free rein in the warehouse. Tiny brown pellets rolled on the white leather.

“We’ll bust through that,” Bunny said, pointing at a six-foot-tall painting on paper of the silhouette of a woman warrior with “FFF” written across her chest.

“And those are her . . .” The retro man seemed embarrassed and shifted in his seat. Maya turds rolled around.

“Yeah, her lips,” Bunny said, referring to the silhouette’s enormous labia.

Lana popped popcorn and poured $2 glasses of wine from behind the bar.

In the corner by the fake fireplace, Craig and Phil discussed refurbishing real wood car dashboards.

Taurean, a recent transplant from the South, explained the word “buggy” to a northerner. “You know—a shopping cart!” he exclaimed.

Bill and I sat at the bar and drank from a bottle of tequila we had brought in, with limes from our tree in the lot. We put a few dollars in the tip jar for popcorn. Everyone was smoking.

Around 11 p.m., Lana picked up her accordion. She slowly played the opening bars to a song she had learned in Spain, then she played a little faster. Cigarettes were snubbed out, drinks dashed. She played even faster as she ascended some dangerous homemade stairs, her platform boots disappearing completely. We all trailed her like rats following the Pied Piper. Maya stayed on this couch.

Upstairs Lana had set up small café tables with flickering candles and a stage with a proper curtain and a backdrop painted black. Whoever wanted to perform on this stage did.

Taurean, the southerner, who also happened to be a gay teenager, took the stage first and did some impersonations of Oakland prostitutes.

Bill and I performed a Ween-like song—he on the guitar, me singing.

The crowd hooted and yelled. They were always drunk and generous.

Another performer did a puppet show with her Barbie collection. A few country-looking people played guitar and sang folk songs. One woman wore a pair of cowboy boots. Another had her hair in braids and wore a straw hat; she had the bluest eyes I had ever seen.

At the intermission, after Bill had already stumbled home, I approached the country people.

“So . . . ,” I started, using my best drawl, “where’re you all from?”

“West Oakland,” the woman in the cowboy hat said.

“Urban cowboys?” I said, and laughed. The country folk lived only about a mile away, on the other side of downtown Oakland.

“Urban farmers,” they said, looking at one another and nodding their heads.

I hadn’t heard that term before. But like I said, in California, people re-invent themselves.

“What do you mean, like milk cows and pigs?” I asked.

“No. But gardens and chickens and bees. Ducks.”

I dragged them over to the lot.

“Well, here it is,” I said. While they surveyed the garden beds, I noticed that the spinach looked as if it had leaf spot and that weeds had suddenly sprouted among the vegetables. I pointed up to the beehive on the deck, then showed off the crude duck pen I had made for the waterfowl.

“The chicks are still in the brooder,” I said, using the word for the first time in a party setting. What I had discovered—at my various jobs, at dinner parties—was that most people didn’t want to hear about my adventures in killing animals. “How can you do it?” they would ask, no doubt thinking of their pet cat or parakeet. But these people, these urban farmers, wouldn’t think I was crazy.

In fact, they seemed wildly unfazed by my raising meat animals. They were doing the same thing. “We’ve got Muscovy ducks,” said Willow, the woman with the strange blue eyes. “They’re delicious!”

Willow had bought a vacant lot in 1999 and started a garden there. Eventually she founded a nonprofit called City Slicker Farm with the goal of providing healthy food at low cost to people in the neighborhood. The nonprofit sold vegetables (on a sliding scale) at a farm stand at 16th and Center streets. Willow kept using the term “food security,” which idiotically made me think of chickens behind bars.

As she assessed the health of my tomatoes I told Willow about my plan to raise a turkey and eat it for Thanksgiving. She seemed impressed. “Now, that I haven’t done,” she said. I beamed.

“Come check out the farm stand on Saturdays,” Willow said before the urban-farming entourage left.

I went back to the speakeasy and stayed late, ecstatic to have found my people. I had never met anyone like Willow in Seattle. She had long hair and wore boots, but I wouldn’t call her a hippie. She got shit done, it was obvious. Like me, she was the offspring of hippies. We weren’t going to make the same mistakes our parents made, I thought, taking another shot of tequila. “Viva la granjas urbanos!” I yelled to no one in particular. Wait, was it
granjas
? Something like that. Lana clinked my glass. I was an urban farmer, too.

At 3 a.m., I heard the sounds of the monks next door. Up for morning prayers, they were making clanging noises and softly chanting. Craig and Phil finally pried themselves off their barstools and began muttering about driving home. I stumbled back across the street to our house and found Bill on the bathroom floor, fast asleep.

“Bill, Bill. Get in bed,” I said.

“I’m resting here,” he argued. “Comfortable.” His head was propped up with a folded towel. It did look kind of comfortable.

“Did you have fun?” he asked.

“Yes, I met some urban farmers.”

“Those people who sang?”

“Yes, they have a garden—well, a farm like ours—on Center Street.” I heard a train off in West Oakland letting out a whistle.

Bill sat up, and I helped him to his feet. We shambled to our bed, passing the glowing brooder in the living room.

I had recently expanded the brooder. The waterfowl had grown too big and were too messy to keep inside, so I had put them in a pen in the lot. But as the chicks got bigger, instead of putting them outside, where I feared they would catch a chill or get beaten up by the big chickens, I cut out more cardboard and taped on additions, until their pen took up one entire room in the house. The room filled with poultry had seemed crazy only a few hours before, but now that I had met my people—fellow urban farmers—I suddenly had a name for this thing I had been doing but couldn’t quite explain. The chicks and turkey poults were still up, and zoomed around their newly expanded digs.

“How long are they staying?” Bill whispered, as if the birds were difficult houseguests. The meat-bird experiment, unlike the garden and the bees, was my exclusive domain. Bill agreed that he’d eat the birds, but the raising and the killing were up to me. I just shrugged.

At 7:30 a.m., I heard three things from my disheveled bed. One was the peeping of the chicks, who had taken to squabbling each morning the minute the sun came up. Another was the Nguyen family’s morning prayers: They listened to a soothing recording of drums and chants as they burned incense. The third noise was Lana yelling in the street. I squinted at the clock and cursed tequila and Lana’s speakeasy. I tucked the covers around Bill, who snored. He could sleep through violent earthquakes, the bastard.

I fed the chicks and adjusted their brooder lights. That settled them down. Then I peered out the window.

Lana was outside, causing a commotion. She looked like a comic-book character, lifting a television and heaving it at Bobby. They had never gotten along, and now that Bobby was squatting in a car just outside Lana’s warehouse door, the tension had increased. Their arguments usually revolved around stuff, specifically the spoils from Bobby’s demonic collecting. It was true that the end of the street was starting to resemble an open-air flea market. Bobby had mounted a corkboard sign near his home on which his friends and associates could post messages. He was a social fellow and enjoyed company. Many of his friends brought “gifts,” one of which was the television currently being flung through the air.

I wandered outside to mediate.

The two were looking at a small square of earth on the curb where a tree had probably stood in the days before Oakland had gone to hell. These days the spot was home to a cheeseweed mallow,
Malva parviflora
. Though she hadn’t planted it, Lana had an inordinate love for this weed. It had little pink flowers. It also had an invasive attitude and a pernicious root system that I, as a gardener, could never love.

Bobby had dug it up and planted a cactus.

God knows where it came from, but the cactus was spiny and columnar and freshly planted.

“Morning, darling,” Bobby said to me.

“Hi,” I mumbled, wanting to seem unbiased.