Twelve by Twelve

by Micahel Powers

  Adjusting to life without electricity was relatively painless. I’ve worked in subsistence economies around the world and have gone for short stints without electricity. The only oddity was that I was in the heart of the world’s richest nation — but living a subsistence life. No humming refrigerator, no ringing phones (I decided to go cell phone free in the 12 × 12), and none of the ubiquitous “standby” lights on appliances — those false promises of life inside the machines. Instead: the whippoorwill’s nocturnal call, branches scraping quiet rhythms in the breeze, and groggy No Name Creek. Looking east from the 12 × 12 toward the creek into the ink black night, without the slightest glimmer of industrial society, I thought, Could I really be inside the borders of a high-tech superpower? To the west, I could barely make out the Thompsons’ porch light, and José’s and Graciela’s lights cast a glow on the trees above their homes.

  Fire replaced electric light. Sparks from outdoor fires would briefly escape gravity and reflect off the creek, before disappearing into the massive dark sky and the flaming white points of the stars above. Most luxurious of all, each night was blessed with the glow of candles. On the eleventh night, I noted in my journal, I lit the candles without even thinking about it. I simply came in after a hike, struck a match, lit them, and began cooking, candle lighting having become as automatic as switch flipping. The house glowed from the inside like a jack-o’-lantern. Sometimes I’d step outside and look in through the windows, a dozen or so candles inside, as cheery as a birthday cake — the 12 × 12 point lit with primordial fire amid dark woods — and I’d feel this smile spreading across not just my face but my spirit as well, lifting me with a feeling of emotional weightlessness.

  “THEY’RE ALMOST HERE,” Kyle practically whispered with excitement early one morning. I jogged behind him up to the woodpile. All of the eggs were laced with cracks. Little beak tips had begun to poke through.

  “Where’s the mom?” I asked.

  “She’s over there eating with the others. But she left this to warm the eggs.” He stroked the blue feathers, interlaced with straw, that partly covered the eggs.

  As we walked together down to No Name Creek, Kyle talked of Boy Scouts and of the coyotes that threatened their ducks. When the weather got better, Kyle wondered, could he and I bike together to the post office? Sure. We skimmed rocks along the creek; they’d sometimes slide along the final traces of ice on top before plopping to the bottom. I wondered about his parents and my other neighbors; I was eager to meet them. We were silent for a while. The water gently complained, muttering over stones, as if annoyed at having been woken up too early. In the distance, a truck hurried down Old Highway 117 South and then was silent. We heard the flap of a hawk’s wings, and then it swooped down over the creek, splashing for a fish, coming up empty.

  Kyle talked about predators and prey. He speculated as to when the duck eggs would hatch. Don’t do, be. I sat there, completely content, listening. Instead of listening with one ear, as I sometimes do when faced with life’s deadlines, with multitasking, I used both ears. Real listening is prayer, I would find, as the weeks passed at the 12 × 12. Perhaps the mistake we make in attempting to pray is that we do all the talking. Slowing down, I would find it so much easier, more pleasurable, to be with children as I let them, and myself, simply be.

  I spent a lot of time walking, aimlessly, hours at a time. Sometimes an entire day would pass out there in the woods, along High way 117. One day I followed No Name Creek down to where it met the old railroad tracks and then walked along them. It was a numb day. I wasn’t thinking or feeling much. I didn’t feel overwhelmed by the great silence or the solitude, nor did it feel particularly peaceful. The earth was cold and hard beside the tracks; the trees rose by the thousands in bare brown attention. Shoe sole on railroad tie, the silver rails a mute metallic shine. I saw a path into the woods and spontaneously took it.

  The path was wide at first but soon narrowed to the width of my body, before abruptly ending. But I kept going, bushwhacking into the brush. A stack of clouds moved across the sky like an iceberg, gradually covering the sun. The air had no scent at all; I just felt the cold in my nostrils, saw my breath as I struggled through a briar patch, scraped my sleeve on a cluster of thorns, passed through a narrow clearing before plunging into a deeper, darker part of the forest. I finally stopped, out of breath. I looked back and saw no sign of the trail. I was utterly alone.

  In the midst of this silence, four words gathered in my mind. A little phrase from Rumi that Jackie had handwritten onto a white card and left out — for me? — on top of other cards on a little stand in the 12 × 12. It read: TRADE KNOWLEDGE FOR BEWILDERMENT.

  I walked on, and the forest opened into a meadow. A fleck of purple caught my eye — the season’s first wildflower. I touched the dew in its four petals, hints of yellow in its translucent pistils. I lay down next to it and turned my head to the side. Around it were a thousand of the same species, the dead husks of last year’s flourishing.

  Pent-up emotion rose from somewhere inside, searching for the fire exits. Death was all around me in those thousand brown husks, the skeletons of trees, the washed-out sky. It was different from the death of hospital fast food, industrial parks, and the felling of rainforests. Those aren’t really death but resignation: giving up on ourselves, our world. The death around me in the woods held desire for life in every detail.

  The next day, the duck eggs hatched. It was the first warm day; spring nudged into the landscape, and the sticky oak buds opened slightly, a thousand winks of green. Fourteen fuzzy, noisy ducklings squeaked for food in the woodpile nest. “They’re fully feathered,” Kyle boasted. I noticed their diverse colorings, the scoop of their wet, quacking bills. And my neighbors, until this moment merely rumors, came out of their houses to see what the commotion was all about.

  TRADE KNOWLEDGE FOR BEWILDERMENT *

  * In the 12 × 12, Jackie keeps a stack of cards with handwritten sayings or questions, like this one. She puts a new one out in view on a little stand each day. I followed her rather Socratic practice, even adding some of my own to her pile. Doing this deepened daily life because, at several points of the day, I would notice the card and be brought into mindfulness. In the spirit of this practice, I include twelve of them at different points in the story.

  4. CHICKEN

  It is not too soon to provide by every possible means that

  as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land.

  The small landholders are the most precious part of a state.

  — Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, October 28, 1785

  MIKE THOMPSON — KYLE’S DAD — walked toward me down the gentle hill from his house, a bucket of feed swinging in each hand. He was a portrait in reds: rosy cheeks, a tomato red shirt (in black block letters: SUPPORT ORGANIC FARMERS), and a pirate’s red goatee, hanging a full six inches off his chin, hiding his Adam’s apple. I could see a reflection of Kyle in him: a tilt of the head, a similarity in the easy offering of his smile. On other days, I’d notice a blend of introspection and unease on Mike’s face. He’d be putting up a hog pen or feeding the chickens, and he’d have another look, as if doubtful his organic dreams would actually flourish. But on this day he had a glow around him as if he’d found his place on the earth. In a huge splash of dry grains, he dumped out both pails of feed, emitting a little whoop as he did.

  Winged creatures rushed at Mike and me, aiming for the seed piled at our feet. The farm around us was a chaotic swirl of birds. Along with turkeys and several species of ducks, from Muscovy to Pekin, were several breeds of chickens — chaldrons and chanticleers, redcaps and rose combs. Local North Carolina finches, cardinals, and an array of sparrows mixed in with the others. The end result was a Beyond Thunderdome version of an aviary. And it descended upon us.

  On the periphery of this pleasant madness, there were the hogs (just two when I first moved in), goats, dogs, and cats. And kids. Two of Kyle’s younger brothers, Greg and Brett, tor
e out of the house like caged wildcats suddenly let loose. They dashed toward Mike and me, right through a swarm of fowl that were flying off the pond toward us and honking like mad over the expectation of food. The two giggling youngsters grabbed my hands to break their stride. More fowl accumulated around my feet, hundreds of them from elsewhere in the farm. Then came the boys’ brother, Zach, skidding into the fray on his BMX bike. Their guardian goat, a long-horned Billy who protected the chickens from foxes, leapt atop the roof of a small chicken house, posing proudly in regal profile. A fresh wave of ducks and geese, sensing the food, alit from the pond, soared in, and crash-landed in the grain.

  Out of this chaos, I felt a tug on my sleeve and looked down to see Kyle. “I found a chicken for you,” he said.

  For a moment I didn’t know what he was talking about. But then I recalled a conversation we’d had while I bought eggs from him the previous day, about getting some poultry as well. “Yes, the chicken meat. Do you have some ready?”

  “No, but I have a chicken,” he said, pointing into the swirl of chickens and ducks around us. “There it is. That’s yours: that white broiler.”

  I saw it, but only for a second. A nice five-pound chicken, strutting around in the free air, not squeezed into a chicken factory pen. It soon vanished in a swarm of color as other birds swooped in. “How much is it?” I asked, and immediately regretted the question. What did it matter? There was no doubt I would buy that chicken, and many more chickens from this family, even if it were twice the price of a factory-farmed chicken. I looked around at all this genetic diversity, this happy dance of people and animals, and suddenly wanted to buy all of their chickens. I wanted to support this.

  Their endeavor was a tenuous one. The Thompsons, as was immediately apparent from the disorganization of their operation, didn’t know a whole lot about farming. They’d bought a bunch of animals and let them loose. Mike and Michele Thompson, now in their early thirties, started having kids in their teens, raising them in an urban trailer park in North Carolina’s Research Triangle area, and going on welfare. It was only when the drugs and knives, so common in the trailer park, directly threatened their kids that they decided to sink all of their money into a mortgage for this remote piece of land, put a simple prefab house on it, and improvise an organic farm. But the tough life Kyle had lived up until then was reflected in his eyes; he had that too-mature-for-his-age look even as we playfully skipped stones along No Name Creek.

  However, as I discovered from our early conversations, Mike and Michele weren’t just fleeing a dangerous urban life; they felt animated by a kind of Jeffersonian dream of becoming independent freeholders. They both wore big smiles and talked energetically about their farm and children. They wanted to live by sweat and gusto. They chose the organic model partly out of idealism, but also because this premium niche market was the only route open to small farmers, since big companies like Gold Kist can crank out conventional factory-farmed chickens much cheaper.

  Kyle took me over to their front porch and opened a shoe box with holes poked in the top. A single duckling. I asked him where the other thirteen were. “Coyote raid,” he said. “They got all but one.”

  I looked down at the single duckling, a little horrified, picturing the coyote downing them one by one, like popcorn. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “It’s fine,” Kyle said. “There’s two more batches on the way.” He pointed to two other mother ducks, sitting on their freshly laid eggs — reminding me of Leela, the divine play of the Hindus, where the forms on earth spontaneously replicate themselves by the hundreds, the thousands. Down by the pond, Mike was dumping another two buckets of feed randomly, two of his kids leaping in it, another twirling an inchworm on its silk in each hand, a hundred birds fluttering for what they could grab. Everyone and everything seemed to be laughing and dancing. In the competition with factory farms, and considering the way mainstream America is organized, could this pay the bills? Michele did some tax preparation part-time — she was trained in basic accounting — but the family was up to its neck in debt. For them, the farm simply had to work.

  I GRADUALLY BEGAN TO NOTICE a mysterious smell. I hardly noticed it at first because I was so enraptured by Jackie’s budding gardens, the 12 × 12’s solitude, the rush of No Name Creek, which had changed from an end-of-winter sluggishness to a cheerier spring flow, flush with rainwater. But after a while the smell was impossible to ignore. It was noticeable only under certain wind conditions and at particular places on my long walks into the surrounding countryside, where it would creep into my nostrils and send a wave of discomfort through me. It was the stench not of death, but rather of the absence of both life and death. The unpleasantness of an overflowing ashtray.

  The smell — which I wouldn’t identify until later — was usually covered over by brighter ones. The fecund scent of thawing earth, the fresh scent of my skin after a rainwater solar shower, budding wildflowers. Jackie’s storied fields came into fuller life. Storied, because her dozens of beds contained seeds, roots, and bulbs given to her by friends and family — tulips from one of her daughters, Honduran herbs from Graciela’s finca south of the border — and as they bloomed, fruited, and flowered each year, so would their presence in Jackie’s heart. She’d left out a colorful, unfolded map in the 12 × 12 that showed the names of her plants as well as stories about the giver of the seed.

  There was Aunt Daisy’s scuppernong, a variety of muscadine grape with sweet yellowish fruit from the aunt of one of Jackie’s best friends. “Aunt Daisy died a few months from her hundredth year,” Jackie noted on her map, “an African American elder and wise woman.” Another “well-adapted bunch purple grape” — the Jack grape — came from Tom Franz, who found it three decades ago on his nearby farm; journals indicate it may have been established a century ago.

  I followed the treasure map to ginger lilies from Jackie’s sister and onward to spider lilies from the old homeplace of “Daddy’s people,” her mother’s yard, and “the gardens of the home place of my great-great-grandmother.” She noted: “Spider lilies are all over my childhood lawn. We always took them to the teachers when school started.” I discovered columbine and green-and-gold, beautiful native wildflowers that Jackie got from her adoptive godmother, who was a legendary activist and, she noted, “my beloved mentor and friend. I have many plants in my gardens from her, and it is as if I walk with her in the mornings.” These were next to her dear elder cousin’s mums, “splendid in the fall” and her “John Jamison apple tree from my dear friend John, who was proud to have been named outstanding Black farmer in the county one year. Wonderful hours in his kitchen listening to his stories.”

  There was beautyberry, which grows along roadsides all over the South, but “this one is from the Murdock home place in Ronark, Alabama. The house my great-grandfather built for my great-grandmother when they married.” A fig tree from an activist friend in Chapel Hill. Fragrant flowers near the 12 × 12 door: Osmanthus, aka fragrant tea olive, “sweet scent of my childhood. It perfumes the air on summer nights, as do four o’clocks from my sister’s garden, nicotiana (flowering tobacco from Analisa), datura, or devil’s trumpet, so fragrant at night.” Plus American hazelnuts and rugosa rose (for rose hips) and native wildflowers from other relatives — Solomon’s seal and Solomon’s plume; dogtooth violet, skullcap, and amsonia — making the whole swirl of life around the 12 × 12 a glorious blueprint of nature, love, and memory.

  Her map brought to mind Thoreau’s observation that it’s perfectly fine to build castles in the sky — just be sure you put foundations under them. Jackie’s air castle — a sensual, productive relationship with a few acres; being mindful and fully present; living on a low-carbon diet — bloomed in full color before my eyes. Her castle took transpiring, photosynthesizing form on the earth’s surface. She put foundations under her dreams: some seeds, some science, some art. Each day I’d walk out at sunrise into a gently transformed world. New shapes, smells, and shades of color, the hang of a t
iny fruit, the wrinkle of a leaf, the ambitious shoot of a straight stalk. Glory be.

  Along with the mysterious smell, another wafted over to the 12 × 12: the smell of a working farm. One day Kyle saw me from across the pond and ran over to remind me about the dangling issue of the white broiler. He pointed it out again, in the swarm of fowl, and I told him I’d take that one plus another.

  “Okay,” Kyle said. “Would you like to take them with you?”

  “Like this?” I said, a frown growing on my face. “But they’re alive.”

  He looked up at me through blue eyes, a little puzzled. I tried to clarify: “They need to be slaughtered.”

  “Yes,” Kyle said, innocently. “You’re going to slaughter them.”

  I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. A moving wall of chickens, turkeys, and ducks was all around us. Kyle was now joined by two of his brothers; the three blond boys stared at me with an earnest, expectant intensity. I was fully acquainted with the relevant theory: if you eat it, you should be able to kill it. Someone else shouldn’t do your dirty work. And if I couldn’t kill a chicken, perhaps the only honest response was to become a vegetarian.

  Kyle filled the silence: “My dad can show you. It takes one hour.”