While my husband all but lived on the farmland, dragging himself home after dark for a shower and quick sleep before heading back out, my prairie time was becoming limited to weekends and the odd day during the week. That was because one of my gigs at an ad agency had grown to the point that I was working in its office.
And I loved it. Going to Swim Creative was everything that the farm wasn’t. In addition to being dry and temperature controlled, it was in downtown Duluth, where one enjoyed the bustle of a retro Main Street and the sun sparkles bouncing off Lake Superior. Plus, it smelled nice.
When typing on my Mac on my agency-provided Ikea desk, it was easy to forget that I was an egg proprietress at all. Until I’d suddenly remember and the thought would dump ice crystals into my bloodstream. Sometimes, it’d drive me to hide in the bathroom for a few minutes, collecting myself until I could dive into the next project and forget again.
In addition to liking the work, I was meeting people. For years, I’d spent my workdays primarily alone, and I can attest that the living room couch does not afford you many new acquaintances beyond the persistent gentleman with his issues of Watchtower magazine.
While I enjoyed all my co-workers, I was particularly fond of Beau Walsh, the guy with the desk next to me. He was a designer hired by the agency right out of his internship and had recently enjoyed his first legal beer. We worked on videos together, and I could tell he had an innate talent for storytelling. Together we made a nice team. Later, this working relationship would become very important to Locally Laid, but back then I was just happy to have Beau as a sweet pal.
Of course, the ad agency wasn’t my only gig.
Like Jason, I’d do early-morning farm chores, but mine were on my Mac. I was building a brand and it started with the name.
“I’m thinking Amundsen Farms,” Jason had said, repeatedly testing its echolalia, sitting at his antique secretary. This was back in our beautiful BC days: Before Chickens.
“Amundsen Farms?” I made a look of distaste. “You can’t have a name that’s not instinctively spelled.”
The s-E-n is an unexpected trip-up at the end of Jason’s Norwegian surname, and frankly the whole thing looks harder to say than it is. It’s pronounced Ah-mun-son (with a silent d), like the Antarctic explorer, but if telemarketers are any gauge, it’s tough on the uninitiated.
After a bit of conversation, I’d convinced Jason that the name should showcase how we would stand apart in the egg case, a differentiator as the marketers would say. That was when we landed on a moniker highlighting our regionality: Locally Laid. And though I was admittedly shy of its double entendre, it truly is a perfect one with a local focus.
Back then I knew only that local food and its devoted followers, locavores, were, you know … a thing. A growing, popular, cool thing, for sure, and one doing good in the world, though I couldn’t exactly articulate what those good things were. Clearly, there was the obvious point of freshness, but beyond that, things got fuzzy.
That was before I’d heard of the newish term food miles. It’s a form of culinary accounting, adding up all the travel on long-haul trucks and plane hops a product takes to get from farm field to processing plant to your town. The Worldwatch Institute ran the numbers and figures that most things we pick up from the grocery store travel between 1,500 and 2,500 miles before they slap down on our kitchen counters. And that seemed like an awful big side of diesel with our breakfast. I started writing about it.
Later, I would understand how much more important local eating is, not just for fuel consumption but for regional economies and sidestepping the problems of food production concentration, such as the overfarming of land and feedlot waste. But food miles was a good start for my researching and writing.
I was beginning to see myself as a pixel farmer writing about our cutting-edge retro practices.
Sometimes it was an urgent task, like when I wrote and rewrote the copy for the egg cartons we needed to get printed for upcoming sales—only to be rejected again by the State of Minnesota for word choice, placement, or size.
As there is no official federal language for pasture-raised eggs, it was a bit like a segment of The Price Is Right. I’d arrange all my words, run back to pull a cartoonishly large handle, and get the buzzer—though it was often unclear exactly what was wrong. And I wouldn’t know until I’d reordered all the words over again. When I’d gotten that straightened out, there were always formatting issues with our carton printer.
Also, I kept the farm website and the Locally Laid blog. Serving as part diary, part therapy, part customer interaction, LoLa’s social media already had a small following of fellow dreamers and the ag-curious. I had a theory that they read along because I didn’t completely sugarcoat it. I told them the things that went wrong—like when we got a vehicle stuck or shocked ourselves on the electric fencing or whatever chicken-chasing nonsense the day served up. It’s a balance. I wanted to keep people rooting for us like the Little Chicken That Could but not push us over into the likes of Jackass 3.
It was sometimes difficult to write about these often humbling days out at Locally Laid, but it also offered me the chance to reframe the experiences. As a child, I watched reruns of The Carol Burnett Show, whose star famously coined the secret formula for funny: Comedy is tragedy, plus time. Writing our farm antics in real time compelled me to speed up the process and expose that much-needed humor right away.
Most followers seemed to appreciate the kind of forthrightness you’re unlikely to see with, say, a Kraft or even other startups. In literary terms, it made me a reliable narrator, and because I told people the bad, it made the good I shared all the more believable. After just a few months online, we already had several hundred followers on Facebook (even the woman who did not eat eggs). It was a group that clamored for chicken pictures so ardently I’ve come to refer to these snapshots I’d post as Softcore Poultry.
While Jason mildly appreciated the “atta-boys” we’d get, I knew he’d do the work without any outside encouragement. I’m more shallow and take people’s sincere interest as much-needed affirmation that our farming upstream was worth all we endured.
But it was becoming clear that people were starting to groove on our mission, and that was when it became clear to me that Locally Laid had one.
I often don’t really know what’s right in front of me until I start writing about it. That was how I came to see that our ag business had a bigger guiding force than “let’s sell enough tasty farm eggs to avoid eviction.” It was gelling into an actual ethos, practically a life of its own that would come to embody our little logo chicken, LoLa.
That logo, which perfectly captured the personality of our farm, is the work of Matt Olin. We had paid out some modest sums to other designers, auditioning concepts, but when Matt showed us his design we knew we’d found our girl. Her legs sprout out of the lowercase Ls and her body swoops around, gray and speckled, to her backward-facing head and orange triangle beak. She’s also just laid a beautiful fresh egg into the crux of the “a.” As far as chickens go, she’s perfect.
I was beginning to feel like my graduate student friends who wrote fiction and told me that their characters mysteriously took on a life of their own, dictating the story. While I wasn’t ready to say that LoLa ran the show, she did seem to have opinions.
As I started to parse and play with the language of Locally Laid, themes started to emerge. There was a locavore element, an animal welfare bent, and something solid for the local business enthusiast. Once we started selling commercially, an ardent foodie factor emerged, and there were always the folks who just like chickens. Correction: people who REVERE chickens, like just this side of poultry obsessed and needing help.
It would take me a good two years of writing and learning to be able to knead all that we do into a true vocation, a calling, our mission.
ACT 3
Egged
SLANG: a foul prank
Chapter 10
By July, about thr
ee weeks after our first chickens came, the second batch of nine hundred hens arrived. And, Myron being Myron, we got little notice. The birds were sprung upon us on a weekday while the children and I were still on the East Coast on writing assignment and visiting family.
“Don’t worry, we’ll be okay,” Jason said over the phone.
His use of “we” was meant mostly in the royal sense. Though I was doing my part of writing for cash and sharing in chicken chores on the weekend, I felt like I’d deserted Jason. He was unmoored in the sea of details. I’d find his lists of things that needed to get done immediately, if not sooner. They’d be written on scraps of paper torn from poultry vitamin sacks or peeled Gatorade labels. I knew my contribution as home fires manager was both important and essential, but I felt that Jason and I no longer existed in that couple co-space we’d long shared, where it was him and me against the world, especially now.
We were only working at the farm together maybe one day a week, usually in separate paddocks, and had no time for recreation. All the things I loved—hiking, biking, and going to the beach—were exactly what Jason didn’t want to do with what little time he wasn’t farming. He deserved to hide indoors, in front of Netflix, fleeing both the real and outdoor world.
Not being there for the next batch of birds, what we called at home The Second Coming, just added to my sense of displacement. I suspected this bothered Jason, too, but there was no time to think about it, as another slapdash delivery of hens was happening.
While the knowledge accrued from that first chicken delivery helped mitigate the problems of the second, it was, according to Jason, nothing short of heinous.
He sent me a text at eleven p.m.: Many casualties.
It was nearly as many as before. And this batch also required Jason’s pasture-and roost-training regimen, meaning another three weeks of sleeping at the farm. Except there wasn’t as much room for Jason in the wooden egg-processing house now that our egg-washing machine, the retro-laborious, circa 1954 AquaMagic V, had been plumbed in by our friend Rod.
The old machine, found in a barn, had been refurbished by none other than Myron. I’ve got to give the man credit, he was good at rebuilding vintage machinery. Our washer was a long, fairly narrow metal device sitting atop metal legs and befitting of the word contraption. But there was no time to play with it much then.
The daily watering and feeding chores were now taking some five hours a day. Plus, the chickens were starting to get crafty. Slowly becoming good foragers, running after crickets and mowing down the field grass to a nub before being moved onto fresh pasture, they had figured out what they liked best. And that was corn. When they saw the four-wheeler, they’d run toward it, knowing there were feed buckets in the back. They’d even figured out that if they worked en masse, they could push over the flexible fence, pulling its stakes right out of the ground, and escape. This meant more chasing of birds, wielding our fishing nets like angry villagers forming a mob. It was a huge loss of both time and pride. It got to the point that Jason would walk all the way across the field carrying two heavy buckets of feed to serve them an appetizer so they’d be distracted when he drove up with the rest of their ration.
“I’m not that bright, but I’m happy to say I can outwit a chicken,” he said.
This farm physicality was starting to wear on Jason’s body, and there always seemed to be some unexpected daily bonus work requiring immediate attention: fixing a shorted-out fence, rewiring the Poultry Butlers again, or changing a flat on the four-wheeler. He was now seeing a chiropractor and sported a terrible rash on his back with painful blisters caused by a virus known as gladiatorum, named after another fun-loving, hardworking lot: Roman gladiators. Likely, Jason had picked up the virus as a sport-playing kid and had a localized case that he’d never noticed. But now as he stressed his body, it was the perfect storm for a massive flare-up that also included headache, sore throat, and, as we learned, diarrhea.
“Hey, how did the visit with the restaurant people go today?” I’d phoned Jason from my parents’ driveway.
In addition to Jason getting new birds and being shorthanded, he’d long promised a farm tour to a local restaurant, one that went through eggs by the thousands every month. The Duluth Grill was, back then, one of the few places in our region making the effort to buy from local farmers. That they were considering using Locally Laid, even partially, once our farm was in full production and state inspected, was a big deal.
Despite his weariness, Jason giggled into his cell. “Oh, Lu, I don’t know if I have a bug or I’m just stressed, but when they were here I had a terrible case of the shi—”
“Backdoor trots?” I offered over his slang.
“Oh, that doesn’t even begin to cover it,” he replied.
I winced.
Apparently, Jason had been showing owner Tom Hanson, his son Louie, and other employees our prairie setup when he’d urgently excused himself. With no hope of making it the hundreds of feet to our Porta-Potty back by the barn, Jason relieved himself in a less-than-private location just behind a coop.
“Chickens on the other side of the fence were coming up to stare at me,” he laughed.
When I returned, the some sixteen-hundred-ish surviving chickens were now on pasture—and Jason was elusive as Bigfoot. There was taunting evidence of his existence—foul-smelling laundry and the occasional Jason-shaped lump on the couch—but not much that anyone could claim as proof of life.
When he did come home, it was usually after dark, when he’d hork down food, any food, and hit REM sleep before he could even set his plate on the coffee table right in front of him. More than once I’d taken silverware off his rhythmically rising chest as he snored openmouthed on the living room floor. Walking upstairs to our room was simply too large a feat, and we rarely shared a bed. I’d joke with my best friends that “ain’t nobody getting laid at Locally Laid,” which was funny, mostly.
The truth was, I missed him in every way possible.
One early morning in late July, as we were reviewing our kid troop movements and social calendar during a predawn roundup, Jason interrupted.
“Oh, the inspector comes today.” He said this calmly, without angst or emotion, and took a long pull on his coffee.
I raised an eye from the calendar in my lap. The term inspector just sounded ominous. This wasn’t a person tasked to issue our participation medal. “No worries, Bird, it’s a good thing,” he said. “The hens are finally starting to drop eggs, and we need this inspection checked off so we can get cartons in stores.”
The chickens were laying later than our business plan had stated (apparently they hadn’t read it), but given the condition in which they arrived we were happy they were laying at all.
“Are we ready?” I asked.
Jason was confident. “The inspection will be good, been ready for weeks,” he said grabbing a dirty binder with the word RULES scrawled in his untidy hand on the front cover. He opened it to a printout of all the regulations, with sections highlighted and notes penned in the margins. There were checks and stars and underlining next to dirt smudges and mystery stains shaped like thumbs. I’m not sure it qualified as a living document, but it sure had seen a lot of life.
“These are the rules, and as I met each one, I checked it here.” He pointed to a column of small Xs with rough fingers that just a few weeks ago had been supple and pink. “And if I have a particular question, I’ve written it here,” he said, sliding a finger over to the far margin on the right to small clots of scribbles. “Then I called the state and got it clarified, writing their response here.”
Pride washed over me and I smiled.
Jason stood, snapped the formerly white binder shut with a snap, tucked it under his arm, and pulled me into a strong embrace.
“Gotta run, my ladies need me.” He hammed it up a bit and for that split second he was truly present. I could see that, although he was fatigued, he was also incandescently happy as only a person moving forward on a gran
d project can be.
“It’s all problem-solving, Lu, that’s all farming is,” he said. And it seemed he was enjoying the puzzle.
He issued me the standard married-people lip peck before grabbing his coffee and walking out the door. I opened my mouth to nag about his taking our good mugs to the farm, never to return, but I stopped myself. Sometimes the price of a happy marriage is lost stoneware.
Later, the children and I were in our backyard garden. It was a quintessential summer night in Duluth with the Free-B-Q going (that’s the barbecue we found a few years back with a free sign on it), grilling bratwurst and mushrooms alongside long strips of zucchini and squash.
Despite the light sky, I felt time elapsing and contemplated how long to hold dinner for Jason. The brats were starting to blacken, the vegetable spears were wrinkled, and I wanted time to clean up before the outdoor movie.
I elected to feed the children. While I wasn’t eating yet, I sat with them on the patio furniture to join in our “Gratefuls.” That’s when we all hold hands, close our eyes for a second, and literally intone the word grateful. It’s part prayer, part intention, and, like Locally Laid, it’s a phrase that can be taken any way one wants.
As they ate, I packed our beach throw into the big blue Ikea bag along with some lumpy pillows for the evening ahead at Movies in the Park. Fridays in July and August, the Downtown Council inflates a giant screen right by chilly Lake Superior and hundreds of people gather in the dark, wrapped in blankets, sitting on lawn chairs. Honestly, it’s magical.
Hearing the old Accord pinching the gravel in the alley, I popped up toward our driveway. I had a Grain Belt Premium in hand for Jason, brewed in our old Minneapolis neighborhood and a loose Friday tradition. Even though we both worked seven days a week now, it was still the start of the weekend and that should mean something.
But as he got out of the car, I knew something was wrong. Very wrong. He was pale underneath his farmer’s tan and though he was giving me a little smile, there was no mirth in it. Walking toward me, it looked like only half his bones were willing to bear any weight, giving him an awkward slouch. For a moment, I pretended not to see it, because I didn’t want to see it. Instead I told him there was a heap of food and that we’d be meeting Skip, Julia, and their boys at the movie soon.
Locally Laid Page 9