by Manny Howard
“All of her?” I ask.
“Yes. Dead,” Joe says, not looking back at our cherry, but studying a sickly Norway maple in a neighbor’s yard, its hefty but bare branches hanging over our property line.
“Even that part?” I ask, pointing out the limb with the leaves and a few sparse blossoms.
“No. Everything else is dead, that part’s alive,” says Joe, without looking in the direction I’m gesturing. “You want I should take it away?”
“Dead?”
“Dead.”
“How much?”
“Three hundred.”
“I guess so.” I shrug, looking at the blossoms on the one limb, trying to fix them in my mind. At least Joe doesn’t charge two grand like every other guy in coveralls who passes through here. The tree was rumored, by the previous owner, to be from the same batch planted along the promenade on the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare when Prospect Park South was first planned and developed in 1898. According to the brass plaque by the front door, reading only 1901, ours was one of the first houses built on this street. This assertion was bolstered purely by accident when, one Sunday afternoon, I was inspecting a soil map of western Long Island that I had bought years before we moved into the house and is now hanging framed in the library. Published in 1901, the map is a color-coded rendition of the numerous soil types that lay buried under the concrete that is now Brooklyn. Their variety and their location are an episodic source of fascination for me: Miami stony loam, Norfolk gravel, Hempstead loam, meadow, Galveston clay, and sassafras gravelly loam. In the right mood, the list reads like verse, and I imagine the first Dutch settlers of the area searching their homesteads for the perfect growing or building conditions. The map also provides a sense of the state of urban development at the time, offering proof that, by 1901, the city was well on the way to overtaking all seventy-two miles of western Long Island and had made inroads, via railway, in the direction of Long Island’s east end. The development is incomplete, nonexistent in some places. Farm plots can be clearly identified. Not until we moved to Prospect Park South did I notice that, at the time the map was made, the grid of streets in the neighborhood had only just been laid. To my delight, our house is clearly visible, the first, the only home on our side of the street. Our cherry may well have been one from the original plantings.
“My wife is going to be very sad,” I lament.
“The tree is dead,” replies Joe, as though I am about to ask him to resuscitate it.
“Still.”
Lisa returns home from a business trip to California just twenty-five minutes after Joe and his crew have driven away with our cherry tree in the payload of the forest green G&D Landscape truck. I salvage four of the largest trunk sections to use as outside stools and half a cord of firewood for the fireplace in the library. The G&D crew has been thorough, raking over the entire yard and even boring out the stump. It is as though our cherry had never existed.
The stockade fence that marks the perimeter of our property is almost exactly the same gray/brown shade as the earth it surrounds. Boards are broken. Some are missing altogether. It has seen better days. Just how tired our fence has become was not nearly so obvious when the tree, even in its own tragic decline, stood in the northwest corner of the lot.
Ah, well. At least now with the tree gone I can begin the serious work of creating a well-conditioned soil bed for my garden. Lisa is sorting through the bills and, purse still under her arm, office rig still uncreased, perched on tall, peep-toe slingbacks, is a vision. She is exquisite in her fashionable urbanity. I drag her to the yard, mail now tucked under her arm, to show her evidence of the first bold step toward building The Farm. Lisa does not see it this way. She insists that she is shocked to discover the tree missing; that we never came to a final agreement about its removal. “Joe said it was dead,” I insist.
“It had blossoms on it,” she retorts, incredulous.
“I pointed that out, too, but Joe said the entire tree was dead except for that limb,” I explain, more defensively than I feel.
“So it wasn’t completely dead,” Lisa proclaims, victorious.
“Well, it’s not like it’s going to bounce back.”
“Not now it’s not.” Lisa changes the focus of her attention, indicating that she has grown weary of winning this point. “So, just how much did you pay the guy who diagnosed and then removed our sick tree?”
“‘The guy’? You mean Joe? And, yes, according to Joe it isn’t sick, it’s dead. But just what are you suggesting?” I feign outrage while doubt creeps in.
“Nothing.”
“Three hundred and fifty: three hundred, plus tip.”
“Hunh,” she grunts. It’s difficult to tell whom she is more skeptical of, Joe or me.
Judging from her infinitesimally more relaxed posture, more weight on her left foot, and a slight supine arch in her back, I believe Joe might be off the hook, but just for good measure, I offer a defense. “Joe’s job is plants; he doesn’t go around chopping trees down for an extra three hundred and fifty dollars.” I spit, wondering if what I was insisting was, in fact, true, before being saved by my own cynicism. “You don’t think he would have made more money by unsuccessfully nursing the tree back to health?”
“Practicality? Is that how you choose your vet, too?” asks Lisa, obviously ready to rejoin the fray and looking at our dog, Fergus, as if somehow my decision to remove the tree impugned my fitness as a dog owner.
“Please?”
“Please,” she mimics, then something at the back of the yard catches her eye, and her expression grows stormy. “That fence is going to have to be replaced,” she says in a tone I imagine she reserves for employees for whom a Human Resources Department file is already being assembled. “And that has to happen before anything gets planted in this yard.”
“Farm,” I correct her. “It’s a field.”
“What?”
“This is a field now, not a yard,” I snap.
“The field needs a new fence,” says Lisa, and turns back to the house.
“No problem,” I shout as she turns the corner for the stairs. After all, how hard could it be to build a new fence?
THE STRANGER
Our neighbor Jen has recently sent a sample of the dirt from her yard out to the Rutgers University Agricultural Extension in New Jersey to be tested for toxins. She doesn’t have topsoil either, just this clay, this substrate. Jen is expecting the results back any day now. The news is not going to be good, but just how defiled the dirt behind our homes has become will beggar our imagination. After reading the report, neither of us can ever look at a child playing in the garden or on the lawn the same way again; the idea of eating something grown in it, absurd.
Later that day, discouraged and confused, as I am standing in front of the garage surveying the barren earth, my musings about the potential of soil boxes as a means of avoiding the clay’s toxicity are interrupted. The country we’re living in here now is literally not the country that our ancestors inhabited. We’re living on a surface that wasn’t the surface then. The voice—that of an older gentleman from the mid-South, a teacher maybe?—seems to be coming from just over my right shoulder, just up the driveway. Startled, I turn to address my visitor, but nobody is there.
If you see that a lot of topsoil is gone, then the thing you have got to do is think a long time about plows and how they are used. Then you ask yourself, what’s in the mind of the man that ran the plow? continues the voice, unhurried and confident. I’m looking in the garage for a radio. Did I leave a radio out here overnight? This old fella definitely sounds like some hard-charger with a book to sell, doing his time on National Public Radio.
You can propose that a certain kind of person caused a gully, and you had better think pretty carefully about what went into the making of that gully, the assumptions, the cultural means and derivations, that went into it. The radio is nowhere. Our kitchen windows aren’t open; neither are those of our neighbors the Feders. Y
et it feels as if this guy is talking directly to me. And then you can propose a person who would come along and stop that gully, and then you’re asking what does he have in mind in order to stop it?
I’m standing next door in the Feders’ yard now, craning my neck to see if Skip, another neighbor, is holding forth in the back of his house. The voice doesn’t sound like Skip’s, but … Because the physical, the practical action of stopping a gully is not all there is to it. It begins far back in the culture. There are two cultural themes here. There’s a cultural theme of destruction and there’s a cultural theme of preserving and cherishing. And they’ve existed side by side.
“What’s a fucking gully?” I call into Skip’s yard. There is no answer; just the clanking and grinding of the hydraulic crushing arm on a city garbage truck.
With the cherry tree gone, the backyard cleared, it stands ready for its useful incarnation as a field. I am momentarily free to consider beginning work on other farm projects. So I begin to worry.
I worry because, rather than working, I have been thinking. I am building my urban farm to describe the effort required to disengage from industrialized food, but it dawns on me now the implications of stepping away from the food that everyone else eats bear examining. Despite these musings and the countless fantasies—heroic and catastrophic—about my immediate future, I never come close to imagining what I am in for.
An outside observer might regard The Farm as a way of making life unnecessarily complicated. Why grow food, she might ask, and for heaven’s sake, why kill food, when you can buy it on the corner? If asked, I might answer that I don’t see simplicity where she does. Rather, I understand the availability of food on the corner to be the result of unyielding complexity. The product of an authorless tangle of relationships—human, commercial, political, industrial, biological, and chemical—that will never be fully sorted. What does having food available at almost a moment’s notice, twenty-four hours a day, really require of us? I’d explain that I wonder how many compromises, negotiations, promises, shortcuts, evasions, explanations, demands, declarations, and obfuscations I am required to make in the twelve hours between the time I wake up and the moment I pick up the telephone to call for takeout from Yen Yen, the local Chinese restaurant on Church Avenue, and exchange my bank-card number for an order of chicken and broccoli with white sauce.
Life on The Farm is going to be a series of spare declarations. I plant potatoes. I water potatoes. I harvest potatoes. I boil potatoes. I eat potatoes. I feed tilapia. I breed tilapia. I kill tilapia. I gut tilapia. I roast tilapia. I eat tilapia. At least that is my theory.
FOUNDING FISH
On The Farm I will wake up. I will pull on my Carhartts and my work shirt and begin the day, a day full of work. I will fix what is broken. I’ll heal what is dying. Then I will feed what is hungry and water what is thirsty. If I think at all, it will only be to determine if there is a more efficient way to complete these four tasks. I will also, I learn quickly once the project is fully realized, dispose of an astounding quantity of shit.
This flood of feces is still in the offing, but when it begins it provides the first hint that my plans have not been transferred into action nearly as efficiently as I had imagined. Minimizing the amount of feces produced by my protein source and then disposing of what is generated is an integral operating principle of my first scheme for producing animal protein on The Farm. I am going to raise tilapia.
Tilapia is a tropical fish. To raise tilapia, little more than a pool twelve feet in diameter and three feet deep is required. It’s important to rig the pool with a dome designed to contain the energy from sunlight to heat the water to eighty degrees. For the most part the fish will survive eating the algae that grow in their tank. The algae is fertilized simply by suspending a burlap sack of dry horse manure over the tank and shaking it over the warm pool once a day until the bloom has matured so that the water is tinted green. If horse manure is not available, I have been assured that desiccated chicken or rabbit manure is a satisfactory stand-in. Since algae are the tilapia’s primary food, no filtration system is needed.
Unlike most all other fish species favored by fish farmers, tilapia require only low levels of oxygen dissolved in their water, so they don’t need a constant source of new water and can be grown in containers without so much as an aerating pump. This hardy fish thrives in nitrogen-rich environments, and—it can’t get better than this—nitrogen is a principal component of their own excrement. But it does get better. The only recommended dietary supplement to their poo-generated algae diet might be easier to produce than the algae itself. A few small plastic garbage cans is the only gear required. Place fetid meat in each can. After a few hours or so, cover the cans. The thousands of housefly larvae and rat-tailed maggots that result will be more than enough animal matter for the tilapia population. Describing tilapia as robust is as inadequate an observation as calling Mike Tyson tough.
A single breeding pair of fish is said to be enough to start a population of a thousand or so offspring. For the offspring to reach the edible weight of one-half pound, the temperature in the pool must never drop below seventy degrees.
The original plans for the dome used in backyard tilapia farming were published in Popular Science magazine in 1968. The dome, a geodesic design, is none other than the Sun-Dome designed by no less a personage than our first futurist, Buckminster Fuller. Fuller still holds the patent for the dome, but his estate only requires $5 for a copy of the plans. Back in the 1970s, advocates of backyard tilapia farming estimated that it could take as little time as five to seven days to erect a fully operational tilapia farm at a cost of no more than $25 ($122.63 today). As soon as the water hits eighty degrees, the breeding pair begin their work. As long as the temperature never drops below eighty, the spawning never ends. I become giddy as I read an account of backyard fish-farming in the January 1972 issue of the journal Organic Gardening and Farming.
Tilapia is an umbrella moniker for hundreds and hundreds of closely related fish, a majority of which originates in the Nile, and now dominates the southern Zambezi and the Limpopo rivers in southeast Africa. But where can my breeding pair of tilapia be had?
I know exactly where to go.
On Butler Street, just east of the Gowanus Houses public-housing project, there’s a nondescript one-story warehouse. Usually a pair of tractor-trailer trucks are parked outside this warehouse. Loaded on the flatbeds sit four or more five-foot, blue plastic cubes that are continually leaking water onto the street. As part of my regular commute to school with the kids, I drive down this stretch of Butler Street at least twice a week, depending on traffic patterns. While planning The Farm I must have driven past these trucks four times before it dawned on me that the outfit was growing fish. Right here, tanks arranged on trucks parked at the curb on Butler Street, full to bursting with what must be thousands of the admirably indestructible tilapia.
Identifying the man in charge is easy. A commanding presence with a clipboard and a meticulously pressed navy blue polo shirt, the boss is Vietnamese and has the totemic, oaken face of a lifetime of real work. He regards me suspiciously as I explain my interest in his business. I am not asking for the world. I am working on a project. I am building a farm. The Farm is in Brooklyn, not far from here. I invite him to visit, to bring the kids. I want his fish, one of each sex. I need brood stock. I am willing to pay for as many as ten to insure that I get at least one female. I am willing to pay very well for his fish.
This urban tilapia farmer regards me. Stony, he tightens his deeply creased lips and his mouth disappears entirely. He shakes his head and looks for an employee to yell at. “No fish,” he barks instead, at me.
He’s right. I can’t see a single fish anywhere; blue tanks filled with tilapia too numerous to count, but not one visible fish. I persist. I’ll be willing to pay him considerably more than the $9.99 per pound that the nearby, upmarket fishmonger charges for his tilapia. “I am working on a project,” I repeat, my tone
intended to soothe, my words pregnant with portent. “Building a farm behind my home.”
“No fish. No tilapia,” the urban tilapia farmer insists. For an instant, I wonder. Maybe I got it wrong? Maybe the tanks are filled with … with … “Ten dollars per fish?” I insist, sensing my glorious, ingenious fish farm slipping away.
“No tilapia,” persists the urban tilapia farmer, turning to walk away, checking something on his clipboard. “Thank you. Good-bye, mister.”
“Twelve dollars per fish,” I importune, following him into his warehouse. Even at that price, if I manage to spawn just a few hundred fish, my protein costs will be pennies.
The urban tilapia farmer marches into the trailer, parked in the near corner of the warehouse, that serves as his office. I hear him turn the dead bolt as the vinyl-sheathed steel door closes firmly behind him. I peer through the small window next to the door—fluorescent light, ramshackle secondhand desk and chair, three mobile phones, and a plastic ashtray. Next to a Makita power-tools pinup calendar is a dry-erase board covered with smudged and faded numbers and what I take to be Vietnamese glyphs. Under the board is a maroon couch with bedding folded neatly on the arm farthest from the door. There is a coffee table and a thirteen-inch color television set. The urban tilapia farmer drops the venetian blind over the window. “Mister, no fish!”