My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm

by Manny Howard

  • Herbs (various)—fighting for every ray of sun under the aggressive thicket of tomatoes, but doing okay, considering the neighborhood’s aggressive ways.

  • Cantaloupe—busy creeping across the lawn, I wish it would put as much energy into fruit production as land acquisition, but its aggressive growth stops passersby in their tracks.

  • Beans (various)—also struggling in the shadow of the tomatoes, but the food is clearly following close behind the blossoms. If they keep this up, these plants will produce enough food for at least one meal.

  Surveying the garden it seems possible that, when the time comes, if harvested strategically, there will be enough food to sustain me. Suddenly it seems possible that the worst is behind us on The Farm.

  Doe #4 kindled (“gave birth,” to nonrabbit folk) on Sunday. In the morning I clear eight stillborn, underweight rabbits from the maternity ward, and my mood is dark enough to seriously consider rolling the hutch into the middle of Coney Island Avenue and setting it ablaze. I guess I got busy, because the hutch and the rabbits were still in the barn in the evening when Juan Carlos Lindé, a friend from Argentina—now living in Berlin—whom we are paying to do the plastering and painting on the third floor, a job I had promised to do some months ago, so he can make the money he needs to buy a new surfboard and return to Germany to find a local girlfriend before the notoriously drab and rainy Berlin winter sets in, remarked, “Hey, you have baby rabbits!”

  “No,” I reply. “The doe had eight stillborn overnight.”

  “You have baby rabbits, Manny. Lots of them, and most of them are moving,” says Juan casually, drawing on the cigarette he had left the dusty confines of the third floor to enjoy.

  Sure enough, eleven more rabbits are going cold on the floor of the wire cage while Mom stands by watching. This is her first litter, and my brief experience and casual book learning suggest that she probably won’t make any effort to keep them alive. It’s not all that hard to empathize after she gave birth to an apparently unheard-of nineteen kits in less than twelve hours. I place the kits in the kindling box in the vain hope that this action might kick-start some maternal instinct. I check the food and water levels and close the garage door for a full day to see if, undisturbed, she does her maternal portion. Twenty-four hours later, six are alive. There is some evidence that she entered the kindling box (adult-rabbit poop), but no suggestion that she is feeding them. Four of the last six starve in a few days. I crush the remaining pair to end their blind suffering and their grotesque, hopeless mewling for nourishment.

  It might be one of the only qualities rabbits share with human beings, but some rabbits are just not natural mothers. The truth is, I’m not helping matters at all. I was standing two feet from her when Sugar Ray’s randy bucks impregnated her; still I miscalculated the due date of Doe #4. So, when she finally has her first litter, I have not yet built the all-important kindling box, the vessel in which baby rabbits are stored and weaned. All the literature makes it clear that a box must be introduced to a pregnant doe well in advance of the birth so that she will have time to build a nest by filling it with fur. The box has precise specifications, and these are magnified when the doe weighs twenty pounds.

  After discovering the newborns, I scramble to build a box. In my haste I use standard kit box measurements for a standard size rabbit. The miscalculation has disastrous results. The box is too small. Doe #4 cannot get in it to feed her brood, and the newborns can scramble, still blind, out of the box and around the cage.

  The logistics of keeping track of her first litter prove overwhelming, and not being a natural mother, and not getting any help at all from me, she panics. This is where the commonalities between rabbits and people end. Rabbits don’t turn to drink or call to yell at their own mothers about certain insidious, subtle, repeated cruelties or congenital deficiencies. Oftentimes when a mother rabbit panics, she simply eats her offspring. I haven’t seen it done since my sister raised rabbits when we were kids, but I have read a fair bit about it recently and quietly dread the possibility. Lisa certainly has never considered such infanticidal ticks among livestock. Stealthy, desperate for a break, I recalculate the measurements of a new more effective kit box and gather the lumber.

  One Saturday in July, I take a planned break from The Farm, the result of my and Lisa’s first serious discussion of what she describes as my “behavior.” I put Bevan Jake on the back of my bike and we pedal off to Coney Island to watch the Mermaid Parade. Hoping for a mother-daughter bonding moment with the rabbits—it’s gotta be good for something—Lisa takes Heath to visit the baby rabbits that Doe #3 has recently birthed. Only moments before their visit, the doe sets about destroying the kits in her first litter, crushing two and tearing the head off a third. Seeing the carnage, Lisa pushes Heath from in front of the cage, but Lisa’s retching makes it clear to our little girl that something is terribly wrong.

  After the Mermaid Parade massacre, word begins to seep through my family about the crisis in my marriage. While walking the dog one evening, I receive a call from my father. He is concerned about me—about Lisa and me—and he blames himself. “I feel terrible about this whole rabbit thing,” he says. “I should have told you how difficult it is to raise and breed rabbits. I know, you see. I worked on a farm as a child after the war. I should have talked you out of it. I should not have allowed it. I feel responsible.”

  “Dad? Please. The rabbits were my idea.”

  “But I knew better and I encouraged you.”

  “They are pretty impressive rabbits, Dad.”

  “They are big, aren’t they? Twenty pounds. Amazing.”

  “You never could have talked me out of it. This isn’t your bad. It’s not on you.”

  “I should have tried. I know about these things.”

  We say good-night, but he is still in a lather. I learn after returning home with the dog that he called the house and spoke with Lisa before speaking with me. “Your father called,” says Lisa without looking away from Law & Order: SVU. “He told me the rabbits were all his fault. Says you could not have known what to expect.”

  “I know,” I reply, stunned that he’d called Lisa. He and I typically use the evening dog walk to catch up on goings-on at The Farm. “I told him he couldn’t have talked me out of it,” I muse, getting sucked into the rerun procedural on the television.

  “I told him the same thing,” says Lisa, eyes glued to the set.

  “He’s really worried. Thinks our marriage is heading for the rocks,” I say through a half smile, thinking of my reliably melodramatic father and how regularly he switches his hobby-horses of woe.

  “Isn’t it?” says Lisa, TiVo-ing through a commercial.

  THE VOICE FROM

  THE WHIRLWIND

  Thunderclaps and the flash of lightning wake me at six twenty. As usual, whenever the weather is bad, my first thoughts are of The Farm. It’s been unbearably hot and muggy for almost a month now, but a heat wave that descended over the Eastern Seaboard two days ago has made everyone nostalgic for those comparatively mild days. The heat has not been the principal challenge to my crops; rather, it is the unseasonably wet growing season. More punishing rain is bad news.

  During the night a summer storm system spawned by this heat wave moved east out of Pennsylvania, gathering strength and dumping rain as it passed over New Jersey. At this hour the sun should be visible above the houses to the east, but it is still dark outside. This storm has a violence that all the others before it have lacked. The rain hammers the windows of our second-floor bedroom at a right angle. Rather than swaying in the wind, the trees on the block that I can see through the murk are all stressed in the same direction, showing the pale undersides of their leaves. Rather than gusting, the wind is a sustained wave. The air feels different, hollow somehow. As I stand at the window, the predawn light starts to struggle in the east. Brightening now, the sky is green; at first a drab olive and after a short while what Crayola crayons calls a Luminescent Asparagus. Th
e rain strikes the bedroom windows as before, and the wind roars and rattles the panes. Lisa, awake well before me as usual, abandons her shower in the upstairs bathroom in a hurry after a thunderclap sounds as if it came from inside our chimney. Her hair bound in a white towel, turban-style, on the way down the stairs she wraps a pale blue silk robe around her wet nakedness. With her eyes she asks if the children are sleeping through the storm. I nod and, as thunder rolls through the house again, shrug.

  I pad down to the kitchen. My routine during any rainstorm is to start a foul-weather damage assessment: ignite coffeemaker, query weather.com, and undertake an underpants inspection of the Fields of the Lord (paying special attention to issues of drainage). This morning I make it only as far as Step Two. “A tornado will strike the Flatbush area of Brooklyn at 6:40 a.m.” That is the unqualified pronouncement from the Severe Weather Desk of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In fact, by 6:22 the twister is alive and has already struck Livingston on the north shore of Staten Island.

  I only hear the forty-foot hemlock tree in the Feders’ yard next door split in two. Its massive trunk tears twelve feet above the ground and would have free-fallen onto our garage had it not first sheared the gutter off the third floor of our house. Taking two stairs at a time to the picture window on the second-floor landing, I look out over the foliage of the giant fallen conifer now settled across the barn/garage and the back porch. While I’m still inspecting the damage from the first felled tree, with a tremendous crack of splitting wood a secondary limb from a century-old Norway maple in the yard of our neighbors on the northeastern side of the fence blows down, clears our fence, and crushes the Back Forty, the most productive quarter of my vegetable garden. The limb collapses the thicket of tomatoes, snaps the young fig tree in two at the soil line, pulverizes a majority of the collard greens, buries the callaloo, and splinters the roof of the high-rise chicken coop. My wristwatch—set ten ineffectual minutes ahead—reads 6:54 a.m.

  Five months ago, when all this started, I would have launched an immediate and manic effort to rescue and repair every corner of my shattered farm. March seems like a long time ago, this morning.

  The sick, green sky brightens, the howling wind dies down, and the punishing rain relents. From the second-floor window I watch the scattered chickens regroup, roosting in the dense foliage of the splintered hemlock. I lope back downstairs, poke around a pile of laundry, searching for my filthy work pants. No, this morning, before heading out the back door and tending to The Farm, I walk out the front door and start pulling felled tree limbs out of the road and off the neighbors’ cars.

  Since 1971 tornadoes have been classified using the Fujita scale, or F-scale. Prior to Professor Theodore “Ted” Fujita’s work, quantifying a tornado’s strength was impossible because the more powerful ones destroyed everything in their path, especially the delicate anemometers used to measure wind speed. Even less powerful twisters come on so quickly that it is nearly impossible to set up the weather tools that might measure them. What’s more, most tornadoes are such brief events that meteorologists don’t know they have struck until they are gone, making technology such as Doppler radar useless. Fujita addressed the problems of tornado measurement by examining and categorizing the damage each funnel cloud leaves behind.

  The Fujita scale gauges storm-damage severity, then extrapolates the wind speed in the twister from the debris at the scene. A storm that causes light damage to chimneys and broken tree branches is given the rank F-0, with winds judged to be between 40 and 72 mph. Storms causing moderate damage on the ground, ones pushing mobile homes off their foundations or flipping them over, get an F-1 rating, with winds assumed to be between 73 and 112 mph. An F-2 generates considerable damage: mobile homes are demolished and trees uprooted by winds between 113 and 157 mph. Severe damage, such as roofs and walls torn down, trains overturned, and cars thrown around, is caused by winds as strong as 205 mph, earning an F-3 rating. The killer storms (F-4 and F-5) cause what is classified as devastating violent damage. Winds whipping at 315 mph level well-constructed walls, tear homes from foundations carrying them considerable distances, and pick up and toss cars, often hurtling them hundreds of feet at hundreds of miles per hour.

  After striking Livingston, our F-2 tornado tears up trees in the Staten Island neighborhoods of South Beach and Fort Wadsworth directly under the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and heads east across the Narrows. It strikes Brooklyn as the first such storm to hit the borough since 1899, and it makes landfall at Seventy-fourth Street and Shore Parkway, the precise location of “Uncle Tune” Bergen’s farm. Heading northeast packing 135 mph winds, the whirl has no mobile homes to savage, so tears the roof off the car dealership, Bay Ridge Nissan, at Fifth Avenue at Sixty-sixth Street.

  At the very moment I am pulling the curtains from in front of our bedroom window, the twister is ripping the face from a row house on Sixty-second Street at Sixth Avenue. As the twister veers east through Leif Ericson Park, it uproots half the trees. At Fifty-eighth Street the winds are 110 mph; they have slowed, but the twister is still powerful enough to tear roofs from eleven houses on one block as it begins to climb the terminal moraine on which Sunset Park is built, shattering windows with debris and shifting cars out of their parking spaces into the street and onto sidewalks.

  It skitters along Caton Avenue, reaching Coney Island Avenue with enough strength to topple thirty century-old trees, blocking streets and crushing cars all around our home. The twister rains debris on the tracks of the Q and D trains in the subway trench at East Eighteenth Street, and then, nine miles away from where it was born, and just five hundred yards beyond The Farm, our tornado vanishes.

  All the earth’s weather occurs within the troposphere, a six-mile band between the earth’s surface and the atmospheric lid known as the tropopause. Within this band the air is dense enough to hold moisture. The rapid exchange of this moisture is the source of the planet’s most dramatic weather.

  Never mind how varied the planet’s climate is, never mind that temperatures range more than two hundred degrees, or that humidity ranges from zero to 100 percent; still, with all this diversity, the atmosphere unceasingly seeks equilibrium. Warm air rises. Cold air sinks. Dry air rises. Moist air sinks. As they do, static air, air closer to equilibrium, flows in to fill the voids the more dynamic air leaves behind.

  Cool air sinks and increases in pressure (just as water becomes denser—solid, in fact—when it turns to ice). When falling cool air reaches the earth’s surface, it washes out over the landscape, pushing static air ahead of it. Wind is nothing more than air moving from an area of high pressure to one of low pressure. An otherwise unremarkable weather front grows and becomes a thunderstorm if the conditions persist while ever more dynamic air replaces static air.

  A cloud is born when moist air is forced upward and cools to a point where it can no longer hold water vapor; that vapor condenses to form minute water droplets. One of the primary ways that clouds are differentiated is by their altitude. High-altitude clouds—cirrus, cirrocumulus, and cirrostratus—reside between three and seven miles above sea level. Altostratus and altocumulus are in the midrange, lie between one and a half and three miles above the sea. The low-lying stratus, stratocumulus, cumulus, nimbostratus, and cumulonimbus are where all the action is. Their bases hang less than one and a half miles above sea level.

  Thunderstorms that create twisters can be caused by dramatic weather such as hurricanes, but just as easily by simple low-pressure systems. Typically a thin layer of warmer, drier air gets jammed up between cold, dry air of the upper reaches of the troposphere and warm, humid air sitting on the earth’s surface. This sliver of warmer air, sandwiched as it is between the dynamic weather and the cold air above it, serves as a cap on the storm; it both increases the heat and humidity of the air below it and regulates growth of the storm below it. It usually contains a storm long enough for it to collapse in on itself.

  The only opportunity a thunderstorm has to b
ecome a tornado occurs when that cap cracks, slammed by the arrival of a strong front of upper-level air disturbance. Once the cap is cracked, the warm air in the storm column soars upward through the rupture—sometimes as high as fifty thousand feet at speeds as fast as 150 mph. As this air rises into the upper atmosphere, it expands in the reduced air pressure, cooling as it does so, making the moisture it holds condense and form rain and hail. The storm continues to rise. In stronger storms, as the column rockets upward, the rate at which this transfer of potential (latent) energy becomes kinetic (heat) grows exponentially. At some point the vertical column meets an upper atmospheric wind, which pulls the top of the storm with it, creating the signature anvil cloud of a severe thunderstorm. A severe thunderstorm can become a tornado if the column contains low but persistent winds that rotate the column counterclockwise. The rotating column (a mesocyclone) is drawn down to earth by moisture-laden air. As it does, it is again compressed in the denser air at lower altitudes, and as the column narrows, it rotates faster (just like the whirlpool at a bathtub drain). This entire process can take less than ten minutes.

  Still, 999 in 1,000 thunderstorms collapse in chaos. But that one whips itself into that perversely regimented, closely contained weather system: the tornado.

  Some tornadoes touch the ground with an impact zone as wide as two and a half miles; others—some very small to begin with, some savage behemoths already beginning to die—can have a footprint just seven feet wide. Most are no more than one hundred feet wide on the ground. The storm’s intense focus is what makes a strike seem so personal.

  When a hurricane rolls in, entire communities, huge swaths of coastline, suffer. But when a tornado strikes, it can destroy a home, kill everyone inside, and the neighbor only forty feet away might feel no effect, only hear the twister as it passes by. The individualized havoc reaped by a twister makes the storm so sinister. Hurricanes are introduced to their victims via the media long before charging into them from over the ocean or a gulf. Tornadoes are often gone long before the media or most anybody knows they were there. Twisters don’t get names. The twisters that live on in memory are known only for the communities they destroy.