BEAT THE SYSTEM

From: Memoirs Of An Imbecile

c 1979 Tristan Winter

At one point in my early youth, I lived with my family in the very heart of the darkest, dampest redwood forest in Northern California. Like so many other victims of contemporary liberalism, we had been prompted to adopt a lifestyle of rural seclusion in response to the collapse of 60s radicalism -my mother being primarily responsible for the decision, just as she had been the most active in the previous era of mass action and hilarity.

Sequestered away in the depths of a wild ravine, our village had grown from the ghostly remains of an old Victorian logging camp, later promoted as a summer resort for wealthy San Franciscans in the early 1920s. By the time we’d arrived all the famous hotels had evaporated, the second-growth forest had developed beyond civilized proportions, completely obliterating the light or even warmth of the sun, and all that remained of its erstwhile glory was the dilapidated and highly dangerous little footbridge over the creek. Distributed along the wrong side of the ravine, tucked away in the most unlikely nooks and dells, stood the hundred or so abandoned cottages that constituted the village. The nearest store was in the next town, a mile and a half downstream.

I remember when my mother first took us to see the house. We drove up and down hills, along the winding, labyrinthine roads hardly larger than footpaths, until we came upon a large two-story house painted in the fairy tales colors of a Bavarian chalet looming up from an erratic garden, which boasted a broken miniature windmill and a kidney shaped fishpond. My mother negotiated the closing of the purchase while my father, my sisters and I tiptoed around the inside of what was then the oddest house I’d ever explored. When we had ceased our wanderings, we found my mother accepting a final word of eulogy from the reluctant seller. He looked like W.C. Fields and, although we could not suspect it at the time, he talked even more like him. He threw open his arms and explained: “Fort Twinkie is an amazing place! It’s ten degrees cooler in the summer, and ten degrees warmer in the winter.” He was right about summer.

Every house in the village was constructed of single-ply uninsulated redwood siding. Central heating was unknown and everybody was equipped with a metal wood stove for heat. Our first winter was a disaster; we had no wood stove and, although there was a fireplace, we had neglected to accumulate any wood before the first big snow. The house was fraudulently outfitted with an electric oven, which proved less than useless as the electric lines for the whole village plunged out of commission at least three times per winter. Our only recourse was to board up the rest of the house and camp -five people, three cats and a dog- in the living room, where we cooked over the open fire in the leaky fireplace. My mother frantically occupied herself with keeping the animals from knocking over kerosene lamps while the rest of us searched aimlessly for stray pieces of wood along the roadside, propping them up and sliding down their frozen lengths in futile attempts to kick them into proper sized fuel. We survived for two arctic weeks in this manner, and when the snows dissolved we set about procuring a gas oven and an Ashley wood burner.

When spring finally began to filter through the woods and the initial defeats faded, my mother decided that, as a revolutionary family unit, we were going to beat the system by becoming totally self-sufficient. Her first inspiration led to the shortest and most disastrous adventure in chicken farming in the history of agriculture. The national economy was suffering and the price of eggs soaring, hence she decided we were going to cultivate or own eggs. In addition to my inherent revulsion of chickens, my asthma was still bad at the time, so I refused in advance to have anything to do with the enterprise. Yes, for reasons of health and well-being, it was unanimously agreed that I should be excused from the venture.

The next afternoon my father returned from work with a boxful of baby chicks. He then set about constructing a temporary pen for them to occupy until such time as we could build a real hen house, complete with roosts and roof. It took the greater part of two days, but when he had finished, the chicks had all the modern comfort that a square yard of packing crate could afford them. My mother was already projecting a strategy for marketing the extra eggs to the villagers when we discovered that only two of the twelve chicks were female, or, technically, chickens. My father tried to rectify the problem by bringing home a few more chicks which he had been assured were female, but chickens have a peculiar habit of not accepting new members of their breed, and when morning came my father had to clean up the mutilated remains of the new chicks, who had been pecked to horrible death.

After the tragedy of the mutilated newcomers my father had a nervous breakdown, and had to absent himself for a couple of weeks. How it came about I am not exactly sure, but the fact is I don’t believe my mother ever set eyes on the chickens after having nodded her approval on that first day, and for some reason my sisters never seemed to be around, so I had to overcome my allergies and prejudices and tend the little monsters. I vaguely recall feeding them handfuls of some sort of grain, which we would purchase in fifty-pound sacks at the feed store twenty miles distant, and which was supposed to make them grow big and healthy without too many startling side effects; filling and refilling a rusty tin with water from the garden hose; and, perhaps not as frequently as I might have, reaching my arm into the lopsided packing crate pen and scooping out shovelfuls of chicken feces while the inhabitants pecked me in protest. Though I detested those idiotic birds more than they could have known, I didn’t envy them their miserable life. However, the magic grain produced good results; the time had come, my mother proclaimed, to undertake the construction of a genuine chicken house.

There was no need for idle speculation insofar as the location was concerned. Behind our house was an old outhouse which the mysterious architect had built, installed a porcelain urinal in, and then padlocked and abandoned, where it remained until a friend and I demolished it to beautify the spot with our projected chicken pen. There might have been something unusual or even valuable in the unused pit, but we weren’t interested enough to go a-probing, and I was exasperated with the entire business of chickens and their upkeep, so we merely filled the hole and set about digging out places for the four corner posts. Unfortunately, the soil in the village was a densely packed variety of volcanic adobe, and it took three days to dig out holes for the posts, which proved to be highly unstable anyway.

Before further construction was undertaken my mother and I made another expedition to the feed store to buy a hundred-pound sack of gain and listen to the toothless old proprietor counsel us on which kind of wire mesh to buy for the floor of the pen. Because of the explosive population of dogs in the area, either my mother or I had come up with a brilliant design whereby the pen would be elevated above the reach of any potential canine predators. The only problem with our design, as the bucolic expert advised us, was to find the right sized mesh which would enable the chickens to defecate as much as they wished and at the same time still strut around freely, without having their legs fall through the wire, where they would remain until some dog came along and bit them off. Naturally the only solution was to postpone the purchase until we went home and measured the chickens’ feet, whereby I believed we could deduce an average dimension.

When we reached the house, we were greeted with the spectacle of my father, who had recently rejoined us, and my sisters running around the grounds in odd, low-crouched positions, much like humanity must have done thousands of years ago. As it turned out, one of the roosters, probably a little more intelligent than the rest of the community, decided that he had had enough of his parsimonious circumstances and somehow pecked open the makeshift latch my father had installed on the crate. The birds weren’t actually courageous enough to flee the city limits, but they seemed adamant about evading the clutches of my father and sisters. Several of the neighborhood dogs were also in on the chase. When night fell and we had finally rounded up the rebellious fowl, I was compelled to abandon the notion of averaging chicken feet and content myself with averaging the remaining chickens. Despite the afternoon’s carnage, I am proud to say that my mother’s vision and determination had not forsaken her; the only female chickens having been devoured by dogs, she insisted that we were devote the rest of our efforts to raising the roosters until such time as they were ripe for human mastication.

According to our more agriculturally inclined associates, the time for devouring the roosters was fast approaching. Consequently, we collectively elected this as an excuse to cease all further construction on the luxurious chicken pen, and the poor beasts, whom I still loathed, were condemned to live out their meager existence in the squalor of my father’s trapezoidal packing crate. I continued to attend to their needs to the best of my ability, but I still cringe in remorse whenever I recall the horror of those last few weeks. We were incapable of devising any means of improving the situation. My mother ceased to speak about our prisoners and my sisters were ashamed to bring their friends home lest they discovered our inhuman neglect and callousness. I dutifully changed the tin of stagnant water or occasionally slipped an enormous serving of magic chicken feed into that piteous slum, that hideous wooden dungeon unfit for even the smallest orphaned sparrow. Reluctantly, I tore up my blueprint for the pen, and with even more reluctance threw out the color photograph of Chairman Mao which I had planned to tack over the door of our glorious chicken commune.

One last, desperate rebellion boiled over the little box. Again we were too late to save some of the martyrs. Several rubbery dinners were lost that day, but the birds fought bravely, and if it wasn’t for the likelihood of them committing mass suicide, I never would have bothered to return those unfortunate few to their tiny, pungent, big-house.

The very next day my father took one of the squealing birds behind the house and laid him gently across a cropping block. With one trembling hand he held the rooster, with the other he held our wood-axe, gripping it firmly close to the blade. For half an hour my sisters and I huddled in the house while he spoke soft, soothing words of comfort to the screaming victim.

“Shh, it’s alright, don’t be afraid. It’s better this way. Shhh. Please don’t cry like that, little rooster. It will only hurt a little.”

I believe the poor thing was more terrified by being pinned to a chopping block and cooed at for such an interminable length of time than if he had sacrificed his palpitating brain without such promises of paradise. Nonetheless, my father went through with the business, and we had to send him away that night, as he had another nervous breakdown.

My mother gave the remaining two living roosters away to some friends who had a farm, and for many years we had one haunting lump in our freezer which nobody touched. It was some time before my father returned home, but when he did my mother had a nice adobe garden plot all plowed up for him to work in. That year we had two tomatoes and a cucumber.