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Bluffs along the Jack's Fork River just above Blue Spring, Texas County, Mo - Click to Enlarge |
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My Life After the Chickens Lately, I've been watching some of the goings-on as a handful of people have been setting themselves up to live in the country, many for the first time. I think it's interesting to watch people dealing with things they've never encountered before. Never having bought a seventeen-ton-truckload of gravel, or hired a well-drilling crew doesn't exactly classify you as a babe-in-the-woods, but that's the feeling you get. To establish a home where once there was only woods requires quite a bit of planning and foresight, as you have to make decisions that you may have to live with for a long time. Watching all this take place always reminds me of when we moved here to Exclamation Pointe back in '77. When we came here, the farm had a few sheds, two big wooden barns and a large chicken house. You’ll notice that I didn't mention any dwelling - for humans, that is - I'd always wanted to design my own house. I grew up not far from here. At the time we moved back, I hadn't lived in the country for several years, and that had been long enough to develop a strong distaste for dealing with traffic and of having neighbors right on the edge of my lawn. The year before, I'd bought an acreage on the other side of town that was surrounded by the National Forest, but the government dudes had finally made it clear that they weren't going to let me bring in electricity, and we decided we weren't willing to get by without it. I'd picked a beautiful spot that was one of the more scenic locations in the Mark Twain National Forest that the government didn't already own. They have since been able to correct that situation, having gotten rid of me. Trying to squeeze a little compassion out of the state had wasted several months, and we were already a year behind our schedule for moving to the country. We decided that we could get out of town quicker if we were to convert the chicken house, the best of the buildings, into living quarters. Funny, how easy it is to use those words, "living quarters". They just sort of roll off your tongue, and if you're anything like I was, maybe you don't spend enough time thinking about exactly what they mean. This was the summer of 1977. I was still married to my first wife at the time, and Christi and Lori were about ten and five. I was so anxious to move out of town that I'd have lived in a tent. My wife and I negotiated that she'd go along with my scheme if "reasonable living quarters" could be provided, and in this instance, that would mean indoor plumbing and electricity. When I say this was a chicken house, I don't mean a little 4 x 8 wire and wooden shed. This was what is known to poultry aficionados as a broiler-house, because it's intended use was to rear young chickens, in fairly large quantities, to the appropriate age when one would want to broil said birds, whenever that might be. Inside the bleak exterior, there was a cold and unforgiving concrete floor, a few dull windows that you had to stoop to see out of, and lots of bare wood. We put batts of fiberglass insulation between the wall studs, and in late summer it seemed as if it would be plenty cozy in the winter. We hired a neighbor to do a nearly-competent job of wiring the place, and a couple of were-plumbers to install a genuine bathroom with its very own septic tank just behind the building. The building itself was about sixteen feet wide, and maybe sixty feet long. Not unlike a typical mobile home configuration. Beyond that, the comparison becomes strained because mobile homes are primarily designed for humans, whereas chicken-houses are designed, as one might suppose, for chickens. This one was built of rough-sawn oak and someone had replaced the chicken-wire on the south side with casement windows of the sort more preferred by humans and the higher primates. Perhaps you have never taken a moment to reflect on the essential differences between man and chicken, but I assure you that they are substantial. First, there is the matter of lifestyle. Chickens get to party all day long, spending their lives cackling with their friends and relatives while gorging themselves in front of troughs of food, their every whim (be it alfalfa pellets, water, or more alfalfa pellets, or more water) is catered to them by the doting and benevolent chicken farmer. We poor humans, on the other hand, have to fend for ourselves. Further, as the astute reader may note, more often than not, chickens are of markedly shorter stature than humans. There were many occasions when this simple fact of physiology would become very relevant to our lifestyles, but the one that is most clearly embedded in my memory is this: If you have any small children in the house, then you know that they are much easier to maintain and care for when they are asleep. That principal in mind, we always tried to maximize the amount of time that children in our care spent unconscious. Up until the time of moving to the chicken-house, I had conditioned myself to come flying out of bed in the morning, then to sprint across the bedroom, tossing myself at the alarm clock, there to wrestle it to the floor and still the thunder in its infernal goozle, lest it wake the children. Now that the girls' bedroom was only a suspended blanket away from ours, this situation was all the more critical. (continued)
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