Books of The Times
Living Off the Land, Surrounded by Asphalt
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/12/books/12book.html
By
DWIGHT GARNER
Published: June 11, 2009
I had a feeling I might like this memoir when I came upon on its first
sentence, a gentle twist on the opening of
Isak Dinesen’s “Out of Africa.” Here is Novella Carpenter: “I have a
farm on a dead-end street in the ghetto.”
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![[]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/06/12/books/novella-carpenter-190.jpg)
Julia Landau
Novella Carpenter
FARM CITY
The Education of an Urban Farmer
By
Novella Carpenter
276 pages. The Penguin Press. $25.95.
But I didn’t
truly fall in love with “Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer”
until I hit Page 38. That’s when the
bees that Ms. Carpenter has purchased
from a mail order company arrive at her post office in Oakland, Calif. A
panicked postal employee calls, begging her to pick them up because
they’re attracting other bees and “freaking everyone out.”
So Ms. Carpenter hurries over, picks up the humming box, and casually
plops it into the front basket of her bicycle. Then she has a parade. “I
proceeded to ride down Telegraph Avenue, laughing out loud at the bees
who tried to follow us amid the traffic,” she writes. “At stoplights I
looked down at the mesh box, the bees churning around, and told them to
get ready for” and here she gives her neighborhood’s nickname
“GhostTown.” Fresh, fearless and jagged around the edges, Ms. Carpenter’s
book, an account of how she raised not only fruit and vegetables but also
livestock on a small, scrubby abandoned lot in Oakland, puts me in mind
of Julie Powell’s “Julie & Julia” and Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat, Pray,
Love.”
Like those writers Ms. Carpenter is not a pampered girl or a
trustafarian; in fact she has a beautifully cranky side and can drink and
swear like a sailor. Like them too she is hyper-literate. The whole
beekeeping business is preceded by a bit of
Sylvia Plath’s poem “The Arrival of the Bee Box,” including these
excellent lines: “I lay my ear to furious Latin./I am not Caesar./I have
simply ordered a box of maniacs.”
And finally, like Ms. Powell and Ms. Gilbert, Ms. Carpenter is very, very
funny. She won’t kill the slugs that have wrecked her garden, as some
people propose, by drowning them in Budweiser, because “this seemed
suspiciously close to buying the slugs a beer, which was more generous
than I felt.” When
“
yoga people” suggest she stop drinking coffee, she thinks: “I want to
tell them maybe they should saw off their legs.”
“Farm City” begins as Ms. Carpenter and Bill, her auto-mechanic
boyfriend, move from Seattle to a small apartment in Oakland. They steer
clear of San Francisco, she writes, because they are misfits and because
San Francisco “is filled with successful, polished people.” Oakland, on
the other hand, “is scruffy, loud, unkempt.” They fit right in. They fill
their apartment, at least partly, with furniture they’ve scavenged from
the street.
It is a rough neighborhood, “a postcard of urban decay.” There are
gunfights and drug dealers; homeless men wander about, muttering. Oakland
has the highest murder rate in the country, she notes. She and Bill take
it all in and begin referring to the lost hairpieces that flutter down
the street they have fallen off the heads of hookers as
“tumbleweaves.”
The garden Ms. Carpenter begins to create, at first squatting and then
getting the owner’s permission, is anything but bucolic. A loud freeway
runs nearby; the place borders on a repair shop and junkyard; a billboard
overlooking the lot warns against sexual predators.
Before long, however, she transforms this lot into a small slice of
paradise. “There was a lime tree near the fence, sending out a perfume of
citrus blossoms from its dark green leaves. Stalks of salvias and mint,
artemisia and penstemon. The thistlelike leaves of artichokes glowed
silver. Strawberry runners snaked underneath raspberry canes.” She begins
to add animals the bees, turkeys, ducks, a goose, rabbits and finally
pigs to the mix.
“Farm City” is filled with terrific stories. But as it strides artfully
along, you begin to see that Ms. Carpenter has other things, even a
larger argument, on her mind. Her own parents were back-to-the-landers
whose marriage went bust when she was only 4. She blames rural solitude.
And by gardening in a bustling urban space she wants to have it all:
ducks and heirloom artichokes and, well, friends.
“I still regard the country as a place of isolation, full of beauty
maybe but mostly loneliness,” she observes. “So when friends plan their
escape to the country (after they save enough money to buy rural
property), where they imagine they’ll split wood, milk goats and become
one with nature, I shake my head. Don’t we ever learn anything from the
past?”
At heart “Farm City” is more about Ms. Carpenter’s experiences with
livestock than it is about growing plump
tomatoes. In fact “Farm City” is a serious, if tragicomic, meditation
on raising and then killing your own animals. She wants to have “a
dialogue with life,” she writes, and she realizes she can do that only by
also having a dialogue with death.
Animals run through this book like messy toddlers at a busy playground,
and Ms. Carpenter names and adores just about all of them. The bustle is
invigorating. But she is raising most of them as meat animals and sees no
contradiction in loving them and, ultimately, seeing them as painlessly
and humanely as possible to their ends. There is gallows humor here. She
dispatches a duck in her bathtub and notes that it “went from being a
happy camper to a being a headless camper.”
The two pigs, Red Durocs, are the biggest job. They eat so much that by
the end Ms. Carpenter and Bill are forced to spend hours foraging through
Dumpsters to feed them. These pigs once ate pellets. “Now they were
eating Chinese,” she proudly writes, “like good urban pigs.”
On one of her Dumpster-diving missions, for which she often wears a
headlamp, Ms. Carpenter meets a local chef, Chris Lee, who was for many
years a farm produce buyer for
Alice Waters’s restaurant, Chez Panisse. He allows her to feed her
pigs from the glorious dumpster behind his own restaurant, Eccolo.
Once her pigs are killed (and badly, to her horror, by a woman she’d
hired to do the job), Mr. Lee helps her carefully make prosciutto and
salami and soppressata out of them. “We had used all the parts of the
pig,” she writes, “the ultimate show of respect.”
“Farm City” is a consistently involving book that includes one of the
purest expressions of happiness I’ve read in a while, so I’ll end with
that: “I felt young and healthy,” Ms. Carpenter writes, “and nostalgic
for the present.”
Santa Barbara Permaculture Network
an educational
non-profit since 2000
(805) 962-2571
P.O. Box 92156, Santa Barbara, CA 93190
margie@sbpermaculture.org
www.sbpermaculture.org
"We are like trees,
we must create new leaves, in new directions, in order to grow." -
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