[lit-ideas] Sunday Twofer
- From: David Ritchie <profdritchie@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 8 Dec 2013 11:21:25 -0800
"Who better than a Scot to advise the president of the U of O on tribal
governance? Someone from Portland State probably, which has an institute of
tribal government and shortly will mount a tribal food summit." I was having
these late and whimsical thoughts on a severe cold night. Normally a house is
just a house hereabouts, we don't go in for fancy, but when the wind comes down
the gorge, bringing Alberta weather in its borrowed shopping cart, then
suddenly a house is really quite something, a marvelous invention, so much
better than a cave or yurt. While I was supervising the dog's inspection of
messages and reflecting on the Modern World, three teenagers wandered down the
street, one of them was wearing shorts. There was no menace. I gave them the
longest opportunity to say, "help, we're lost," or some such thing, but on they
went. I can only hope that whatever was pumping in that young blood let go,
and eventually they found a warm blanket's security.
At twelve or maybe seventeen degrees fahrenheit in their unheated coop, the
chickens decided to take up theater, adapting one of John Le Carre's better
known volumes, "The Chicken Who Came in From the Cold." When I went to see how
rehearsals were coming, they were their usual polite selves, "Thank you for the
invitation, but we think we'll take a raincheck on wandering today. We're up
to our necks in this."
"Besides, a god has covered the ground with stuff."
"Quite white, that."
"And cold."
"It's inconvenient."
"Very inconvenient."
Though they were clearly still thinking in theological terms, they were moving
towards that ecumenical accommodation which cold offers. When you are sharing
the same perch through the long and frosty night, whether or not god is two
beings in one or the force which through the green fuse drives, becomes a less
urgent question. What matters is how you remember the moonlight sonata when it
once came wafting through the summer air, how well toast goes down, the freedom
you felt when your haunches first pushed you to take-off speed. Memories get a
chicken through.
Unlike egg laying, pooh ejection in (or more accurately from... and accurate in
not actually the exact term) the chicken does not expose said bird to
predation. The feat (if feat it is) is accomplished mid-stride. Walk, walk,
walk, pooh...just keep going. I mention this indelicate subject only to
explain why, while we have been committed to the free-range chicken experience,
we are beginning to appreciate the possible virtues of fences. If chickens
continue to take an interest in burglary, casing our windows from time to time,
there will soon be too much evidence of their forwardness for forensics and
cleaners to cope. We are... back logged; snow and cold are in this respect
welcome.
The other problem with free range is not all its rules and aspects are
universally understood. At a hastily convened all-fowl co-operative meeting I
explained that the idea is, while having the freedom to run around wherever you
wish, you return *to the coop* to lay. Nesting under bushes or other
convenient places would be from this day forward streng verboten.
"Nazi," muttered Wensleydale, whose blue eggs we haven't found in weeks. "Ours
is the embrace of nature."
David Ritchie,
Portland,
Oregon------------------------------------------------------------------
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