Photo by Tim Vetter

Everyone danced at my sister’s wedding.

The wedding singer was once the black-haired lead in our school plays, three years ahead of me. By now he had dropped the Sixth-Year poses and his hair was grey, but all the years of leppin’ to Chuck Berry and Van Morrison and Neil Diamond had kept him free of the usual Irish gut. Business was good—he and the band had worked every night for the past five months—and he seemed to enjoy the liturgy of other people’s songs. With his black shirt and pants, he had the hands-off charisma of a good-looking curate.

His heart sank when he saw us come in, he said. Sixty five people in a ballroom that would hold more than two hundred for a summer wedding—and on top of that, he recognized a good number of them as his teachers from twenty years ago. The rest were our neighbours, who had known my sister since she was born, and our aunts and uncles, who were in for the day from their farms in Roscommon and Tipperary. How was he to warm up a crowd like that?

And then the long-stemmed bride and her new husband finished their first dance, and the band launched a waltz, and all the friends and neighbours and aunts and uncles filed out to the dance floor and paired up. Here were Siobhán and Pat, Dónal and Mary, Nora and Denis—the naming order for each couple as established and natural as their moves. The Roscommon uncle I hadn’t seen in 20 years danced with the aunt I remembered as a bride. My neighbour Pat refused to dance with anyone but his wife—but how well he danced with his wife! Esther and Martin, who had been there to greet me when I was born in Zambia 35 years ago, now waltzed for Claire’s wedding.

They all did. The graduates of the 1960s ballrooms swirled around the dance floor like cream in black coffee. The under-forties made circles, unskilled but enthusiastic. The toddler flower girl raised her skirts over her head and shrieked, while the older kids chased the white balloons they’d blown up the night before.

A few nights before the wedding, we girls had made our parents tell us again about the night they’d met, at that céilí dance in Cork in 1968. Their friends used to go out dancing all the time, Mum said; all night, all kinds of music. No drink or drugs to keep them going—it was just pure craic. She felt so sorry for the young ones now, trying to meet someone in the nightclub scene she’d witnessed on Claire’s hen night in Limerick the week before. Shouting drunks, thumping music, sloshing beer, married fellas on the pull, bottle fights in the Ladies. Those weren’t our only options, we told her, but I believed her when she said they’d had more fun.

After decades of Christmas drinks and summer barbecues and year-round bottomless cups of tea, I’d never seen our friends and family dance. They jitterbugged and foxtrotted. Dad danced with each daughter, and none of us could dance like Mum. Everyone gave it up for Tutti Frutti, and shook arms high for Brown-Eyed Girl. We made my sister’s boyfriend show us the moves for his oh-so-serious Dance-Offs with his rugby teammates, including the ultimate winner, Reversing Around the Dance Floor: one arm draped in mid-air, the other turning an imaginary steering wheel, while you glide backward and make beeping sounds.

When the band took a break, a musician friend set up her trad band to play The Siege of Ennis. It’s the easiest of the traditional Irish set dances, but many of us hadn’t done it since primary school, and others had never learned it at all. In vain our friend Seán tried to call the sets—“Slip sides, change back, swing to the right…”—as the Canadians and the under-forties flailed, and the older men swung the bridesmaids til the Guinness churned in our bellies. A flushed guest succumbed to a swing with extra elbow grease, and landed on the bride’s train. When it was over we called for more sets—Fallaí Luimní, The Walls of Limerick, or Ag Baint an Fhéir, The Haymaker’s Jig—but we didn’t deserve the efforts of such fine and serious musicians. I felt a little guilty when they packed up the bodhrán and the rosin and handed us back to the wedding singer.

For children, Irish weddings are still about fizzy orange and Coke and Taytos, and racing around a hotel unchecked, and getting twirled by the bridesmaids, and letting your mouth hang open while the younger men teach you The Robot. People you don’t know come up to you and give you money and tell you you’re a lovely girl or boy. It’s magic. I know—I was a child at the weddings of some of these dancers.

My uncle J.—another I hadn’t seen since I was a young teenager—shyly handed over a creased photograph he’d brought for me. In it, he had the dark looks of a young George Best, and I was sitting on his lap with my curly-headed cousin. Our full names were written on the back, though we were only babies. It was dated Dec 2 1973: the day before he married my aunt.

I rattled off life-bumps for him—London, New York, divorce, backpacking, San Francisco—and when I saw his stricken look it occurred to me that I was the only wedding guest who was divorced. It’s the kind of news that doesn’t filter out to the quieter men in a family, and he was shocked and grieved that I’d had to go through such a thing. For me, it was only a fact, not a feeling, and I had to cast back five years to reach the rawness that matched his.

Divorce wasn’t legalized in Ireland until after I left, in 1995. Most of these friends and relatives were still in their fractious forties then, and might have been tempted to split if separation had been sanctioned. It seemed archaic and cruel to confine people to bad marriages, and I’d still vote for legal divorce today. Yet the patina of a mellowed marriage is lovelier than the shine of fresh romance, and without a social structure that supported enduring love—in both senses—we would have lost many relationships that could have been restored. If, when you’re sixty years old, you can dance joyfully with the one that brung ya, then you’ve earned your great luck.

I thought about how we would have celebrated this day in the U.S. or Canada or England: the delicate seating plans to accommodate merged and cleaved families; the reception briefings on splits and re-marriages. Love is too tough to be left to couples alone, and that’s what the wedding singer acknowledged when he closed the night by sending our bride and her Canadian groom under the steepled arms of the people who love them, while he bawled “Everybahhdy…needs somebahhdy…”

Earlier, I’d given a speech about what it meant for emigrants like my sister and me to be part of a gathering like that. We aren’t rootless—that’s a different problem entirely. But we don’t have tap roots, burying deep in a single place for nourishment. Ours are runners: we grow by extending outwards to make new plants. We have have too many roots entirely—tendrils that pull us to Limerick and Dublin and Ottawa and New York and San Francisco, and more tendrils that tug us toward the others who have moved. We dream of the mythical party where all our beloveds will be under one roof, even as we know it won’t ever happen.

In a rushed world, where “I have to work” isn’t called out as the lie it usually is, we know how rare it is to be surrounded by decades-worth of friendships and memories. Between the Caher Road neighbours and the Crescent teachers and the old friends, there were about 2,000 years of affection and friendship gathered in that room to send Claire and Glen off into their married lives. I was proud of the dowry we raised.

Happy 37th anniversary, Mum and Dad.

I’m making French bread to go with breakfast eggs from Cleo the chicken. I’ve never worked with yeast before. It breathes, it stretches, and it smells like a sleepy lover—how could you not say good morning to such a substance? Tim makes fun of me when I wake up my dough with flour and water, and chat to it about the night it’s had, and show it the moves I learned last night watching Saturday Night Fever. But I’m in the city today, where there are no chickens to shimmy with over tinned sweetcorn. And it’s less crazy to talk to spores and birds than to screens and cars, no?

Because the internet is all about telling the world what you had for breakfast…

“The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”—Samuel Beckett, Murphy

“Welcome to John Wayne International Airport. The current Homeland Security threat level is Orange. To enhance your safety, and to avoid transporting dangerous goods, please do not leave baggage unattended. Please report suspicious or unattended packages to law enforcement personnel.”

“We have a high degree of need to protect structure.”—San Diego County Fire Chief, on NBC News

Anaheim, California should be paved over, if it weren’t already. We’ve been going there weekly for six months, yet my friend J. and I still get confused between the 57 North and the 55 as we leave the airport. Our plasticky rental cars get no respect on these freeways, which crawl with wide-arsed vehicles that are probably bought with the profits from p*n*s enl*rgement spam. We cut them off through incompetence, and get cut off in our turn. Who cares? It’s not as if they’re human.

With names like “Hotel Drive,” “Convention Drive,” and “Airport Way,” the streets round here don’t even try. We can’t get a purchase on the geography, so we learn to swerve into U-turns. We drive past Christian superstores, Disneyland hotels, and PetCo chains. Cell towers and bulldozers and parking lots. We look forward to our few landmarks: Fritz That’s Too, our favorite strip-joint, or Mr. Stox, an early 1980s power restaurant straight out of Caddyshack. The memory of dinner there makes us laugh every time.

We drive by strip malls and theme malls and self-styled anti-malls, where the women have padded lips, new breasts, and pale hair. It’s the opposite of camouflage—without them, you disappear at thirty. Their daughters wear skirts that my friend G. describes as “two inches from the good stuff.” Surrounded by modifications, I’m struck by how human beings are hard-wired for facial pattern recognition. I catch myself staring at people in Starbucks queues, searching for symmetries and flaws, trying to tell what’s been altered. Cosmetic surgery is unsettling, in the way that shaved eyebrows are unsettling, and I fantasize that some Hallowe’en the whole population of Orange County will wear t-shirts printed with their first driver’s licence photos, for easy comparison.

Our usual hotel is full, and we call this one the Willy Loman Memorial Marriott. Instead of room service, there’s a communal mini-bar at front desk—a fridge with a tray of tiny liquor bottles, Lean Cuisines, and frozen burritos. At 10 pm, J. knocks on my door and holds up a miniature Dewar’s scotch and a Snickers bar. “Dinner,” she says, my organic, vegetarian friend. “I just wanted someone to witness it.” We make up German words to describe the feeling of opening the door to a lousy hotel room: Hiltonschmerz. Scheissekarpetzgeist.

At breakfast, men eat pallid eggs and make notes on their PowerPoint decks with cheap hotel pens. They’re already in meetings, and it’s just past dawn. Soon they’ll waltz to the ballroom to show the numbers at the All-Hands, while their colleagues doodle. Their company name is pegged up on one of those old-fashioned event boards. They sell drug testing solutions.

John Wayne swaggers at the entrance to his own airport—cast in bronze, bow-legged, a life-sized 12 feet tall. Those security announcements loop on the intercom, full of robotic warmth, while we line up to be searched and have our hummus confiscated. At the departure level, two fat cops on Segways roll past a wall of windows that frames a dark orange sky. The Santa Ana bellows is still blowing on the wildfires to the south, and we can smell the smoke even in the sealed terminal. The air is itchy and thick.

“Keep your hands up! Don’t touch anything. “ A woman sprays Purell on every surface near her son, murdering bacteria, while he asks where I’m going. He’s five, and his name is Miles. He holds his hands up patiently and kicks his light-up sneakers. “M-I-L-E-S, Miles,” he says, mumbling the last letters as she swabs his mouth.

J. and I soothe ourselves with trashy magazines for the plane ride home. The sales clerk at the airport newsstand is a friend by now, and every week we discuss Britney Spears. While J. counts out the dollars for People she asks her a question. Something innocuous; about weekend plans, maybe. However it comes up, the woman answers that, well, at the moment, she’s homeless. She lives in her car, sometimes sleeps on friends’ couches. She’s hopeful that something will turn up soon.

Behind us, there’s a line of tired people waiting, without much interest, to find out if Brad really has walked out on Angelina this time. Or was it the other way round? Everyone wants to escape.

For Caoimhe, born September 12, 2007. Her name is pronounced KWEE-veh, (more or less), and it means “grace.” Caoimhe is Liam’s sister. The Ken Burns Effect is a default setting on Apple’s iPhoto, which pans and zooms through a photo album to make it look like a movie.

KEN BURNS EFFECT
You yawn, you doze, you blink and gaze,
You pout and grasp your granny’s thumb.
To learn your strength, your knuckles squeeze
That wrinkled hand that shields your bum.

Twelve feelings float across your face,
Twelve photos glide across my screen.
The frown, the fist, the curling lip:
You haven’t learned to hide or preen.

These pictures bring me cells, not bits:
Your pudding rolls, your morning mewl
I sniff your powder-cotton smell
I nibble toes, kiss dewdrop drool

Your belly, with its shallow tides,
Is springy silk, like rising dough.
I gnaw my lip. I’m saving breath
To leave more air untouched for you.

“O child of grace, of butter made,”
Our Irish mothers used to say.
You store ten thousand furled-up lives
Which stories will you tell some day?

For you, I pause my modern march
To learn again what I forget:
The dazzle in a breath, a toe.
You teach me to stay here—and yet

I flip ahead. Who will you be
At fifty-four? At seventeen?
O child of grace, your slideshow pans,
And I cast you, star of my own dreams.

From Tim:

Helen died this morning a little before dawn.

Her condition hadn’t changed much when I got back from work last night so I set up a heated infirmary ward for her in the bathroom. She seemed to understand that I was trying to help her and didn’t resist being picked up and relocated. She felt very emaciated.

She didn’t move much but stood erect and steady on a bed of newspapers. She drank a lot of water and took cooked oats, blueberries, and omelette scraps from my fingers.

Later she lay on my lap and let me stroke her and seemed very peaceful. I set her on a jury-rigged roost, a 2×4 spanned between the toilet and the bathtub. I collected moths from the windows outside and she snapped them up from my fingers with apparent relish.

She seemed bright-eyed and alert when I turned the lights out so I thought the little feeding might help her pull through. But around 4:30 I woke to the sound of thrashing and by the time I got down from the loft she was on the floor dead.

I buried her up on the hillside overlooking the house.

The others birds aren’t showing any signs of physical distress yet so fingers crossed this wasn’t something contagious. The three older hens do suddenly seem baffled and sullen. They didn’t want to come down from the roost this morning, and aren’t venturing far from the coop. I guess every time they lose a ringleader they have to work through considerable social adjustment.

No doubt in my mind now that they know and remember individuals and suffer some sense of dislocation when somebody dies, possibly something like our grief.

Tim’s girls had spent a near-perfect chicken morning rolling in the dust, clucking over worms, and swerving from the randy rooster, and they objected to being shooed back into the coop so early. He was cool and heartless about it, like Tony Soprano ditching Carmela for an afternoon at the Bada Bing. We were going to the Santa Cruz County Fair in Watsonville to gawk at far more glamorous show poultry.

(I’d never imagined that one day I’d drive two hours on a motorbike to look at prize chickens. It makes me wonder what more excitement waits for me.)

It cost five dollars to park at the fair, and nine dollars each to get in. While we waited to be searched for weapons—poor America—sticky, cranky children trailed out with their prize goldfish. I’m glad that goldfish have short memories.

Tim bought a corndog right away. I wanted to go to the 4-H tent. At work I study what “youth” do, online and at the mall, and for moral peace I needed to see that some of them still grow radishes and make hand-drawn exhibits on The Life Cycle of the Mosquito. I’m descended from farmers, and grew up across the road from a dairy farm, and so of course, the teen me wouldn’t touch muck or muck-related things. Now that I’m old, I think farming is a wholesome pursuit for young people—especially in a country that calls soil “dirt.”

Small baskets of produce were arranged as carefully as a Yangon market stand. The best had purple ribbons. “Third Prize, Patty Pan Squash, Olivia Kohler, Age 7, Santa Cruz.” Three days into the fair, some of the carved vegetable creatures buzzed with fruitflies; soggier versions of the masterpieces in the photos propped beside them.

At the entrance to The Wonderful World of Reptiles, a crowd gathered around a man wearing an albino boa constrictor. Next door, in the Farmyard Tent, a red-haired teen sat in a pen supervising a miniature horse and goat. He stared a thousand yards past the punters who lined up to ooh and ahh as if we were in the Costco meat department come to life. The boy wore his disdain like the martyred llama that slouched opposite, under a sign that explained how donkeys and llamas differ. (“Different: Llamas dislike being looked at or touched.” “Similar: Donkeys and llamas leave their droppings in the same spot every day.”)

A hefty eleven-year-old—clearly the red-head’s sister—took more pride in being the expert on the bonsai Brahma bull in her pen. “He’s three years old. He’s not going to grow any more. I’m totally used to taking care of him,” she said with authority.

But the real draw was in the next stall, where a miniature ram called Napoleon lounged with his two short girlfriends. His shorn fleece had grown into a light, elegant sweater, revealing a huge, shaggy appendage that swung like a termites’ nest between his back legs.

“?Son los cojones?” said a man in awed disbelief.

“Dude, are those his NUTS?” said another.

“Daddy, what is it? What is it?” said a small girl, pointing.

You can learn a lot at the County Fair.

Outside, Tim ate a barbecued steak sandwich served by a Brooklyn Italian. I sweated in too-tight jeans. We still hadn’t found the prize chickens. The pig races were over, so instead we went to see Extreme Canines—dog athletes who did backflips and somersaults and caught dozens of frisbees in a minute.

The crowd was so thick I needed a piggyback to see the action, and when Tim got tired we wandered the Hobbies and Collections hall, peering at glassed-in life capsules. Model sportscars. “Sand From the Beaches of the World.” Motley Victorian teapots. “My SpongeBob SquarePants Stuff.” The handwritten cards explained each collector’s vision.

“When I was about 5 I really liked SpongeBob Squarepants and I started getting his stuff.
Now I have 23 things.
My favorite is the Krusty Krab model.
—Luis Sandoval, Age 7, Watsonville”

There was a line at the Bud Lite tent. There was no line at the Obama 2008 stand.

At last we found the poultry barn. The contestants—hens, roosters, bantams, game hens, ducks—sat in their cages, pecking at their corn and putting up with our stares. The plain-Jane layers and meat birds were grouped in one area, and the fabulous drag queens preened in another. At least the Polish chickens could hide behind their bangs.

After an afternoon strolling through an agricultural fair, I had an urge to show off in the poultry barn. Unlike these blow-ins fussing over the freak birds, I knew chickens. I’d spent at least six Saturdays watching them scratch while I drank wine. I’d read E.B. White. I’d cuddled chicks and collected eggs. I’d rented The Natural History of the Chicken from Netflix. I could recognize at least four breeds (with shaky accuracy). I was a chicken geek, in some senses at least, and I wanted recognition.

I stopped in front of a Rhode Island Red who was getting her cage cleaned out by an official.

“Oh, she looks just like Susan!” I said in a fake voice to Tim, and then turned to the straw lady. “One of our birds was killed two nights ago,” I told her. She clucked in sympathy. I accepted her condolences, even though Susan wasn’t really my chicken. “She’d taken to roosting in a tree after a raccoon attack in the coop. Probably a coyote got her. Lot of them up there in the mountains.”

I felt I’d established my credentials, but it was less satisfying than I’d hoped. “Reds are lovely birds. Good temperament,” I added knowledgably, wondering if Red or Rhodie was the cool-kid term.

The exchange reminded me what had made me an uneasy traveler in my year of back-packing. Being a tourist embarrasses me. I can’t stare in peace at what is supposed to be stared at—I looked at Angkor Wat sideways, the way New Yorkers look at Nicole Kidman on the street. I always want to pretend that I’m a local, an insider, an expert, even when it’s clear I’m no such thing. You can’t blend in without felt experiences, no matter how often you Google the customs.

As we left the Santa Cruz County Fair—a happy day—I wondered what it would be like to gawk at a 660 lb squash without a 21st-century commentary running like a velvet rope between me and the moment. To be amazed; to admire the labor honestly; to tot the sum of pies, pickles, and preserves a giant squash would yield; to talk about it with the neighbors while we waited for a bolt of calico or a bushel of chicory.

It might feel like faith.

Chicks on the Pacific Coast Highway
Photo by Tim Vetter

At 45, a man’s mind turns to fast engines and young chicks, and Ranger Tim is no exception. In a short time he’s acquired five motorbikes—all beaters—and seventeen hens. They’re his path out of the (Silicon) valley of darkness.

Four sisters survive from his first Easter clutch of bathtub chicks. For every murdered bird—lost to coyotes, rattlesnakes, racoons, or suffocating love—he consoles himelf with three tiny replacements from the hatchery in Watsonville. The nursery coop has been busy all summer, and the original four are now poised young hens.

Helen is still the favorite, a brash Americauna who will put up with cuddles in return for exclusive access to a soggy tomato. She lays Tiffany-blue eggs with orange yolks, which I coddle with cream. In fluorescent conference rooms, I look forward to Tim’s bulletins on her adventures:

“Helen is a lush,” runs one subject line. “Last night I opened a cabernet and sat watching the chickens scratch around by the house. She feels considerable entitlement to hand feeding of treats like pinhead oatmeal so often jumps up on the table and glares at me until I put out. This time though she was distracted, picking at the wine bottle, and so on a lark I tipped my glass toward her and with only brief hesitation she put her beak in there. Emerged shaking her head, then straight back in, lapping it up.

After a minute I took the glass away but I’m sure she would have licked it dry. As it was her beard and cheeks were soaked with wine and she looked lit and dishevelled like any young Englishwoman at the pub.”

When chicks are moved from the bathtub to the coop, at about two weeks old, they are confused by strange surroundings. Doors are a new concept. They blunder past the open door looking for the way out, or else they get out but can’t understand why their indoor sisters are right in front of them and yet out of reach.

At first we joked about their limitations. But they figured out the coop exit long before we realized that a chicken could visit our offices any day and marvel that even though the door was right there, these full-grown humans couldn’t seem to find the way out of our cubicles.

Chickens are wise. Every morning they deposit their rent in shared nest boxes. They spend the rest of the day gossiping while they scratch for food, exploring the ranch, and taking ecstatic dust baths. Because every bird looks out for the flock’s safety, together they have more time to feed and play. At dusk they troop back to their roosts and cuddle with a kindred spirit, until they wake with the sunrise. They have never taken a Work-Life Balance Seminar.

Regular service at dervala.net will be resumed tomorrow, Tuesday. I screwed up a transfer from Movable Type to WordPress. Sorry!

Update: Fixed! Sort of. God, no one should let me near a server.

“They’re so busy,” I say. It’s Friday night at the end of winter, and the action on Tim’s kitchen floor is better than the movies. We sit on the sofa, chins on knuckles, and we stare at the chicks. They patter around the bare floor, and from time to time they hoist themselves up on a log of firewood to peck for insects.
“Yeah, but it’s the busy of a badly-run restaurant kitchen,” he says. “Lot of activity, lot of bumping into each other, but not much is getting done.” He’s the naturalist, always more precise in his observations. Able to tell a hungry cheep from a happy cheep within a few hours of owning chicks. And they love him for it, in their way. When he teases them by lifting his feet so that he’s no longer in their plane of vision, their peeps get shrill until his boot returns. The Boot of Worms. The Boot of Warmth. The Boot of Life.

“Birds, birds, birds, birds, bi-irds,” he says when he enters the cabin, and from their bathtub home they twitter with excitement. The Boot! The Boot is back! To Tim they are animals first, but to me they are females. I call them “Girls.”

Tim started with three chicks, bought from the Rural Supply Store as concubines for the ranch rooster. They are a self-assured eight days old when I meet them, clattering up and down the cardboard that lines his bathtub, scrabbling at their feed. A wall heater keeps the room at blood heat. A steady drip tops up their water bowl, and an Ikea desk lamp warms the small cardboard hutch at one end of the bathtub, where they cuddle at night. When they hear Tim, they stop pecking and start peeping. He greets them, and they let themselves be picked up—two in one fist, one in another—and carried out to the garden.

This grass place, it’s a wonderland. There is dirt; there are stones; there are things that crawl and things that buzz and things that scurry. Everything has to be investigated immediately. They are immensely busy, heads down, but they come when Tim calls them by tapping a fingernail on the flagstones to draw attention to a slow-witted worm. That’s how their mother would teach them where to peck.

At first they stay close to the cabin, and even when they explore, they stick together, peeping a constant call and response. When one loses sight of the others, her trills get higher in pitch and volume. She doesn’t peck again until her calls have been answered and she is reunited. But when she finds something good—or something that might be good—she tries to get away from the others to investigate in peace. The others give chase, flailing after her, and she as she heads them off the worm, or twig, hangs from her beak. It looks like chick soccer.

It’s when they are sleepy that I love them best. They want, more than anything, to be taken under a wing, but there are no mother wings in their hatchery world. Tim’s shirt pockets are a warm and crowded substitute, and after some formal complaints they enjoy being stuffed in there to doze while he fixes motorcycles or visits Sal. I peer into the pocket and think of being under the duvet with my two small sisters, at an age when they were all bird bones and soft, sweaty hair. How annoying they were, and how comforting, with their doggy toddler smell. The chicks seem to have the same regard for one another.

When it’s too late at night for pockets, he sets them down on the kitchen floor to run around before bedtime. When they get tired they huddle in a fluffy scrum and try desperately to get under another chick. Is that so much to ask? They stagger, slit-eyed, up against another’s belly, and butt until they’re underneath. But the comfort never lasts. Their bodies are too light. The top chick topples off, and the bleary one is exposed again. These negotiations go on and on, a shifting dune of exhausted fluff.

The following day, Tim goes to town to buy three more chicks. He brings them home in a bucket with a window screen for a lid. Next to them, the older babies look like hulks, and I begin to feel sorry for all the toddlers who get stuck with younger siblings.

It takes a few days for the chicks to learn to drink. At dawn, the small ones reach up to pluck at the tips of the blades of grass. I don’t understand why, until Tim points out that they’re sipping dew-drops. Most birds can’t swallow as we do; they don’t have a peristalsis mechanism. They rely on gravity to drink, tipping their heads back and glugging like a Spanish farmer with a wineskin. When they’re just a few days old, a dish of water is beyond them, and so they reach for dewdrops. Later, when they see their older sisters drink from a bowl, they understand, though they can’t yet work out the physics of reaching in. They step into the dish and together they arch their necks to glug, beaks open, like the four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in a pie.

Now that they can drink, their digestive systems kick in. They leave little pesto droppings on the kitchen floor.

I don’t want them to grow another inch.

“Bonsai chicks?” I say to Tim, hopefully.

I have a narcissistic prejudice in favor of one of the small ones, a dappled brown Americauna. Because she has mouse-colored fluff, I believe that she is smarter, more resourceful, and finer of feeling, than, say, the butterball blonde Rhode Island Red who always has dried shit stuck to her behind, no matter how often Tim goes after her with the nail scissors. I name my favorite Helen, after Helen Mirren, another cool and brave brunette. None of the others has a name. Tim says that since he hasn’t felt inclined to name the rooster, he doesn’t see why the birds need names. Then again, he can keep the six different breeds straight, and I can’t.

They practice flying, vaulting over a few feet of grass or up the kitchen steps. When an airplane flies overhead, they freeze and fall silent. A born fear of aerial predators, maybe, but it’s also their response to any loud, new sound. When the rooster crows from his henhouse thirty yards away, they freeze again.

I sit on a tree stump and watch them for hours, chewing my bottom lip to hold in tender sadism. I want them to suffer, in tiny doses, just so that I can rescue them. After an hour or two in the weak March sunshine they start to shiver, and let themselves get caught. Their bodies are warm but their legs are chilled. Even the Leghorn, who wears ridiculous chaps of dirty white fluff, has cold feet. I feel Helen’s heart banging against matchstick ribs, and I want to squeeze her little body like an ortolan.

The rooster, for his part, is perturbed by their arrival. He was barely grown when Tim’s neighbor rescued him from the side of Highway 17, and he’s been alone for more than a year. These strange but familiar creatures have stirred something in his rooster heart. He seems to have a rusty memory that he is a patriarch by rights, born to lead and breed. But he doesn’t yet recognize the chicks for the sexy pullets they could turn into, and they are too small to be left alone with him. Since they were taken away, he has fallen into a rooster funk. He still crows, but then he puts his head down and stalks around his house, clucking in a low voice as if questioning himself.

Tim notes that when the Foghorn Leghorn cartoons first came out, in 1946, most of the audience would have known a rooster personally, and would recognize his pompous, ridiculous magnificence from life. These days, the references go the other way. Most chickens are industrial workers, as are we, and they’re usually in a KFC bucket by the time we meet. As I watch the chicks, I compare them to Furbies, or anime characters, or the clay birds of Chicken Run. All of them are objects designed with the cues that make us love infant creatures—big head, big eyes—but they will never grow. We call them animated, but they have no spark of life.

These chicks are beautiful because they are alive. They have their own drives, their own chicken hopes, and they are fully engaged in every moment. They’re learning, changing, moving, and even as they startle at every rustling leaf, they’re not afraid to depend on one another. I’m glad I met them.

Rural Supply Store, Los Gatos (all photos by Tim Vetter)

Drearier than the prospect of fourteen hours at the mercy of America’s worst airline is knowing that Atlanta, and not home, is at the end of it.

Atlanta has given the world Delta Airlines, soda-pop, and 24-hour televised war, and perhaps this business vigor is why it has the busiest airport in the country. That means 45 minutes of kick-shuffling a laptop bag through the lines at Immigration, then sighing through more queues at baggage claim and Customs. And that doesn’t mean you’re free to go. Atlanta takes its Homeland Security hospitality seriously. If you arrive on an international flight, you and your bags must be rescreened after Customs, even if you’re connecting only to the taxi rank. They take your luggage, brusquely, and wave you to another Tensabarrier maze.

We passengers have just arrived from Tokyo, Delhi, or Madrid, and we don’t understand who has our bags now and where we are going. The minimum-wage security staff at the end of the maze can’t fathom why we are so stupid.

“Four more lines. Four more lines! Keep moving. Keep moving down. Keep MOVING,” shouts a guard, dragging people out of the main queue to the empty security lines nearby. We are bleary, our bodies still belong to tomorrow, or this morning, and strangers have taken our stuff. We look bewildered and pissed off. We have the money to go to Tokyo. No wonder she hates us.

The suitcases have been sent to another carousel, a jolting train ride away. One-footed, we strip off shoes, belts, and jackets, scrabble to get laptops into gray trays, and watch as our little bottles of airline Evian or mouthwash get confiscated. In the strip-lighting, after hours breathing recycled air, we’re as gray as the trays. There’s nowhere to get dressed and repack. We hop in half-laced shoes and clutch our bits and pieces, as the trays back up because we’re in the way.

“The current homeland security alert level is Orange,” blare the announcements, demanding that we keep an eye on Unattended Packages. Baby soldiers sit against the wall, tethered by the too-short cords of the public phones. There are always soldiers milling around this airport. They stick together and don’t say much, a class apart from this air-conditioned bubble world as they wait for their flights to German bases. Most, of course, look far too young and small. Everyone says that. But many more look too old; bone-tired and wobble-bellied. A gray-haired soldier leans against a camouflage backpack embroidered with his last name, and reads Fiasco. I am too ashamed to smile at them and wish them safe return and recovery, though I do it silently.

Beside the second baggage carousel, a tiny girl skips and sings.

“Too-morra, too-morra,
I love ya, too-morra,
Betcha bodda dodda
You’re ownee a day a-way…Mommy, what’s next?”

I hope she’s right.

It takes another hour for my bag to arrive, on the wrong carousel. Hours later, I call Ranger Tim from The Four Seasons, greasy-haired from massage oil, with room service on its way and a laptop downloading a week’s worth of emails cheeping for attention. It’s been ten days since we talked, and I miss him. He was out at the chicken coop.

A year ago, Tim rescued a young rooster wandering at the side of the highway near Los Gatos. Now the rooster lives in a fine house at the ranch, safe from the coyotes and the mountain lions. He’s sleek, and he crows proudly, but we’ve worried about his enforced celibacy. (Maybe it’s easier to feel sympathy for a rooster than a road warrior.) We enquired into girlfriends for him. You can order chickens over the internet, and once in a while people put them up for sale or adoption on Craigslist And the Santa Cruz mountains are home to little farms that supply some of the best restaurants in the world, so surely someone would sell us chickens. You can even rescue worn-out battery hens, so that they don’t end a miserable life as dinner on Delta.

Still, we never got around to it. The rooster got no honey, and we got no eggs. Today, tooling around Los Gatos on my green motorbike, Tim noticed a box of chicks set outside the Rural Supply Store. Easter chicks, set out for children to pet. They were three dollars apiece, and he bought three.

“I brought them home strapped to the Puddingmobile, like a Vietnamese farmer,” says Tim. That’s what he calls my old green Yamaha Seca motorbike, which he spends hours fixing up. “They were terrified, but it was good preparation for their next challenge—surviving life with the rooster.”

At first the rooster paid no attention to the three chicks. He stuttered around his cage, indignant at Tim’s invasion. The chicks huddled in a corner, cheeping in terror.

“Then eventually one of them just said ‘Fuck it, I’m getting on with life.’ And she started to explore a little, peck around her. The other two stayed huddled. It’s amazing, these animals don’t know anything, and yet their personalities are distinct.”

The rooster got over his annoyance. He noticed the chicks. He watched them. Then began to show what might pass for paternal behavior.

“He started to peck in small circles, like he was showing them what to do. And eventually they got it, though they’d never seen an adult before. They relaxed. They even started pecking his beak in some kind of feeding behavior, and he let them. He was looking out for them.”

Until his mood turned and he grabbed a chick in his beak and shook it.

“I thought, here we go, the blood bath has begun. The chick was screaming, and the other two were freaked. But then he let her go, and she wasn’t hurt. It looked something like a cat shaking her kittens.” Still, the chicks were chastened, and retreated to their corner. Life beyond the shell is violent and unpredictable, no matter how cute your yellow fluff.

I ask if the rooster realized that these useless, invading bundles represented his shot at passing on his genes. “Depends,” says Tim. “In a couple of months, they’ll be mature. But who knows if he has the foresight to see them for the bodacious pullets they could turn into if he leaves them alone?”

He watched as social equilibrium was slowly restored, at least for now. “It’s like some kind of reality show,” he says, “where three babies get dumped on some single guy, and he’s clueless, and he grumbles, but in his own way he looks after them.”

I haven’t been to the ranch in months. My life is air-conditioned now. The weekends I used to spend there, I now spend working on PowerPoint in Atlanta or Tokyo, or the airports in between. I didn’t miss the mountains in the rainy season, but now that spring is here I crave news from the real world, where the coyotes don’t wait for room service, and the morning is beautiful if you survive the night.

UPDATE: The chicks survived the night. From Tim:

The rooster didn’t harm them, but he didn’t brood them either (I thought, very wishfully he might have a bit of gay motherliness in him). It was turning cold when we got back from dinner at Lupin, and checking in on the birds, I found the rooster up on his roost, nonplussed at the flashlight beam, and chicks huddled in the corner of the coop shivering. Didn’t take me long to decide they weren’t going to survive the night under those conditions. They’re living now in a cardboard box next to the woodstove cheerfully pecking at a random selection of grains from my larder, run through the coffee grinder. They seem to like white grits and rolled barley best; turn their noses up at all forms of daal. I’ll let them try Irish pinhead oats tonight.My plan is to keep them inside for the rest of this week then starting the weekend have them spend days in the chicken house with rooster. In two weeks supposedly they’ll be able to stand the cold on their own.

The Yamaha Seca

Chicks getting ready for new adventures

Chicks get introduced to the rooster

Chicks rescued from the rooster and the cold