Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [119]
By early afternoon six roosters had lost their heads, feathers, and viscera, and were chilling on ice. We had six turkeys to go, the hardest piece of our work simply because the animals are larger and heavier. Some of these birds were close to twenty pounds. They would take center stage on our holiday table and those of some of our friends. At least one would be charcuterie—in the garden I had sage, rosemary, garlic, onions, everything we needed for turkey sausage. And the first two roosters we’d harvested would be going on the rotisserie later that afternoon.
We allowed ourselves a break before the challenge of hoisting, plucking, and dressing the turkeys. While Lily and her friends constructed feather crowns and ran for the poultry house to check in with the living, the adults cracked open beers and stretched out in lawn chairs in the September sun. Our conversation turned quickly to the national preoccupation of that autumn: Katrina, the hurricane that had just hit southern Louisiana and Mississippi. We were horrified by the news that was beginning to filter out of that flooded darkness, the children stranded on rooftops, the bereaved and bewildered families slogging through streets waist-deep in water, breaking plate glass windows to get bottles of water. People drowning and dying of thirst at the same time.
It was already clear this would be an epic disaster. New Orleans and countless other towns across southern Louisiana and Mississippi were being evacuated and left for dead. The news cameras had focused solely on urban losses, sending images of flooded streets, people on rooftops, broken storefronts, and the desperate crises of people in the city with no resources for relocating or evacuating. I had not seen one photograph from the countryside—a wrecked golf course was the closest thing to it. I wondered about the farmers whose year of work still lay in the fields, just weeks or days away from harvest, when the flood took it all. I still can’t say whether the rural victims of Katrina found their support systems more resilient, or if their hardships simply went unreported.
The disaster reached into the rest of the country with unexpected tentacles. Our town and schools were already taking in people who had lost everything. The office where I’d just sent my passport for renewal was now underwater. Gasoline had passed $3 a gallon, here and elsewhere, leaving our nation in sticker shock. U.S. citizens were making outlandish declarations about staying home. Climate scientists were saying, “If you warm up the globe, you eventually pay for it.” Economists were eyeing our budget deficits and predicting collapse, mayhem, infrastructure breakdown. In so many ways, disaster makes us take stock. For me it had inspired powerful cravings about living within our means. I wasn’t thinking so much of my household budget or the national one but the big budget, the one that involves consuming approximately the same things we produce. Taking a symbolic cue from my presumed-soggy passport, I suddenly felt like sticking very close to home, with a hand on my family’s production, even when it wasn’t all that easy or fun—like today.
Analysts of current events were mostly looking to blame administrators. Fair enough, but there were also, it seemed, obvious vulnerabilities here—whole populations depending on everyday, long-distance lifelines, supplies of food and water and fuel and everything else that are acutely centralized. That’s what we consider normal life. Now nature had written a hugely abnormal question across the bottom of our map. I wondered what our answers might be.
Our mood stayed solemn until Eli introduced the comedy show of poultry parts. He applied his artistry and grossout-proof