Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [100]
On the way back off the island, we are the only family on the ferry and the captain allows Amy to stand at his position in the wheelhouse. She puts her hands on the wheel, and when I see the size of her smile I can tell it is good for her to get the attention. When the ferry gate lowers, we drive our loyal van up the ramp to solid ground and point for home. Within the first mile, Jane starts her brass-lung bawling. It is 290 miles from the tip of Door County to our farm in Fall Creek. A six-hour drive. With the exception of twenty minutes somewhere west of Green Bay and the times we stopped to check to see if her diaper was wet, or if she was hungry, or if her seat buckles were pinching her, or if she was just worked up over the subprime mortgage mess, she screeched nonstop until we took her out of van and into the house at home. Honestly, I don’t know how she did it without the aid of an oxygen tank. Clearly circular breathing was involved. Amy spent most of the ride with her hands locked over her ears. The next time someone suggests we put her in the car and drive around when she won’t sleep, I will hand them the keys and the car seat and the ear muffs and tell them to have at it. Very early in the trip the air conditioner threw a belt, which was nice because it gave us reason to run with all the windows down, the siren sound of our bundle of joy pealing out across the countryside and scaring cows.
We’ve been holding off on getting the chicks from Billy and Margie until the Washington Island trip was out of the way, and now the big day has come. I spent the morning working with Mills, but since the coop is still nowhere near done, I used the time to build a chicken tractor. A chicken tractor is basically a portable enclosure with an open floor that allows the chickens to pick and scratch—you will want to read Joel Salatin for the definitive take, although this is the age when Google met chickens, so a profusion of examples are a split-second click away. Once they’ve worked the area over, you move the tractor, and they move with it. You can get as carried away as you like, but I kept mine simple. I built a wooden frame roughly the dimensions of a twin bed, incorporated a roost and a hinged door that doubled as a ramp, and even remembered to build a small shelf in the corner on which to place and secure the waterer. I put the whole works on two elevated skids and attached heavy rubber flaps along the bottom of either end. The skids allow it to be dragged from place to place, while the rubber flaps seal the gap at either end. The rubber is heavy enough to keep small chicks in and all but the most serious predators out, and because it can flap both ways, the tractor can be dragged from either end. Mills dug the rubber out of one of his Sanford and Son piles, smiling triumphantly. Nothing makes him happier than to put something he scavenged to good use. To finish off, I rigged hooks at either end of the skids so I could put loops in a rope and tow it either way.
I’m pleased with how it turned out. It’s square and sturdy, and I managed to avoid idiot do-overs. In fact, with my sad record for building things, this went amazingly well, with only one head-knocking moment: because the pickup truck had been unavailable, I removed all the seats from the fambulance and took that. In a rare moment of prescience, I measured the inside width of the van’s hatch and made sure to cut the chicken tractor cross-members a good inch narrower so it would fit in when it was done. Unfortunately, I overlooked the fact that the cumulative width of the finished product would include the vertical supports, and when I tried to put the finished product in the van, it was exactly two inches wider than the interior of the vehicle. I took this in relatively good humor, mostly because Mills was right there, and among handymen it is considered impolite to throw another man’s tools.
But I was kinda stuck. I needed that tractor for