Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [80]
Mills is especially valuable in an endeavor like building the chicken coop, because he has a lot of very cool tools—chop saws, nail guns, and so on—and he is quite handy. Even more important, he is a professional-class scavenger. I don’t mean a guy who picks something up at a thrift sale now and then (he does), I’m talking about a guy who goes to nearly every auction within a forty-mile radius; is an eBay power seller; knows the guy in the basement of the local grocery store who has all the free five-gallon buckets; can put a word in for you with the guy who handles all the scrap wood from the furniture factory; and—this is huge—is on a first-name basis with the dump guy! Mills owns a farmstead. His red barn is jammed with every conceivable form of potentially useful scrap and geegaw—steel barrels, discarded RV siding, plumbing supplies, secondhand plywood and discontinued signage, doorknobs, hinges, and used Styrofoam sheeting. Some of the best stuff is outside, hidden from sight behind the pine trees that ring the property. Mills calls these stashes his “Sanford and Son piles.” Treated posts, barrels, trailer frames, angle iron—you name it, somewhere out there in the brambles beneath a tarp, he’s got it.
The other day I introduced Mills to Craigslist, and our relationship may not survive. Problem is, our geographic search parameters overlap, plus we regularly covet the same items. Having been on the lookout for a radial arm saw, I was excited when I spotted one on Craigslist for a most reasonable price. It was located south of me in the tiny town of Humbird. In the photo the saw was posed in front of a red garage and looked promising. I contacted the seller immediately. Too late, he said. Someone had already claimed it. Two days later, I ran into Mills. “This Craigslist thing—woo-HOO!” he said. (In conversation, Mills runs heavy to italics.) “I got an amazing deal on a gorgeous saw!” “Poacher!” I said.
Lately I have been scoring stuff from Craigslist nearly every week. Rain barrels, fence posts, lumber. I even managed to find another radial arm saw. It was a newer model than the one Mills stole, and I paid less. “JINKIES!” he said when I told him. Nowadays we regularly consult with each other before making contact on Craigslist items. It is my understanding that the original purpose of Craigslist was to help people in San Francisco locate apartments. I am tickled to think it wound up causing two knuckleheads in Wisconsin to fight over used barbed wire and secondhand pickle buckets.
Since Mills has all the equipment and most of the supplies, we decide it will be easier to build the coop at his place, prefab style, then haul it over to our place in pieces. So I am on my way to his house now, with Amy in her booster seat behind me. With my schedule over the past year, “our” efforts to homeschool Amy have quickly devolved into Anneliese doing all the day-to-day hard work while I provide the occasional off-kilter field trip—in this case a morning spent constructing a chicken coop in the company of two grown men whose greatest aspirations tend to center around finding any excuse to shoot arrows at overgrown goldfish.
“Where does Mr. Miller live?” asks Amy as we drive. “Mondovi,” I say. “Is that a city or a state?” asks Amy. This is a recurring lesson.