National Security: One Hen Coop at a Time

7 March 2011, Boise

“Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands, and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed, as birds universally sing when they are so engaged?” -- Thoreau, Walden, “Economy”

Winter is nearing its end, but like an old man intent on showing the world he still has some kick left in him, the season gave us a four-day storm of snowfall and near-zero lows — all of it more flurry than force. Days before that a warm front had pushed up from the coast, bringing with it Oregon juncos and chickadees riding the soft wave north. I had just returned from three days of back-country skiing in the Sawtooths with my good friend Dave M. from Sonoma County, and it felt like we'd stepped out of central Idaho into balmy Northern California. But now the chilled air is back and the juncos are chittering in the bare trees, perhaps feeling cheated somehow, perhaps looking on the bright side as the sun melts away at the snow patches on the ground. That's February for you: a warm caress from the south, then an icy suckerpunch from the north. But you can't feel too badly for being duped when you see how many migrating song birds have been fooled just the same.

Yesterday we went to dinner at the home of our friends A.W. and J.B. For a year now I'd been hearing about their famous “compound” over in the southeast-end of town, and I was anxious to see it for myself. A is an artist, and her husband J is a craftsman; and with their sweet two-year old daughter, and A's sisters living next door, the whole fam-damnily has put together a big shared property that is about as village-utopian as you could hope for. The sprawling backyard is a combination of neighboring yards with the fences taken down. There are garden plots and cherry trees, solar panels on the rooftops, landscaped fire pits and picnic tables, a ditch canal that runs water from the Boise River (which they have a share of), and a big yurt on a platform that serves as A's studio and houses her glass kiln.

But what takes the cake is the chicken coop. Down the spine of the block runs the canal through an easement between the backyards. At first they had put a coop back there and set a few chickens adrift, and then the neighbors got curious. Soon everybody on both sides of the canal wanted in. And now you push through the wire gate to a menagerie of hens of every kind: dozens of them, skirting underfoot, cawing, amazing in their variety and brilliance, soothing in their murmuring calls. The deep warm straw smell of the coop brought me back to my grandparents' place in Italy: an Old World feeling of home and security and coziness. We collected a few eggs and gave them to Ada to carry in her basket. She was delighted out of her mind by the birds. And as if that wasn't enough, she went silly over the plump lazy rabbit that has taken up home with the birds.

Back in the house, toasty warm with the stove burning, we drank beer and ate dinner and talked while the girls ran about the place. Or rather, J and I ran our mouths. We were glad to have sympathetic ears and so we got things running pretty hot: why are so many American's so damn ignorant? Ignorant of their own working past and traditions of craft and self-sufficiency? In part because this present manifestation of the American Dream is fundamentally a suburban one, conceived in the Fifties and perpetuated by corporate interests, which would rather keep us as children forever wanting trinkets instead of providing for ourselves; forever fatuous and fattened up, cut off from the wisdom of the land and our grandparents, believing that if you use your hands you deserve to scrape along, and that if you want to get somewhere in life, it's got to be upwards into the digital heavens of finance and technology. We talked about Thoreau's economics of self-sufficiency; we talked about the Confucian Code of Fealty: family first, then your block, then your village, then your countryside, and somewhere past the concentric rings of the horizon, your “country”.

All of this at a time when the state of Wisconsin (and other states, including Idaho) are vying to strip public workers of their right to collective bargaining. What will it take for us to remember, to relearn, our working class history and common strength. Common people fighting the excesses and advantages of the wealthy few who both pull the levers of the machine and draw the drapes of media which hide the machine. All of this while the people in Tunisia and Egypt and Libya are rallying to the precipice of revolution. If they have the courage, why don't we? I'm not arguing for revolution in this country, not on a national level. Americans are not quite uncomfortable enough for that to happen yet. So long as TV dinners come twenty to a cheap-pack at Costco, the revolution will never pry itself from its Lazyboy.

Except on a local level. We've all heard the rallying cry. But it's a timeless refrain, going all the way back to Confucius' days, back to the German and British Romantics, the American Transcendentalists, even the Arts and Crafts movement: quality over quantity; craft over consumption; local over diesel-driven shipping containers. Your first devotion, your first revolution, must be to and at home, and from there the effort ripples out to your block, your town, and long long down the line, if ever, to your so-called country.