|
 This is the story of a food coma turned deadly. It begins on a farm, where a pair of deer have spent the night gorging themselves on potatoes. When morning comes, they are too full of starch to do much of anything—not even flee when the farmer tries to scare them off with his rifle. And so he fires, felling one, and when the other still does not budge, it meets the same fate.
These events transpired several months before I began my internship on an organic farm in Bolinas, California. By the time I arrived, my fellow intern Cameron was fashioning herself a pair of leather moccasins out of one of the deer’s hides. Cameron had been on the farm longer than any of us; she was our resident wise-woman, a little dreadlocked nymph. On weekend afternoons after harvest, she would work on tanning the hides—an arduous process that involved making a paste out of the deer’s brain and massaging it into its skin.
“Every animal has exactly enough brain to tan its own hide,” she said brightly as she worked one afternoon. She was full of these little nuggets of wisdom. She observed the natural world with the same level of attention and insight that others apply to politics or literature. Farming never became intuitive for me, but Cameron could read the elegant logic of plants as if it were etched in the dirt.
Much of Cameron’s wisdom could be boiled down to the acknowledgement of a will to live. Plants will do anything to reproduce themselves. Case in point: summer in Bolinas is cool and gray, but if we had a few unseasonably hot days in a row, the lettuce would bolt—the stems would thicken and shoot up towering seedpods. The leaves lost their delicacy and sweetness, and we could no longer harvest them for market. Stressed out plants will always trade their supple adolescence for early motherhood, Cameron explained.
The lettuce’s bolting in the heat, the hen hiding her eggs from predators, and my flirtation with a fellow intern are all examples of the same basic drive to reproduce. Life wants to keep on living. So how to explain the utter docility of those two deer in the face of the rifle? Food coma or not, if someone pointed a gun my way after Thanksgiving dinner, I’d run.
The deer conundrum reminds me of a story I once heard about a farmer who treated his pigs with dignity and respect, fed them chestnuts and acorns, and let them muck around in the dirt. When the time came for slaughter, this farmer said he looked his pigs in the eyes and saw no suffering—just peace and acceptance of their fate.
I’m not sure whether I buy it, but it’s a nice story. And when you think about it from the perspective of the species, the pigs’ behavior is not all that different from a lettuce plant bolting—one pig’s life may be ending, but humans’ taste for pork sustains the pig population at large.
You could tell a similar story to make sense of the deer’s behavior. Too many deer in one area means resource competition, scarcity and starvation. A mountain lion or a farmer with a rifle are culling the deer population in the same way we interns culled the thick rows of beets to give the remaining plants more room to grow.
Of course, lettuces don’t actually want to live and deer don’t surrender themselves for the survival of the herd—these stories are a way to find meaning in nature’s cold indifference. It’s the same reason why Cameron went through the trouble of tanning the deer hide with brain—there are easier ways to turn skin to leather, and she could have just bought a pair of moccasins. But the process helped turn what happened to the deer into a sacrifice, instead of a slaughter.
As far as I know, this kind of self-deception doesn’t exist in the animal world—no mountain lion says grace before mauling a deer to shreds. Why should it apologize for its nature—for what it is and must be?
We humans are another story—we’re conflicted. We can’t just be what we are, perhaps because we don’t entirely know what that is. Carnivores or vegetarians? Hunters or gatherers? Farmers or city folk? To be human is to live with ambivalence—an ambivalence that gives rise to rituals like Cameron’s Native American arts and crafts project.
And me? This essay is my moccasin.
 |
Show/Hide comments
