vituperation

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I learned something valuable yesterday: people aren’t always what you expect.

We started out the morning with a stop at the feed store for some eggs. Since the last hatch didn’t do so well (seven survivors out of nine hatched from forty-two eggs), we decided to just jump back in with both feet and stick another batch of eggs in the incubator. At our trip last week, I talked to the owner about buying some of his eggs for hatching, but he’d have none of that, and insisted on giving us the eggs. He has a Buff Orpington rooster and Gold-laced Wyandotte hens, so I expect any offspring will be mighty handsome.

(side note on the chicken thing: I guess I’m going to have to do another big purge soon. There are at least two roosters I missed last time that need to go, and some of the November chicks that I think are red broilers are getting pretty meaty, too. Plus, we need room for the seven chicks in the brooder, whatever comes out of the next batch, and whatever we get from a hatching of Icelandic chickens planned for the spring. As much fun as it would be to think about having 150 chickens, it really does get kind of stinky out there when there are too many)

Whenever we go to the feed store I end up spending a long time talking to the owner, and yesterday was no different. The more we talk, the more it seems we have in common. Yesterday I found out that he wants to start a flock of purebred chickens (and unfortunately I can’t remember for the life of me what breed he mentioned), and oddly enough Robyn and I have been talking about starting a side flock of pure Black Copper Marans chickens, an extremely rare breed that produces some awesome dark eggs.

I also found out yesterday that the feed store owner feels the way I do about the government meddling in our lives. At one point in our conversation, I commented that he should start a petting zoo because he has so many different animals around the store (dogs, cats, quail, a parrot, goats, potbelly pigs, geese, ducks, chickens, peacocks, cattle, and guineas, off the top of my head). He told me he once had many more animals than he did now, because he loved them so much, and one day a USDA inspector showed up and told him he’d have to have a “zoo permit” because he had a couple of non-standard animals there and the government considered them “on display,” though he didn’t charge people to view them, they just lived at the store. He got rid of the animals.

He also raised 3000-5000 ducks every year and released them into the wild, because of his passion for conservation. Not any more, courtesy of the feds trying to get more and more involved. I understand that there might be a valid reason for some minor regulation, but not nearly what the government ends up imposing.

But I don’t want to get into that. This is my happy fun site, not a heavy political (boring) place. Well, it’s probably boring, but at least not because of politics. I’ll just say it’s nice to find that the feed store owner and I feel about the same about government intervention, and leave it at that.

From the feed store, we headed up to Lawrenceburg, to look for an Amish furniture maker to fashion us a storage cabinet for the kitchen. In my experience, the Amish have always been a scary people. They don’t talk much, they don’t smile, and they never come across as happy. I know that part of that is probably having to deal with outsiders like me, and that they might be just as intimidated by me as I am them, but they’re just a little, well, off-putting.

I got a whole new perspective yesterday. At our second furniture shop stop (the father wasn’t home at the first one), the young craftsman was just as open and friendly as he could be. He took my rough sketch and improved on it, offering suggestions and improvements, and quoted a pretty reasonable price to build it out of poplar (we opted for poplar because our stairs are poplar and we thought it would present a sort of theme). While he wrote up the receipt, we chatted about gardens (they had rows and rows of plastic mulch with strawberry plants that appeared to have survived the winter) and raising food. I had hoped he might know someone who had small pigs, but he didn’t. All in all, I was probably in there for 45 minutes talking with him. Even my notoriously scared-of-the-Amish wife came in for a bit.

(another side note: He only wanted 10% down to start work on this big-ass cabinet. It was a welcome change from the people I normally deal with who want 50%-75% in advance for work to perform. It’s also kind of cool that he’s going to send us a handwritten letter in 3-5 months when the cabinet is finished and ready to pick up. It’s sort of a nice respite from the pell-mell “normal” world)

We kept driving around, looking for a hand-lettered sign advertising piglets, but we didn’t see any. One sign offered a butchering hog, so we stopped there to see if he might have some small pigs. He had a couple, but he was raising them for his family. There was another Amish man, he said, on the other side of the highway, who had some smaller pigs, but probably not as small as I wanted. I got directions from him, and bought a dozen eggs because I saw a rooster in with his hens.

Before we got back out to the highway, we stopped for more eggs at a place where the chicken yard was about the size of our own. We spotted a couple of roosters in with all the hens. What the hell? If you’re going to hatch some eggs, might as well fill up the incubator, right? According to the woman who lived there, she had about 140 hens and three roosters. It’s nice to find someone with more chickens than us, but I have my doubts about how fertile those eggs will be.

Finally, we made it across the highway and to the house where there might be some pigs. The man had pigs, but they were about 100 pounds and bigger than we wanted. But that’s not important here. What’s important is this:

Not only did the Amish man smile openly a number of times, he actually LAUGHED more than once, and just as I was leaving, he cracked a joke.

You could have knocked me over with a feather. Not so much because I think they’re a grim people (I don’t), but because they’re always so very reserved around us English folk. It was really nice to find that they’re more friendly, cheerful, and open than the facade would lead you to believe.

He told me of another man up the road who might have small pigs, and we were on our way. I found that man working on a shed in his workshop. He had three pigs about 45 pounds, he said, but someone from Birmingham had spoken for them. That person was to have picked them up on Friday, but didn’t show up.

“If a man’s going to come from as far as Birmingham,” he said, “I can understand if he’s not here on the right day.”

“If he hasn’t come by Monday, would you be willing to sell them?” I asked.

He would not be willing. Next Saturday, yes, but not as soon as Monday. He was also very open, smiled a lot, and was generally friendly. When I told him I’d been coming up there for 20 years and never knew any Amish people lived on his side of the highway, he told me he’d been born on the other side but moved across when he got married. About half the Amish people lived on one side, and half on the other. He even told me of another man who might have pigs, but we never found his house. We ended up somewhere in Deliverance country in a maze of one-lane roads twisting through hills and valleys, and there was a time where I started to wonder if we were getting lost.

Just a grand day, all in all. We didn’t get any pigs, but we got an incubator full of eggs, a new storage cabinet ordered, and a lesson in judging people.