Back to the known

After my wrist was declared fully healed (nothing like a farm for rest and recovery), I pursued the cruise contract that was retracted after my accident. Well, it turns out that they have no openings for the 'near future'.

Well, that throws a wrench in my plans for working on a cruise ship. Time for plan B.

I can go anywhere in the world and do a wide variety of things. I'm back where I was nearly a year ago. Ok, I'll make an opportunity out of it.

I can teach horseback riding lessons in New Zealand, Italy, Argentina or the UK. I can lead troubled youth through wilderness therapy in the American Southwest. I can work in theater.

But I'm done with the farm life. Over three months of being in one place really got to me. It was time to move on.

Three days after the news from Princess Cruises, I got a concrete job offer out of the blue. Someone from Philadelphia wanted me to production manage a show going to Edinburgh, Scotland in August. There were no guarantees that I'd come to Scotland, but they needed someone in two weeks to help get things in order.

Great.

Back to Philly, where I have plenty of people to stay with, where I know the value of housing in different neighborhoods of the city. Familiarity with a city leads to a million conveniences that one does not particularly appreciate until one moves. Or until one moves around every few months in a consistently uprooted lifestyle.

So I'm in Philadelphia, production managing a show, preparing it to go to the greatest art festival in the world. And trying to find my next adventure.

Making a Road Trip out of it

I left Heifer Ranch on Friday. I had been there for over 3 months, which is a very long time for me to be in any one location or job, consistently, since I graduated college. I had done 3 months in the same apartment, but I had left on tour a few times while I was living there. No wonder I was getting antsy.

I was driving up to Columbia, MO, to visit a friend that I hadn't seen since high school. We had kept in touch consistently, using only phone conversations and phone messages. We became facebook friends and knew each other's email addresses, but we never resorted to electronic communication. We never resorted to written correspondence, either. It was a weird way to keep up a friendship, in this modern age, but it was unique, and it lasted.

So, being in the same time zone, and with a free chunk of time before my next job, I decided to drop in and visit. That meant an 8-hour drive up from Arkansas to Missouri (which is only the next state up). But an 8-hour drive is nothing compared to the epic 20+ hour drive from Philadelphia to across the Mississippi.

So I did the 8-hour drive in one day, packing all of my belongings on Friday morning (the standard 1-hour-pack-everything-I-own routine), said goodbye to a life of daily adventures, and hit the road. There were plenty of road-trip-esque attractions along the way (Super deep caves! Ozark Historical Museum! Lake Vacationstop!) that I rolled on by.

I was preoccupied by the landscape, watching the rolling Ouachita Mountains turn into the jagged Ozarks, which rolled into long plains before retreating back into more jagged Ozarks. I had to stop for gas, and figured a good place would be Springfield, MO, home of the flagship store of Bass Pro Shops, an outdoor store.


This particular Bass Pro Shop was their flagship store, and included supersized versions of everything they sold. A couple nascar racecars were on display. Their bait and tackle section included full-sized fishing boats, boat trailers, and even vehicles to pull them. If you wandered through the outdoor section long enough, you ended up in their hunting section. Good thing you passed the food court, where you could pick up a snack for the long trek back.

The place was decorated with hunting trophies, with stuffed deer heads coming out of every bit of wall space. They set up dioramas of bucolic outdoor scenes, complete with stuffed animals. Like, taxidermy. Not cute stuffed animals, but cute, stuffed animals (if you don't know the difference, I recommend learning the fine points of English grammar).


The highlight of the place, though, was the live alligator. Hard to beat.


Revitalized for the long drive, I headed out. I stopped briefly in Jefferson City for dinner and a glimpse of their beautiful State Capitol building, with beautiful views over the huge Missouri River right behind it.


I rolled on in to Columbia not too long after, and concluded my small first leg of another move. Eight hours is an easy drive, compared to what's to come next week.

When Daily Life Is An Adventure: Chicken Chopping

Warning: Graphic content

We raise and process our own chickens here on Heifer Ranch. That means that when they reach 8 weeks of age, we slaughter them and prepare them for cooking in our kitchens. We wake up early one day and process all of the birds in one go. The day-long event is called "chicken chop" (or poultry processing--we're into alliteration here apparently).

At 5:30 in the morning, we transported the chickens to the chicken chopping room in one of our farm trucks. They all wait patiently in the back of the truck, quite content to peck around and lay down.


Each bird gets put in a metal cone with their head sticking out the bottom. We hold their heads, sight the cut, and use an extremely sharp knife to cut both main arteries and the windpipe in one swift, wrapping cut. We hold the head back as most of the blood drains out. The chicken convulses after it dies (as it's put in the cone and the cut is made, it's quiet and still; we try not to stress the birds).

We had three cones operating, allowing the first bird to bleed out by the time the third was killed. We then dip the carcass in hot (170 degree) water for about 15 seconds, to loosen the feathers. Then the head and feet are taken off and discarded.


The scalded carcass goes in our clever defeathering rig, which rotates the carcass around inside a barrel lined with rubber spikes, which catch and remove feathers. The rest of the feathers are plucked by hand (preparing chickens for eating is mostly defeathering, it turns out).

The bird is now ready to go inside. First, we remove the innards, taking out the intestines and the liver, etc in one giant mass. We try not to break the GI tract, since that would get manure inside the carcass. With the innards out, the front of the GI tract is ripped out, then the other end is cut off, along with the tail. The heart is also taken out (it hugs the sternum, keeping separate from the 'guts'). Lastly come the lungs, which are difficult to pry out, and the windpipe, which gets pulled out the front, at the base of the neck.


The gutting step was where I ended up doing most of the work. I got fairly proficient at it, and it was very systematic. There is very little cutting: just open up the carcass and cut off the tail, everything else is pulling.

I learned a lot about chicken (and animal) anatomy. Animals are amazingly good at using up all their inside space. The livers had rib indents from being pressed between intestines and rib cage. Lungs were plastered into the spine. The intestines were wound into a small, solid mass. The organs didn't look like textbook organs, in perfect rounded shapes with smooth outlines. They were jam-packed inside the little bodies in a crazy game of anatomical tetris. Pretty efficient. Pretty cool.

But it all came out and went into the discard pile. Once the carcass was gutted, it got passed down the line to be scrubbed out with a high-pressure water wand, then on down to be finely defeathered. Once someone double-checked for small pin feathers (the roots of feathers that get stuck in the skin), it was submerged in ice water to cool.

After lunch (yeah, we took a break and actually ate in the middle of this process. No chicken for lunch, though), we hung up the carcasses and cut them into quarters. We bagged the quarters (4 quarters to a bag) and stuck them in the freezer. We'll rotate them until they freeze solid, then they're ready to be distributed into kitchen storage.

Then defrost, cook and eat.

Now I know how to prepare chickens for the table. A great skill to have. I bet I can even apply that skill to other small animals, like rabbits and squirrels. Not that I often have a rabbit or squirrel to eat. But the option's there.