At Crossroads with Chickens: A "What If It Works?" Adventure in Off-Grid Living & Quest for Home

by Tory McCagg

Overview

In 2012, McCagg and her husband, Carl built an off-grid, solar-powered house in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. It was to be a weekend getaway for the writer (“what’s this pitchfork for?”) and trombonist (a wannabe farmer). In December, with two cats and six newly adopted chicks, they drove up to Jaffrey from their home in Providence, Rhode Island, ostensibly just for the winter so their new pipes wouldn’t freeze. . . . But their hen “Rhoda Red” turned out to be “Big Red.” Roosters are outlawed by Providence city regulations, so Big Red couldn’t go back. Thus, writes McCagg, “neither did we. Survival of the fittest. Natural selection. Soul evolution. We named our 193-acre home “Darwin’s View” for a reason.” Chicken kerfuffles lighten the mood, but this story is born of heartbreak, of yearning for the great beauty of the world as it used to be. As she moves from full-time weekender to organic gardener, McCagg’s interlaces her tale with her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s, braiding both Mother and Mother Nature. Add the sun, the wind, and a cock-a-doodle-do, and you have the recipe for a perfect storm of personal growth rippling out to effect a larger transformation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780872333178
Publisher:	Bauhan Publishing
Publication date:	06/24/2020
Pages:	172
Sales rank:	1,259,020
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Tory McCagg holds an MFA from Emerson College, where her thesis and novel, Shards, won the Graduate Dean’s Award. In February 1997, her short story “Earthquake Weather” was a semifinalist in the Tara Fellowships/Heekin Foundation. She has won two honorable mentions: one for “Enology” in 1998 (A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction, White Eagle Coffee Store Press); the other for “Chain Material” in 2001 (Lorien Hemenway Short Story Competition). In 1999, “Roots”, an early chapter from her novel Bittersweet Manor was a semifinalist in the New Millennium Awards VIII contest; Bittersweet Manor won a Silver medal for Contemporary Fiction from Independent Publishers in 2015. Tory is an accomplished flutist, and lives with her husband, two cats, and myriad chickens at Darwin’s View where they all practice an experimental life off the grid and on the land.

Table of Contents

I The Web We Wove 11

Roots 13

The Place and the Players 15

How We Got Here 25

Chicken Reverie to Reality 55

II 2013: Adaptation 65

Off-Grid Defined 66

Ascent 77

What I Knew About Gardening 89

Life and Death, Though Not in That Order 95

Nature at the Door 107

A Cold Night in Hell 112

III 2014-2015: Resistance to Resilience 121

Nature Is Not Moral or Fair 123

Project Preparation 132

When Is It My Turn? 136

Seeing What We Want to See, or Not 142

No Guarantees 147

Once Upon a Time 152

IV 2016 and Beyond: Darwin's View One Breath After Midnight 161

Little Big Man and Panda 162

The Road Chicks 166

And Now? 184

Acknowledgments 192