Susan Orlean On Selling the Farm

On a humid night in July of 2020, in the midst of a global pandemic and a seemingly endless stream of bad news, Susan Orlean visited a newborn colt near her farm in New York’s Hudson Valley, and then tweeted a one-word missive: “drunk.” For a certain segment of the Twitterverse, it was as if she’d opened a relief valve, the collective pressure of a terrible time dissipating a little more with each humorous, relatable, rambling-yet-lucid reply. Excerpted here, from Orlean’s new book of essays, On Animals, is a love letter to her farm, which she sold in March of this year.

I assumed I would spend the rest of my life on our farm in upstate New York, surrounded by animals. But in 2011, quite unexpectedly, we pulled up our stakes and headed west. We brought a limited representation of our menagerie—a mere dog and two cats. We left the rest (the ducks, the chickens, the cattle, and so forth) in the hands of neighbors and friends. Because our move to Los Angeles was intended to be temporary, the animal arrangements were temporary, too. I fully expected to reclaim my creatures when we headed back to New York in the spring.

In L.A., I discovered that we were contending with a whole new animal experience. Our house was well within the urban envelope, and yet animals abounded. Hawks and owls eyeballed us during the day. In the evening, gangs of coyotes skulked around our mailbox with the sullen attitude of juvenile delinquents. One day, at dusk, I took a walk down our block and spied the unmistakable silhouette of a bobcat. There were mountain lions afoot. That first winter, the lion known as P-22 set up camp under a house not far from us. A mountain lion, for heaven’s sake. We were in the second-largest city in America, and yet it felt like we’d moved into a natural history diorama.

When spring rolled around, we prepared to head back to the Hudson Valley. A night before we left L.A., our house sitters in New York called with grim news. A murderous raccoon had broken into the chicken coop and killed all of the poultry. I was knocked sideways. Over my years as a chicken keeper, I’d learned to live with the fact that chickens are, at best, provisional holdings, because every single thing in the universe conspires to eat them. The first time I lost a chicken to a predator, I cried for hours; the fifth time, I sighed deeply and went out and bought a new chicken. But this was an annihilation, and I began to feel like maybe I couldn’t handle having chickens anymore.

I spent that summer without them. I tore down the raccoon-breached poultry pen and sold my coop to a neighbor who declared, with delight, that it looked like a spaceship for chickens. This purging was a bit of overkill, maybe, but because we had decided to return to L.A. for another eight months, restocking on poultry made no sense.

Eventually, we fell into a rhythm: eight months in L.A. and then back to the Hudson Valley for the summer. Years passed. I spent summers in the verdant bosom of our farm, but because I was a short-timer I couldn’t justify getting chickens. It drove me crazy, knowing how delightful it would be to have a flock following me as I weeded the garden; how my breakfasts would be made with eggs so warm they could have almost cooked themselves.

Then, wouldn’t you know it, kismet. An old friend called one June day asking if I might be interested in three hens and an affable rooster. They belonged to her daughter, who was moving to the city. How could I say no? I pushed all misgivings out of my mind and bought another coop. The new chickens were a lively, lovely bunch. The rooster was a cheerful little bantam, about as big as your hand, busy all day long attending to his three red hens.

Oh, I was so happy! I fell back into chicken husbandry easily, even knowing I would have to figure something out in August, when we headed back to L.A. again. I floated the idea of bringing the chickens with us even though I knew it was a cracked idea. Those coyotes that held their club meetings at our mailbox would have rejoiced had we brought the chickens to L.A., and not in a good way.

I didn’t let myself bond as intensely with this flock, probably because I knew their tenure was limited. I had always taken great delight in naming my chickens. This flock came pre-named, and I just let them be, giving myself a little more emotional runway for when the inevitable farewell took place.

One day, the young woman who cleaned our house mentioned that she was about to have a baby. I was astonished—she was as slight as a twig. Any day now, she explained, the eggs would crack. Aha. I didn’t know she had chickens, thus the confusion. She wanted more babies, she added, but her rooster was getting very old.

“I have a rooster,” I said, “and he’s going to need a home.”

And thus, a deal was struck. Maria would welcome my three hens and my fertile rooster to her home at the end of the summer, relieving me of the worry about where I would dispatch them when we headed west. I made some noise about maybe borrowing them back the next summer, but I didn’t want to complicate things too much.

As it turned out, that was a good thing. We loved our house in the Hudson Valley more than anything. But getting there from Los Angeles was starting to feel exhausting, especially because we didn’t like to put our pets on a plane, so every summer my husband had to drive the dog and the cat to New York. COVID was the final straw. We listed the Hudson Valley house and sold it to the first people who saw it. Our chapter there was done.

We went to the farm one last time to clear it out for the new owners. It was a hard goodbye. I’d always dreamed that I would live with animals all around me, in the house, in the yard, watching me in the garden, dotting the landscape, crowing in the morning, lowing in the moonlight, barking at the wind, and I had had that there. I had reveled in their friendship and their strangeness; the way they are so obvious and still so mysterious; their colors and textures, their fur and feathers; the sounds and smells of their presence. I liked the way their needs set the rhythm of every day, and how caring for them felt elemental and essential. Living among them, as I had on the farm, was just as satisfying as I imagined it would be.

When the house was emptied, I took one last walk around. As I made my way across the fields and down to where the coop had been, I collected a few things that could remind me of the farm forever and perhaps betoken someplace in my future that would feel the way it had: a piece of quartz, a pine cone, a knob of moss, and one perfect chicken feather.

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Audio excerpt courtesy of Simon & Schuster Audio from On Animals by Susan Orlean, read by the author. Copyright © 2021 by Susan Orlean. Used with permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Text excerpted from On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press). Reprinted with permission of the author. Copyright © 2021 by Susan Orlean.

This article appears in the November 2021 issue of ELLE.

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