Enslaved by Ducks (2 page)

Hazel:
victim of sneak attack

Lizzie:
presumed perpetrator of sneak attack

And two that remain nameless

ORDINARY HUMANS

Bob Tarte:
put-upon author

Linda Tarte:
long-suffering wife to unfortunate author

Joan Smith:
sister to victimized author

Rupert Murdoch:
nonbillionaire duck breeder

Jacob Lestermeyer:
operator of petting zoo/meat market

LuAnne Grady:
owner of indoor orphan Green-Winged Teal

Bill Holm:
mocking yuppie friend of pathetic author

Marge and George Chedrick:
DNR-affiliated animal rehabbers

LETTERED HUMANS

Alanson Benedict, DVM:
“So you’ve been bad-mouthing our practice.”

Katherine Stallings, DVM:
prescriber of questionable ointments

Michael Hedley, DVM:
amiable zoo-consultant genius

Alice Colby, DVM:
doesn’t do turkeys

Owen Fuller, DVM:
avian expert extraordinaire

John Carlotti, DVM:
made Howard a collar

Carl Glaser, MD:
“Do you hear voices?”

Jerold Rick, MD:
heartless hippie shrink

I
SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
I was doomed to write a book about our animals. Since they had taken over just about everything else in my life, it was only a matter of time before they commandeered my word processor, too. This began to seem inevitable when I was working on a music column for
The Beat
magazine about a vocal group from Sardinia, and my editor CC Smith asked me, “Are there any animals in it?”

“No, of course not,” I protested.

“No parrots or rabbits?”

“Not even a sardine.”

“Well, that’s a first. Every column this year has had a goose in it or something.”

“Not this one,” I answered defensively, though I had very nearly written about a goose, but a pang of conscience had stopped me.

Though not quite as frequently as my editor had claimed, animal anecdotes had steadily gnawed their way into my music column over the years. I never could figure out why she allowed them to inhabit a magazine devoted to reggae and international music. I suppose they added texture to
The Beat
, like sand clinging to a strawberry. And they certainly made the other writers look even more expert by comparison.

I had started contributing to
The Beat
back in 1989, when record stores still sold records. When I bought my first CD player, I was
seized by a rare fit of extroversion and penned a letter to the magazine suggesting that someone cover the scant few reggae, African-music, and world-music albums then available on CD. My letterhead made the bold claim that I was a writer. I had little experience with magazines, except for an article on strange coincidences involving clowns and the number 22 that I had written several years earlier with a friend for a British paranormal magazine. But CC liked what I had sent her and christened my CD-review column “Technobeat,” never suspecting that this would one day become the name for a type of computer-generated dance music—and never dreaming that I would one day hand in a story about chasing runaway ducks.

My main difficulty with my new column was a profound ignorance of the international music I was supposed to be an authority on. But I figured that as long as I concentrated on obscure genres like Tuvan throat-singing or Finnish Karelian
runo
songs, most readers of
The Beat
probably wouldn’t catch on that I didn’t know any more than they did. To help discourage informed readers who might expose me, I began leading off my column with an obfuscating essay on a nonmusical subject—typically one that presented me in an unflattering light. A ready subject was my jarring change of address to a rural setting after thirty-eight years of urban life.

One column described how, just after I had moved from an apartment in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, to a one-hundred-year-old farmhouse, I was tortured by a sign outside GoFer’s restaurant up the road that apparently proclaimed
CONGRATULATIONS BOB TARTE
. This troubled me. Who knew I had bought a house? Who should care? When I pulled into GoFer’s parking lot to get a closer look, I discovered that the sign actually read,
CONGRATULATIONS BOB
&
TATE
. But why the strange confluence of names the week of my arrival? What person is first-named Tate? And why was fate snickering at me?

I wrote about my wife, Linda, our vacations to oddball places like Wawa, Ontario, and, increasingly, the animals that started invading our lives. The topic of pets became hard to avoid. One evening I was reviewing a CD by Foday Musa Suso, a musician from Senegal playing the West African
kora
harp. Our rabbit, Binky, had been roaming the living room in search of electrical cords to chew when I fired up the stereo, and the plucked strings of the
kora
unnerved him. He hid behind an overstuffed chair, loudly thumping a hind foot against the floor until I finally turned off the CD.

Subsequent animals cut deeper into my listening hours. Noisy parrots—who were themselves inexplicably sensitive to noise—protested if I played music in the evening while they were soaking up their beauty sleep. Animal concerns eventually restricted daytime listening, too. I needed to keep my ears open for signs of mischief from woodwork-destroying parakeets, or for quacks of distress from an outdoor duck that had fallen afoul of its flock.

I still loved music as much as ever, but it no longer played the same role in my life that it had in the days before I had reluctantly begun accumulating pets. Back when I was still an apartment dweller, if I found myself unavoidably thrown into a social setting with a stranger, I would quickly worm my musical tastes into the conversation.

“We just built a new deck onto our house,” a fellow might brag.

“Oh, where do you live?”

“On Bali High Boulevard.”

“No kidding!” I’d marvel. “Speaking of Bali, are you a fan of Balinese gamelan music? I just got a really good album of small-ensemble shadow-puppet music.”

The relentless onslaught of animals changed all that. The quick dart of a question, “Do you have any pets?” usually led to camaraderie rather than strained silence. Most people owned a dog or
cat whose bad habits they were eager to discuss. If the stranger was a harried bird or bunny owner, I immediately considered that person a friend. And if an eye-rolling remark about parrots followed, I would add the friend to my will.

But this newfound love of animals perplexed me. If I had grown up swooning over animals, I could better understand my devotion to them. I was as diffident about my boyhood beagle, Muffin, as she was about the family. She wouldn’t endure petting unless a snack was somehow involved. I used to tease her using two of the phrases she knew best, “Go for a ride in the car,” which never failed to elicit great excitement, and “Get a bath,” which sent her scuttling to her hiding place behind the dining room door. “Muffin,” I’d address her brightly, “Go for a ride in the bath?” Her change in demeanor from happiness to confusion delighted me, as did talking to her through the vacuum cleaner hose or calling her over a speaker that carried my voice into the kitchen while I hid in the closet with a microphone.

Oh, those were the days. Now it’s our pets that confuse, control, and tease us.

This morning Linda’s large African grey parrot, Dusty, blocked my path to the bathroom by squaring off on the linoleum and threatening to chomp my toes. Other times, aiming for a coffee refill, I’ve been forced to stay out of the kitchen rather than suffer the consequences of a starling drilling his beak into my scalp. At least our ducks and geese live in backyard pens, though trudging outside to fill their plastic swimming pools involves a trip through the basement, where two convalescing turkeys yip pathetically if I don’t coo and hand-feed them grain.

Pound for pound, these animals don’t add up to much. Dog fanciers with a couple of Rottweilers trump us in terms of sheer biomass. But, when it comes to sheer insistence, even the largest, most
unruly dogs—or, for that matter, your average herd of cattle—are no match for our ducks, geese, parrots, parakeets, turkeys, cats, rabbits, and other birds.

And over time, I have found myself thinking of them less as “animals” and more as beings, as little packets of alien intelligence. People who hunt for sport probably never consider the deer or turkey they’re about to blast to smithereens as a unique individual. But pat the hunter’s hound on the head, idly suggest that one of these days you’d like to bag a dog with a .22, and expect a heated discussion. Viewed from an emotional distance, animals do tend to blend together into an undifferentiated mass, like a crowd of spectators at a football game. Yet even a common-as-mud pet like a parakeet will reveal a vivid personality if you pay close attention. When I was a kid, we kept a parakeet in a cage by itself, tucked away in a corner of our dining room. I regarded it as the essence of dullness. But our three parakeets are radiant souls. Sophie is shy and ladylike. Reggie is mischievous and a copycat. He will flutter to my shoulder only after Rossy has already landed there to nibble on my neck.

Our animals have provided me with the only subject besides music that I’ve ever felt impassioned to write about. Since CC Smith balked at turning over her entire magazine to the art of trimming rabbit teeth, I knew I needed to explore those weighty subjects in a book. I also wanted to grapple with the unlikely series of events that had changed me into an animal lover. The long, smooth slide from keeping one animal to housing more than two dozen amazes me as much as the fact that I’m willing to expend energy on them. I’m so lazy, I’ll take an entire month to clean my upstairs office by shuffling around a few mounds of junk per day. Yet pets have compelled me to perform backbreaking labors that would wake me screaming from a dream.

I also thought that telling the story of Bob and Linda might serve an instructive function. Books about raising dogs and cats are plentiful. Bookstores abound in how-to guides on naming, grooming, potty training, feeding, and deworming felines and canines, as well as narratives of joyful ownership, psychic abilities, and heroic exploits of Fido and Tabby. But when we tried to locate a book on keeping ducks, geese, turkeys, doves, and even rabbits as pets, we came up empty-handed. Instead, we found handbooks on backyard fowl filled with gorgeous photos of breeds alongside helpful sections on butchering. And though the literature on parrots has grown over the last few years, I had to read between the lines to realize that you attach yourself to one of these willful animals at your peril.

I thought, too, that I could use my book to warn about the pitfalls of keeping pets: The bunny with the charming overbite will strip your living room carpet bald. Backyard ducks that supposedly “take care of themselves” require more maintenance than the space shuttle. And the goose you got for free could get sick, and empty your pockets faster than a trip through airport security. I heard experts claim again and again that owning pets reduces stress and might extend your life. I tried to remember that as I dragged a hose out of the basement to fill the ducks’ plastic swimming pool in January weather so cold, the snow complained as I stepped on it. I wondered: Who wants to live longer under those conditions? Why didn’t anyone warn me?

While these were all good reasons for thinking about writing a book, it took a push from an animal to turn thought into action.

I was struggling to eat a sandwich one Sunday afternoon as Linda returned from a potluck at her church. Sitting in the dining room was out of the question. Our green parrot, Ollie, threw himself
into a squawking fit as soon as I sat down at the table to cut my sandwich in half. The African grey parrot, Stanley Sue, countered with a few bright “I want” chirps that degenerated into raucous complaints and bell ringing as I took my first bite. I moved to the living room only to find myself still within Ollie’s field of view.

“I’m taking my lunch outside,” I said to Linda.

“Well, don’t sit out on the deck,” she warned. “He can see you through the window.”

“That’s fine. I won’t be able to hear him.”

“That’s what you think. I could hear him out in my car.”

I headed for the backyard, but then I realized that if the ducks and geese knew I was outdoors they would clamor to get out of their pen. My sandwich and I roamed the front yard, eliminated it as too close to the road and the exhaust fumes of passing cars, and settled on a soft patch of grass near the front of the barn, invisible to the turkeys behind it. They would yip like dogs when they saw me, and I wanted to eat in peace. The spot I chose felt safe. A massive fir tree that seemed to double in size every year shielded me from the house. Leaning against the post that supported the satellite dish, I raised my sandwich to my mouth just as our black cat, Agnes, leaped upon my lap from out of nowhere and begged for a taste.

Defeated, I shared my lunch with her. A few minutes later, I trudged into the house, sat down at the word processor, and started thinking about our animals—trying to figure out why I had rearranged my life to accommodate theirs.

After living so long in the city, I felt peculiar at the farmhouse in Lowell. Looking out the window and seeing woods instead of another window disoriented me. So did waking up to songbirds and a shotgun blast from across the river rather than to car horns and a pistol shot from down the street. I had trouble getting used to the well house outside the back door, the hulking wood furnace in the basement, and the wall of brambles beyond the fence. Strange beasts prowled the property by night. Vultures sailed overhead by day. Stanchions in the barn and a rusted-out cattle trough on the edge of the swamp told of other animal residents—all part of the past, I told myself. But my wife-to-be, Linda, had ideas of her own.