The No-Garbage Theory of Chicken Spirits

Nothing disappears. I looked into the yellow and black eye of my chicken as she gasped, and the presence departed from that eye. Where did that breath just go?

I read somewhere of “primitive” cultures without the concept of trash. Where resources are a closed system.

In our lives, garbage goes to that magic place called “away” and new things keep appearing on the shelves. But that’s an illusion. Everything goes somewhere, everything comes from somewhere.

So where does a chicken’s spirit go? Or it’s breath, if you don’t want to grant chickens a spirit. There is something in there that is alive, then it isn’t.

I had a hard time killing this chicken. She had chickenality, which is personality with feathers. But she was a meat bird, I rationalized, of a hybrid breed that will usually die of a heart attack if let live much past its prime butchering age. Besides, somebody was eating the laying hens’ eggs, and that behavior is not to be tolerated in the coop. It was just her time to go.

I cradled her in my arm as she looked around and told her I’d love to meet her again someday, when she’s not the chicken and I'm not the farmer; when we’re more equals. And then I stuffed her gently but firmly into a bucket, pulled her head through a hole in the bottom, and cut her jugular.

I held her head down so she wouldn’t flop out of the bucket as she expired. I apologized, and I sobbed. A chicken takes a long time to completely expire. The eye is lucid, then it blinks. It fades, then returns briefly. The body jerks. One has eons to think and to feel while standing there, knife in one hand, chicken in the other, burgundy blood dripping.

If spirits “come into this world” and go out of it, where is the spirit warehouse?

There was an energy that was trotting around, pecking, scratching, flapping. Now it hangs limp in my hand. Physics gives us the “law of conservation of energy” which says that nothing disappears. That chicken’s breath has gone somewhere. The energy in the flesh has not gone anywhere yet, though it will eventually become part of three things: my body, my activity, and my composting toilet fodder. Poop will become dirt, and then nutrients taken up in a tree. My body, too, will eventually become dirt, taken up by plants. My activity makes body heat and moves resources. So our legacy is dirt, and the things we move. Plus spirit.

One can follow nutrients around. But spirits? Can they appear, like new toys on the shelf, and go, like garbage hauled off in the truck? Then where is the factory, and where is the dump? Or is it the recycling plant? There must be a circle of understanding big enough to encompass the resource flow of spirits.

If rattlesnakes can register the heat left in a mouse’s footprint, and physics can split atoms, should we not be able to measure a spirit and follow its trail as it departs into thin air? Maybe spirit is air itself. It animates a body, and then it stops entering it, and takes that heat back into itself. Is God in the air? Is God the air itself? Is God the Warehouse of spirits? Or is God the warehouse Manager? Or is God just a word for things we can’t measure but need to believe in?

The next steps made the chicken less resemble the entertaining creature I knew, and more resemble food. Scalding, plucking, removing head and feet. Eviscerating. During the final step, I noticed that she was developing chicken testicles inside that body. Sorry, little rooster. Life is full of surprises.

Exploring the Motu

From July 20
From our private anchorage in Makemo atoll, we explored the palm forest and paddled into mini-lagoons between the motus. I jogged along the beach in the morning and took long picture-taking walks. We snorkeled together. Henrick repainted some rusty bits on the boat and I scrubbed the galley until it shone. We walked to the ocean side of the motus to scavenge among wave-tossed trash from the world over. Garbage lines the craggy beach, a stunning amount of it.

Plastic bits and bottles, intact light bulbs, a TV set, a metal cooler rusted almost beyond recognition, scientific equipment, fishing equipment, a truck tire, rope. Deodorant from Equador. Laundry soap from Japan. Shampoo from someplace with curly Sanskrit-looking letters. Something round from Spain. Rum bottles, empty of contents or messages.

Hermit crabs rule the motu. Fist-sized crabs with red legs, covered in bumps with short yellow hairs sprouting from the bumps. They inhabit every shell. They claw round holes in fallen coconuts and dig out the innards. They climb up into trees and young palms and wave their little antennae at the world.

We walk through their domain in the shadow of the palm forest. Fallen palm fronds crunch underfoot. Mounds of split coconuts attest to the copra trade of the area. Natives harvest the coconuts, split them, shuck out the meat, and send it out by the burlap bag on the supply ships that periodically pass. Copra is their main economic mainstay, along with tourism. The pearling industry has essentially collapsed.

Palm forest is maintained by burning. Charred trunks and patches of ground tell the tale. When we reach the ocean side of the grove, the wind picks up and we think we hear coconuts falling. Repeated thumps vibrate the ground. I put my hands over my head and look up. Not a coconut in sight. They have all been harvested. Two palm trunks colliding in the wind are making the ground vibrate. Still, we gingerly make haste through the maze of coconut husks and fallen branches back to the lagoon. Henrick wants to harvest a wild coconut, and becomes disillusioned by all the empty trees. It isn’t until the next atoll we visit that we find any coconuts still in the trees, but that’s another tale.