by McKenzie Watson-Fore
Nine AM, winter-bright sun. Acres of high-desert prairie spill west from the yard where we’re gathered to the base of the Front Range, under the mountains’ sharp cobalt silhouettes. The blade of Long’s Peak glints like steel in the light.
I recognize most of the small cohort standing in the scrub grass by the wooden rail fence. Peter is a musician from east Tennessee with a rolling Southern accent, shoulder-length curly brown hair, and untrimmed thumbnails for finger-picking guitar. Taylor is a semi-recent divorcée who grew up in Cañon City, a town in southern Colorado with no fewer than thirteen prisons. She’s a year or two younger than me, which makes her mid-to-late twenties. Dania, who convened us, is dressed in her usual canvas Carhartt overalls. Sunglasses sit on the bill of her “Planet Bluegrass” trucker hat, clamped down over gray-blonde hair.
I’ve been a working member in the packhouse for the past two summers, trading a shift a week for a share of veggies. This is how Dania introduces me to the folks I don’t know—a stocky man with a hedge of brown beard and a slight, agile guy in his early forties whose graying hair is pulled up into a trendy man-bun. They all worked full time on the field crew this past season—Peter for the past two years, Dania for five or six years—except for the woman with a dark pixie cut and dangly butterfly earrings.
Dania introduces the woman with the earrings as Sophie, from the local permaculture group. “She’s here to facilitate the harvest,” Dania says. Sophie is going to show us how to kill chickens.
::
Death was never a threat for me. I grew up evangelical: Sunday School, church camp, invited Jesus into my heart when I was six years old. I believed in a bodily resurrection at the end of days, and the life of the world to come: that we would be caught up into the clouds and meet Jesus in the air, and we would be with the Lord forever. We would spend eternity praising God in heaven, dancing on streets of gold.
Death and impermanence and finitude were like exam questions and I already knew the answers: Heaven. Salvation. Eternal life with Jesus Christ.
::
Sophie walks us through the steps. Dania has already tied doctored plastic milk jugs upside-down to the fence posts with baling twine: execution cones. Dried cottonwood leaves, the color of stale tea, cluster on the ground. Sophie explains that we’ll take the chickens from the coop, one by one, and place each hen upside down in a jug. That way, we can access the head and the neck, and the container will restrain the hen’s wings.
“They’ll have a reaction when you kill them,” Sophie warns. Severed nerve endings send an electric shock through the body, so the birds are likely to flap rapidly once we’ve cut their throats. Sophie tells us that after we kill a bird, we’ll leave it in the cone for a few minutes so it can bleed out. “Sometimes it takes a while for all the life to leave.”
::
Have you ever noticed that once you think you know the answer to something, the question no longer holds interest? That’s how it was for me, with death. I didn’t have to consider what the end of life might mean. The belief system prescribed to me covered up death’s ugly uncertainty better than a smart latex band-aid.
::
After the birds have bled out, we’ll scald them. Two propane camp stoves sit open, burning, on a stack of wooden pallets. We’ll dunk birds over the south-side burner. The other stove keeps an eight-gallon pot of water boiling so we can adjust the temperature in the primary pot.
The ideal water temperature is around 150 degrees: hot enough to loosen the feathers but not hot enough to start cooking the skin. Sophie tells us we’ll hold the birds by their gnarled, reptilian feet. We’ll dunk two, three, four times, swishing until water saturates the down. Each time one of us lifts a bird out of the pot, water will spill over the sides, and the burner below will sputter. All day long, the propane stoves hiss into the wind. Steam billowing into the air.
Sophie warns us, again, about the body’s possible reaction. If we take the bird from the cone too quickly, the shock of the water might trigger a second burst of reflex motion, random electrical signals discharging in the tissues. The body, a misfiring machine.
::
I was in middle school when my mom took me to the touring Body Worlds exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Room after room of human cadavers on display, posed to demonstrate the inner workings of the skeletal and muscular systems under various circumstances.
But we were six-day Creationists, which necessitated a certain suspicion of Science, a refusal to accept all its claims—its dubious “theories”—as fact. Belief took precedence over everything else.
Whatever wonder I—and my mom—might’ve felt about the cadavers on display came secondary after our allegiance to the paradigm of God as Creator and Sustainer of life. I could take in the exhibit insofar as it populated my reverence for the Lord. Any other reactions, I understood, were off-limits. Restricted behind a velvet rope in the mind.
Body Worlds alternately captivated and disgusted me. Against my will, the rooms of flayed bodies seeded discomfort. That was how we looked, underneath our shrouds of skin? And more importantly: if that’s all our bodies were, how did God fit in? Where did the soul go?
I was girl who’d been given a literalist faith, suddenly faced with the evidence that my most cherished beliefs were metaphors. The heart not a home or a throne or a door on which Jesus knock-knock-knocked, but a bulbous, glistening glob of tissue and tubes.
I was just old enough to start squirming before unsettling philosophical questions: what if we were all just brains in paper bags in a dark, many-shelved laboratory somewhere, being prodded by scientists’ wands, our neurotransmitters stimulated to make us think we were experiencing “reality”? What if everything I understood as reality was just a simulation? What was the nature of reality, anyway? And how would I know?
::
After the scalding, the plucking. Both hands at once, stripping the carcass of its protection, denuding the bird until it’s bare and clammy and vulnerable. The wing feathers will be hardest to get out, with cartilaginous quills large enough to make into a pen. The plucking is meticulous, tedious work. Sophie apologizes for not borrowing a defeatherer: a metal canister that spins and pulls out the feathers with gray silicone plugs.
Once all the feathers are gone, we’ll remove the heads and feet. A cleaver for the head: find a spot between two vertebrae and whack through. Simple and efficient. For the feet, Sophie instructs us to identify the ankle joint and use a boning knife to sever just below the hock. We’ll toss those parts into bags for whoever wants them. Bird, severed of both brain and mobility.
::
When I was eighteen, I moved east for Christian college. No car, an elegant but remote campus north of Boston surrounded by four hundred acres of woods and wetlands. My plan: study the Bible, become a youth pastor. Share with others the doctrinal answers that had been given to me.
But halfway through my biblical studies major, a crisis of faith erupted like a volcano in my life, anachronistic and devastating. I started questioning how easily my faith tradition dismissed whatever it didn’t understand. How the evangelicalism I grew up with valued correct answers over curiosity. Impenetrability over openness.
Around that time, I got my first farm job.
I’d applied to work as a campus tour guide at my Christian college, but the admissions office didn’t hire me, so I found part-time work off-campus at a nearby CSA farm instead. The exchange felt symbolic: I’d wanted to serve and promote the Christian institution, but ejected from the cloister, I turned to the land. I sought sustenance in the soil instead of the Scriptures.
::
Sophie walks from the plucking station to the next table, set with an assortment of sharpened knives.
“Evisceration,” she announces. She talks us through the steps. Remove the oil gland, just above the hen’s tail. A small incision at the base of the neck: we’ll identify the crop, which holds whatever the bird ate in the last twenty-four hours. “You don’t want to rupture it,” Sophie warns. “Use your fingers to pull at its edges to separate it from the fascia.” We’ll tug out the trachea, a cartilaginous straw.
Once the crop and the windpipe have been isolated, we’ll turn the bird around. Another small incision, this one just above the hips. Then everything else will come out. The gruesome—intestines, poop track, gallbladder, and gizzard, heavy in the hand like a psychedelic blue stone—along with the familiar—liver, heart, and lungs; each one a tiny replica of the same blood-powered units tucked inside of me.
::
On my first day, I reported to an apprentice named Harper, a girl a few years older than I was, though both of us were younger than Taylor is now. She wore a t-shirt under a red-and-white sweater under a giant, unbuttoned flannel, and her curly hair was pulled back in a leopard-print scrunchie. The coolest girl I’d ever seen.
She led me out to the green Ford field truck. We drove past an acre of harvested potatoes and fields of cruciferous greens over to the late-season lettuce that needed harvesting. While we worked, Harper told me that her last job was at the most pretentious coffee shop in Cambridge, Mass.
“I’ve dealt with depression; I mean, who hasn’t, right?” she said. I hadn’t, yet. But I nodded anyway. She squeezed each head of lettuce to assess its readiness. “That’s what happens when our entire system is built on working so hard but doing work that doesn’t benefit anyone we’re connected to.” One clean slice: she severed a wrinkled green orb from the ground. While she moved down the row, I watched earth accumulate in the lines on her hands.
Harper told me she had a Catholic mother and an ex-Catholic father, “the kind that is very against the church.” She claimed no faith tradition for herself. But when she spoke about farming, her language mirrored what I’d heard at a recent school convocation, a lecture on the Spirituality of Eating.
“Eating is no small thing,” convocation speaker Dr. Norman Wirzba began, “because for us to eat, something else has to die.” He described eating as one of the most intimate actions: to take something inside us and live from it.
“I’ve seen life turn into death,” Harper said, “and farming is where death turns back into life.”
::
The chicken harvest is gory. Blood and organs on the table. Buckets of severed heads. A rank stench wafts over the scrub-grass yard. While I dressed this morning in the still dark, my husband asked if I was sure.
“You couldn’t even look at the mouse our cat killed,” he reminded me. But does squeamishness give me a right to look away? Sinister is how the writer Margo Steines describes it, “the idea that by refusing to look at certain spectacles, there can be moral cleanliness from the existence of violence.” I eat meat. My life is sustained by the death of animals. I don’t want to be the kind of meat-eater who is horrified, indignant, at the thought of butchery.
American society depends on violence, whether or not I am willing to see it. Failure to witness it would not eradicate the act. Nor would my absence from this bloody table absolve me.
The early afternoon sun, already drawn toward the teeth of the mountains, will warm my back while I plunge my hand inside a slaughtered bird. Wrist to fingertips covered in goop. “We lack hunger,” Steines writes, “for truths about the violence we participate in.”[1]
::
“There’s some profound truth there I haven’t unpacked yet,” Harper added. She knelt to shave another lettuce head from the furrow. “They’re onto something with that whole transubstantiation.”
I began to consider what it means that Jesus instructs his followers to feed on him, to live on his flesh and blood, to take his body and eat.
In my Christian college days, we didn’t talk about how this command—and the sacrament it instructs—are most closely mirrored in motherhood. We didn’t discuss the divine feminine, or the possibility of locating the sacred in our bodies, in others, or in the land. We talked about heaven. Salvation. Eternal life with Jesus Christ.
Never did we dare use feminine pronouns for God. Rarely did we recall that Jesus describes himself as a mother hen.[2]
::
Aspen Moon’s hens are egg layers. But Sophie’s worked predominantly with meat birds. Because of this, Sophie doesn’t yet know—none of us do—that as we work, we’ll discover eggs inside their bellies. Fat, fluorescent globes of yolk will plop out onto the slime-covered table. Certain hens will relinquish the quivering jellies of egg whites. Peter will find an egg fully formed, already encased in its nursery-blue shell.
::
Wanting to be like Harper, I considered seeking my own agricultural apprenticeship after college, but that path felt too secular. Instead, I committed to a year-long Christian volunteer corps that placed me in Houston, Texas. I thought I could stifle my doubts with service.
::
After gutting, all that remains will be to rinse and bag the birds. To make them presentable. The table will be slick with their internal juices, oil and gel and viscera. Water from the hose won’t cut the lipids, but we’ll attempt to spray down the hollowed-out carcasses, brushing off flecks of feathers, wicking away traces of the disemboweling. We’ll stuff the birds in freezer bags, zip them—our hands sliding over the plastic, goopy fingertips struggling to earn purchase on the bag’s cheap zippers—and layer them into Dania’s cooler. Every couple hours, Dania will transfer the bags to the storage freezer in her garage. Packing meat for the winter. Preparing for the fallow season.
::
The summer before I moved to Texas, I went to east Tennessee to work on a farm full-time. Small-scale, a hobby farm that grew organic vegetables on a little over an acre. I did everything: planted, watered, weeded, tended, harvested, washed, sold at two local farmers’ markets. I sat on the hill across the sloping valley from Bays Mountain and marveled at the seductive swells and silhouettes of Appalachia while I picked cabbage aphids off my kale. I read essays by agrarian poet Wendell Berry, poems by Mary Oliver, Fred Chappell’s evocative trilogy: Brighten the Corner Where You Are, I am One of You Forever, and Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You. That farm was named Serenity Knoll, and I was bound to leave it.
I felt pulled between intellectual performance of the principles and doctrines I’d always assented to, and a life that took seriously the material world, the land, the body. Farming represented the sensuous path. The one I didn’t feel licensed to choose.
::
What I find, when I probe back into my own history with farming, is that faith has always come easier to me when it is covered in dirt. Faith that the plants will bud again in the spring. Faith that the ground will prove fertile. Something in my soul harmonizes with the earth in her cycles, recognizes transcendence beneath my booted feet, sees and hears the Spirit rustling the leaves of the slender ailanthus trees.
The first Wendell Berry quote I ever loved: “I don’t think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a “hypaethral book,” such as Thoreau talked about—a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better.
“Outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders,” Berry continues. “We see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread.”[3]
That quote was gifted to me by an older student, who’d scrawled it on a ripped-out scrap of paper while we were backpacking through the Adirondacks on a school-sponsored trip. It was the summer before my freshman year of college. Every day, we trekked through northern hardwood forests in our quick-dry rain shells and fleece pants and rank woolen socks, and I contemplated what the Jesus of two thousand years ago wanted from me. What I could do with my life that would be sufficient.
Four years after that backpacking trip, I did what I thought God asked of me by moving to Houston.
Maybe it’s that I lost the wonder, that the astonishment at the heart of faith was dulled by over-intellectualization and the slow sterilization of my community and my own disillusionment with evangelical exclusivity. Six years in Houston—during which, I fell in love. I married an atheist. Our union, the definitive strike of my noncompliance. A death knell for my long-standing desire for religious approval. But not the death of my desire for spirituality and sacrament.
::
My husband and I moved, unexpectedly, back to Boulder, my hometown. Ground zero of my evangelical formation. This sudden return ignited a reckoning, a purification, a burning away. My twenty-eight-year-old self—married, wary of judgment—working at the liquor store in the same plaza where my sixteen-year-old self—yearning and malleable—met with mentors after church. Unraveling years of conditioning in the same place where that conditioning happened.
Mountains rim the city like the spiked jaw of a bear trap. How to develop a relationship with this place now?
A farm job. One shift a week at a biodynamic vegetable farm in a tiny town north of Boulder called Hygiene. People used to come here to recover from tuberculosis. I, too, seek healing. The farm—Aspen Moon—is run by Deadheads whose daughters are named after flowers. Planting happens in sync with the moon cycle and the chicken coop moves around the hundred acres so the birds can fertilize the soil. I work in the packhouse: washing coolers, weighing and bunching or bagging salad greens, sorting cherry tomatoes, bundling the rainbow carrots and beets. In exchange for my labor, I receive a share of the harvest.
Every Tuesday for these past two summers, I rise before the sun to drive along the base of the mountains. The dented pyramid of Long’s Peak, 14,259 feet tall, looms in my windshield. The plains unfurl to my right and the dun-colored slopes of the foothills ascend on my left. I am forging a new connection to this place. I am cultivating a spirituality that asks questions. That listens to the wisdom of the land. That refuses to dismiss the earth or those on it.
::
“I believe everything is everything,” Peter will tell us. His arm wrist-deep in chicken.
During the years I lived in Houston, the only metric for theology that still made sense to me was interconnectedness, radical communion. That our lives depend, intimately, on the lives unfolding around us. We do not live in a vacuum. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s belief that we are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”[4]
::
When I lived firmly within the walls of evangelicalism, there was so much I did not question. Returning to the place of my formation has prompted me to sift through it all, deciding what to jettison and what to keep. I choose to reject the inculcated self-hatred, the belief in a prevenient sinfulness—that before anything else, I was already broken.
::
“I’d like us to start with a blessing,” Sophie says. “This can look however you want it to, if anyone wants to say anything.”
Peter speaks up.
“There’s a line from Walt Whitman I often think of,” he says. His words are like river rocks, smoothed by water and time.
“The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.
All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.”[5]
::
Earlier this year, I read a poetry collection written by a woman I used to know from church. She writes about leaving. Her own process of disentangling the beliefs she can still abide from the ones she can no longer—perhaps could never—bear.
“Outside the wall,” Sara Triana writes, “we discover we might die. I’ve begun to believe I will truly cease.”[6] My voice catches every time I read this poem.
Is this the exchange? If I reject heaven—that convenient, smart latex band-aid of presumptuous belief—I get life on earth instead? With all its viscera, blood, violence, sun, mountains, wind, fear, and awe?
::
My turn to slaughter a hen. We bring the bird out of the coop. A metal bar locks the door. Sophie helps me situate the chicken upside down in the cone. Bright red stains on the stiff grass at the base of the fencepost.
I close my fingers around the neck like a vice, cupping the hen’s head in the darkness of my palm. She strains for a moment, then falls still. Sophie shows me to separate the downy feathers with my thumb, to get as close to the skin as possible. I press blade into flesh and draw it across the throat in one deep slice. Warm blood drips onto my hands.
::
[1] Steines, Margo. Brutalities: A Love Story. P. 157
[2] Matthew 23:37, Luke 13:34
[3] Berry, Wendell. “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” from Sex, Economy, Freedom, and Community. P. 103.
[4] King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail”
[5] Whitman, Walt. “Song of Myself, 6 [A child said, What is the grass?]”, from Leaves of Grass
[6] Triana, Sara. “The One About the Wall,” from Spread Thick. Finishing Line Press: 2022. p. 41.
::
McKenzie Watson-Fore is a writer, artist, and regenerative agriculture enthusiast based in her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She holds an MFA from Pacific University. She can be found at MWatsonFore.com, drinking tea on her back porch, or dancing Argentine tango.
Image: Still Life with Dead Poultry. Johann Heinrich Roos, 1676. In the Public Domain.
ID: painting of a dead white chicken hanging upside down surrounded by various small, dead birds.
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