Run, Spot, Run

Members of the Flock

 by Rachel LeFever of Lititz, PA., as told to Marty Crisp, "Guideposts," Nov. 1989

With Thanksgiving 1983 only two weeks away, I was counting my blessings: one good marriage, three healthy children, a farm on twelve and a half acres of green woods and rich fields, and 28,000 contented and clucking chickens laying 17,000 eggs a day. Life was good, and I was grateful -- in a thank-You-God but taking-it-for-granted way.

My husband, Dave, and I had almost completed our first full year of egg farming, with a flock of birds contracted from egg suppliers R.W. Sauder, Inc. So far our hard work had paid off, and I was singing happily to myself that Sunday morning, November 13.

And then Dave came into the kitchen with a puzzled look on his face. He'd been on his morning rounds and discovered that 22 birds had died during the night. It's not uncommon to find five to ten dead chickens a day; that's fairly average for a flock our size. But 22?

We went to Sunday worship service, and later spent some time with out church friends. But as the day went on, I could tell Dave was uneasy, and I was too. At 9 p.m., Dave and I walked out hand-in-hand to our long white chicken-house to check the flock.

I have always loved the sound of chickens "singing," the soft and rhythmic clucking they make as they perch on their nests. But tonight, as we stood holding our breath in the darkness, the sound we heard was a rattle, a coughing, a hacking. Dave opened one of the cages and lifted out one dead bird, then another. I began to cry.

There was no doubt: it was avian flu. This highly contagious disease of the respiratory and digestive systems can wipe out an entire flock. Our chickens had been hit. And our dreams -- and our life savings -- were now jeopardized by that terrible rattle.

On Monday we had 44 dead chickens. The eggs laid by our hens were now soft-shelled, and some had no shells at all. The transport belt that carried the eggs became gummed and jammed, and our feet stuck to the floor where gooey yolk had dripped. The chicken feed sat uneaten in the metal trays.

On Tuesday, government inspectors arrived. Our farm was placed under quarantine. Antibiotics weren't effective. We were just going to have to wait until the disease ran its course.

On Wednesday, there were 439 dead chickens. It was getting harder and harder to remove them before they began rotting in their cages or in the aisles where we piled them. The whole family was up at 5:30 every day now. Our children, Gwenda and Jeff, 10 and 13, pitched right in. And Donovan, who was only five, helped load the flatbed truck; he rode along to the ditch Dave had dug on the edge of our property and helped his daddy throw dead chickens in for burial.

Thanksgiving was getting closer, but not a bone in my body was rejoicing. Day after day, the death toll mounted. On Saturday, it was 1,806. The birds that were still alive hardly fluttered or made a sound at all.

A guard sat in our driveway now, enforcing the quarantine and disinfecting every vehicle that went in or out. Anyone who went in or near the chicken house had to wear a white plastic suit and scrub down before leaving the premises.

On Sunday we were up and working for two hours before church. Even though we were exhausted and every minute counted, we knew we had to go to church. We needed spiritual support more than ever now.

The sermon that morning was based on Habakkuk 3:17 and 18: "Although the fig tree shall not blossom, neither shall fruit be in the vines...the flock shall be cut off from the fold...Yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will joy in the God of my salvation."

Rejoice? Thanksgiving? The Bible said it could be done, but I wasn't sure I could manage it.

At home that evening, we fell into bed exhausted yet again, but I woke up during the night to feel Dave pulling at me in his sleep. When I yipped, he woke up. "I thought you were a chicken," he mumbled.

In spite of a good middle-of-the-night laugh, on Monday morning I could barely drag myself out of bed. "I wish our chicken house would just be hit by lightning and burn down," Dave said bitterly. He had reached a point where he would almost rather watch his dreams go up in smoke than to see them rotting in the aisles. "Then we'd all move to Florida and start over."

With what? I thought wearily. We staggered out to the chicken house and started our work. It seemed especially impossible today. And just as I was thinking that, I heard the sound of cars and pickup trucks pulling into the driveway. It was my brother Nelson, with a 12-man crew from our little Erb Mennonite Church. In 45 minutes they did all the work that it would have taken us a whole day of struggling to do!

We were so happy for the help that I went inside and made a batch of "apple goody," a Pennsylvania Dutch treat. Even Joe, the guard, stood out in the driveway with the men in their white plastic suits and gobbled it down. For the first time since this whole thing started, I looked around at our church friends and felt a burst of genuine thankfulness.

I guess we knew it had to happen: the special Avian Flu Task Force sent by the U.S. Department of Agriculture arrived and pronounced our chickens "hot." Even a quarantine was too risky now; the entire flock of birds would have to be "depopulated" to protect other birds in the surrounding areas.

Two days before Thanksgiving, the official government depopulation team arrived. It seemed we were being visited by men from outer space, as these strangers in white suits, caps and masks came to dispose of the rest of our flock -- including my grandfather's prize bantam roosters.

It was almost a relief. Our poor chickens had been so sick that it hurt me to watch them. I felt so tired and overwhelmed that I got a little silly: if people with the flu eat chicken soup to feel better, I wondered, what should chickens with the flu eat?

"Now you folks can start your clean-up," one of the inspectors said as he was leaving. Dave and I looked around at the entire yolk-encrusted, feather-matted area. The government required that this whole area of the farm be scrubbed clean and disinfected.

For starters, we'd have to blast the walls and floors with high-pressure hoses. Then our 2,000 feet of conveyor chain and belt would have to be scraped with putty knives and scrubbed with steel wool. The lard buildup on the freed troughs had to be painstakingly scrubbed off by hand, along with the eight-foot-long manure boards under the cages. And the cages themselves had to be scoured and cleansed for all they were worth.

Barely two weeks earlier I'd counted my blessings with such satisfaction. Today the count had changed: We now had one completely empty but quite contaminated chicken house, monthly mortgage payments of $1,800, no eggs and no income. We were about to lose everything we'd put into the farm.

And then it was Thanksgiving Day. We went to Dave's sister's for dinner. I tried to enjoy the corn pudding and the apple schnitz. Everything looked delicious, but nothing tasted good to me.

"When do the church people start?" Dave's sister asked.

"Start what?"

"Cleaning up your farm."

"What?" Only then did Dave and I learn that about a hundred people from the congregation were coming over to help us.

They showed up all right, people from the church, organized by the minister, and eager to help us scour and scrape and wash. The women of the church provided ample food for the volunteers and for us.

It took days and days of hard work, but there was a lot of laughing too. Everybody helped, nobody complained. Even our mutt, Tippy, was well-behaved; I wondered if the poor dog had just given up barking at strangers since there had been so many around lately.

When the massive cleanup was over, our chicken house was as clean as any hospital operating room. But that wasn't the end of it. There were the "love gifts," money given by members of the congregation "so you can pay your bills and get started again."

On December 18, almost a month after the nightmare began, our chicken house passed inspection.

Five weeks later, On January 28, 1984, 28,000 new and healthy chickens from Perry County were delivered, and they nestled right into their spanking clean cages. When Dave and I stood in the dark that night and listened to those chickens singing peacefully, my heart was so full it just wanted to burst.

So when Thanksgiving comes around again, I will continue to count my blessings -- one good marriage, three healthy children, a farm on twelve and a half acres of green woods and rich fields, 28,000 contented and clucking chickens laying 17,000 eggs a day -- and most certainly our loving church family. But I'll never take these things for granted gain. I'll just go on thanking God. Even for the challenges he gives us.