By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
Recently a neighbor told me, “I prefer our landscape of chickens and cows to the territory of horses and vineyards over the mountain.”
A comment on wealth, on the contrast between the production of everyday staples and luxury items, and also on the feeling of a place. How a hillside changes depending on whether it’s dotted with mild-eyed cows or elegant horses. How rows of glistening grapes give off an exotic, Mediterranean light, so different from the dusty glow of chickens scratching in a yard.
This valley is poultry country, and in the Friendly City, chicken is king. Our most commanding architectural structures belong to the poultry plants; the railroad track is strewn with feathers and fallen grain, and trucks bearing crates of closely-packed birds roll through town in a downy haze. Many city-dwellers raise chickens on a small scale, for the eggs and the companionable presence of these plump, mincing creatures, who enliven our neighborhoods with the nervous gaze of their ancient dinosaur eyes and the sound of their monotonous, fussy clucking.
Humble, domestic, and of a nice, manageable size, the chicken is a good representative of the city’s animal kingdom. Our beasts are on the small side, built to scoot out of sight underneath a car if necessary. Squirrels, rabbits, possums, groundhogs, raccoons, and mice populate our yards, fluctuating with the time of year, along with the cardinals, robins, and other petite birds that fill the air with song, closely watched by a multitude of regal, bored-looking cats. The largest of the urban fauna are occasional deer and ubiquitous dogs. The latter, while beloved members of many households, are also the most likely to provoke a passing walker. I have often inched warily past a yard where an untied dog barks at me in alarm, both of us calmed only by the presence of the smiling dog-owner on the porch.
Seasonal visitors add a particular delight to walks in the city, combining the excitement of change with the satisfying familiarity of return. The ducks of the creek come so regularly they have recently been celebrated in a series of bronze statues scattered through downtown. Canada geese descend on the ponds of the state university in the warmer months, along with families of shy turtles, whose young, compact and gleaming like brownish-green marbles, can be seen sunning themselves on a muddy pipe that juts out over the water.
There is a season of field crickets, a season of garter snakes, a season of spiders. Many porch ceilings are painted haint blue to ward off malevolent spirits and/or wasps. We are entangled, even in the city, with what the philosopher David Abram calls the more-than-human world. And as an urban space edged all around with the rural, where a ten-minute drive in any direction takes you into the country, the Friendly City has a close relationship with farmland, visible in the local businesses selling agricultural equipment, the tractors that occasionally slow the traffic, and the livestock auction just over the hill from my house. Tales are told in my neighborhood of escaped pigs being chased through the streets and the dramatic death, some years ago, of a wayward bull. Country and city are woven together, taking part in each other’s lives. In my household, we are urban folks; but our uncle once kept a small dairy nearby, our cousins sell pork and poultry at the weekly farmers market, and visits to friends often take us to porches where cows watch us blandly over the fence.
How the creatures of the Friendly City have enriched my walks with their sparkling presence, like stars in the night sky! The deer in the park. The crow on a wire, balanced so neatly in its black leather tailcoat I was reminded of the little boy on my street riding his bike with no hands. The large brown snake I watched in the creek near the Ice House, swimming upstream, whipping itself along with a startling jackknife motion. The rabbit washing its face and long ears with such catlike diligence I have thought of the species, ever since, as a type of soft, skittish, lolloping, vegetarian little cat. The bashful groundhog that played peek-a-boo with me under a bridge. The curious turtle that stretched its neck toward me, wrinkled and imperious like a cantankerous professor. And even the dog that tyrannized my neighborhood for more than a year.
He was a terrier, small in stature but huge in personality, whose proud throat had never known either collar or chain. During his reign, the portion of the street claimed by this irascible animal took on the menacing air of a mountain pass where strangers are warned to beware of highway robbers. Every time I passed the place—which unfortunately lay between my house and my job—a wild ball of fur with needle teeth hurled itself at me, bristling with rage and baying for my blood. This dauntless dog attacked moving bicycles with equal ferocity; eventually, he even tussled with a car, which we thought would mean his end, but like Billy the Kid, the legendary gunslinger he so resembled, he had a matchless power to defeat the law, whether natural or manmade. After being hit by the car, he returned to his post, madder than ever and sporting a rakish new haircut like a badge of honor. He long evaded punishment, continuing to terrorize the street even after he’d bitten two kids and an animal control officer. At last he was apprehended; but he left behind, as a lasting memorial on the house he once guarded with such unrestrained devotion, a clot of scratches and minor holes in the front storm window, evidence of his audacious plan to bite his way through the plastic.
I do not miss this dog. But the thought of his mischief reminds me that the more-than-human world does not always play by human rules, and that while life with the local critters is full of wonder and affection, it’s also often scrappy, smelly, and tragic. Above all, it’s unpredictable—but isn’t this where stories come from? Since moving to the Friendly City, we have met several people who have been swarmed by yellowjackets; one who was bitten by a copperhead (her unflappable parents told her to take an aspirin and go to bed); and another who broke a rib when he fell down while chasing a rooster.
