Village life: She has passion for city chickens

Erin Caudell has a yellow house in Carriage Town, a big dog named Daisy, a blue pickup truck, 1,100 Facebook friends and a passion for urban chickens.

And when we set off in the truck recently for lunch at Hoffman's Deli, she had to move two bags of dirt to make room for me. That's right — dirt.

Caudell's dirt, enroute from two downtown sites to get tested for a patch of locally grown vegetables, shot me a dose of pure happiness.

Described by a colleague as both fearless and formidable, the 5-foot 11-inch Caudell, 32, is the outreach program coordinator at the Ruth Mott Foundation.

In that position she is helping forge dramatic new ways for Flint to reconnect itself with what it eats. From those primal basics, she believes, perhaps the community can heal itself.

"There's a momentum of hope," she said over a healthy lunch, "and people will do what it takes."

A Burton native, she returned to Flint by choice after a Michigan State horticulture degree and the end of a five-year marriage.

The degree, she recalls, was very much about production for the retail market — Easter lilies, poinsettias — but she soaked up whatever she could about vegetables, as if knowing her life would lead her directly back to food.

But it started much earlier, with her grandmother, and her grandmother's garden. She recalls idyllic days when grandmother and granddaughter would snap peas under the chestnut trees and wandered a nearby cemetery.

When Caudell was in middle school, her mother let her have an herb garden in the backyard. There she grew dill and oregano, mint, rosemary, marjoram and her favorites, burnett, lemon balm and lovage.

"For dinner, I was always in charge of the salad, and my brother would say, 'Hey, she put weeds in the salad again!' But now he's a complete 'foodie,' too, so he wouldn't eat a salad without 'weeds' in it."

A series of summer internships at Applewood fueled Caudell's fascination with plants. She was, she said, already "crazy about dirt and bugs," and the Applewood gardeners, deeply devoted to education, took time to teach the interns something new every day.

"This was the culture I wanted to be around," she said.

About three years ago she got obsessed with reading books about food.

"And then I had a series of food meltdowns," she recalled.  "I didn't know what I could buy that was safe. Everything we had access to, it looked like, was toxic — and I can't afford to buy everything organic.  So I started asking, what are the choices that we have?"

At the same time, she was working with the Genesee County Land Bank and grappling with options both for the county's vast stock of abandoned lots and huge jobless problem.

"Safety permeates everything, and people use that as a reason not to go outside," she said.  "But everything is connected — I know that as a horticulturalist — so I started thinking about how the ecosystem of people works."

Potent local research propelled her. One Flint study, for example, said people involved in community gardening felt safer. And those statistics often cited by Farmers' Market Manager Dick Ramsdell, that Genesee County residents spend $1.1 billion a year on food, with some $900 million of it leaving the county. Barely a tenth of it stays here with local food providers.

"How do you start?  I can only help with the skills I have, and it all comes together with food — where it came from, how it was grown, who touched it, what chemicals? Do restaurants have our best interests in mind?  What does the government think kids should eat in school? How is all this fueled by agribusiness?  It's a mess."

Yet, she slowly discovered, "there are tons of people in the community who grow gardens, in side yards, back yards, people who came up from the South. I love driving all around Flint, and I find new gardens all the time. This is not new.  It's not like we're starting from scratch. But some of my generation forgot."

So she has devoted herself, and her work, to what she and others can literally bring to the table.

She's deeply gratified by the success of the "hoop houses" — there are now three, including the newest one at Ebenezer Baptist Church — where teenagers are paid to grow collards, lettuce and mustard greens year round and carrots and tomatoes just starting their season. The kids sell their produce weekly at a popular Farmers' Market stand.

A Kellogg Foundation grant, support from the Ruth Mott Foundation and help from many other community groups and individuals, have made that happen.

The city recently turned down that proposal for urban chickens, but she's not giving up.

"There are a lot of people who care about Flint, and that's why I keep doing this stuff," Caudell said. "I just dare somebody to tell me we can't."

All the accoutrements of her life, committed and literally blooming, qualify her as a new kind of Yuppie — a young urban pioneer in downtown Flint.

Caudell and others like her are a heartening, hopeful answer to my column of last month, in which I vented gloom about all the depressing things in Flint right now that made me begin to plot a bitter escape.

A cynic from a neighborhood association recently rued the emergence of this cadre, mocking what he called the "neo-hippie agrarian ethic." The phrase made Caudell smile.  She looked down at her long, embroidered skirt and I noted her dangly earrings and earthy amber necklace.

"Yeah, I can see that," she said with a grin.

But skeptics don't undo her, and she thinks they're missing the point — a big, important point about what's at stake.

"I don't believe we should use everything we have access to. We should be responsible with our resources," she said.

This younger generation, an intriguing posse remarkably thriving in downtown Flint, don't just sip idle lattes, though they do linger over coffees here and there — but actually get their hands dirty, motivated strongly by love for a town that doesn't always love them back.

This tired old lady needs this young crowd. And because of them, she just might find herself saved.

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Columnist and Poet Jan Worth-Nelson has lived within walking distance of East Village Magazine since 1981. Her 2006 Peace Corps novel, Night Blind, is widely available. You can find her essays, fiction and poetry on her web site, www.janworth.com and her blog, http://nightblindblog.blogspot.com/index.htm. She teaches writing at UM-Flint.