Free Shit

One of the things I did with my mother, when I was a child, was go with her to the local stable, where she would shovel horse manure into buckets. I didn’t like flowers or gardening as much as she did, or wanted me to, but I liked to look at the horses, and pet their noses, while she squatted with a shovel, filling six buckets with horse manure and loading them into the back of the little blue car I would eventually, years later, learn to drive on. 

There are four stables along Skyline Boulevard where horses are boarded, where you can get manure if you want to take the time and gasoline to do so. "Anthony Chabot Equestrian Center" is the one I’ve always gone to. You drive in and turn right, park, and then walk on a narrow plank that takes you between the two enclosures of horses that regard you curiously, which is how horses tend to regard you. There is a walled-but-open structure filled with what started off as grass, became poop in a horse, came out of the horse, and after being mixed with sawdusted wood chips, has now become manure, something softer and more gentle, almost pleasant smelling. There is so, so much of it. 

You can squat with a shovel and fill two enormous garbage bags in under ten minutes, which is more than enough for what you need for your small backyard garden. You can be done and home in not even an hour. There is so much manure that it would take hundreds of trips to diminish the enormous pile in any noticeable way, first driving up into the hills, onto 13, then past the Mormon Temple onto Joaquin Miller Rd, which turns into Skyline Blvd, a four lane that becomes a two-lane just before the left into the stables. 

Everything is dusty and sun-baked, there in the hills, and if it were sunrise, you’d be able to see the sun rise over the endless continent just to our east. There is hardly anyone there, and I always feel like I’m stealing, or like someone will ask me what I’m up to. No one ever has. The sign at the entrance says “Open to the Public,” because Kheystone Stables is also apparently also Anthony Chabot Equestrian Center, part of Anthony Chabot Regional Park, which is part of East Bay Regional Park District. You can go there. During the early days of the pandemic, the gate stayed closed because the parks were locked down; once or twice, desperate for a way to be outside and to do something organic, I parked along Skyline and carried my shovel and my bags down to where the horses still pooped, to where the manure still accumulated, and to where no one still stopped you from carrying it off. It felt good to do that, the way gardening felt like a good response to whatever the fuck all of that was. We don’t tend to remember the depths of the pandemic very well, because the thing we tend to do with shit is burn it, bury it, and forget it.

In my lifetime, I’ve probably filled thirty black garbage bags with horse manure from this stable. It’s a fifteen-minute drive, about ten miles. If the little blue car I drive these days gets thirty miles per gallon, and if I fill two to four bags each time, that would be, what, about three gallons of gas I’ve burned? For perhaps, what, two hundred gallons of horse manure? Is that right? I was better at word problems like this when I was a kid, but it’s a striking calculation, all that petroleum formed from the anaerobic decay of planktons and algae buried a billion years ago or so. In a day it will be my mom's birthday; in a few months, it will be eight years since we scattered her ashes on her daffodils, wonderfully perennial plants that die in the fall and rise again in the spring. When I put this manure in my compost pile, it will burn aerobic and hot, within hours, especially when I stir it and add water. Within a week or two, it will smell of nothing but the ground. I’ll use it to grow tomatoes, with which I’ll try to interest my children.