At Crossroads with Chickens
A “What If It Works?” Adventure in Off-Grid Living & Quest for Home
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At Crossroads with Chickens
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Narrated by:
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Tory McCagg
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By:
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Tory McCagg
About this listen
In 2012, McCagg and her husband, Carl, built an off-grid, solar-powered house in Jaffrey, New Hampshire. It was to be a weekend getaway for the writer (what’s this pitchfork for?) and trombonist (a wannabe farmer). In December, with two cats and six newly adopted chicks, they drove up to Jaffrey from their home in Providence, Rhode Island, ostensibly just for the winter so their new pipes wouldn’t freeze....
But their hen Rhoda Red turned out to be Big Red. Roosters are outlawed by Providence city regulations, so Big Red couldn’t go back. Thus, writes McCagg, “neither did we. Survival of the fittest. Natural selection. Soul evolution. We named our 193-acre home Darwin’s View for a reason.”
Chicken kerfuffles lighten the mood, but this story is born of heartbreak, of yearning for the great beauty of the world as it used to be. As she moves from full-time weekender to organic gardener, McCagg interlaces her tale with her mother’s battle with Parkinson’s, braiding both Mother and Mother Nature. Add the sun, the wind, and a cock-a-doodle-do, and you have the recipe for a perfect storm of personal growth rippling out to effect a larger transformation.
Beautifully modulated and on target for the differing moods McCagg wants to convey, the author’s reading of her story allows the listener be yet more a part of her life at Darwin’s View with all its ups and downs....
Tory McCagg holds an MFA from Emerson College, where her thesis and novel, Shards, won the Graduate Dean’s Award. Her novel, Bittersweet Manor, won a Silver medal for Contemporary Fiction from Independent Publishers in 2015. Tory is an accomplished flutist and lives with her husband, two cats, and myriad chickens at Darwin’s View, where they all practice an experimental life off the grid and on the land.
©2020 Tory McCagg (P)2022 Bauhan Publishing AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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5 out of 5 stars
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The most beautiful book I’ve ever read
- By KFratt on 04-26-19
By: Pam Houston
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Essays of E. B. White
- By: E. B. White
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 12 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 235
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 209
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 207
Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.
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5 out of 5 stars
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E.B. White writes honestly, fearlessly and clearly
- By Bonny on 09-03-17
By: E. B. White
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Miracle Country
- A Memoir
- By: Kendra Atleework
- Narrated by: Cassandra Campbell
- Length: 9 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 48
Kendra Atleework grew up in Swall Meadows, in the Owens Valley of the Eastern Sierra Nevada, where annual rainfall averages five inches and in drought years measures closer to zero. Kendra's family raised their children to thrive in this harsh landscape, forever at the mercy of wildfires, blizzards, and gale-force winds. Most of all, the Atleework children were raised on unconditional love and delight in the natural world. But it came at a price.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The best memoir I've read
- By Patricia on 08-15-20
By: Kendra Atleework
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Dog Years
- By: Mark Doty
- Narrated by: Mark Doty
- Length: 6 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 68
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 45
When Mark Doty went looking to adopt a small dog, a cuddly creature who might comfort his terminally ill partner, Wally Roberts, he was surprised to find himself returning home from an animal shelter with a full-grown golden retriever, a dog whose "absolute openess of regard", and paw gently offered through the bars of a cage, proved irresistable to him.
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5 out of 5 stars
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I cried my face off
- By Brad on 10-27-08
By: Mark Doty
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We Are Unprepared
- By: Meg Little Reilly
- Narrated by: Zach Villa
- Length: 8 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 59
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4 out of 5 stars 58
We Are Unprepared is a novel about the next big storm, the one that changes our relationship to nature and each other...the superstorm that threatens to destroy a marriage, a rural Vermont town, and the Eastern Seaboard when it hits. But the destruction begins months earlier, when fear infects people's lives and spreads like a plague.
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4 out of 5 stars
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A Sociological Almost Post-Apocalyptic Thriller
- By Brian on 12-25-16
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The Good Good Pig
- The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood
- By: Sy Montgomery
- Narrated by: Xe Sands
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 375
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 328
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 328
A naturalist who spent months at a time living on her own among wild creatures in remote jungles, Sy Montgomery had always felt more comfortable with animals than with people. So she gladly opened her heart to a sick piglet who had been crowded away from nourishing meals by his stronger siblings. Yet Sy had no inkling that this piglet, later named Christopher Hogwood, would not only survive but flourish.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Uplifting memoir of a pig + autobiography
- By Diana on 04-04-19
By: Sy Montgomery
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Tomboyland
- Essays
- By: Melissa Faliveno, Joey Soloway - introduction
- Narrated by: Melissa Faliveno
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 63
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 54
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 54
Flyover country, the middle of nowhere, the space between the coasts. The American Midwest is a place beyond definition, whose very boundaries are a question. It's a place of rolling prairies and towering pines, where guns in bars and trucks on blocks are as much a part of the landscape as rivers and lakes and farms. Where girls are girls and boys are boys, where women are mothers and wives, where one is taught to work hard and live between the lines.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Embrace the Quirk
- By Lorraine S. on 07-26-22
By: Melissa Faliveno, and others
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Travels with Charley in Search of America
- By: John Steinbeck
- Narrated by: Gary Sinise
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 5,531
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 4,850
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 4,849
In September 1960, John Steinbeck and his poodle, Charley, embarked on a journey across America, from small towns to growing cities to glorious wilderness oases. Travels with Charley is animated by Steinbeck’s attention to the specific details of the natural world and his sense of how the lives of people are intimately connected to the rhythms of nature—to weather, geography, the cycles of the seasons. His keen ear for the transactions among people is evident, too, as he records the interests and obsessions that preoccupy the Americans he encounters along the way.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Gary Sinise is fantastic!
- By C. Wilson on 01-11-17
By: John Steinbeck
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Driving on the Rim
- By: Thomas McGuane
- Narrated by: Traber Burns
- Length: 12 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 92
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 73
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Story4 out of 5 stars 71
The unforgettable voyager of this dark picaresque is I. B. "Berl" Pickett, M.D., whose die was probably cast the moment his mother thought to name him after Irving Berlin. Other insults piled on apace thereafter: the spasms of Pentecostal Sunday worship; the social debilitation of following his parents' itinerant rug-shampooing business; the erotic initiation at the hands of his aunt. It's hard to imagine what would have become of him had he not gone to medical school.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Delightful
- By Roy on 01-05-11
By: Thomas McGuane
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The Bucolic Plague
- How Two Manhattanites Became Gentlemen Farmers: An Unconventional Memoir
- By: Josh Kilmer-Purcell
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 8 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 218
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 192
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 192
A happy series of accidents and a doughnut-laden escape upstate take Josh Kilmer-Purcell and his partner, Brent Ridge, to the doorstep of the magnificent (and fabulously for sale) Beekman Mansion. And so begins their transformation from uptight urbanites into the 200-year-old-mansion-owning Beekman Boys. Suddenly Josh---a full-time New Yorker with a successful advertising career---and Brent find themselves weekend farmers, surrounded by nature's bounty and an eclectic cast.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Selling your dream and name dropping
- By Mark on 09-13-12
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Walking to Listen
- 4,000 Miles Across America, One Story at a Time
- By: Andrew Forsthoefel
- Narrated by: Andrew Forsthoefel
- Length: 13 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 402
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 348
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 350
At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel headed out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder, his copies of Whitman and Rilke, and a sign that read "Walking to Listen". He had just graduated from Middlebury College and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn't know how. So he decided to take a cross-country quest for guidance, one where everyone he met would be his guide. In the year that followed, he faced an Appalachian winter and a Mojave summer. He met beasts inside: fear, loneliness, doubt.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Transcends the typical trekking story
- By barefoot rabbit on 08-07-18
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Dalva
- A Novel
- By: Jim Harrison
- Narrated by: Chris Henry Coffey, Stacey Glemboski
- Length: 13 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 67
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 60
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 58
From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born, and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at 45 she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth, and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians.
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5 out of 5 stars
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As a woman, I can finally appreciate Jim Harrison with this book.
- By kathryn gray on 09-11-24
By: Jim Harrison
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Let's Take the Long Way Home
- A Memoir of Friendship
- By: Gail Caldwell
- Narrated by: Joyce Bean
- Length: 4 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 224
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 144
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Story4 out of 5 stars 145
In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gail Caldwell offers a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life and her extraordinary friendship with Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story. Though they are more different than alike, these two fiercely private, independent women quickly relax into a friendship more profound than either of them expected. They grow increasingly inseparable until, in 2003, Caroline is diagnosed with Stage IV lung cancer.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Uniquely wonderful book
- By Lucie on 09-07-10
By: Gail Caldwell
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Will's Red Coat
- The Story of One Old Dog Who Chose to Live Again
- By: Tom Ryan
- Narrated by: Tom Ryan
- Length: 8 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 233
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 208
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Story5 out of 5 stars 208
Drawn by an online post, Tom Ryan adopted Will, a frightened, deaf, and mostly blind elderly dog, and brought him home to live with him and Atticus. The only owners Will ever knew had grown too fragile to take care of themselves or of him. Ultimately Will was left at a kill shelter in New Jersey. Tom hoped to give Will a place to die with dignity amid the rustic beauty of the White Mountains of his New Hampshire home. But when Will bites him numerous times and acts out in violent displays, Tom realizes he is in for a challenge.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Wildflowers And Drunken Butterfly Dances
- By Gillian on 05-06-17
By: Tom Ryan
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Almost Anywhere
- Road-Trip Ruminations on Love, Nature, Recovery, and Nonsense
- By: Krista Schlyer
- Narrated by: Marisa Vitali
- Length: 10 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 76
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 66
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Story4 out of 5 stars 66
What do you do when your world ends? At 28 years old, Krista Schlyer sold almost everything she owned and packed the rest of it in a station wagon bound for the American wild. Her two best friends joined her - one a grumpy, grieving introvert, the other a feisty dog - and together they sought out every national park, historic site, forest, and wilderness they could get to before their money ran out or their minds gave in.
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4 out of 5 stars
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No a travelogue - its a diary
- By Jonathan on 12-29-20
By: Krista Schlyer
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The Road from Coorain
- By: Jill Ker Conway
- Narrated by: Barbara Caruso
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 166
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 143
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 142
In the 1930s, Jill Ker's parents bought a sheep farm on the western plains of New South Wales. In 1944, they lost nearly everything when a drought hit. Forced to leave Coorain, 11-year-old Jill and her mother settled in Sydney where Jill struggled to find a place for herself among Sydney's elite. Her story, both a chronicle of life in the Australian outback and the odyssey of a brilliant woman fighting the constraints of her time, offers a loving view of Australia.
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5 out of 5 stars
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So glad I (finally) listened to my aunt
- By T. on 07-12-13
By: Jill Ker Conway
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Because Our Fathers Lied
- A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today
- By: Craig McNamara
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright, Craig McNamara
- Length: 7 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 65
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4 out of 5 stars 56
Craig McNamara came of age in the political tumult and upheaval of the late '60s. While Craig McNamara would grow up to take part in anti-war demonstrations, his father, Robert McNamara, served as John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense and the architect of the Vietnam War. This searching and revealing memoir offers an intimate picture of one father and son at pivotal periods in American history. Because Our Fathers Lied is more than a family story—it is a story about America.
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1 out of 5 stars
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Title Does Not Reflect Scope of the Book
- By Amazon Customer on 07-15-22
By: Craig McNamara