The Mall of the Wild
BILGER, BURKHARD
9 i i84 i9149 i84184 i'~'i~i ..... ~i)i!i: en Holyoak's fish hatchery, frog farm, and wild hog preserve sits | on a small gravel drive guarded by a very large fish. Eight feet long and...
...I've got too much to do today," he says,"to worry about yesteMay...
...Guess how old Jason is...
...They're gonna replace the cricket...
...In the evening's whiskey-colored light, I could see a bullfrog's eyes floating on the surface like soap bubbles, mesmerized by passing clouds...
...But he soon became impatient...
...I was hoping some catfish might do the trick," he said...
...He ix not drc;llllilig an\luorc...
...5, He suspects that the Chinese sold him sterile frogs...
...lnis second wifc, Judyc, asked him one day while Holyoak and I were emn~, luncln at her kitchen counter...
...Then, five or six years before, he began to grow them in vats at the main hatchery building...
...attached to the rope was an army surplus fuel drum, banged up and perforated with rust: The preferred nesting hole for Holyoak's channel catfish...
...It takes about three days of this .job before the snakes get ya," he said, deadpan, as I climbed out of his pickup...
...The only reason he knows my birthday is because it's a holiday...
...When I told him where I ~v,ls From frogs, catfish, and turtles to wild pig and Indian black buck, game ranching has gone • h:om the back 40 to a billion dollar market...
...But though the frogs had learned to settle for fast food, their wild instincts were only napping: The minute Holyoak moved them to an open pond, they staged a mass escape...
...We glanced at each other in silence...
...Then the disease struck...
...Still, Holyoak's success is indisputable...
...you ask...
...Tender and buttery, with a subtle, amphibian chew, it was so mild that the Sancerre almost overwhelmed it...
...But they knew what I wanted...
...Stripped of its slinky tights, each ligament, tendon, muscle, and articulated joint looked ready to leap across the room...
...Over the past twenty years, as annual sales of hunting licenses have dropped from seventeen million to fourteen million, operations like Holyoak's have rushed in to fill the vacuum...
...But hc'd be on to lilt' right ;i,,vav.'" H olvoak's ol't]cc was a plain, celnent-bh)ck qructure with windows on t;,)ur ~ides...
...Christmas...
...But while the others took a break when we arrived, scratching the mud from their boots with sticks, I decided to give it one last try...
...They're on pellets from metamorphosis on up...
...lit.' llltlrllltlrcd into the mouthpiece, his COilSOllililP', inul'flt'd Till...
...While the secretaries watched, fascinated, the old man shuffled forward with his cane, aimed his bony, bearded chin at Holyoak, and assessed him crazy over 'em...
...I've never worked with those things)' He was about to go on when one of the others signaled for him to shush...
...I don't know if he ever will...
...And so, for the next ten years, he dedicated his life to breeding the world's biggest bream...
...Go ahead...
...While she had branched out into Victoriana and interior decorating, pant suits and fancy pastas, he was still doing the same things he'd always done and tuning out the world around him...
...lack~on h)okcd away wimullv...
...a protL'ss<)r ill wildlitk...
...I}tlt I also knew that such tarnls arc .i natural breeding ground for fiaud...
...They won't eat for strangers" Holyoak said when I asked why they weren't touching their food...
...So we take all the New York ,journalists we can get...
...As novel as it seemed, the pitch }lad ;i t.uniliar ring to it...
...it declared...
...There's the man you need to talk to" he said, pointing through the hangar door...
...Move Over Chickens...
...then ca: merely doubled their pn Since the 1970s Norwe~ had begun their own rat frogs were still scurrying the page somewhere, wi ostrich to keep them co: After all those years hatchery, of designing bi ter fish and schooling th embryo to adulthood, H have been tempted to th nature was his to contro not so easily broken...
...By the time he died he had grown his Farm to six hundred acres and dcvclopcd special systems fi)r raising hogs and co\vs...
...In;ulagclncnt at the University of(;ei)rgl,i...
...it\ Imv...
...Now, as Berry set my dinner before me, it was hard to connect that memory with the thing on the plate...
...For every one hundred legitimate catfish (>r wild-ganle t,ums, there ,ue two or three Ponzi schelnes--brecding aniinal~ ti)r a nonexistent Inarkct...
...They've had some problems lately...
...tile FFFA believed...
...2, He won't let me talk to his frog biologist...
...People are goin' grows larger and more bewildering with each new enterprise.When his fish business needed boosting, Holyoak stuffed his catalogs with snake guards, pond aerators, and "Bug-O-Matic" feeders...
...The two of them were about as different as could be, she said...
...It was a promising start...
...His numbers have a suspicious consistency~ten or twelve fish, ten or twelve ponds, 300, 300, 300 percent~ and Jeff Jackson is quick to point out that Holyoak didn't really invent the Georgia Giant: Large hybrid bream occur naturally...
...Once again, though, we were interrupted-this time by a family of nineteenthcentury farmers, or so they seemed...
...Call it Bullfrog Reality...
...After some prodding I'd even been shown Holyoak's top-secret "North American Raniculture Research Center": A domed, corrugated hangar where the frogs are raised...
...slaking going, his eve,, lit up like I'at (;.urctt's at rumors i)t V, ilh" the Kid...
...Steel at some point and won an a\\ard f()l "1 t)()pcrccnt sales pcrformancc," whatever that means...
...On every side, Georgia's coastal plain stretches to the horizon in a weary ostinato, its peanut fields and forests repeating endlessly from the swamps of Florida to the hills of Alabama...
...If I can just find a fish that'll eat the animal by-products, I can close the loop...
...I knew that a seminar in frog raising costs $1,000, that a complete system costs around $25,000, and that such a system should be able to churn out twenty-five thousand pounds of frog legs every year at a wholesale price of $6 a "It takes about three days of this job before the snakes get ya...
...But the exact sequence is known to no one least of all Holyoak...
...In 1972 there were fewer than 30,000 bison nationwide, relegated to a few paltry preserves...
...bcn hc drivcs arouHd his grounds, his eves constantly he sold sandwiches to other students, evcntually hiring twelve salesmen to run orders for lmn...
...Holyoak jabbed his thumb in my direction and told her,"He doesn't know when I'm teasin' and when I'm tellin' the truth...
...Holyoak had done his homework...
...My name is J. C. Bell" he said, "and I'm looking for some advice on fish...
...Just why I was doing this wasn't clear, but I suspected it was a diversionary tactic...
...Is he dreaming...
...I took the fish...
...with .i tl.ldllight ,ind a tbrkcd stick, l~))ut 1 also knew that l]og leg,', h.ive llcver quite made the lc.lp into lllalllstrealll AIlleritJll cookiIlg...
...Halfway down the side I felt it: Soft and spongy, with loose, flowing tatters like boiled egg white...
...Ifyou oMer it in a French restaurant, ilk high...
...He keeps them fat by dumping fifty-five-gallon drums of peanut butter in the woods...
...I call 'em super wiggle worms" he said, reaching a hand into the bin...
...Ten minutes later he walked out with a bin under his arm and a new fishing pole besides...
...As soon as I left, I imagined, the secretaries would stand up, take off their glasses, stop typing nonsense, and collect their checks from Holyoak...
...But I squeezed through anyway...
...He'd been selling fish ti)r decades and had tradenl, uked a popular hybrid ,tlntMl called tile (;e()rgi,i (,i,mt...
...l~out had a heart attack right there...
...From the age of five Holyoak would stand by thc door and bawl until someone let him hold a fishing rod...
...Holyoak chuckled beside me...
...Working my way along the shore, feeling pale and ridiculous in my swimming trunks (the others were wearing T-shirts and hip waders), I passed the time compiling a list in my head: TEN SIGNS THAT KEN HOLYOAK IS PARANOID 1, He won't let me see the frog hatchery...
...Silent Spring is now here for the bullfrog," one of his leaflets declared...
...lnd with them the ecoIIOIllies ()t'sever,ll st;ires...
...crawfish gross $45 million annually in Louisiana alone...
...They wiggle better than anything I've ever seen," Holyoak said...
...It's a great summer wine from the Loire valley, with a bit of a tang to stand up to what you'll be eating...
...At first you think he's being evasive, but little by little you realize he just doesn't remember...
...Each of us, I imagined, was doing the same thing: Madly rewinding the last minute's conversation, and divided his time between the hatchery and the University of Georgia, where he was a research technician...
...I've got to show it to you real bad...
...But then there is Holyoak's fish: A thing both of the landscape and monstrously out of place...
...Most selfmade men spend half their time composing their autobiographies, editing out the failures, and eliding the equivocations until their lives sound as propulsive and single-minded as Horatio Alger stories...
...The women were in bonnets and gingham dresses, the patriarch in black slacks, black suspenders, and a white straw hat...
...In the wild, fish continually fan their eggs with their tails to oxygenate them...
...The rules of the game require the frog to wait until the final flicker of a second, when the net is descending, when the lance is in the air, when the finger squeezes the trigger, then the frog jumps, plops into the water, swims to the bottom and waits until the man goes away...
...No seems so docile yet so hi ticate, so vulnerable--lik organ, pulsing in the opt suicidally stubborn...
...I'll bet you he doesn't even remember when we were married or how old I am," she said...
...9, He says he can't offer me a room in his house because it's full.Yet his house is enormous and he has no guests...
...Every stack had a pipe above it that sent water cascading down to the tubs below, and every tub was covered in black mesh to keep the frogs from hopping away...
...He could quote the Bible word £or word, and hc could do numbers in his hcad tipster than any calculator I've cvcr seen...
...Instead he drove me out to a pond and pointed a high-powered rifle out the truck window...
...I wish I had halt the mind he had...
...Still, I had to admit: Holyoak's paranoia was not entirely misplaced...
...lie saM...
...Out in the parking lot, a tall, angular figure shambled past, shoulders hunched and hands in his pockets...
...I don't have any idea" he said...
...Biologists worry that game farms incubate diseases and can water down the gene pool for some species...
...Pollution, destruction of habitat and overharvesting" are decimating frog populations worldwide...
...Just a few months ago, Holyoak said, there were 98 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 150,000 croakers in here---nearly 250 per tub--but they'd been selling so fast lately, there were hardly any left...
...Frog doesn't need a lot more than that...
...Unfortunately for him, his son's talents lay elsewhere...
...7, His land is posted with signs that say "Warning: This Area Is Patrolled by Trained Attack Dogs...
...10, He suggests I spend my nights in the motor home where his father died, deep in the countryside...
...uring the millennia /./ that frogs and men have lived in the same world," John Steinbeck writes in Cannery Row, "a pattern of hunt and parry has developed...
...I they're grown in concrel perforated floors...
...Only this much is certain: At some point Holyoak managed to bring his two gifts together...
...But here, in the elegant finish of this dish, in its seamless transformation from bullet kill to haute cuisine, lay another sto W . All nature's stubbornness, I thought, is no match for a good imagination.We've taught pigs to find mushrooms and dogs to lead the blind, corn to manufacture its own pesticide and watermelons to grow without seeds.Why shouldn't the Holyoaks of the world one day domesticate anything on legs, turning frog farmers into princes of industry...
...I don't know," he said...
...But when hc talks ab(mt tii>g t[irlns...
...It" VOLI c,ltch It...
...Let me suggest a Sancerre," the sommelier murmured as soft jazz wafted down from hidden speakers above him...
...As ,1 chcf l kuow put it:"A frog is either lowbrow or lnghbrow...
...Anyone who is remotely familiar with bullfrogs real92 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR II Summer Reading Issue 2001 plllt'h [lllllsclJ' t() 1114ke stlrc lie is llOt drcanling...
...But Holvoak had t,lUg]lt Ills ti'ogs to eat fi>od that didn't ini)vc, and hc had ,i p:ltented system tbr growing them with little or no manu.i1 hbor.-Fhauks to his techniques, @(>g )arlns ulight SO011 spread across the t'i)lllltl'V like tilt' poultr.v industrv...
...I just keep lookin' for ways to make 'em better and bigger and faster growing," he says...
...But then the taste was worlds away from the swamp...
...Holyoak looked up, a gleam of genuine hope in his eyes...
...IllOllCV OlllV s(') [Ollg ,1...
...he asked in a faintly Eastern European accent...
...His name was John Joyce...
...The truth is I have no idea what to suggest...
...1OO THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 "So that was two years down the drain," Joyce said...
...l wish [ could ,,o with...
...The beginning, at least, is clear...
...Sometimes it seems that what he's running is less a hatchery than an amusement park--one that ] meat sells for $14.99 a pound, camel for with squinting eyes...
...Earlier that day I had dropped off a pair of bullfrog legs at the Grill's kitchen...
...There was a first with in there soinewhere, and the birth of his son Hugh, and then am)ther marriage and another b...
...4, He says he "can't remember" what kind of worm the super wiggle worm is, and he won't let me ask his worm biologist...
...I had thought that the moral of Holyoak's story was clear: Some things just aren't meant to be domesticated...
...The Cubans tie him to their stomach and dance around...
...It's easy to question Holyoak's claims...
...Catfish were once considered fit only for other bottom feeders...
...They're gonna replace the worm...
...you and ask ,i tcw questious...
...Frog farms may be their only hope, Holyoak suggested, yet glancing around his office I still heaM Jackson's woMs in my ears...
...To make up for lost time, Holyoak flew to China to buy some domesticated breeders...
...Holvoak was a special caw...
...How much "perfecting" did his system still need...
...Eight feet long and six feet high, bristling with exotic fins and fluorescent purple-and-yellow scales, the fish looks like a cross between a bluegill and a beetle--a Volkswagen Beetle, that is, circa 1969--and hovers above passing cars as if scanning for minnows...
...He had a genius for numbers and a "photogenic THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 95 memory," Holwmk remembers...
...The centipedes were just too strange and, at $68 for two thousand, too steep an investment...
...Even when he's giving you the runaround, it's hard not to admire his work ethic...
...Holyoak's stacked trays were natural breeding grounds for bacteria, Joyce said, especially if the frogs were overcrowded...
...By then Culley had spent twenty-five years trying to perfect an indoor frog-raising system, but year after year his food and labor costs were higher than the costs of frog legs from Asia...
...and I'd g,own up with kids who still caught their |]lllliIv dinner, on ()tcaisiim...
...Got up every mornin' at four o'clock, jumped in a dugout canoe, and went six miles down the river to fish in a dead lake...
...It i, Bullli-og l<calitv!'" This was news to ,lie...
...I knew that frog gigging ix .m old Southcrn tradition...
...By 1992 there were 110,000 bison, and by 1999 there were 300,000...
...Bison ranches, deer ranches, pigeon, alligator, and turtle farms have sprung up across the South, and their meat is being served in the finest restaurants...
...If yc inside, you've got to was whole habitat with chlo~ every day, give 'em a ligl bleach every day, and eve run into disease proble~ In 1981, when Lutz LSU, he joined ranks wi try's one true frog-farmi THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR tt Summer Reading Issue and gently josded by paddle wheels...
...I called the best one the Georgia Giant," he says...
...There was only one problem: The frog I brought wasn't raised by Holyoak...
...Somebody over there" he said, nodding toward the office, "is listenin' in on us...
...Then I reached under the quivering mass, pulled it free, and floated it to the pound...
...Later in the same issue, a graph showed how little aquatic species had been improved by breeders over the past sixty years--especially compared to other speci top, shooting across the l Patriot missile, were chi( 1940 and 1990 they nea speed at which they gre, them were cattle, rising vertiginous line...
...I sauteed it for three or four minutes and then drizzled it with a lemon-caper sauce," Berry explained, settling in next to me...
...He lives in Liberty, Mississippi, now, far from the scene of his final frog fry...
...now U.S...
...He's teasin' all the time...
...And he hasn't sold that many of 'em...
...n inv way to Holvoak\ h,ltchcry, I stopped off t() talk to Jeff Jackson...
...But when I asked about the frogs, he started to fidget like a subpoenaed witness...
...When I asked where the name comes from, he glanced over as 8 if embarrassed for me...
...Maybe tilapia will work" Holyoak called out as Bell left, "or African catfish...
...By the time he was a teenager hc was providing most of the protein for his thmil> It wasn't just that Holyoak liked fish, it was that hc had a psychic COllnection to thcm...
...Once a frog got sick in one tray, his infection drained down to any neighbors beneath him...
...The patriarch stared at him, befuddled...
...his indoor operation was similar to Culley's.Yet after thirty-five years of catching frogs and feeding them pellets, tinkering with automatic feeders and inventing vaccinators, the Future Frog Farmers of America were no closer to dropping their first name...
...Poultry, cattle, sheep, and goats grew there, all grazing the same pasture in strict rotation...
...He had a master's degree in aquaculture We've taught pigs to find mushrooms and dogs to lead the blind, corn to manufacture its own pesticide...
...He grows 300 percent faster and 300 percent bigger and bites 300 percent better...
...The question was, did he know frogs...
...For years, he explained, Holyoak simply collected frogs from his ponds and sold them to farmers a few dozen at a time...
...Holyoak made a similar argument...
...I made him from scratch," Holyoak said...
...Hc built a sprawling ranch house ot-whitc brick with Greco-t~,olnan columns ill tlont, buried both parents, and somchow "We had hybrid strawberries and dogs and cats and seed corn, but we were growing the same fish that Columbus scratching ()tit pools in his backyard and dropping in his live catch...
...Inside the black mouth of the drum, my knuckles scraped tentatively against a rough, flaking surface...
...a blazing seraph, come to warn you of man's indignities to nature...
...The scattered dung encouraged weeds, which the sheep and goats liked to eat, and pecan trees turned their dung into nuts...
...Frog delnand, thcv insistcd, i~ a Iuuctum of frog supply...
...Up in its left-hand corner, a small red light was burning...
...96 TIlli AMERICAN SPECTATOR • Sununer Reading Issue 2001 Holyoak cut a thick wedge from a raw Vidalia onion and put it in his mouth...
...At any given moment there could be bream, bass, crappie, catfish, grass carp, trout, or even Japanese koi growing in there, all at different stages of development...
...Inside, a heavy vegetal smell hung in the air and a watery silence reigned...
...Then suddenly he was cartwheeling across the water, belly flashing like a green-and-yellow whirligig, trailing a ragged red streamer as if in an excess of joy...
...In Boston, at Savenor's market, kangaroo meat sells for $14.99 a pound, camel for $34.99, lion for $21.99, and zebra for $39.99...
...I don't know if they'll even eat for a camera...
...Ask him when he started his hatchery or where he found his super wiggle worms, and his answers will trail off into misty generalizations:"It's been years and years" or "I've been just about everywhere...
...Hi)lyoalk, flanked by ti)ur h)cal wcrctaries and r.mk, ¢)t- untMv cabinets, spieled away on the phone, reclining s() t]lr that his chair back was nearly h()rizi)nt,ll...
...It was a threehundredacre farm, Bell concluded, making $1,000 profit an acre, and the products were all natural...
...I knew that ,Iquilculture ,uld game tarlns wcrc ch,ulging the f.lce of thc Southern landsc,lpc...
...he said over a crackling phone line...
...I would just talk to 'eln and they'd go under...
...At}or that, the details start to get thzz> He went to work for U.S...
...Then reach around inside until you feel somethin' strange...
...tile total lll;irket lnight be worth more than a bdhou dollars...
...Then he hung up...
...You can't believe anything he tells you," she said...
...At the University of-Georgia he discovered a second skill: Making mone> While other studeilts relied on their parents f~)r their allowances, Holyoak opcratcd thrcc or four vcnturcs from the house he rented...
...ver tile years Jackson had inadc solnething o)il h()blw of busting quacks...
...Slowly uncurling my fingers, I felt along the thing's edges and delicately peeled them loose from the wall...
...But he might have seen it coming...
...His operation has grown from THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 97 one pond on two hundred acres to seventy-nine ponds on fifteen hundred acres, and now hatches forty-four million fish eggs a year...
...Why shouldn't the Holyoaks of the world one day domesticate anything on legs...
...I've been watchin' him work on this thing for a long time, and he's never quite gotten it," Joyce said...
...He reached under his chair and pulled out a Tupperware bin the size of two shoeboxes...
...Built ten or twelve ponds, brought in fish from all over, the biggest I could find, and bred 'era together...
...The light was slowly fading, and I was weary and sunburned and crusted in slime...
...She put her hands on her hips and shook her head...
...M any days later, at the Horseradish Grill in Atlanta, I sat at a gleaming oak bar and awaited my dinner...
...Monkeys and fish, that's all they ate...
...kept .i dlarp rye on enul and ostrich suppliers, and pu]icd thc rug out from under ,I beaver ranch...
...When turtles started eating too many of his fish, he invented a "solar turtle trap" and sold his catch to a supplier in Florida...
...According to the journal World Aquaculture, frog farming was a field so starved for good ideas that "successful frog farmers often guard their technology closely...
...Twenty-seven...
...But th, turn a profit by hiring cl catering to the frog's wa" by domesticating it...
...Over the past couple of days Holyoak had been feeding me frog information at about the pace of a Bug-O-Matic--that is, just slowly and regularly enough to keep me famished...
...Twisted oaks and linear pines sit so far back from the highway that the sky seems to engulf them, and the locals have little interest in raising the skyline...
...He'd been with Holyoak off and on for twenty years, he said, mostly breeding fish and tending to their health troubles...
...Not Holyoak...
...Even toda...
...For ten years, he invested everything he madeuaround $10,000 a year--until he had ten or twelve hybrids...
...I had been told, on good authority, that this was the finest authentic Southern restaurant in the country and that the chef, David Berry, was a big fan of farm-raised game.When I had called to ask if he would prepare one of Holyoak's frogs for me, he had agreed immediately...
...They are caught in nets, gutted an clean, and then shipped world frozen: A tasty, if i variety of meat...
...Bell was unconvinced...
...In the end they had no choice but to collect thousands of bullfrogs from the wild again and to teach them to eat pellets...
...On the one hand, no meat is quite so recognizablemso luridly anatomical--as a pair of frog legs...
...farms 94 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR II Summer Reading Issue 2001 grow more than half a billion pounds every year...
...Try piranha," he said...
...We fed 'em larvae and pellets at first" Joyce said...
...Ken t . How about Hugh...
...in others you could see a coiled twitching within scanning for any self-incriminating quotes...
...I ain't got nothin' but hollow-points in here for shootin' hogs...
...I now knew how long his bullfrogs take to grow to full size (180 days) and how much feed they consume in that time (a pound and a halfmabout a dollar's worthmper pound of meat...
...Holyoak's answer had been to dump me off here to collect fish eggs...
...Had this fellow fiom Ncvv York show me hoxv" When the Air Forcc dra(tcd him after graduation, he still managed to make some spending money selling picturcs of othcr airmen f~)tlnd time to visit thirtv-thrcc countrics to look at frogs...
...in still others the fry had broken free and were beating futilely against the current...
...These things are ju tough," says C. Greg Lut specialist in aquaculture State University (LSU).' aggressive, but also very they tend to succumb tc bacterial infections...
...Or maybe just to sell you a few hybrid bass...
...For an ever more ravenous, ever more ingenious society, wild game is just another work in progress...
...8, Twice a night, between midnight and four, he drives around his grounds looking for fish thieves...
...all you have to do is add a slice of potato every now and then...
...his body was tile product orselective breeding: 245 poullds ()t'(icorgia good o1' boy, hybridized fionl h)c.iI and Utah M/)rnioll stock, borli illid raised OlI the s\v,l,np...
...His father was a Mormon missionary, sent to Georgia from Geronimo, Arizona...
...r clil,s dissections, l.qlt with a good domestic ,uppls...
...Even Holyoak doesn't recognize its species...
...I'd done my share of hand grabbing by now, but this time we weren't after fish...
...You could drop mc in the lniddle o£ a desert," Holvoak said,"and 1 guarantee 1'11 ha\c a busi ncss started within an hour...
...Attached to the buoy was a thick nylon rope...
...But then the eggs they laid weren't fertile...
...Here Come the Bud Boys...
...Those frogs spook easy...
...Add the prolits ffoln tanned fi(~g skins, frog intestine, ;ix surgical supplies, and li'og-oil cos|series, and you had a gold nitric ill the making...
...According to Lutz, Culley's frogs were reluctant to eat processed food--a crucial step in bringing down costs--and even when they did reach marketable size, they tended to cannibalize one another...
...His tray sys' tem showed Chinese and Brazilian influences...
...Inside, mllK'd has, floated ahmg every w.dl, mounted (in pl.lques inscribed by thcnds and happy custolncrs...
...l ,just understand what they're doin'," he savs...
...Just don't walk out at night...
...Take the food we were eating: Pulled pork and butter beans, stewed cabbage, cornbread, and tomatoes and rice...
...After thirty-five years and a million dollars of investment, Ken Holyoak had finally grasped the slipperiest of holy grails: A way to mass-produce frogs...
...Listening to him, I realized that Holyoak's frog farm hadn't cracked the amphibian code after all, but neither was it a Ponzi scheme...
...Holyoak looked him in the eyes and smiled...
...Enigma means cc puzzle;' he explained...
...Judye stared hard at him for a moment, then smiled despite herself...
...So we take all the New York journalists we can get...
...He insists, for instance, that Cubans and Haitians buy most of his turtles for use in voodoo and fertility rituals: "The Haitians, they put the turtle on a pedestal and worship him, and when they're done, they chop off his head and drink his blood...
...But bacteria about wiped 'em out...
...In the lull that followed, I tried to steer the discussion back to frogs...
...He shifted from foot to foot...
...I just asked this feller that goes to my church to make me a feesh" he says, "and that's what he come up with...
...There, glistening like living amber in the midday sun, were some twenty-five thousand catfish eggs" Holyoak's next generation...
...Jason...
...That one ix too acidic, this onc is overpopulated, that one is infected by bacteria and needs to be drained...
...l'vc got nonlethin" l got to show VOtl...
...I can walk out by a pond and tell you where they are...
...He lost fifty pounds, he added, but he developed an appreciation for piranha...
...Inside, corkscrewed through a thick bedding of oat bran, lay hundreds of centipede-like creatures, faintly venomous looking, with tan and gold stripes--another of Holyoak's Amazon discoveries...
...Thirty-six...
...The result, unlikely as it sounds, is a kind of microcosm of America's increasingly privatized wilderness...
...Nope, I thought, he isn't biting...
...They'll keep in here for a year...
...3, He won't let me see his top-secret super wiggle worm breeding laboratory...
...Then he started a side business in hypnosis for studcnts who wanted to quit smoking...
...N ot long after that meal I finally managed to track down Bud Culley, the grand old man of frog farming...
...Grinning strangely, he walked over to a wooden post beside me and pointed at the intercom hanging there...
...Trying to get a grip on Holyoak's life feels a little bit like that...
...He had cxposed crooked worm I]ulncrs...
...When I pressed him for details, though, he cut me short: "I make my living off this consulting, so I'm not going to give you a lot of information to spread around...
...In some troughs the eggs were still quiescent...
...In Brazi grown in outdoor vats...
...Along the walls, the fish rose toward their imaginary lures, mouths gaping, eyes mesmerized...
...Holyoak nodded his head and peered at Bell for a long moment, from above his black reading glasses...
...When would their products reach the market...
...By the time Lutz arrived, Culley was ready to clean out his lab and retire...
...But he agreed to come back with some water samples from his pond...
...It just didn't add up to me...
...All of it is raised on game farms in the United States...
...He had short gray hair, protruding ears, and eyes that peered at you intensely for a moment, only to skitter off when you tried to meet them...
...6. His office is surveyed by videocameras...
...No" he said...
...We've got the only frogs we know in the world that are entirely on pelleted food...
...Then he laughed despite himself and leaned in closer...
...It seemed he owned an experimental farm about twenty-five miles away...
...First to their girlfiiel~ds...
...One of the centipedes clasped on to his forefinger with its two front legs, then writhed around to find purchase for the others...
...He was born, appropriately enough, in Enigma, Georgia, six miles from Alapaha...
...The more people eat buffalo," one rancher told me, "the more buffalo there will be...
...Course you can't do that with a snappin' turtle...
...Turning to one of the older hatchery workers, a former manager at a Winn-Dixie, I asked if he knew how many frogs Holyoak sold every year...
...After brief introductions to his staff, I settled down to talk frog, but just then the door burst open...
...Behind me, the sun-baked evening crowd lounged about in summer dresses and linen suits, under the heavy beams of the vaulted ceiling, as a fire blazed in the corner...
...J j ' ~ j ~ ' a k e y o u r h a n d i n t o a IV/ fist, or it might get bit," Kevin, one of the hatchery workers, told me...
...Finally one of the younger guys broke in...
...Like most of his jokes, this one had a kernel of sense...
...When I told him I wanted to grow nothm' but fish, hc about died," Holyoak remembers...
...Published by arrangement with Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc., New York...
...After a couple of years we had a good breeding stock of frogs, eatin' just pellets...
...There the gelatinous masses of eggs we'd collected would be dropped into one of two hundred metal troughs, bathed in a steady current of water, them...
...A~ nnlch :ix anything else here...
...He glanced at his son...
...We spoke hand language mostly" he said...
...It was something altogether sadder and more grand: A failed dream...
...They're down to less than twenty thousand now...
...When a herd of wild hogs invaded his land, he started a hoghunting business...
...Ken still has to From Noodling for flob~eads by Burkhard BUgec Copyd0ht @ 2000 by Bud(hard Bilger...
...IBr izc~ immediately that flogs arc discriminate ti.'cders," the ,elease said...
...The computers and file cabinets would get trundled off, the stuffed fish would come down from the walls, and Holyoak would drive off in search of another small town, another scam...
...In walked a meaty, impatient little man dressed in a striped knit shirt...
...Who was buying these frogs...
...My trained attack dog will kill ya...
...Holyoak had promised to give me a frog before I left the hatchery, but when the time came, he said the North American Raniculture Research Center was locked...
...knee-deep in one of Holyoak's artificial ponds, pulling up one of the buoys deployed along its shores...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 9 Summer Reading Issue 2001 101...
...I was wrong, of course...
...It upsets them...
...Then we had a big frog fry...
...But I've got something even better...
...But for other species, living on a game ranch may be the only way to avoid extinction...
...From four in the morning until eleven at night, with two late-night patrols thrown in, he inspects ponds and makes sales pitches, invents gadgets, shoots hogs, and breeds fish...
...S()lllC ()f" these things," he says "1 don't hardly know why I know 'era...
...She wouldn't eat it for the world, but he wouldn't let her serve anything else...
...Have you got any night crawlers...
...A t the end of another long day, I climbed on the back of a truck and headed toward the main hatchery building, an openended hangar of steel and concrete...
...The United .%tatcs inlports 3.8()() tons of flog nleat ;I veJrIllloFe thJll ;ill\" othcl" c()tllit r v I , i l l d scho()l,, t.lke /lIIothcr t',vo million live ffoL,,~..it $2() ;Ipiecc...
...What if all this bustle and earnest business was just an elaborate ruse--a setup like the fake bookie's office in The Sting...
...Cows mowed the grass, then laying hens scratched through the cow patties for bugs...
...D'ya see how far that bullet blowed 'im...
...Here we had hybrid strawberries and dogs and cats and seed corn, but we were growing the same fish that Columbus had," he says...
...The room was filled with rank upon rank of algae-covered tubs, each about the size of a large kitchen sink, stacked five high and fifteen deep...
...We were standing water's surface...
...there arc IlC1A" suckers to hu'c in...
...and other animals are making the same transition...
...A round here, Holyoak is fond of saying, you can get up at sunup and shoot a hog, bag a frog, catch a fish, and trap a turtle by sundown...
...Though his claims were probably inflated and some of his products a bit strange, one thing was certain: Holyoak knew fish...
...Two years ago Holyoak had spent a month on the Amazon, living on a raft with native fishermen, scouting for new ideas...
...I looked in on a couple of the survivors: Wide-eyed and mute, their bodies like pools of green-and-yellow wax, they listened like Zen adepts to the sound of water falling...
...But rather than stewing in bittersweet memories, he's already in the throes of a new venture...
...Holyoak later denied this version of events, but Joyce had no reason to bad-mouth the operationmquite the opposite...
...As a frogs eaten today are cau wild, largely in Banglade Southeast Asia...
...I helped in the grand slaughter" Lutz remembers...
...About the only thing I've ever done with frogs is flatten 'em with a post...
...The FFFA pronuwd to ch.ulgc all that...
...Snub-nosed and jet black, their tails whipping back and forth, they looked like little hair follicles in search of a scalp--a wig on the run...
...When he urinates, it means they'll be fertile...
...MI:RICAN SI)IiCT.VI'()R • ,~[llllll|t'r Reading Issue 20()l 93 yet gravelly, like the sound of a country road heard from inside a car...
...Thirty-five...
...We can't stay long," Holyoak said, half blocking the door...
...Dudley "Bud" Culley...
...Mapaha, the closest town, has no visible sign of industry and only one restaurant--one so secretive that I drove past it three times without seeing it, though I was famished at the time...
...One day, while researching the country's ballooning aquaculture industry, I came upon a press release from a group called the Future Frog Farmers of America (FFFA...
...More Indian black bucks live on game ranches in Texas, with its vast grasslands, than in their native land, and bison have made a similar comeback across the country...
...Those ponds out back, stretching to the horizon in rectilinear formation, were no painted backdrop, and those were real people calling in their orders...
...Though they looked Amish to me, they soon revealed themselves to be Lubavitcher Jews, returning home to Kentucky by minivan after a Florida vacation...
...Such a fish might make a splash in any setting, but in Holyoak's part of the country it has the quality of a vision...
...Thirty-one...
...Without hindsight to hinder you, the future is a realm of perfect possibility...
...Then, too, some of Holyoak's stories are simply outlandish...
...By the age of eight he was scan his ponds' surf'accs for signs of troublc...
...Two summers ago, that building was full of frogs" he said...
...He started out small, growing run-of-the-mill bluegills on his daddy's land...
Vol. 34 • July 2001 • No. 6
