I’m sitting at a desk in someone else’s house about 150 feet away from five goats and a duck. I am house- and goat-sitting, which is a nice perk for a sabbatical. This, happily, gets me a little extra cash while doing new things to shake up a lot of time at my desk. Plus: GOATS. As my mom said when I told her, “Who doesn’t like goats?” There are also three dogs and three cats, and for four days, I got a side gig feeding a nearby horse. E-I-E-I-O!
(For some reason I can’t do Alt Text on a gallery, so here are photos of my son squatting in a barn hugging two goats; a wily white goat with curling horns looking into the camera; the side of a horse’s head outside a small barn; and an image of three goats, with white wily goat in front and two little brown and black goats in the background outside on snowy ground with hay.)
My son is in one photo above because, while he was home from college for a long weekend, I had to call him on an SOS. The door of one of the pens in the barn fell off the track, and I knew he’d know how to get it back on. It was heavy as HELL, because it has to contain livestock, and one of the more energetic goats with large horns was pushing at it from the inside. He wanted to get back out where the fun was. The door bowed outward, away from its runner, and then the next thing I knew he was out, the door was hanging lopsided, and there were five goats milling around the center of the barn like it was a party.
(This is a sideways video of goat chaos, with two goats approaching me for some treats inside a barn, with hay strewn on concrete, and one small brown and black goat coming up at me to get treats.)
Goats, like people, don’t really do what you tell them to do. One of my jobs is to get them into the pen at night, and believe you me, they are not goal-oriented. They want to linger as long as they can outside their pen in hopes of getting extra treats, and in general I think their senses of humor make them a little prone to chaos.
It’s mysterious: some nights they all whisk right into. the pen, and other nights it’s like pinball. At first I thought they could sense my anxiety or my tension, but as I’ve gotten to know the goats better, I also see that it’s not about me. They have interpersonal (intergoatanal?) dynamics that influence who wants to go in when, and if the alpha goat with the big horns is too near the pen door, he just wants to headbutt anyone else that comes in, and the other ones get spooked.
I am also spooked often. In this season of my life, I’ve seen something that looked like a bad sign, say from earlier this fall, when my husband was in crisis, and I go right to, “Nope, let me flee. Is there an underground bunker nearby?” This, I would say, is one of the major challenges of my life. Sometimes I am too much on a hair trigger, and yet other times I have ignored clear warnings. Could things just be CLEARER? The goats are also primed to sense danger, which I like. Their rectangular pupils give them the ability to see almost 360 degrees around their heads! (about 320 to 340 degrees) to scan for predators.
Clearly, the goats are going to be part of some writing that is very much unformed. Right now I’m just taking notes. But I have been obsessed with goats for a long time, and in a nonfiction class about 10 years ago, I had even used “Sonya’s Trip to See the Goats” as an example of planning an immersion experience for writing memoir. This came about because I saw an image of goats in Morocco climbing argan trees to eat the leaves.
I know: SO MANY QUESTIONS.
It turns out these goats are not harming the trees; they’re in a symbiotic relationships, actually dispersing the seeds of the tree. But like, think of the first goat who put his hoof on a tree trunk and thought, Maybe up here?
Running back and forth to tend these creatures has been good for my soul. If nothing else, it has allowed me to move around, to be challenged in new ways. And to be distracted. I need all the reminders I can possibly get right now that there’s a wider world out there. What has been great are the sweetness of these creatures. I love animals of all kinds, and it turns out that this routine is familiar. The occasionally collection of duck eggs reminds me of getting to collect eggs with my grandmother from the hen house on their small farm in Arkansas long ago, the sense of an Easter Egg hunt, the unexpected gifts. I have much to say about the duck as well.
One of the hardest things about risk is that it has also brought so much good into my life. The impulse that says, “Why not?”—which has gotten me into trouble—is the same one that lets me see a post on Facebook about being a temp goat-minder and say yes.
This really made me smile, thank you. When I started working at my city's zoo many years ago --without any relevant experience -- I joined what was known as the hoofstock section. The zoo didn't have any goats at that time, but there were sheep. The other keepers had to teach me not to turn my back on the ram, because his sense of humour involved charging at backsides. My image of myself attempting to learn how to spin round to face down a charging ram still amuses me, as does the memory of my fellow zookeepers laughing.
There is such a good lesson here - for everyone, but especially for long haulers 💛