Farewell, My Subaru_One Man's Search for Happiness Living Green Off the Grid

by Doug Fine

  PART TWO

  FLOODED

  Turn Around, Don’t Drown.

  —New Mexico State public service pamphlet advising against driving across flooded rivers, found in a drawer on the Funky Butte Ranch upon move-in.

  FOUR

  LIVESTOCK SHOPPING IN THE DIGITAL AGE

  I can’t explicitly prove that the New Mexico Realtor Association was engaged in a conspiracy with the National Weather Service, so I’ll just leave it as coincidence that the most serious August flood in recorded history chose to begin less than a week after I bought a property that required two water crossings to access the rest of the world. The once-annual desert-monsoon season had simply waited seven years to arrive almost the moment I moved in.

  I left the Funky Butte Ranch in what I thought was a freak thunderstorm, and it was still raining when I returned home with two baby goats from a Craigslist pickup in Tucson. Or I should say when I tried to return home. The whole landscape had saturated in the two days I was gone and now looked more like an ocean than the Chihuahuan desert. This was a problem. I needed to cross the Mimbres River in order to make the last mile to the Funky Butte Ranch.

  * * *

  Even in an arid desert, it is possible to live off harvested rainwater (http://www.harvestingrainwater.com/).

  * * *

  The goats sounded ready to be home, too. Their backseat driving, once we hit the spine-rattling New Mexico dirt roads, took on a harmony of complaint evocative of a slaughterhouse. I tried singing “Homeward Bound” to them, which seemed to quiet them a notch. But it didn’t look at all sure that we would get much farther homeward. I couldn’t help observing that the river, ankle-deep when I left, was now in the Class Three range. There were rapids. Whitewater crested midchannel. Uprooted cottonwood trunks were cruising downstream like alligators late for lunch.

  I parked at the bank in a steady drizzle and flipped open my cell phone. I didn’t know that Janice, my goat saleswoman, was expecting a customer service call so soon. But as I stepped out of the LOVEsubee into almost elastically mushy, knee-deep mud, I was pretty sure I needed advice from a goat guru.

  “How important is it that the baby goats get to a safe, dry home space tonight?” I asked Janice.

  “Dry?” she said. “Are you planning on getting them wet?”

  “Well, I hope not to. But I’m looking at the Mimbres River here, and I’d call it fifty-fifty if we’ll make it across.” My foot made a sucking noise as I pulled it out of the ground that was the consistency of pudding.

  “They do need someplace safe to sleep,” Janice said. “They could get stressed and sick if they stay cooped up in the car too long.”

  But that would be marginally better than drowning, right? I thought. Into the phone, I said, “Hang on, I’m gonna go out and test the depth. It doesn’t look too bad.”

  “Don’t do that!” Janice yelled from Arizona. “People die that way all the time.”

  It was true. I had just read about this exact phenomenon in a Louis L’Amour western. Flash floods can surge in a matter of seconds. L’Amour called greenhorn ranchers like me “rawhide” operations, as in “an outfit that’s held together with rawhide, otherwise it would fall apart.” Nonetheless, I put the phone down on the LOVEsubee hood and edged into the water, a modern pioneer with two goats and a goat guru screaming at me.

  The air and water were both still warm despite the late hour, and the world smelled not just like rain, but like a lot of rain. But, oh, the river felt lovely climbing over my sandals. A soothing massage after all that desert driving. I sloshed onward into the current. In two steps it had reached my ankles. Then my calves. The river peaked at my thighs midchannel, about the height at the top of the LOVEsubee’s tires.

  I turned around and skipped the thirty feet back to dry land. “I’m gonna go for it,” I said into the cell.

  “Oh jeez.” Janice sighed. How many potential repeat customers had she lost to ill-advised flood crossings? “Call me if you…when you make it across.”

  Taking her self-edit as a vote of confidence, I pushed the zaftig alfalfa hay bale I had strapped to the roof of the LOVEsubee onto the ground and covered it with a tarp. It easily weighed a hundred forty pounds, and I thought it might be better to lighten my load as much as possible for the crossing. I jettisoned all kinds of junk from my Tucson shopping spree as well, stashing them under a tree near my neighbor’s “UN Free Zone” sign. I wondered what he would make of my Wal-Mart exposé DVD. He’d probably call the sheriff.

  OK. Enough delay. Now was the time for action—especially since the river was rising by the minute. Had it done nothing but rain while I was gone? I studied the current. I had done some guiding in Alaska, so I was trained to “read” rivers. True, most of this training surrounded travel in actual river rafts, but I figured the same principles applied to car crossings. Mulling my choices from the driver’s seat, I opted for the “going as fast as I can will get me across faster” method. This meant that I left foot-deep tire tracks in the mud moments before the LOVEsubee hit the river and went briefly vertical as the goats loudly wondered, “Do we not have any say in who adopts us?”

  That was the last time a motorized vehicle would successfully make it across the Mimbres River for a month and a half. That is, if you consider a river-soaked engine block and a dislocated wheel bearing evidence of a “successful” crossing. I do, considering that three days later my neighbor Jake flipped his monster truck midchannel, escaping through his sky-side window while his vehicle, now a boat, floated toward nearby Mexico. Still, I wasn’t too proud of myself, since I had foolishly left the driver-side window open as my goats and I rafted across the Mimbres in a Subaru, and twenty gallons of liquid New Mexico and one small fish had landed in my lap.

  Was it only five hours ago that I got the goats? I wonder what any witness must have thought that wilting August afternoon in Tucson, watching a well-groomed thirty-ish woman transfer two tiny, snot-dripping animals with huge, floppy ears from her truck to a Subaru hatchback, while a shaggy guy in a straw cowboy hat passed her a check. Was there some sort of kinky trade in goat parts gaining popularity at Arizona house parties?

  I was twenty minutes late for the two p.m. goat pickup because I’d been rushing around to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s the way country folk do when provided with actual shopping choices (I decided to delay agonizing over whether organic chain stores counted in my box-store boycott). Since I had moved to rural New Mexico, I had already forgotten how to drive in traffic. I had forgotten about freeways. I was the gomer people honked at and invited to join the twenty-first century with colorful hand gestures. Sweating profusely from the stress and the Venusian Arizona heat, I felt like I was watching a movie of myself as I handed money to a woman in an SUV in exchange for the Chihuahua-sized infant goats. My first thought was, if they spoke, it would be Spanish. I wanted to feed them Taco Bell.

  * * *

  To feed three billion new people, more food has to be produced in the next fifty years than was produced in the past ten thousand years.

  * * *

  Janice the goat dealer had been waiting for me in one of those faceless business centers that are sprawling across the Tucson desert. I spotted her rig and felt like Columbo. Or the guy Columbo was after. Who meets strangers in a parking lot to pick up livestock?

  It all seemed so sensible when we worked out the details on Craigslist. But real-world consummation of Internet relationships is weird in the best of circumstances. As I drove up to my contact, I thought, “So that’s the person I’ve been e-mailing for a month. I had her hair straighter and browner.” I suddenly realized I had no idea if buying large animals over the Web was legal. I looked around for a guy eating a sandwich in an Oldsmobile or some other TV-triggered sign of a fuzz tail. Oh, sure, like that parked van was really a “janitorial service.”

  Forget about what any cop or bystander would have made of this scene, I wonder what I would have thought if I had witnessed it a month earlie
r. This fit nowhere in the world of my suburban upbringing. I was as out of place as a Travis Tritt single on a heavy metal station. But as no one had bolted out of the van yelling, “Freeze, fuck bag!” I warmed to my task.

  Warmed is too weak a word. The little nubby-horned goats climbed from their pet carrier straight into my heart. One was snow white and commenced eating my beard as soon as I lifted her. There was nothing I could do. Fighting it all the way, I burst forth in a three-second rendition of the annoying “Awwww” song. Fortunately, her sister, the brown-speckled loud one, sneezed in my ear when I picked her up. This helped me remember that the kids’ cuteness was merely a frill. Much more important, these creatures would be the centerpiece of my new life on the ranch. I relied pretty heavily on the first line of Jim Corbett’s book Goatwalking, which stated definitively that “Two milk goats can provide all the nutrients a human being needs, with the exception of Vitamin C and a few common trace elements.”

  Before I left Tucson, Janice (a perfectly nice housewife from a nearby ranch who even brought me lunch) showed me how to bottle-feed the pure white gumdrop I had named Natalie because I think Natalie Merchant’s voice sounds a little like a goat. That little kid went after her milk with a force that made me glad I’ll never have to nurse. I cringed and massaged my own chest just watching her. I thought she was going to inhale the nipple. But that was just the start of the unpleasantness. Next, Janice pinched an area behind Natalie’s shoulder and said that’s where I should inject the various vaccinations and medications with the syringes I was to order from the soon-to-be largest recipient of my income: Caprine Supply. Syringes? Inoculations? Personally, I had to look away when I gave blood.

  “The first few weeks are the hardest and the most risky,” Janice said. I didn’t know if she meant for me or for the goats. “Here’s my cell-phone number. Call me if you have any problems.”

  I already had a couple. Natalie, who was revealing herself to be a heartbreaker and who started nursing my finger forcefully when her bottle was empty, clearly wanted to sit up front with me, while the one I was calling Melissa (as in Etheridge), whose horizontal slit pupils looked mildly homicidal and who bore a resemblance to Martina Navratilova, was showing signs she didn’t particularly want to come to New Mexico at all, judging by the maniacal bleating.

  I had been reading almost nothing but goat literature for a month, much of it contradictory. As usual, books failed to prepare me for real life. The classic goat-care bible is David Mackenzie’s 1957 tome Goat Husbandry, and thanks to the line, “The nature of the goat is disciplined, co-operative and intelligent,” I had started my career as a gentleman rancher naively thinking that raising dairy goats would be easy. I mean, I’d throw them some hay, breed them, and soon enough they’d be giving growth hormone–free milk, with enough left over for me to barter locally for things like hay, buffalo meat, and massages. How hard could it be?

  Now, with five minutes under my belt as a goat owner, one of my kids was kicking me in the pelvis as I tried to get her into my car. Still, the amount of effort involved in ranching somehow wasn’t sinking in. Instead, I stared optimistically at the animals once we stuffed them in my Japanese hatchback. These little fur balls were eventually going to give milk. Milk at the Funky Butte Ranch meant no more “carbon miles”—the fossil fuels snuck invisibly into the meals I had to buy. Yes, seeing breathing goats in the same car that used to carry things like Wal-Mart paper towel forests gave me an “I’m not on Long Island anymore” sensation. Where I came from, a vet didn’t have to be trained to examine anything beyond a cat, a dog, and the odd parakeet. The only time I had even seen goats as a kid in New York was at a petting zoo. But I thought, Of course the goats’ll give me a little trouble at first. I’d be scared, too. They’ll be fine when we get home and they see the sweet corral I’ve prepared for them.

  Meanwhile, we had set Nat and Melissa on a tarp with a bit of hay for road-trip munchies. They had already peed all over both. Melissa was butting the windshield with her tiny horns, and I wondered if the scene was being filmed for posterity by a crew from Cops.

  We made it home from Tucson with only $600 in car damage. I was cool with that. I looked at it as more Cosmic assistance with my attempts to use less gas. And now I had goats ensconced on the Funky Butte Ranch. I was a rancher! Everything felt so real and tangible, if smelly. In fact, life was great…for almost three hours. That was when the coyotes started closing in. Their yips were the wild canine way of tucking napkins into their shirts and sharpening their forks and knives. They knew within minutes that two helpless goat babies were in the canyon. For them, it was like Chinese delivery. They were thanking me.

  I had returned home exhausted and wet at eight p.m. I immediately tucked the goats into their new corral and prepared to tuck myself in. As a lullaby I played them a brief Charlie Parker tune on my saxophone, which either soothed them or sunk them into a coma. (The goatlike Greek god Pan loved music. So I started calling my goats the Pan Sisters because I discovered right away that any kind of tune transfixed them.) By nine it was dumping rain and a bolt of lightning had taken out a full-grown cottonwood about twenty feet from the ranch house. This was a sturdy, seventy-year-old tree, sliced in half. By ten the rain had tapered off and the coyotes were too close for comfort.

  And so I quickly came to terms with the reality that delicious, healthy, local cheese, yogurt, and chocolate goat ice cream were not just going to appear on my kitchen table. The misconception that it would do so lasted less than one evening. Not that I was pleased to realize that goats in fact required ceaseless vigilance. I was pissed. I sprang out of bed in my underwear to find Natalie and Melissa trembling at all the unacceptable howling sounds. Goats like routines, I had read.

  I couldn’t be sure that the corral was predator-proof. Mackenzie encouragingly and uselessly explained to me that “Our goat houses must inevitably be…a compromise between that which is most comfortable and health-giving for the goat and that which is most convenient and economic from the point of view of human management.” Nothing about hungry coyotes.

  From the middle of the corral I scanned the horizon of my new spread with binoculars in the moonlight, trying to spot the wild dogs and scare them off, but evidently they had learned how to outsmart a neophyte goatherd like me. I felt like an Idaho survivalist fending off a tax collector. The coyotes’ party was about a quarter mile away. It sounded like five hundred children being tickled.

  There was no point denying it. I had to sleep outside with the goats to make sure the local predators passed by on their buffet line. I sighed. I was attached to the little Pans already, and I could not face coming outside for the morning feeding to find four ears and a pile of coyote scat. Sadie, destined to be a livestock guard dog, was still too young to be more than an appetizer herself. So out came my shotgun. It was strange and weighty in my hands, which made me feel like Elmer Fudd.

  This was not going to be the comfortable night’s rest I had envisioned when we’d first made it across the river. At least the night was clear, though I had already learned how fast fronts could move in around here. I laid out my sleeping bag below the eaves of the goats’ already dung-sprinkled corral cabana down the hill from the ranch house. After popping shells in my weapon, I tried to let the coyote symphony waltz me to sleep. “Sleep” being a euphemism for “continually waking from restless dreams of finger amputation to find a goat nursing my hand.”

  And I liked it. I liked being relied upon. I liked being responsible for my life (in this case my future protein). In fact, it kind of shocked me how quickly I was becoming one of those progressive-yet-Libertarian cowboys who listen to a lot of Willie Nelson—sort of the pope of this modern Rugged Individualist lifestyle. I craved a mass-produced domestic beer. But in an iced glass.

  I woke up sore and smelly in the goat corral early the next morning. And, I noticed, promoted to the position of herd leader. The kids wouldn’t stop following me around (and they haven’t stopped yet). I guess th
e first bottle I fed them convinced Natalie and Melissa that I was Dad, or at least in charge of when the corral gate would open and wonderful things like hay, grain, and milk would appear.

  I looked around groggily and processed that I was bunking with goats and packing a firearm. If I had suggested this as a career goal to a Long Island guidance counselor, he would have called for the men in white coats. Might as well make the best of it. Still casting moon shadows at first light, I built the Pan Sisters a jungle gym out of regionally unnecessary studded snow tires, ladders, and mud. I had learned from a majority of the “expert” authors that goats like to climb and be as high as possible. Who doesn’t?

  When I finished construction, I meditated for twenty minutes, thinking that I was a long way from my first batch of goat milk. Even though they’re physically ready to kid at nine months, I was determined to give the Pan Sisters a fifteen-month childhood, to break the chain of teen motherhood and all its associated social problems.

  Added to their five-month gestation, that meant I was a year and a half from any payback from the beasts. Somehow it was worth it, just to be working toward home-grown dairy products. I came from a world where there wasn’t even a country station, let alone the John Prine cult I now find such an important part of any healthy subculture. No one raised his or her own food on Long Island. Where my weekly shopping list once contained items like,