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

by Doug Fine

  Orange juice

  Wasabi

  Preroasted chicken

  Ice cream

  Now I found myself browsing stores owned by Bush apologists for products like,

  Hay

  Shotgun shells

  Live chickens

  Ice cream

  I couldn’t wait to get that ice cream off the list. Please understand how important this was in my life. Ice cream is a Food Group for me, which is why I’d gotten a goat breed, the Nubian, known for its fatty milk. And thus the Pan Sisters were even more precious. Precious enough for me to forgo sleep or even living in a house. As though to accent that thought, the day’s first thunderclap rumbled ominously from the north. I went inside and put Pope Willie on the iPod. I figured I might as well get into character.

  FIVE

  HOW A FORMER SUBURBANITE CAN WAKE UP AS A FULL-TIME GOAT VET

  I’m not a big crier, and never in my wildest dreams would I have thought I could sob over a goat. But just as the Pan Sisters and I had developed a routine, I tromped down to the corral for the morning feeding, and found Natalie’s nose running like something was chasing it. The next day she came down with a vicious stomach distress. The goats had been in my care less than two weeks. So much for my big ice cream plans.

  It wasn’t just the hideous mess in the corral that was freaking me out; when an animal who has already effortlessly digested two of your hats stops eating overnight, you worry. And when it’s an animal you bottle-feed and occasionally rock to sleep, you worry a lot. The fact is, Natalie was clearly near death, and it hit me hard. These kids were the focal point of life on the Funky Butte Ranch—not just because so much of my plans centered around them, but because I couldn’t ignore their strong personalities. Like the popular kids in the high school hallways, they always had to be carrying on some kind of conversation. And breaking every ranching rule, I had gotten sucked into these conversations. I’d become attached to them.

  But I knew I had to buck up and shift into treatment mode, and fast. I started, of course, with Mackenzie, who informed me, “If disease arises in spite of the…efforts of the reader…then call in the veterinary surgeon or herbalist.” Obviously not a book written in places that get hopelessly flooded by monsoons. No one short of a paratrooper or Navy SEAL was getting to the Funky Butte Ranch. So I Googled the hell out of “goat diseases,” and after surfing to some links featuring quacks asserting that goat milk was the cure for every intestinal disease in people, I found out that Nat had a form of often-fatal parasitic diarrhea called scour. It could kill within days.

  I found the treatment (a powerful scarlet liquid originally intended for pigs whose label contained ominous warnings about overdosing), immediately placed a rush Web order with Caprine Supply, and tried to keep Natalie hydrated for the day or two until the medicine arrived. It was awful to watch her: her eyes were filmy slits. I recognized the sensation: she felt as though she had just drank the tap water in Guatemala City. All I could do was try to get her to drink and then drink some more. Not even saxophone serenading helped.

  I was continually welling up as I worked at comforting my kid. I had been getting used to life as a goatherd. In addition to feeding the little Pans milk formula and hay twice a day, I ministered to their routine health needs (the Funky Butte Ranch kitchen counter at any given moment was strewn with used syringes, cotton balls, and a massive eye dropper called a drencher, which I used to force nasty oral medicine down their gullets), and every couple of days Sadie and I “slept” in the corral fending off predators. The kids had almost doubled in size during their fortnight in my charge (which wasn’t saying much) and were probably the most carefully monitored goats in the history of animal husbandry.

  In fact, until that terrible morning when I found Nat almost too weak to stand, I worried I had become one of those crazy, overprotective animal owners. After all, ice cream was at stake here. The evidence was strong: I was camping in the corral and fretting over every goat sniffle, and I had even posted a “Beware of Goats” sign at the entrance of the property to scare potential kidnappers away.

  In truth, Melissa, the imposing bodyguard of the two, could take on any attacker, human, canine, or feline. Even at the tender age of six weeks, she wielded her horns with a precision that could get her a job with the Three Musketeers. In her overall demeanor she reminded me of Judge Judy with PMS. Natalie, on the other hand, was the snowy princess, demure and snuggly, whose smile reminded me of my favorite grandmother. She held her hooves out to me daintily when I trimmed them, like she was at the manicurist. Her ears, like Melissa’s, were half the size of her body. Strangely, she was dominant over her much tougher, doting sister.

  And now she was on the verge of dying. I felt helpless as I waited for Caprine Supply to deliver the antiscour medicine. It wasn’t just vets who were shut out of the Funky Butte Ranch. I was socked in. Even in a friendly rural valley, thumbing a ride with two horned animals would be a tricky endeavor, not that they could ford the river. It had rained every day since the goats’ arrival—sometimes for an hour, sometimes for six. The rest of the world was off-limits to me, unless I was willing to swim.

  Even routine feedings required me to fetch a little hay at a time from the giant bale I had stashed on the far side of the river. This was a life-threatening act, given the flood levels. It also meant a soggy, mile-long, barbed-wire-hopping hike every other day.

  * * *

  New Yorkers, possibly because they tend to walk rather than drive, emit only one third the carbon per capita of the average American.

  * * *

  To make things worse, I got a panicky call from Margaret, the local UPS woman, the morning after Natalie got sick. I was in the goat corral stroking her tiny head when my cell phone started singing.

  “You’re up to four packages now,” Margaret wailed. “And one of them says, ‘Urgent: Goat Medicine.’ I can’t get anywhere near your place.”

  This was a woman who believed in her work, so I convinced her to overrule post-9/11 policy and just drop my swag off at Lacy’s house across the river. But how would I get the medicine to the ranch? Luckily, I didn’t have to worry long. Just a few minutes after Margaret agreed to drop the meds off, Lupy, a lithe conservation organization manager from Silver City, called me up for a date. We had met at a book reading I did some months earlier.

  “I’d love to hang out,” I said. “But could we do it here? And, um, on your way over, would you mind picking up a package for me at Lacy’s house? It’s really important.”

  To just about anyone else on the planet, requiring a twenty-three-mile scavenger hunt followed by traversing a Class Three river with an armload of boxes would be cause for cancellation of a date, and possibly the end of all contact. Not for Lupy. I knew I was safe making this request. In fact, she’d relish the challenge.

  This tall, blond, eminently strong young woman ran extreme races through the Rockies and competed in triathlons. Sometimes she won mountain bike competitions on trails I’d be cautious about hiking. Fording the flooded Mimbres River was hardly a notable chore for her. It was a thrill. Her idea of a sexy way to start the morning was to take me on a twelve-mile run before work. Before breakfast. Preferably including an icy stream jump. This was foreplay for her. She was Wonder Woman without melanin.

  “Sure” was all she said. “See you at seven?”

  I love mountain girls.

  Humming “I get by with a little help from my friends,” I kissed the goats on their heads and promised I’d be back in a couple of hours. It was time to trek for their breakfast. Nat wasn’t eating, but I hoped that would change, and Melissa was ravenous. I put on my river booties and started hiking to the drenched riverbank, which was, for better or worse, my ad hoc hay barn.

  And this was why, two weeks into the scariest flood even old-timers could remember, I found myself waist deep in the main channel of the Mimbres River. The supposed-to-be-gentle waterway by this point looked something like a Grand Canyon flume. T
he state’s depth gauge had washed away. Overall, this was the kind of morning that made me wonder why Noah needed forty days and forty nights to get the message to live a holy life. One attempt to get across an engorged river was enough to set me praying, aggressively.

  In fact, I looked like one of your more raving penitents as I held two pillow-sized hunks of alfalfa hay above my head after the manner of an Iwo Jima marine hoisting Old Glory. My face was contorted into a look of goggle-eyed concentration. Crossing didn’t get easier with experience, because the channels shifted with each new downpour. The riverbed was a boulder field, an obstacle course designed to trap toes and dislodge kneecaps. If I stumbled and dropped the hay, it would be gone before I regained my footing. My whole life was now a game of liquid Twister.

  But the goats had to eat. It was as simple as that. I was almost getting used to the fact that this was the way I had to import anything I wanted from civilization, anything dry at least.

  “Stay toward the right side of the channel!” my sixty-ish neighbor Will Ogden called from a comfortable rock on the far bank, sipping coffee and straightening his cowboy hat. He practically lived in that spot these days. The flood was his principal source of entertainment, allowing him to share thirty years of embellished flood stories with the rest of the local ranchers, and one organic rawhide newcomer.

  I tried to listen to Will’s backseat river-fording, but from my vantage point the right side of the channel featured the same gushing whitewater as the center and the left side. One of our fellow neighbors was an aspiring pilot, and I made a mental note to inquire into hay airdrops, but the attempt to multitask caused me to arc precariously forward and two seconds later my cell phone and credit cards were soaked in my shirt pocket. You just don’t see these topics covered in Louis L’Amour novels. No taciturn cowboy turns to the bonneted damsel and says, “Hold off those Apache, ma’am, while I make sure I can still send a text message.”

  I was almost halfway across now, though, and, scouting ahead, I thought I would make it upright today. I was dedicated to this, because drowning would complicate my plans with Lupy. It was my first date in a pretty good while.

  I just had to survive the entire walnut tree that I suddenly noticed was angling downstream toward me like a torpedo. I’d been through this before. I timed my jump perfectly, and saved the hay the way an hors d’oeuvres waiter maneuvers a tray palm-up through a tight crowd. I heard Will applauding on the far bank and knew I was getting etched into local lore.

  It wasn’t yet ten a.m. Because an encounter with Will Ogden meant at least two hours of venting at the county for failing to build us a bridge during the four hundred years that Westerners had been hanging out here, I knew I had to get an early start on the goat husbandry that had abruptly taken over my life.

  Though they slowed me down, I loved the community coffee klatches that formed at the swollen riverbank during the Great Flood of Aught Six. They allowed me to bond in inundated misery with members of the twelve households who lived along El Otro Lado Road (which means “The Other Side,” in more ways than one). These kinds of connections could otherwise take decades to form in an insular rural culture where folks tend to speak softly and mind their own business.

  At any given time during the flood, one to six stranded Otro Ladoans could be found gathered along the wrong side of their overrun riverbank in a sort of group therapy session to rationalize their questionable real estate decisions by cursing the government.

  “We should all organize and refuse to pay our property taxes until they provide us services,” Will was saying as I sputtered onto the far bank with my damp hay. “I mean, how could an ambulance even get in here?”

  That was a particular bone of contention in our stranded Otro Lado minds at the moment. The wife of the valley physician, Mrs. Crown, was sick and needed to get to town for oxygen treatments. And this was just one in a series of neighborhood affronts. Everyone was still talking about Jake’s narrow escape from his Monster Truck. A tractor had sunk during the recovery efforts. The Silver City newspaper had even run a photo of the carnage. We were feeling kind of famous.

  “I think we should draw up a petition, demanding representation if they want taxation,” Will inveighed, stamping his foot on the shaky bank.

  By Day 15 of the flood, this was a refrain. I set down my hay and tamped river water out of my ears.

  “OK, Will,” I said, just as I heard the thunder getting serious. “You’ve been here for almost thirty years. Is there something special about this year? Or is it always like this at monsoon season?”

  “Oh, it’s always like this,” Will replied in a softer tone, studying his boots. “Everybody gets all worked up, people nearly die, and then the river goes down and everything returns to normal.”

  I decided not to argue the very choice of the word “normal” in a community whose members paid mortgages on properties they couldn’t get to or from, who lately risked electrocution every time they stepped out of their doors. Just as Will finished speaking, I watched an indigo lightning scar nail the hillside transformer behind his shoulder, taking out the electricity grid for southwest New Mexico for a couple more hours. Of late we had been enjoying power with the relative frequency of Baghdad.

  * * *

  In 2003, 380 Americans were electrocuted.

  * * *

  As the day’s first downpour went through its calisthenics, I turned back to survey the Mimbres River backdrop. The sky was a nasty bruise blue, and a heron was perched on a nearby cottonwood limb. Everything smelled like prerain ozone. Desert dwellers tend to gape in awe at the color green the way, say, a Floridian reacts to snow. But we had this odd surplus of chlorophyll. I wasn’t even marveling anymore that our valley looked more like a Photoshopped fantasy of Switzerland than the kind of place where John Wayne hunkered down while in the act of genocide.

  “Whatdya think?” Will called to me. It was the same question he asked me every day.

  “Yep,” I announced, spitting out an imaginary hunk of chaw. “Still too high for a Subaru, I reckon.” Silently I added, “I hope this isn’t too much to ask of Lupy.”

  “How’re things going with you and Celia?” I asked Will, as I gathered up the hay. “Got enough supplies?”

  “Oh, yeah, only problem is getting the grandson out to the highway to meet the school bus. How ’bout you? How are you holdin’ up out there?” He gestured over the nearest ridge toward the Funky Butte Ranch.

  “One of my goats is dying,” I said.

  “That’s hard. First sick animal. Good luck with that.”

  “You, too. I wonder if you couldn’t catapult young Reggie over the river.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that. Might work. He’s hardy. Could land on your hay.”

  I sighed and caught the top half of my reflection in a bank-side eddy. What the hell was I doing here, trying to raise goats and pretending I chewed tobacco? I felt like Billy Crystal parodying a cowboy lifestyle. All I saw in the water was a scared freak in a straw hat and wet flannel shirt flecked with alfalfa hay feed. I could barely keep two head of livestock alive for two weeks. One of them was in need of emergency medical treatment, and the other was prone to sharpening her horns on rocks prior to attacking me lovingly at full speed. It was like living with Cato.

  The kindness of my neighbor saved me from delving too deep into self-pity. “How ya doing for fruit?” Will said.

  I almost laughed. The Ogdens had pushed enough of their heirloom apples on me that I couldn’t close my freezer. Some grandparents foist toys or money on the young ones. The Ogdens foist fruit. My carbohydrates were accounted for thanks to two sunset picking sessions in their orchard in the past week. Both times, a cricket symphony serenaded me as I stood on a ladder and plunked into a bucket the tastiest crunchy-sweet golden apples I’d ever sunk my teeth into. I ate one, picked two, ate one, picked two. It was an orgy of crunchy sweetness in the rain. This was a variety that had disappeared from store shelves when everything at every super
market got the McSame.

  “I think I’m keeping the doctor away for at least a year,” I told Will. I was cheering up at the thought.

  Whining wasn’t going to solve anything, I realized. I was stranded and continually soaked, but it wasn’t just raining on me. Everyone was in the same boat. And from people with equal or greater problems, all I was getting was support.

  Sure, I had to schlep a lot of hay and hitch rides into town for food. Yes, if Natalie wasn’t better by tomorrow, she probably wasn’t going to live. OK, I was no longer living with the comforts of suburban life. But giving up so soon would be an embarrassment. Even with my crack executive team of certified Realtors, three weeks would be pretty quick to flip a ranch.

  Lupy showed up right on time, with Natalie’s medicine in hand and with a carton of chocolate ice cream for me.

  “Any problem crossing the river?” I asked.

  “What river?” She flipped off her sandals and headed into the bathroom to change into dry clothes. A Thursday evening, I realized, as I dashed outside to play vet, could be spent far worse than in the company of a superheroine environmentalist who could leap flooded rivers in a single bound, out–bench press me, and stare down the meanest cow-defending rancher.

  Natalie was too weak to put up any resistance to the drencher I pushed down her throat. Scarlet medicine dribbled over her lips like Kool-Aid, and she looked at me as if to say, “This better work.” We’d know by morning.

  Up at the house, I was so grateful to Lupy, I started to make her a Thai peanut stir-fry from the Funky Butte Ranch’s first chard and leeks.