Doug Fine: Author, Journalist, Adventurer, Goat-Herder

It was Lonely Planet’s Fault

The important piece of background for this entry is that my two baby Goatlets had taken over my life, ever since I had to sleep outside with them the night they arrived via Craigslist, when coyotes were yipping too close for any of our comfort. (See August Dispatch.)

The plan was to raise them then breed them, then enjoy their healthy, local, growth-hormone free milk, cheese, yogurt and ice cream.

The essential dichotomy with Natalie and Melissa is that they are at the same time heart-breakingly cute and genetically mischievous. With their long floppy ears and horizontal slits of pupils, they laugh at me when they, for instance, get into the house and chill on the sofa via the cat door. This results in the kind of love that a father gives a favorite wayward daughter.

We have been engaged in a struggle to keep them out of my rose bushes since their first week here. Well, not so much a struggle, since they always get in. They have 41 acres in which to forage, but they know I don’t want them in the roses. So that’s where their genes tell them to go. It’s no use fighting a Goat’s mischievousness: it’s precisely the trait that makes them such great survivors. And I want them to survive.

So fast forward to a trip to Mexico I took with my friend Lupy in early January. My hiking campanion was being amazingly tolerant of the fact that as we hiked across the incomparably beautiful Copper Canyon, I was bonding with everyone we met on the subject of goats.

“I have goats, too!” I’d exclaim. Or at least that’s what I thought I was saying.

One day about a week into the trip we were deep in the Copper Canyon speaking with two precious ethnic Rarumari girls. This culture is sometimes called the Tarahumara, and they are the world’s most famous distance runners. The two girls were maybe age 6 and 4 and their parents were off distance running somewhere when we arrived at the clean spring water oasis that was their home (they even had a solar panel). They were used to sweaty strangers staggering in to drink at their spring. I was thinking we had an area of obvious bonding on what my Lonely Planet Latin America phrase book clearly called “cabras.”

You know, goats.

Who doesn’t love goats?

In my life, even still, I suffer from “I Am Grooving On A Phenomenon So Everyone In the Cosmos Must Also Be.”

But in this case, as in much of the developing world, goats are in fact an excellent ice breaker: they are mutual funds to much of the planet’s humans.

So I thought I would talk about goats, since the girls brought us their day-old kids to show us. People say this a lot, but in this case I mean it literally: it was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.

Evidently, though, I nearly caused an international incident, when telling the girls, who were holding the kids in a hammock, “I have two hairy bastards, too.”

The girls just stared at me, silent, wide-eyes, and no longer giggling.

You see, my Lonely Planet Latin American Phrase Book listed the above-referenced epithet for “goat.” How many times has language caused wars, or in my case, near-lynchings? “Chiva” is the preferred term regionally, I have since learned.

Back in the nearest village that night, our hostel host Cheryl, while we were star-gazing, casually mentioned that she had heard in town that there was a posse forming to find “the shaggy Gringo” who had used foul language in a conversation with two young girls who had been perfectly innocently abandoned by their parents for a few days at an oasis called Los Alisos (the Sycamores). (So what if this would be a felony for a few hundred miles north?)

I blinked.

In fact, I’m pretty sure I wore the same expression the Rarumari girls had before a friend we hiked with that day had corrected my “cabra” mistake and I rejected the correction, citing my guidebook phrasebook.

The posse didn’t find me.

On the long drive back from the Copper Canyon, singing every song I knew with Lupy in impressive and accidental harmony, I experienced a formative event, for the purposes of writing Farewell, My Subaru. Leaping Dukes of Hazard-style over one of the speed bumps that, often disguised, presage every Mexican village, I finally wrecked the LOVEsubee’s transmission (at a mere 204,000 miles). This made it a lot easier to stomach buying the ROAT, the Ridiculously Oversized American Truck. Which I needed to do if I was to convert to vegetable oil power. You need a diesel rig to do that. Prior to no longer being able to use 3rd and 4th gears, I had been experiencing a bit of separation anxiety from the reliable Subaru, which had never failed me over 12 years.

The morning after my return, I went to meditate with Nat and Melissa and I found them so plump and big, their growing horns so potently dangerous now, that I realized I could no longer call them the Goatlets. They became, and remain, the Chivas. I still like to sing them a modified version of Bob Marley’s “Them Belly Full” as I greet them for the morning feeding. It goes like this:

Them belly full but they hungry,
A hungry goat is every goat…