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

As do her mother and aunt, the Funky Butte Ranch’s nubby-horned, ubiquitously-smiling baby goat Nico loves my (marginal) saxophone playing. Like a has-been rock band touring Japan, I’ll take whatever species of fan I can get.

Well, let me clarify. I say she loves my playing (which is generally badly sight-read Charlie Parker solos or what I like to consider inspired if, shall we say, “free” [of known chord progressions] improvisation). We’re talking solos that frighten the local predators. Think Shofar blowing. Actually, what Nico really loves is my physical saxophone. It tastes great to her. But also she seems to genuinely enjoy the music, dancing, jumping, spinning in mid-air like an adolescent slammer at an early 90s Primus show. Not by accident did those Greeks envision their party god Pan as a goat. Her full grown Aunt Melissa is like a groupie, jumping on my shoulders and decking me like we’re auditioning for a “Wildest Animal Attacks” video.

Music, in fact, is the only way I’ve found to reliably get a mischievous goat (say, raiding your rose bushes) to behave. I’m like the pied piper out there. When I see one of the now three FBR goats acting unacceptable, I moisten the reed, and the transfixed miscreant will follow me, stoned on the beat, back to the corral.

The chorus notes for Nico’s Song, which I composed spontaneously to extract her from the grain bin last week, are GGBB ABA GED (The ABA section is a sort of glissando triplet). You have to hear it with my special, er, tone, you know, “inflection” – it’s kind of a happy funky syncopation. I’m still working out the verses.

In other Funky Butte Ranch news, we collected nettles for tea as advance protection against next season’s juniper allergies (it worked miraculously this past year), and I’m making the first batch of Natalie milk/Funky Butte Ranch yogurt today. I’ll update on the results in the next Dispatch, but I’m already immeasurably excited that the carbon miles are slipping away from my life.

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