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

 

You might start reading this Dispatch — and the massive, multinational publicity machine responsible for the Green revolution would be delighted if you do start — under the flattering impression that I’m a rugged individualist like the Minutemen of old. Never mind that I grew up on a diet of Dominoes Pizza chased by sugar water. I’ve shaken that identity, and hopefully sweated all the poisons out. But as the legendary, undeniably Biblical, climate change-inspired, and all-around unprecedented August 20 hail storm in my valley made clear, at this stage in my sustainability journey, for all of my now almost three years of petroleum-reducing, local-living effort, I’m exactly one weather event away from a return full-scale retail consumerism.

The hail event was a setback, to be sure (though one could argue, as I did in my New York Times Magazine essay on the topic, that my livestock, arguably, might have allowed me to survive the deluge should I have lived in this spot and endured the same hail storm on, say, any date in history prior to 1960). However I spin it, I lost all my corn, tomatoes, carrots and beans over the course of three hours. And I spent a LOT more currency on food than I had been getting used to the next time I blazed to town in a haze of munchies-inducing, vegetable oil exhaust.

But there are two delightful indications, ones which have crept up on me so subtly that I didn’t even notice, that I am in fact on my way to local living (that is to say, that I might survive should Globalization go away). One is in the realm of protein. Natalie, the goat I got off Craigslist and who is named for a singer I like but find somewhat goat-like in Natalie Merchant, is if anything stepping up production as winter digs in its heels here at 5,700 feet. She’s giving more than a half gallon of creamy, organic milk per day, meaning (as I’ve noted in earlier euphoric Dispatches) that I now bypass the milk, cheese, yogurt and ice cream sections in the crunchy food co-op in town, 28 miles away –- even after Biblical weather. Hail has no effect on this crucial, nutritious, and formerly expensive part of my diet.

But an even more telling (and to this suburban-raised neo-Rugged Individualist, shocking) sign that I might truly be transforming into a landed hillbilly is that I’ve picked up the mandolin. My musical tastes have migrated strongly toward the rural. The organic. The rootsy. This a fellow who grew up in an area that not only didn’t have a country station, but none of its denizens recognized Willie Nelson as a prophet. I’ve Dispatched about this before: how music makes a place — you don’t see Ralph Stanley coming out of Watts anymore than you get Too Short emerging from Portugal. Music is the expression, in sonic vibration, of the dominant vibe of an ecosystem. That’s the good news.

The bad news starts when I try to play the thing. Just ask my closest human neighbors, who at half a mile away hear the pained howls of the Funky Butte Ranch dogs when I start “practicing.” Unfortunately, until I have my chops, licks and calluses up to hoe-down par, not to mention my music theory and high lonesome, slightly flat warbling, my bluegrass will likely continue to sound like the typo I just made – blurgrass.

No one likes the noise I make on any instrument except the goats. Regular followers of these Dispatches will know that I have discovered that the only way to get the caprine ear to listen to a human’s wishes is to play them any kind of music (my choice happens to be profoundly imperfect renditions of Charlie Parker riffs on the alto saxophone, but a kazoo will do). Not by accident did those Greeks design their drunken music god Pan after a goat. The world’s most mischievous creatures might be illicitly munching my roses or lounging on the roof of my Ridiculously Oversized American Truck (the vegetable oil-powered R.O.A.T.). But when I start honking on the sax, they freeze, then spin, then watch me transfixed before following me like I’m the pied piper as I back away toward time out in the corral.

Yes, now I’m finding myself inclined not as much toward urban jazz, hip hop, or electronica, but rather toward the kind of music played by people who smoke corn cob pipes and drink out of gallon jugs. And there’s no end in sight. Not that I don’t still love the occasional Boogie Down Productions jam session. But my rural music tastes are getting stronger. Beware, neighbors. I’m now pricing banjos.

And so, says a Blur-grass Pickin’, Supermarket Avoidin’, progressive-leanin’, hillbilly inclinin’ organic citizen, “Thank God I’m A Country Boy.” I don’t care what else he said, did, or played, John Denver sure was right about a lot in that song.

I think what really sealed the deal for me, convincing me that there’s no going back to the suburbs, was what happened in my head, musically, when I headed over to the next valley to pick up some hay from the neighbors the other day. As the dust settled (literally) on the scene I had skidded into – the cows, the twenty-six dogs, the six nursing kittens, and that was just in the living room – my first thought was to start humming the “dueling banjos” theme from Deliverance. But then I quickly sensed disappointment: I had forgotten my mandolin, I realized, and I wouldn’t be able to join in. These were my peeps.

As I close this Dispatch, astute readers might have noticed that I’ve been avoiding the term “redneck,” even though I am one. I mean literally – folks who spend time outside get a sun-tinted neck. Such as when I loaded the hay into the bed of the R.O.A.T. with my neighbors’ help. But I like “hillbilly” better because friends have told me that “redneck” has the connotation of “listens to right wing idiots spewing insane and childish lies over the airwaves.” These neighbors of mine didn’t. They wanted to know if driving on vegetable oil and powering my ranch by solar was efficient.

But whatever term one chooses to describe my musical state of mind or my increasingly common, Willie Nelson-acknowledging demographic, I’m feeling renewed, with every not-yet-Dave-Grisman-esque pluck of the mandolin string or canine-confusing saxophone jam. My cacophonous hoe-downs are convincing me that, hail storms aside, local living can be done. Which is useful in case it ever has to be done. And as I’ve mentioned before, I sense, from the emails I’ve been getting from Farewell, My Subaru readers, that even “mainstream” Digital Age citizens are at least switching from believing my experiment in Petroleum-free neo-Rugged Individualism is radically subversive to simply radically unfeasible.

Now I seem to get, “How can I do it?” more than “Why the hell are you doing this?” And the answer is, “You can, and pretty easily, too, if you don’t mind wading in a lot of goat and chicken dung and taking your showers in the afternoon in winter.” The fact is, if I can do it, anyone can. First step: get off the Dominoes pizza and sugar water.

 

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