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

Two evenings ago, just before sunset and for no reason I can put my finger on, I decided to crouch outside the laundry room door while my sweetheart gathered a load of clean clothes to bring outside to line dry. She thought I was at my desk writing as our son slept.

I waited for several minutes. Maybe four. It seemed longer. I was coiled like a defective Slinky. She was humming – Toots and the Maytals, I think. Expecting nothing. I was starting to cramp up and was stifling giggles. Finally, maybe three minutes later, she emerged, clutching a heavy damp hamper of diapers and Carhartts.

“Boo!” I explained, wearing a kind of wide-eyed, open-mouthed, scary gotcha face.

“Oh, hey,” my sweetheart said, laughing a little and then kissing me on the beard as she passed by, not breaking stride.

She was so not expecting any dangerous energy. Her overall parasympathetic alert level was as untroubled as I’ve ever seen in a primate. No adrenaline at all was produced by my sweetheart’s fight-or-flight mechanism as a result of my jumping out at her. I couldn’t believe it.

You have to understand, I had witnessed, in more than three decades of hiding, jumping out, and scaring the s—t out of people (starting with my older brothers when we were growing up, and including once, accidentally, a museum guard in Victoria, BC, when I was aiming for my parents), souls almost visibly leaving my victims’ bodies, out of sync with their horribly recoiling, impossibly elastic frames as they primevally fled my exuberant Howard Dean screams. I am, if you don’t mind me tooting my own horn, somewhat of an expert at jumping out and scaring people.

I followed my sweetheart to the laundry line. “Didn’t that scare you?” I asked.

She clipped a sock on to a clothespin. “It scared me a little at first, but then it was funny.”

I pressed. “But I mean, you didn’t even jump. You chuckled.”

“I guess you’re just not very scary to me. You’re not a scorpion or a rattlesnake.”

I know from her occasional shouts that these are my sweetheart’s primary (now I realize “only” since Bush is out of office) fears in the life we have set up for ourselves here at the Funky Butte Ranch. That and a toxic beetle inappropriately called a kissing bug.

Shaking my head and heading back in to check on the sleeping toddler, I decided to take my sweetheart’s statement about my not being scary to her as a compliment. Why not exude friendly energy? Although I have to say, after excursions in Rwanda, Uzbekistan, and the U.S. Congress, I’m still a bit more tightly wound when someone – even someone I love – jumps out at me in a dark house at sunset. Nonetheless, I come away from the experience with nothing but admiration for my sweetheart’s almost total sense of comfort, peace and relaxation in her life and home space.

Still, I’ve been analyzing the event almost non-stop for the past 48 hours. Relaxation is one thing, but I imagine that there is a school of social behaviorists who would categorize a fellow who spends seven minutes curled outside a laundry room door merely to jump out when his sweetheart emerges as having a bit too much time on his hands.

If this is true, I have two words in response to that diagnosis: “Thank God.”

It’s an indication that for the first time in perhaps fifteen months, I am not waking up with a feeling of playing catch-up. We all know that juggling the multitudinous, leaky grab bag that tenuously holds the elements of modern life in the Digital Age can make “multitasking” seem like the quaint lifestyle of one’s great-grandfather on the fief. But trying to be a father, lover, writer, goat herder and, of late, exerciser, all on a Ranch 28 miles from the nearest town, generally causes me to eliminate unnecessary parts of my day, like meals and sleep. Especially the “father” part.

No more. Jumping out at my sweetheart made me realize I’ve once again got a handle on my schedule. And indeed, just in time for autumn, I notice with astonishment that we’ve nearly finished the shade gazebo here on the Funky Butte Ranch. The final touch was the bamboo I just picked up from my violently relaxed neighbor RC.

Now all the gazebo needs is some walls –- also bamboo, though probably woven in a thatched grid pattern. I want a sort of Corona-on-the-beach feel to the structure, which seems about right for a hummingbird-surrounded barbecue on late summer’s evening. The 8×8 structure sits just outside the Ranch House’s giant southwest-facing sliding glass door. My hope is, once the grape and kiwi vines I’ve planted grow up the side trellising, the gazebo will keep the Funky Butte Ranch house from becoming quite literally an oven every afternoon for eight months of the year. Seriously, you can cook beans just by setting the pot inside the sliding glass door from noon to three p.m. Essentially, the solar feng shui embedded in the house’s design is too good. Take it from me – you can get a tan inside my house. In September.

In the winter, by contrast, the vines will lose their leaves, and the house’ll get the intense “solar gain” when I want it to -– that is to say, seasonally. Now all I have to do is wait for the vines to snake up the bamboo walls I’ll thread in next week (the main posts are from the local forest – burn thinning), and try not to notice that the structure, while sturdy, was measured as the result of perhaps more eyeballing than the traditional protractor and logarithmic work commonly associated with professional building. Making a blueprint was out of the question. You think my three dimensional building skills are rudimentary? Well, my drawing development ended at stick figure level. My skill in perspective about matches those of middle age European tapestry makers or maybe Egyptian tomb painters.

But the thing stands, it doesn’t even wobble in strong winds, and early visitors, I’m noticing, are tending to compliment its appealing visual je ne sais quoi. As a result, this one novice shade gazebo is almost a physical manifestation of my growing confidence in what I hope are my nascent building skills. Part of that, no doubt, comes from a climate that is, comparatively, unbelievably more forgiving than other places I’ve lived, notably Alaska. Consider a slightly imperfectly constructed roof. For three quarters of the year it’s too warm to matter about a little air. Your rain catchment gutter will, well, catch the rain, if you’re lucky enough to get a Monsoon in these unpredictable Climate times, heading off leaking. And even in winter, you light one stove fire for an hour in an adobe home and you’re glad for some circulating air. It’s generally, therefore, not a life-or-death situation if your initial roofing effort wouldn’t be featured on This Old House, which I believe is why so many people -– like me, soon — take the leap and build their own, if architecturally imperfect, dwellings here. Count me in, and don’t tell the building inspectors.

Now that I’ve shown, in a stunning shrug-off of a childhood spent barely being able to stack Legos, that I can make a three dimensional structure stand (a skill I consider one that might prove valuable for long-term survival, given the almost Sisyphean difficulty of booking a contractor in Southern NM), my next project (following some rain catchment work), sort of a Blue Square intermediate effort in ski run terms, is going to be to build the goats a new wind- and sun-protected gazebo of their own in their corral. They deserve it in their own right, but, buoyed by the gazebo success, I’m also doing it, I freely admit, to test the Earthbag Theory of Intermediate Building.

Utilizing advice from Earthbag-cheerleader friends and a few very down-home Web sites, it didn’t take long to discern the premise of Earthbag building: stick sand (or slightly more insulating material like adobe mud, rice hulls, or volcanic soil if you’ve got it in our area) in old animal feed bags and stack the bags until you have a structure. There’s a little more to it than that, but not enough to make my eyes glaze, like most projects do when the reach the level-and-protractor stage.

My sweetheart had been stockpiling the feed bags in our barn for a year. She knows these things. I slip on them. They’re spilling out past the saws and tools and into the hay and outside, confusing the ducks.

Philosophically, I was torn at first. The Funky Butte Ranch lies in the heart of Adobe-land. I slip on the stuff in the creek on my morning runs. Folks have built durable structures here from the surrounding clay quite successfully and efficiently for several Millennia. Do we really need the bags? For one thing, for something called “Earth” bags, feed sacks are made from material so unearthly you pray for the residents downstream of the factory. The bags are off-white, a sort of wispy plastic weave that tends to shred in the truck before you get them home. And I think about the politics of the purveyors of these bags –- generally not organic produce eaters nor the type of people to shout, “Yes, We Can!” at political rallies.

I came around pretty quickly and fully, though -– perhaps proving some deep metaphorical point about everyone of all ideas needing to work together for the Kumbaya Factor to come about. Earthbagging is really the Idiot’s Guide Take Making An Actual Three Dimensional Structure Stand, and In Fact Have Pretty Decent Stability and Insulation. Conceptually, it’s more Pla-Do than Erector Set or even Lego.

Fill it. Stack it. And if it holds, if the goats give it Two Hooves Up, I might implement the technique for the planned new Ranch House addition, guest house, and Ranch manager abode. Plus, I can always slap on some rammed earth adobe on the outside of an Earthbag structure. That’ll make me feel like Nature Boy again.

Now, I don’t want the PETA-minded to get worried: this is a kind of animal research, but, I think with a very low risk. Lower than the plank-and-roof-sheeting hut that Walt the Scimitar-Horned Billy Goat so effectively dismantled within an hour of his terrible but necessary arrival at the Funky Butte Ranch.

In any event, I’ve discussed the project with the goats and they seem in favor of it. I am blessed to have perhaps the most relaxed goats in the history of ruminants. Herd animals? Nico tends to chase my dogs, Melissa can open the corral latch (if left un-clipped with a carabiner) in under three seconds, and Natalie can show you with her hoof exactly where she wants you to scratch her during morning meditation. These are chill goats.

Maybe I should be learning something from the low stress levels of the females of all species that surround me. Maybe I have learned something. And I’m certainly hoping we’re raising a relaxed kid. It sure seems that way. The little elf emerged into the world with a sort of kicked-back smile on his face, and he’s only gotten more content since.

We live in a dangerous world, of course, but I think I’m going to instruct my son that the best way to be prepared for it is to only be startled when necessary -– to go in to any situation generally knowing what to be startled about, and how vigilantly to be watching for the world’s scorpions and rattlesnakes in any ecosystem. It may be conniving colleagues in a grad school workshop. Or more traditional snakes and scorpions. But don’t go through life coiled up expecting someone to jump out at you. This is my definition of “homeschooling.”

Who knows if he’ll even need that lesson? It probably depends if he’s got my sweetheart’s parasympathetic nervous system or mine. Maybe it doesn’t matter: we’ve both come to an equilibrium relaxed appreciation of life. My sweetheart’s, I think, is genetic, and mine is acquired.

And a step not to be under-estimated in that acquisition, for me, is the lovely concept of designing and building or at least improving and decorating one’s dwelling. (We came to the Funky Butte Ranch with a lovely thirty-year-old foundation of adobe-based structures here.) There’s just something about playing a role in your home space that I think must be embedded in us genetically to inspire pleasure. Or relaxation. There’s no other way to put it. I just hope the goats feel that way should my debut walled structure prove less than symmetrical. I certainly promise a future Dispatch with the answer to that one, and a photo of the resulting project, whether successful or more resembling the corners cut by a military contractor with a drinking buddy in the Vice President’s mansion.

You’ll have to excuse me if I close this Dispatch somewhat abruptly. I just hit the ceiling with my soul and my body is still recoiling somewhere in the neighborhood of my keyboard. In fact, I almost had a heart attack as I typed. The reason? Someone just jumped out at me from under my desk. Oh, it’s two people, I see as my heart rate slows to under 160. The two people I live with. A woman and a fifteen-month-old boy, both giggling uproariously now as I pant, prone on the rug and clutching my chest.

My sweetheart and son must have hid under there when I returned with a glass of water a few minutes ago. Looks like the goats weren’t involved. That’s a good thing. It would be hard enough to do a competent job on their pending corral improvement project if I weren’t contemplating revenge the entire time. As for the human part of my family, I’m going to see if I can order a fake rattlesnake over the Internet. I know just the pillow to leave it under.

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