July 5th: The Secret Life of Goats

For anyone who just tuned in, I spent two weeks on a little farm in Big Sur, California- milking goats, making cheese, and spinning honey...

The goats are so fantastic to take out grazing. They're afraid of mountain lions but they trust people so as soon as they leave the safety zone of their barnyard, they follow whatever human is with them. They are animals of routine and femininity. They are each others support team and they prefer pack life to free wandering.

While walking through the forest with the goats, they will stray only far enough to reach some tender branches, which they will all gather around and feast on. Sometimes though, one of the goats will get caught up with a particularly luscious shrubbery and not realize that the pack has moved on. She finishes chewing absent mindedly, looking around blankly as if thinking, "wait, what the hell's going on?" and then, remembering the circumstances, recognition flashes through her eyes, she bows her head and makes a mad a-line dash for the pack, kicking off rocks into an in-flight full-body panic spasm, contorting through trees, mowing over saplings and whizzing an inch from my kneecaps, only settling once she's in the center of the pack. At which point the whole matter is wiped clean from her memory.



The grazing world is a microcosm for all of goat existence. I feel like I have a pretty solid grasp on goat society, social norms as well as the occasional pushing of the mold, and the personalities of the five ladies I've been traipsing around the forest with.

Lucia is the big mama, about to kid any day now. Her pregnancy shows as she wheezes along, loyally sticking within a few feet of me but hesitant to stray too far from the shed. She is by far the wise one of the bunch. Definitely the only one whose brain activity transcends the day-to-day routine of a dairy goat on Sweet Water Farm. Her mind thinks beyond the goat world of hay, milk, and alfalfa, as she methodically ponders the unknown, the banal existence so many easily fall into, the eternal, the here and the now, and the legacy she may leave behind. Physically, she's easily distinguishable by her thick white collar and quaint, classic gold bell which hangs under her throat and emits the high, proud jingle of authority, leadership and worldly wisdom only clear to her and I. The rest of her goat company frolic in and out of life's daily pleasures, unaware of existence outside of themselves, utterly devoid of perspective. Lucia gazes pensively out of pale black eyes, never shying away from sustained eye contact or any opportunity to connect on a deeper level, humans alongside her intellectually disappointing but indelibly attached goat kin. These bodies we are graced with are of course, but external shells housing a piece of the eternal which Lucia recognizes everywhere and within everything. I get the feeling that Lucia curses her crude hoofs for not allowing her to express herself through the medium of watercolors. She has come to terms with the fact that her wisdom falls amongst furry deaf ears yet she remains hopeful as to the new pure-breed high-producing Sonnen that Charlie the farmer man has promised to bring in come October.

Ange is meek and mild. Sensitive no doubt, but not wise like Lucia. Ange is the milquetoast one of the pack. There's nothing weird about her. She's just your ordinary dairy goat. Her pride, however, lies in this reliable domesticity. Unprompted, she can be counted on for half a gallon of milk morning and evening, her teats hang evenly and she stands patiently until the pail is full, making milking a breeze. Her kid, to whom her initial milk production can be attributed, is long gone on another farm or, but she prefers to not consider this option, slaughtered. Bucks however, as she knows well, are of little use in the dairy world. Every effort in Ange is directed toward progressing the dairy business of the farmer, to which she is loyally devoted. "I did not choose the life of a dairy goat," muses Ange, "but alas, it is the life into which I was born and I shall fulfill my destined role." If things had been up to her, who knows where she would be, what pastures she would be frolicking through, and with which bucks she would be fornicating. Her pride in being the "farmer's pet" as the other goats tease, makes for a constantly tested ego. "This is all I've got," Ange rightly observes, ever the realist. Her value to the farmer, her external attributes and temperate disposition, make for a superficial relationship and at times, she feels taken for granted. In an everlasting effort to bolster her self-esteem, held up by external approval not internal confidence, she is a victim to her ego and she often finds herself comparing herself to her fellow goat ladies and then admonishing herself for doing so. To make it more difficult, Ange is naive to the fact that the existentialist struggles she faces are not unique to herself alone. She attempts to not bog herself down and "go there" by focusing on life's daily pleasures and her valued role in the barn community.

In-depth character analyses of the 3 other goats, Sierra, Heidi and Blanchette, are coming!! Stay tuned. They are stunning items as well. To be continued....

July 4th: No Fireworks in Big Sur! The Mountains are Made of Kindling

The goats this morning were petulant! Sierra, the new mother goat with two feisty 4 month old girls, kicked my newly sanitized milking pail, tossing hay and poop pellets into an inch of her milk. Charlie the farmer was displeased and aimed a resigned sigh at me, showing me again, proper forearm-hoof blocking technique and I said 'okay'. I poured the milk out and rewashed and resterilized my stainless milking equipment. I wished that I had had some coffee or that coffee was at least in my future. Or that I had gotten a few more hours of sleep the night before.

I lugged my mattress out from the yurt and onto a wooden platform in a clearing nearby and, through my slightly hazy consciousness, gazed up at a sky fuzzy with stars. I focused on one star, and a layer of new stars appeared behind it so I focused on one of those and a new layer appeared behind that. The Milky Way smudged the sky and, an hour later when I woke up to smack mosquitoes off my arm, I saw that all the stars had rotated around me while I was sleeping, like I was on a giant lazy susan spinning slowly around. I woke up at 5 in the morning from a fitful night of sleep and my bitten-up body echoed the buzz of the mosquitoes circling my head and dive-bombing my neck and shoulders. I lugged my mattress back into the yurt to avoid the bugs but, laying between sheets crunchy with dirt, I got equally mutilated indoors.

Resteralizing the milk pail, I just began to discover all of my bites. I pushed back through the goat pen and, crouching down beside Sierra, I got back to work. Another inch of milk in the pail and she kicked it again. I let out a little hopeless wimper and, looking around to see if Charlie was around, picked out the hay pieces and kept on milking. Finally, I finished Sierra and got to work on Ange, whose temper makes milking much easier. Twenty minutes and 50 experimental crouching positions later, Charlie came in to check on me, essentially to see what the hell was taking so damn long. Seeing that the poor goats had long ago run out of food and were now bored and antsy, he relieved me of my duties. Sierra, her head still locked into the feeding trough, was laying down awkwardly, face resting against a clump of alphalpha, snorting.

I stood just outside the opening of the goat shed and watched Charlie milk. I'm 5'7” last time I checked and Charlie is at least a foot shorter than I am. So everything in Charlie's self-built world is slightly smaller than everything in ours. Charlie's world is custom and we all adapt to it upon entrance into Sweetwater Farm. The sinks come up to my pelvis, the mirrors are hung six inches lower than I would hang them and the barely etched out paths through the deeply wooded forest that connect everything- shed to coop, yurt to bathhouse, garden to composting toilet- are custom pruned. Walking to the bathhouse in broad daylight is still a challenge for me. This morning, I got caught up watching my feel trudging uphill through rocks and stumps and I totally missed the low-hanging branch in front of me until it clocked me in the forehead.

So stepping out of the goat shed with a five foot roof, was a relief to be able to stand up straight. Charlie though, was happy as a clam squatting next to his beloved goat.
“This position, I've found, is the most comfortable for milking,” he said, not looking up from his work. Having interns in and out of Sweetwater Farm constantly, Charlie has gotten so used to teaching and preaching that it's hard to break him out of the pattern, even at the dinner table.
“It's the same position that I use to take a shit. It aligns the body. This is the position Asians sit in instead of us with our lounge chairs and I've found, it really is the best for the body. I could sit in this position for hours.” And the milk squirt squirt squirts into the frothing pail.

“See how much more milk I'm getting out with each squirt? It's about twice as much as you're getting. But you'll get it. You're already faster than you were yesterday.”

July 3rd: A Day in the Life at Sweetwater Farm

Morning goat milking. Kind of a pain- takes forever and is hard on the lower back. A quiet breakfast with Charlie and Elodi, the French-Canadian woofer. She's very sweet. She grew up on a farm in Quebec and has broad shoulders and muscular arms. Not at all the marketable body image most city girls are going for but I think she's gorgeous. She listens quietly and intently as Charlie rants on about how the bible is a load of crap and the biggest scam the world has seen, when the conversation started out with me asking what temperature I have to heat the milk to pasteurize it. A fly fell in it. This breakfast however, was quiet, each of us engrossed in our respective publications of the Sun literary magazine.

Tim West arrived, a very cute and energetic cook from the same camp as where I met Charlie, to plan the menu and arrange a staff for their next gig in August. My younger step sister wouldn't talk to me for two days after having seen us kissing at the camp. I felt really bad. I knew she had a crush on him, even though he's eleven years older than she is which, when you're fifteen, especially an immature fifteen, does make a difference. But he came on to me and I didn't resist. Melodee and I were bra shopping at H&M a few days later when I brought up the matter and, quickening her pace and hoping I'd follow, she skimmed her hand across a lacy lingerie set and said, as if in an afterthought, “You didn't have to DO him though.” We didn't have sex. Not even close. She thought we did and for some reason, for her that was the deal breaker. I assured her, even pinkie promised her, that we didn't “do it”. I threw in one more apology for good measure and our relationship was healed.

I took a fantastic bath in the beautiful bathhouse today, with a view across a few miles of empty rolling hills. The hills part in the middle to reveal a crotch of ocean and the view doesn't stop until the natural horizon, however many hundred miles off. But today there was a fog bank creeping up on us and filling in the split between the mountains with a thick pile of white wet clouds.

Unloaded a truck and lugged some things here and there. Lunch and post lunch sleepy lounging. I laid on the couch with my legs over Tim's lap and the two of us dozed while Charlie assaulted poor innocent Elodi with an exasperated explosion of his thoughts on mass food production, the manipulating arrangement of super markets, and Monsanto lobbyists. As I fell in and out of slow murky sleep, phrases from Charlie's rant worked themselves into my dreams.

After lunch and lounge, garden work! Lots of weeding and watering. Tim strut around with his shirt off, carrying an axe at one point and a pellet gun at another. He shot a rabbit while it was munching in a raised bed and later (after my second shower of the day) showed me how to skin it. Charlie's cat, Minnie Mouse, dug up the head and pelt and Tim (now with a shirt on. Rubber gloves too.) chased him with a hose until the cat dropped the rabbit parts. Tim reburied them. Charlie's garden overlooks hills and hills of beautiful Big Sur forest, white slab rocks jutting out here and there. Dropped the weeds in the chicken run and the lemongrass in Charlie's for tea tonight.

Down near the goat shed, I hung some curd in cheese clothes while Elodi milked. Wrapped some Camemberts in the earth-chilled aging room. “Just like a Christmas present”, said Charlie. Off to dinner. I wonder how Tim will cook the rabbit. Not much to say today- very quiet. But very happy.

July 2nd: Day Two on Charlie's Farm

I've known Charlie for six years now but have only seen him briefly, here and there, for nine days each year. He's the chef at the hippy dance camp in the Hye Sierras that I go to. I've known that he has a farm up in Big Sur and this year, with more of an interest in farming and less of an interest in spending my whole summer in the metropolis of Los Angeles, I asked him about his farm. Turned out he needed help and turned out I had the next two weeks free. So just like that, here I am, in his guest yurt, half an hour drive from an already sleepy part of highway one into the completely isolated but vibrantly alive hills of Big Sur. His post office box is twenty minutes away.

Before leaving, I riled up my friend Tyler to come along. He and I were planning to go on some sort of adventure and the goat herding and cheese making of Sweetwater Farm seemed like the perfect opportunity. The drive up along the coast was fun but, as soon as we got to the farm, it was obvious that Tyler was not in his element. Im sure it didnt help that Charlie clearly prefers for his farm interns to be girls; young attractive girls.



So Tyler, and the Subaru that brought me up here, left- just 24 hours after arriving. I assured him that I would be fine and would find a ride back to LA before my flight home in two weeks. And I will. I'll get back and I'll make my flight but right now, I have no idea how that will happen. But for me, that's the ultimate freedom. I don't enjoy the uncertainty for the sake of the rush of waking up not knowing where I'll be sleeping that night. It's not a discontent with my original plan. What I like is that it's an open ended deal. A trip that could take me anywhere. My original itinerary is a fall-back plan. And any divergence, an improvement.

My New Soundtrack

My gap year has instilled in me a false sense of permanence. I feel like I have all the time in the world to do all the things I want to do. Which of course means that, as my year goes on, I am doing less and less. But now it's started to ramp up again with plans, responsibilities and travel dates. So, now- sandwiched into another coach seat off to another adventure- is a perfect place to play catch- up.

The most monumental and important change that has taken place in my life is my recent interest in Country music. Baxter, my brother, was forced to listen to Country by the chef of the restaurant in which he worked. The song that won him over (and eventually me too) was "My Big Green Tractor" by Jason Aldean, whereby, with some close lyrical analysis, "taking a ride on my big green tractor" appears to refer to "having sex".



The biggest challenge for me in accepting Country music was severing the connection I had in my brain between intelligence and musical talent. I had always assumed that the people who make the music I love would also be people who I would like to get to know- people who had a lot in common with me and shared many of my same values.

Having grown up listening to Ani Difranco and The Flaming Lips, this assumption is probably pretty accurate but when Country music enters the picture, things get confusing. Killer guitar riffs and fantastic instrumentation of fiddle, banjo, and mandolin are offset by lyrics like "I want to check you for ticks", "she thinks my tractor's sexy" and the line to one of my favorite songs by Josh Turner in which he muses over a girl's smile by comparing it to "butter beans, cherry pie and an old wheel barrow filled with summer rain".



But already having acquired a taste for bluegrass, in which the musical abilities of the musicians can often overshadow their blind and at times, garish, devotion to Christian dogma, I was able to ease myself into being able to respect and genuinely enjoy the music without expecting to respect and share the extraneous viewpoints of the musicians. (Hopefully the former fans of Tiger Woods will pick up on this important distinction and remind themselves what the man is famous for.)

Now I can even appreciate the very things about Country that initially turned me off of the genre.

1. Most of the songs, if not all, are really simple. There are no elaborate metaphors, no probing questions, no esoteric references. Everything is simple. It's about plowing the field, making fried chicken, how nice a good pair of jeans feels, trying to get a girl to sleep with you, or working hard all week to put beer on the table.

2. Country lacks the smug competition of most other genres. Nobody, in Country, is trying to outdo anyone else or reinvent themselves.

[Just a little side note to emphasize Country music's adamant adherence to tradition:
Hank Williams' son, Hank Williams Jr., was criticized for making music that (within the genre of Country) differed from that of his father. So Jr. wrote a fantastic song called "Family Tradition" basically telling everyone that although he respects his father's name, he's going to make whatever kind of music he damn well wants to. And that settled that. Until HIS son, Hank Williams III diverged in his own musical expression beyond the comfort zone of Country- even becoming the principle member of punk metal bands Assjack and Superjoint Ritual.

To which, his father, Jr., responded with the country song "You Just Don't Use the F Word in Country". After this tactical move on Jr.'s part to publicly denounce his son's divergence, Hank Williams, Jr., and Hank III all got together to record the album "Three Hanks: Men With Broken Hearts", uniting over a topic familiar and relatable to most everyone, which happens as well to be the founding theme of Country music.]

3. Everyone has the utmost respect for the classics- Loretta Lynn, George Strait, Hank Williams- and if any novice wants to pump out a country song of their very own, they can just follow the formula: upbeat guitar intro, simple twangy chorus, quiet low didactic bridge, and then the last three decisive chords and the finishing concordant slide- at which everyone jumps up and starts clapping and whooping because they know that those three chords mean the song is over and now it's their time to jump up and start clapping and whooping.

As a way of life, no- I would not like to live like this. But as a form of music that I can pop into my stereo system whenever I want to- I love it, love it, love it! The fall-back formula is a good one and the stream of amusing lyrics never stops a'comin' in.

Can't Get Them Masaais Outta My Head: Why We Live So Differently

Over the summer of 2009, I spent 5 weeks living with a tribe of Masaais in Kenya. The experience was fantastic but many parts of it were agonizing, isolating, and unbelievably frustrating. Mostly, it brought up a lot of things that make my head spin and are hard to justify or explain...

The only thing that creates conflict in groups, is innovation. We have layers of foundations- things that are givens- rules that everyone follows, a repertoire of tools that everyone uses, words that mean this and not that. We agree on these things, everyone has them, so there's no reason to fight. But as soon as something new is introduced (a new viewpoint, a new concept) everyone must separately decide how to classify this new item, and not everyone will agree.

The most united, steadfast groups of people are those who denounce and reject innovation. The French dont allow the language to change at all. There's even a committee to invent new French words for American inventions. Their language is therefor perfect and untouched and everyone defends it with their lives. The same concept of preservation applied to larger human and cultural development can cause stagnation which can limit a people in their ability to change, adapt and reevaluate according to a changing world.

Is it better to live in peace in a world lacking innovation (kenyan masaais, the avatar people) or one endorsing innovation but subjecting itself to restlessness, discontent and the fracturing of its people?

Does innovation have to inevitably lead to restlessness, discontent, and fracturing? As far as I can see, the only reason why it does, is because of people's inability to approach anything (a situation, a relationship, an object) without a preconceived idea of what it is, what it should be and its purpose. (Look at the clouds and what do you see? Condensed water hanging in the sky?? No- A sheep, a dinosaur, a dolphin!) Seeing things just as they are with no expectations makes for no disappointment and allows us to lose our baggage, our (at times limiting) values, our past experiences, and simply adapt to our surroundings. For Americans, living very comfortable, easy lives where survival is a given and self creation, self actualization is our struggle, preconceptions are limiting. But for the Masaais, where having 'a people' defined by prejudices, classifications and tradition is the only way of surviving, preconceptions are what makes you run away from a sound in the woods- assuming of course that its an elephant and can easily kill you. Maybe it was just another person from your tribe and you didnt need to run away but if you were wrong, the potential outcome is a painful death.

Innovation, for the Masaais, makes no sense and preconception-based preservation becomes first priority. But the delicate balance between nature and man that must be mastered and preserved to survive off the land, only works for both sides of the equation if neither one of them changes. Unfortunately, the land is the one thats changing this time. Hence, now, a dying people who, unable to adapt to their surroundings, are living hundreds of years in the past.