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.”