Back to the Land

A panacea 

Tomorrow marks one week since I started at CBF and already I feel I've settled into a fairly comfortable rhythm. It helps, perhaps, that I've worked 6 of the last 7 days (by design, so that I wouldn't have too long of a lag in the middle of training). Most mornings I rise at 5 am or before, make my coffee and drive the 2 minutes over to the farm, amidst a backlit sky and wispy threads of fog slithering across the road. I head straight downstairs to the barn and back to the milk house, where I start the sanitation cycle on our pipeline and begin to get the parlor set up, a fairly minimal task involving refilling grain and iodine dip cups. I have to say, working with a pipeline instead of milking cans is a revelation -- set up and clean-up are a relative breeze in comparison to what was required at Twig and Lazy Lady. Normally the girls are out on pasture, which means herding them into the loafing yard, but on days like today when the driving rain forced them to stay in the barn overnight for shelter, the somewhat challenging task of kicking them out from the dry warmth of the barn into the rain soaked muck of the yard was required. Needless to say they were NOT having it. Goats are incredibly persnickety when it comes to a variety of things, particularly dirt and mud -- they hate getting their dainty little hooves wet and filthy.

One of the pair of us who are scheduled to milk opens the gate and runs in ahead of the first group, manning the wooden slat of a door to allow just 24 girls at a time into the parlor. Since we're milking a total of 124 girls, they're divvied up into five groups of twenty-four, plus a straggler posse of 4 that we let in at the end. The first two or three groups are seasoned pros at this point, with nary an incident preventing them from marching in orderly lines into their headlocks. But the ones who hang back are a self-selecting group who are none too pleased to get up on the stand, so often they require a little more hands-on guidance, both in urging them from the yard up the ramp and into their proper headlocks. I have laid claim on the front half of the parlor and whomever it is I'm milking with, either Mark or Sam, takes the back sector. We strip and dip alternating girls and put the pumps on while we prep the remaining half, then milk the other 12, post dip and kick them out into the barn. One of us fills up the grain troughs while the other lets in the next 24, and so on. Once everyone's finished milking, we sweep the stand, scrub the pumps and switch over the pipeline in the milk house and take the reading to see what the yield and the average quantity of milk per goat is. (This time of year it's around 4.5 lbs per milking. Early or mid-May is peak milking time, and things decline slowly from there til we dry them off in December.)

Generally, chores take a half hour, milking begins at 6 sharp and by the time we're done cleaning and kicking everyone out to pasture, it's just about 9. Whoever wasn't milking is often out in the field setting up new pastures, as we move the girls into a new section of grass twice a day to make sure they have plenty to eat and to guard against parasites. We break for the morning to have breakfast -- at 5 am about all I can get down my gullet is coffee and a spoonful of peanut butter, but by 9 I'm ready for a real goddamned grownup breakfast -- and congregate again around 11 to tackle whatever task needs the most attention, be it picking up flex net from a pasture that's been eaten or moving the gaggle of meat kids into a new plot or, as happened last week, weed whacking around the fence line to make sure nothing was tripping the fence and thus compromising the electric charge. (See: eyeballs sutured shut from grass). Around noon, one of us feeds the kids who are still not weaned using some combination of goats milk siphoned from the bulk tank in the morning and milk replacer (only the doelings and bucklings we aren't keeping get replacer -- the kids we plan to keep as milkers get the good stuff). 

We break again at 1 and reconvene at 3 to set up for evening milking, which is effectively the same routine as the morning. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, we also have to account for cleaning the bulk tank, as the creamery empties it on those days. I finish my day around 7 and stumble home, peel off my barn clothes, crack open a beer and then shower and assemble whatever I have the energy to make for myself to eat before tumbling into bed. My aim is normally to be in bed by 9 and asleep no later than 10, being that I am old and less than 7 hours of sleep for a full, physical day makes for a grumpy and underperforming Gittles. 

Monday was the day that we shipped 4 does and a buck to the slaughterhouse. I missed morning milking due to an attack of allergies so bad I was temporarily blind (pro tip: never weed whack without protective eyewear lest you get violently assaulted by flying greenery directly in the tear duct), and was hoping I'd miss the hand off. But I arrived just in time to help load the unlucky animals into the trailer to meet their deaths. And while I never got a chance to know these guys, my heart broke knowing the stress they'd be experiencing traveling to an unknown place and being handled by unknown people for the remaining hours of their otherwise very charmed lives. This will unquestionably always be my least favorite part of dairy farming. I had a little cry after they pulled out of the driveway and then soldiered onward to clean out the barn in anticipation of an audit. The Fiona Apple was turnt up LOUD and I sang my little heart out to stomp out the bew hews but when I glanced back down at my phone and saw that it was after 1, I knew the deed was either done or in the process of happening. And I cried a little more. 

Yesterday was a glorious day off, and in spite of the driving motherfucking rain, I was hellbent on traversing the heretofore unexplored territories of southern Vermont in which I am currently residing. I had hands down the best travel companion possible for such a journey, one Agnes Barsalow, who might as well be the mayor of the Green Mountain State. A lifelong Vermonter who's spent the better part of the last decade roaming to all the far corners of the commonwealth, she knows the whereabouts of every point of interest and object of local lore that exists. (To wit: I asked her if she could recommend some cool places to check out down this way and she claimed, apologetically, that this was a part of the state she didn't know well ... and then proceeded to list legit one dozen weird and awesome sounding localities. She is a one woman travel bureau.)

While our plans to visit the furniture-cum-pizzeria restaurant in Manchester and the sours-only brewery in Brattleboro were thwarted due to unannounced/unadvertised closures (oh Vermont), we managed to scope out the MOST picturesque (and HELLA affluent) little hamlets one could ever imagine, a thoroughfare of stately second homes curated and manicured and maintained to within an inch of their lives and fairly oozing with picture perfect New England charm. We passed by some OLD ass cemeteries and country clubs that for sure did not allow blacks or Jews entrance probably until two to five years ago. (VERMONT SO WHITE.) We pitstopped at a smattering of gorgeously kept state parks that  exuded the same orderly, tidy vibes that, presumably, they exuded back in the 40s when they were first created, back in the days when America gave a fuck about things like state parks (thanks FDR, thanks Civilian Conservation Corps), and saw some of the most magnificent vistas I've ever laid eyes upon. It was positively indecent. Along the way we saw some frustratingly adorable post offices and general stores and procured not one not two but three creemees (I only consumed one, but I supported Agnes's very real and serious efforts to evaluate and document as many of Vermont's creemee's as possible). We briefly hollered at Rudyard Kipling's former digs (where he wrote The Jungle Book)  and Abe and Mary Todd Lincoln's son's vacation home (COULD VERMONT BE ANY GODDAMNED WHITER SRSLY) and I gave the side-eye to Bennington's terrifying obelisk before we headed back north to my odd little domicile for the night. Owing to our obscene collective creemee consumption, we both elected to go to bed without dinner. 

Today it was back to work, and glorious to have the sun, finally, wringing out the sky to a brilliant washed blue, the piles of muck and shit drying and baking in the heat. Friday I'll holler at my northerly friends and go pester my Laini at her post at the farmer's market, where I plan to introduce her to zaa'atar and sumac. My little heart is still in tatters but the Vermontiness of Vermont and the goatiness of the goats, whom I am still getting to know but already love enough to miss when I'm away for just one day, is helping to sew that stupid thing back together.

Let the goddamned healing begin.