Emotional Landscape

You can't go home

So much has happened in the last month, and so little. I realize as I write this that I'd vowed to keep myself from looking back, but being that this chronicle isn't written in real time, I cannot help but delve into the recent past in order to document the happenings in my little corner of the world. But more broadly ... I find it's truly impossible to look back positively never. Like anything, I believe being TOO MUCH in the past, or the in FUTURE, or in ONE'S HANDHELD DEVICE can veer into the territory of pathology. Processing the present requires context. Perhaps all of this is just an excuse for me to remain comfortably in my sentimentality. So be it.

A few weeks ago I went back up to the Northeast Kingdom to visit a small goat dairy and to see a passel of my most cherished humans. I have, for the duration of my life in Vermont, considered my "past" to exist primarily in New York. There was New York me, the me of the past, and Vermont me, the current moi. However I realized during this trip that I've officially been here long enough for there to be Vermont chapters of my past. Too much time here has elapsed for it to all be one contiguous Dairyland sequence. One would assume things move at a glacial pace up here, or at least in the Kingdom. But in revisiting my old, first stomping grounds I realized that even there, incremental changes pile up, and time marches on. It no longer feels like I'm visiting a recently vacated set from the  production of Gittles: The Dramedy.  The pangs of nostalgia for my old life, my old self (the good shiny parts anyway) suddenly stab my gut when I realize things just aren't the same as I left them (cue Dinosaur, Jr.).

On a Friday afternoon I drove up Westfield way, intending to visit darling little Sage Farm in Stowe and then proceed north to Lazy Lady to hug some goat pals and scoop up Laini for a coffee and pastry across the border at a little patisserie in Canada. Of course, things ran over and when I called Laini to say I was headed her way, she said we'd run out of time and she couldn't get together. My crest: it fell.  Tail betwixt my legs, I pointed my whip towards Lowell and my former mountain home.  There too, things have changed. Heidi put the house on the market over the summer and it's sold. As of mid-March, it will be occupied by a couple from New Jersey and I will no longer have my little safe haven in the woods, with the wooden cut-outs in the stairs and the cast iron wood stove and the weird plaster nose hidden the chimney rocks. All of it was the backdrop for a period of time that shaped me more than anything else in my adult life, and I have to keep reminding myself that I don't NEED the actual physical trappings to access those memories. But somehow it feels like an essential part of me is being erased. 

My time in the Kingdom was fraught, no doubt about it. All I'd have to do is thumb through the journals of my tenure at LLF to remember just how imperfect it was. Perhaps it's Stockholm syndrome but most of the bad stuff has receded and I'm left with this impression of purity, of hopefulness, or maybe blissful ignorance. It feels like going home. This last trip, my twin anchors (Laini and the farm, Heidi and the fairy cottage) had shifted, and suddenly I was rudderless (again).

Back at CBF, nothing is settled. We are deep in the throes of preparing, as best we can, for the maelstrom of baby goats. Last week, Lydia and I spent seven or so hours pitchforking the dense hay/poop pack that blankets our barn floor into a skid steer. If I haven't yet mentioned my intense hatred of the bedded pack, let me do so here: seriously fuck bedded packs forever. They run entirely counter to my ethos of cleaning a little every day versus letting literal shit build up until it becomes this terrifyingly huge and daunting cleaning task. Some say that they're good for the animal's joints (especially when they're heavier with their pregnancies) and that they keep things warm in the barn during the winter. I say they're dirty breeding grounds of bacteria and overall gnarliness and make me hate my life. 

Anymyshouldersarestillsore, in the midst of this mucking out extravaganza, I went out to check on the goats' water, and noticed that Flash, a sweet 2 year old Alpine that we got from Lazy Lady, was expelling some bloody mucus from her vagine. Not chill. Two months early, and she looked to be aborting. 

We put her in her own little pen with warm water and second cut hay, hoping she'd pass her (most assuredly dead) baby or babies, and sure enough, before we were done feeding out hay, her amniotic sac plunked out on the ground, containing three small but perfect looking stillborn kids. I donned rubber gloves and scooped them gently into some hay and a torn in half feed bag and ferried them to the bunk silo to bury them under the still-warm manure, bummed out but grateful that mama Flash seemed to be doing ok, and probably dodged a bullet in delivering those babies early, as they still had 2 months of growing and she's a small lady. Ouchie. 

Over the next couple of days we monitored Flash closely to make sure she expelled  her placenta and cleaned out. She cried and cried, looking for her babies and licking my face reflexively, the biological imperative to clean her young still intact even when they were no where to be found. I'd forgotten the heartbreaking song of the childless mother inside the barn this time of year. One becomes inured to it in dairy -- this plaintive maternal cry is part of the din, and a necessary soundtrack to the institutionalized separation of mother and child as a built in facet of dairying. But somehow the added dimension of the kids' early death emphasized the true grief that the mama goat endures as a matter of course over and over throughout her life. I have been stopped short many times in my tenure as a goat farmer when I realize the true extent to which this line of work is exploitative even in the best of scenarios, and that melding nature with business ensures a certain amount of manipulative trauma is meted out to our once wild companions. 

All of which is to say, much as I love my work, there are times when I question its morality. I am not prepared to stop eating cheese (yet?), and so I suppose that if I'm able to justify being a part of the system that produces such (glorious beautiful heart stopping) comestibles, I might as well be part of the production cycle where at the very least I can try to adhere to my own set of quasi-humane standards. But I know that starting my own farm, I'll run up against these same issues -- the necessary flesh and blood byproducts of these systems that are considered waste from an economic standpoint -- the perpetuation of this cycle of exploitation. I wish there was another way to do this thing I love and to turn a profit doing it while also letting the animals live their very best lives. 

As kidding season looms, my anxiety over the inevitable dramas -- with 130 odd pregnant does, SOME shit is bound to go south -- mounts. Every shitty situation has been an opportunity to learn and improve, but it will never not suck that my inexperience and ignorance has and will continue to result in loss of life. I just hope there is a minimum of pain all around. 

In summation: Kiss your boos. Hug yourself. Life is short. 

Happy Valentimes?