I didn’t know that France had canyons until one became a landmark for the 20-minute walk to the bar. This was in the south of the country near an organic goat farm just a horizon away from the black mountains. The farm had a small, happy family of horses, two cats and two dogs, chickens, pigs, a huge vegetable garden and about 26 goats. The goats had two jobs: making milk and making manure. The manure fed the vegetable garden and the vegetable garden fed the people. The people made cheese from the milk and fed scraps to the pigs. The farmer was a kind woman named Ingrid who immediately made me feel at welcome in her home by forcing that idea on me.
“Eh… is it that you would like some glass of water or some sing?”
“Zare is de sink. Ze glass will be zare.” And it was done.
I had requested an invitation to live on the farm and do a little work. After the glass of water, I was offered boarding in a retired circus bus near the edge of the property. I jumped at the offer. My neighbor was a retired acrobat who lived in a Winnebago about 100 yards from me. He kept stealing what I thought was my electricity, but other than that our paths rarely crossed.
Ingrid grew up on the farm. I had only stepped foot on one to pick pumpkins some Octobers in New Jersey. When she taught me to milk the goats, she was patient. Not everybody has milked a goat before. But when it comes to keeping the bucket of goat food lifted above my shoulder when I’m around them, well if I didn’t know that I was probably an idiot. So when the goats jumped at the bucket of food and knocked me into the wall of the barn, I proved myself one. I continued prove that sort of thing for weeks. I pushed a cart I should have pulled, I tried untying a bale of hay when there was obviously a rock (a rock) for cutting the twine right there. I wasn’t allowed to chop wood.
We would wake up early. Very early. Each day I would wake up to the sounds of the chickens wandering around outside the bus and head to the big house. In the distance was the goat barn from where I could hear Ingrid shouting French things at the goats. There were often paying guests in the house, and I would prepare some breakfast and chicory coffee for them. They’d eat some cereal, some fresh bread, some jam and butter and coffee and tea. I’d clean up, sweep slate floor of the dining room, and bring scraps from breakfast and last night’s dinner to the pigs. They loved that stuff. By then it was an hour or so to noon. There would be some more work to do, but only a few hours of it before siesta.
One day we spent those hours mending the parts of a fence that had been stolen. If there is a French word for bandits, than that’s what I’d call the people who stole the fence. Ingrid found that the fence was stolen after one morning when the goats were where the horses used to be, and the horses were where the goats were supposed to be. So a small crew made up of the farmer, some of her visiting friends, and I set out to rebuild the missing pieces of fence. The rest of the details of day are not as relevant as this one: among the tools we used was a red hammer.
A week later we needed that hammer again. Well, we needed a hammer anyway. That’s when we learned that between the garden and the big house and the guest house and the in-ground pool and the barn and the circus bus and the expanse of that plot of France there was only one hammer--that red hammer--and it was gone.
So either I set out to search among the new fencing to find the hammer, or I was sent out to find it. Sometimes it’s hard to tell when people are just getting rid of you. I walked up a dirt road, horses properly to my right where they belonged, and goats, pigs and a canyon way out to my left. The road went slowly up hill. At the top was a small structure that I came to learn was some sort of water house. As such a structure should, it sat at the highest point of the property. From there it was downhill to the goat’s favorite part of the paddock. I imagine they enjoyed the new fence. And it was from that highest point on the property that the goats spotted me. When they did, they got excited. The ones who saw me told their goat friends until the whole group was as close to me as they could get within the fence. I felt a little guilty, like I should have brought a gift or a bottle of wine--some good news at least. But they were terribly excited to see me and I had nothing for them. All I had was no hammer.
I may have pet some of the goats when I got to them, I decline to say. But if I had, they weren’t satisfied. I walked the perimeter of the paddock keeping an eye out for the hammer. Those goats followed every step—some pushing others aside to get closer to me, keeping an eye on my every move. Anticipating. They were not as excited or satisfied as I was when I found the hammer and split.
I returned with the tool, and when siesta came I walked down to the bar. It’s out past the pigs, a left at the canyon, following the ridge until you get into the village. Thirty minutes. You pass some vineyards and almond trees (almonds grow on trees) and wander like a stranger into a town built centuries ago into a cliff. Beautiful. Older than old. My French was never terrific, but at this, the height of my ability, I was able to ascertain that the bar sold beer and that the beer was inexpensive. I made a habit out of walking the half hour to that bar most siestas, having a beer or—if there was time—two, and making the 45-minute walk back to the farm in time for the goats’ evening milking. That was the routine
Now, there are book smarts and streets marts., but it turns out there are also farm smarts. An unmarketable term, to be sure, but if you’re on a farm for four weeks without farm smarts you’ll be made aware. If that farm is in France, and your French is awful at best, you will be gently reminded of that particular shortcoming every hour or so. So that month was one of the best months of my life, but had its share of peculiar difficulties. I was thinking about all of that on my last siesta when I dared have a third beer before heading back.
Some familiar faces had popped by the bar at just the time that I was thinking about walking back up hill. A man from Argentina who had learned what little English he knew from listening to Megadeath as a kid, and a lady with whom he was faireing the vindage. They had just finished harvesting grapes on a vineyard in one of the neighboring villages and popped in for a beer. I was two beers in to my final siesta in that beautiful old village, and some interesting people had just shown up to a table I had had to myself for the late afternoon, so I pretended not to hear the church bell at five o’clock and had one more.
By the time the panic set in it was six. I should have met up with Ingrid for the evening milking when I stood up to say goodbye to my friends. Three beers in and my sentences were each coming out in up to three different languages. The rest of the table was playing Babel as well. And I had a 45-minute walk up the hill.
Down the dirt road, past the pigs, I saw some goats wandering inside their fences. I got a bit of relief from that, since they all ought to have been in the barn. Then I wondered if it was all my fault, that Ingrid and all of those goats were waiting for me to milk them. Somehow I doubted that and the anxiety rinsed away again.
I heard the farmer when I got near the barn. She and her mother, a lady greyer and just as sweet, were standing around the farm. I yelled my first apology for being late, and it got me a slightly confused look.
“We were going to milk at six, right?”
“Oh, yeah, but zees goats are missing.”
Some goats were missing. The barn was half full. About a dozen goats were unaccounted. Cedilla, the chevre whom I had learned to milk best, had a group of her own and they were not to be found. I saw my chance for redemption, so I took a walk.
I climbed to the top of the water house and became the Surveyor of All that I Could See. In the distance I saw a goat back near where I had found the hammer. I climbed down and walked straight in that direction. As I got closer the goat saw me and called all her friends. I picked up a stick about as long as I am tall, and all of the sudden I was Moses in the desert. I had a dozen goats following me around, and this time I was leading them to the promised land of milking and oats.
The thing about that paddock, though, is that it’s big. It’s big and it’s a little convoluted and I couldn’t really find a way to a gate to get my followers out to the road. I had hopped over the fence on the way in and couldn’t ask the same of the goats on the way out. They were with me the whole way. Every time I climbed over the remnants of an old rock wall only to find more fence they were with me. I suspect a faction of those among them questioned my credibility, but none questioned my leadership. And eventually we found ourselves, a dozen errant goats and I, on the dirt road I had been treading on my way home from the bar. We were headed to the barn, a hero and a herd.
Then they all stopped following me. I turned around and found them 10 yards behind me as if there were an invisible fence I had crossed that they could not. I realized that I was standing in front of the pigs’ trough. Six black pigs were lying about, which apparently is a goat’s biggest fear. I coaxed in English. When that didn’t work I tried French. Nothing. Maybe it was my accent. Some goats retreated back into the woods and walked along the edge of a cliff as it rose against the road. When they got past the pigpen, they jumped down one by one off the cliff, safely circumnavigating the sleeping swine.
The braver ones, the ones with true faith in their leader, approached me in the road and, when arriving in front of the lackadaisical pigs, leaped four feet into the air to evade them. It was a genius maneuver that went largely unnoticed by the pigs behind the fence. We were a group again. Having made it out of the paddock and past les couchons terribles, we arrived, bleating and proud, to the barn where Ingrid and her mother were still standing.
“Oh! Is great! Where is it that you found them?”
“They were over by the water and the fence and then more…” talking but interest waned as the goats walked into the barn demanding food and that they be relieved of their goat milk. The same pragmatism that made me at home with the glass of water demanded that I not gloat. My day in the sun was brief, but it was mine and it was in the sun.
