Goat Crossing
Recently I saw this herd of pygmy goats grazing in Annadel State Park. They reminded me that long before I met and married Dave Abramson, he dreamed of being a goatherd.
Dave had a special place in his heart for animals—especially dogs, cats, and chickens. But this story is about goats.
When Dave learned that the East Bay Regional Parks used herds of hungry goats for grassland management, he was completely entranced.
In 2001 we moved from the East Bay to rural Sonoma County. One of my husband’s first projects was to relieve our babysitter of Lucky and Lily, a pair of strapping Toggenburg goats she’d raised as a 4H project. He bought a book to learn how to care for them, then mail-ordered a goat saddle because he wanted to take them goat-packing. I was dubious about this. But I tried to keep an open mind, and watched Dave’s experiment with amusement.
He spent weeks trying to get Lucky to tolerate the saddle. The goat didn’t cooperate.
Dave had sold me on keeping goats with the idea that they would have a function: to help maintain our property. He tied them up to a stake in the yard. This is how he learned that given a choice, goats prefer to browse up. Goats were not a good choice for a property with lots of fruit trees. (Sheep and llamas graze down, and would have been a better match for our needs.) So instead, Lucky and Lily became the weed disposal system for Dave’s massive vegetable garden. Rather than throw weeds on the compost pile, he hefted them over the fence into the goat pen, where they would be devoured with relish.
Feeding the goats became one of the major attractions on our property, entertaining children of all ages.
Visitors often asked, “What are the goats for, Dave? Do you milk them?”
“Why do they need a purpose?” he’d ask. “Can’t they just be pets?”
Over the following decade, Dave pursued another lifelong fantasy, forming one rock ‘n’ roll band after another. He gathered a community of musician friends and their families, practiced his guitar licks, and treated the world to gregarious rambles in a gorgeous golden baritone. Eventually, he produced an annual music festival at our place and called it “Goatstock.” He built two stages, brought in hay bales for seating, and with unpaid help from me and others, produced a daylong potluck event for over a hundred people.
When we’d had Lucky and Lily for about ten years, a newly-arrived neighbor’s dog got loose and attacked them. Lily had to be put down at once, as the vet said she would never be able to stand on the injured leg again. We treated Lucky with antibiotics for an infection, but he died two weeks later.
The next summer, Dave found another family of goats who needed a home. These were Alpine goats. One evening a trailer pulled into our driveway with the mom, Dulce, and her three kids named Comet, Aconite, and Chichi Valenzuela. Dave learned that wherever he could tempt Dulce to graze, the kids would follow. So he set to work getting Dulce to trust him. Soon the goats had eaten back the blackberries that had grown in at the edges of our property.
In the winter of 2016, Dave spent a lot of time in hospitals, fighting the cancer that eventually took his life. At one point our whole family was away with him, and our friend and neighbor Jim took care of our animals. One morning Jim found the mom, Dulce, lying dead in the corral. As Dave lay in the hospital, it was tempting to crack a morbid joke that she had died so that he could live. But we never learned what killed her. Jim managed the disposal of her body. Once Dulce was gone, Chichi Valenzuela got out of the pen and went missing. She never came back, so we assumed she had become dinner for the coyotes who had moved into the canyon at the edge of our place. And then there were two: Aconite, a doe who had been the runt of the litter, and Comet, a buck.
Dave died later that year. After twenty-two years of marriage, I thought I knew all his stories. But at his funeral I heard a new one. His old mentor, Keith, told a yarn about Dave’s proposal a decade before I met him, to use goats to manage the weeds at the residential substance abuse treatment program he managed. Dave had argued that caring for the goats would be therapeutic for the recovering residents; they would save on landscape maintenance as well. Keith encouraged Dave to fully evaluate the idea, which Keith found humorous at best. (Upshot: it never happened.)
Listening to this story thirty-five years later, I thought, what a chump I am! My husband had been trying to carry out this scheme far longer than he’d let on. I was such a fool for love! And no wonder he was happy in our marriage—I tolerated, and even underwrote, his crazy obsessions.
A week after the funeral, my husband’s old friend Hal delivered a gift. Months earlier, Hal had found a yellow diamond traffic sign in a junk store. It read “Goat Crossing.” So he had picked it up as a joke gift for Dave. The sign now hangs above my husband’s ashes on the fireplace mantle, along with other cherished offerings.
Aconite and Comet are now old and infirm. The vet comes regularly to check on them. Aconite, the former runt, has turned the tables, becoming a fat bully who won’t let her skinny brother eat his food. They look at us quizzically with their sideways eyes, as if to ask, who are you? Any fruit treats for us today? I talk about giving them away, but my daughter wants to care for them. They were her Dad’s.
The pygmy goats grazing in Annadel gave me a gift: a sweet reverie about the lively, quirky guy I loved, and his improbable projects.