Banana Yogurt

Days 15-21

What the hell? A whole bunch of days lumped together? It’s impossible to know what VanGuy was doing each day! I feel lost!

I know this seems disappointing, but I haven’t been writing out the details of each day, so some of it’s a bit of a blur, and I don’t feel like asking Micah what we did each hour of each day, even though she probably would remember. Which is creepy. Speaking of creepy, when we were hanging out with her friend Brad, the two of them happened to know that the last time they saw each other was in April of 07. Without even really thinking about it. I don’t even know where I lived in 07. I’d have to count backwards. But never mind. Some people just have better memories than others.

Ah! But what have we been up to this past week? GOATING! And it’s been one of the best weeks I’ve had in a long, long time. Micah and I have been living peacefully in a yurt out near the little town of Cloverdale in the northern section of the Oregon coast. We’ve been staying with Will and Deb, the parents of our friend Whalen, and they have been the most generous of hosts. Even though we’ve been helping out (I’ll get to that in a bit), they have been housing us, feeding us, beering us (must be a term if you can say “beer me”), and teaching us all about goats and farm life. They’ve also been very understanding about sleep schedules, and that even though I’m living on a farm, I’m eating breakfast after they’ve been up and working for about 5 hours. Again, very nice people.

Micah and I were eager to arrive and start learning about milking and making goat cheese, so that’s where we started. They have 3.5 milking goats (because one had it’s own babies and didn’t have as much milk). I must say, milking is pretty fun. You make a little ring with your fingers up at the top of the teat and close tightly, trapping the milk down in the lower part of the teat. Then you squeeze it out, working from the top down, and then you let go and allow the teat to fill with milk again. Fun! It takes quite a bit of strength, but we got it down pretty quickly (well, Micah got it down perfectly with her left hand, but I’d say her right hand needs to do some more rock climbing exercises to build up endurance). Micah also became the master cheese-maker. Almost every morning she would get the next batch of cheese that was setting, and mix it up with some salt and get it perfect. I think we ate goat cheese with every meal for the first 3 days before accidentally forgetting it when eating some leftover pizza for lunch one day. Micah also became the favorite playmate of the 7 little baby goats. They jumped on her incessantly, smearing pooh everywhere while trying to knock her over. Oh, and that’s the other thing. Nothing we owned was clean by the end of the week. Everything either had dirt (if we were lucky), goat shit or goat urine, sap (ruined Micah’s leggings), wood debris, soot, or peanut butter (I accidentally spilled some peanut butter on my shirt and attempted to lick it off with peanut butter in my mouth. Whoops.). But it was all worth it. We tried to help out as much as we could - we helped plant trees, chop wood, feed the goats, feed the hummingbirds, make and package up the goat cheese, chop down and clear out unwanted shrubbery, help with laundry, sweep up, do dishes, etc. But we never did a fraction of what they did all day long. The only real big help we were was cleaning out the goat barns. See, when someone says, “make the goat beds,” what they really mean is muck out all the shit and urine that’s festering on top of, underneath, and throughout the straw that they sleep on. So Micah and I got out shovels, pitchforks, and rakes, and cleaned out so much goat turd that I nearly barfed twice. The smell was soooooo bad. It was shit and piss that had been living in the cracks of the wood for what seemed like forever. But we made it spotless. Will and Deb, who also work other jobs on top of all the farming (he teaches an alternative education program at the high school and she’s a vet) were very appreciative of what an amazing job we did scraping crusty poop off the floor. It took hours, and it turns out they do that weekly (not as thoroughly as we did, but still).

When we weren’t working, we were doing one of two other things:

Relaxing in the yurt/talking with Will and Deb about life and such.

Going out on trips to the coast for hikes to the beach.

Will took us around town and showed us some of the cool spots along the shoreline. We stopped in a Pelican Brewery for some beer and fries, walked along Wineama beach, and checked out the towns of Pacific City and Cloverdale (which had 3 of its 5 buildings burn while we were up here). Micah and I also took a trip out to Cape Mears, where we saw a bunch of tourists taking a treacherous 0.1 mile hike to a lighthouse giftshop, watched large people picnicking in a patch of grass in the middle of a parking lot (oh, the excitement!), and took pictures of the amazing attire of tourists on Memorial Day Weekend. When we tired of the weirdos we took an actual hike down to the beach where we sat on the rocks and found a bunch of agates without much effort (pretty sweet).

In the yurt we hung out doing crossword puzzles, writing, reading, and accidentally making the place uncomfortably hot with the wood stove. We also played with the dogs (who I named Big Whitey and Jumper because one was very big and white and the other jumped on me), and some of their cats (one of whom I named Lion-O because of his awesome mane and his resemblance to the Thundercat), and baby goats (I was only allowed to name one, and Micah said it was the worst name ever, which I disagree with. Although it’s not the official name (I was overridden), I called my little goat Potato Yogurt.). The only real downside to the trip was that it rained pretty much every day. That was a major drag, but there were moments of clear sky and a bit of sun. Just not very many.

We stayed up many nights thinking about abandoning all other plans and living here with the goats, helping out Will and Deb, and leaving society behind. There was even consideration on Micah’s part of postponing grad school for a year to be out here. It’s just so peaceful. I think we’ve somewhat abandoned the idea of staying here forever, but we do have hopes of returning next summer during Micah’s summer vacation to live out on the farm. It’s pretty sweet out here. Really pretty sweet.

Four last thoughts that I forgot to mention: 1)Micah and I used the wood splitter. It was awesome. 2) We searched everywhere for clam chowder without bacon, and it didn’t exist. 3) Will said “If you wait for the weather in Oregon, you won’t get anything done.” 4) On this leg of the journey we saw two bald eagles, sea lions, and a whale. Now I just need to see a beaver (we saw a dam), and a wolverine and/or badger and I’ll be happy. Also a cougar.

**Pics forthcoming**