Kessler - Goat song: a seasonal life, a short history of herding, and the art of making cheese

E ARLY J UNE. T HE MOUNTAINS TURN TENDER GREEN THIS time of year, the skies become enamel blue. The goats wear bells around their necks while we hike up Masons Hill. Theres eight of us here todayseven goats, one human. We step through salad greens and the goats taste everything in sight: steeplebush, wild strawberries, buttercups, blackberry vines. Were heading to the mountains soon.

Each day we wander the Vermont woods for an hour or two. I love the leave-taking, the sound of the goats bells, the brief nomadism. Herding is a way of doing something while doing nothing; it asks only for ones presence, awake, watching animals and earth.

Wind rakes the trees. Clouds float shadows through the grass. We enter the woods and the goats eat ash, birch, and maple. This evening Ill milk the does back in the barn and when the sun goes down Ill make an aged cheese from their milk called a tomme . Months from now when snow covers the mountains, Ill open that tomme and find this day again inside its rind: the aromatic grass, the leaves, this wind.

I call the goats on. They moan back from their branches. Hannah and Lizzie, Pie and Nisa, Penny, Eustace, and AliceI know each voice as well as any humans. Were heading up the slope now. They nod through cinnamon ferns.

A goat path in the wild leads to mountaintops where other animals cant go. Some afternoons I follow my goats and others they follow me. The Igbo of Nigeria tell their children, if lost in the wilderness follow a goat, she always knows the way back home. Ive been following these goats back home each day, but where they lead surprises me still.

I want to take you there.

Y EARS AGO I FELL IN LOVE WITH A FARMHOUSE IN West Virginia. The house sat at the head of a hollowwide-board floors, a rusted tin roofthe last outpost before impassable mountains. You drove up a dirt road beside a murmuring creek and came to a cattle gate. When you hooked the gate again it felt like you were leaving the world behind.

I lived in Manhattan back then but never felt right in the city. I longed for fewer people and more trees. The rented farmhouse was an anodyne. Between semesters and on long weekends my wife, Dona, and I escaped to West Virginia. I adored the long drives, the eight-hour commute, the layers of Manhattan peeling away with each Mid-Atlantic stateNew Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia. It felt like stripping out of formal attire; by the Alleghenies we were down to underwear.

We were about to shake hands on the West Virginia farmhouse when a phone call came one night. The seller had burned down the house. Turned out he never really owned the homeplacehis sister did. He burned the house for spite. A family feud. An Appalachian story. The night the call came I mourned, convinced wed never find such a perfect place again.

My whole life it seemed Id been searching for a retreat in the mountains, a patch of land where I could grow my own food. I was a writer, Dona a photographer. We made our livingour artwith paper but we longed to make it with earth as well. Ever since reading Walden as a teen Id nursed Thoreaus old dream of self-reliance, his cabin along the lake, his meticulous lists of peas and beans. I admired how he wove literary culture and agriculture into one fabricpen in one hand, hoe in the otherand how he understood that alongside civil disobedience, the most active thing one could do on earth was produce ones own food.

For five years we searched for a home. We scoured the whole Northeast, looked at a hundred plots of land. One week a realtor called from Vermont. Hed found an eighteenth-century farmhouse on a dead-end road in the western part of the state. The asking price was absurdly low; the farmhouse had sat empty for years and nothing inside was expected to work. We might have to tear the place down, he confessed, and start anew. Yet the land was apparently stunning, worth the asking price alone. There was an orchard, a pond, outbuildings, a brook. Seventy-five acres of sheepland grown back to forest.

We drove there late one October afternoon when the trees had shed their leaves. The valley looked promising; narrow and forested with folded hills. An opalescent river tumbled aside the road. The pavement turned to gravel, then we jostled up a rocky drive and the house swung into view: bone white clapboards, mountains all around. We both knew right away.

This was over a decade ago. Back then neither of us knew much about animal husbandry (wed both grown up in the suburbs). But soon Dona began photographing neighboring dairy farms and helping with chores; and that led to a familiaritya friendshipwith animals, particularly with goats.

This is the story of our first years with dairy goats. A story about what its like to live with animals who directly feed you. I tell of cheese and culture and agriculture, but also of the rediscovery of a pastoral life. Rediscovery because the longer I lived with goats the more connections I saw to a collective human past weve since forgotten, here in North America at least. I saw how so many aspects of our everyday culturefrom our alphabet to our diet to elements of our economy and poetryarose from a lifestyle of herding hoofed animals, and how unbeknownst to most of us, pastoralism still informs so much of the way we live today.

Goats had intrigued me for yearstheir intelligence, their seeming disdain of human dominion. I once trailed a herd of goats in India through the Thar Desert back to their homes at night. A herder led them into the walled city of Jaisalmer. The goats marched single file, hoofs clicking cobbles, while scooters and trucks squeezed past. At each narrow curve another doe broke from the parade and turned in to a home where a member of the householda child or a womanheld open a wooden door and greeted the returning goat with a palmful of salt. The does had returned from the desert to be milked and bedded with their family at night. In the morning theyd gather again with the herder. Id never seen such a wonderful arrangement beforegoats and humans living side by sidebut it was one of the most ancient continuous relationships between mammals.