Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye
With enormous regret we announce the departure of John Miller and Goat Rising from the farmstead at the corner of Route 8A North and Mountain Road. Goat Rising, under new ownership, has moved to Plainfield while John and his Jerseys have joined the centuries-old Appleton Farms in Ipswich.
John and his aunt purchased the farmstead in 2003, the year before we bought Mill Brook House. As John added Jersey cows to the goat farm, the herd increasing each year, the farm’s limited pastureland became an increasing liability. The addition of the Curtis Country Store to the farm’s enterprises, delightful though it was, turned into another liability. Recession, bad tenants, and a devastated real estate market combined to make for steep losses. But the straw that broke the camel’s back seems to have been Hurricane Irene and the damaged bridge over the Mill Brook in front of the farm. The months-long four-mile detour over dirt roads meant headaches for John and his family getting out and deterred customers for the farm’s store from coming in. More losses.
Ironically, the week John moved, the bridge was finally repaired.
The boutique farm with its prize-winning cheeses, raw milk, fresh eggs and delightful animals was the highlight of our neighborhood, a favored destination for a walk for ourselves and our guests, a wonderful of source not just of local produce, but of produce from animals we knew personally. John’s mother was a superb baker, and after the Country Store closed, her cookies and muffins appeared serendipitously next to the ice cream freezer in the farm store, providing a quick pick-me-up after a day of painting or laboring in the garden.
True, it wasn’t all Irene’s fault, but the loss of Goat Rising after so many other losses from the hurricane is painful and deeply felt.
I attach my review of Brad Kessler's memoire of goat farming, which evokes our own fond memories of Goat Rising.
Book Review: Goat Song
This book was a natural choice, given the goat farm down the street from us. Raising goats is clearly not for the dilettante or the faint-hearted, and we’ve seen evidence of that, too, in our immediate neighborhood. One neighbor thought she would rescue a male kid, slated to be shipped off to more or less certain death by Goat Rising. (Few males survive in the world of domesticated goats, where milk and cheese are the goal.) Our friend stuck it out for several years, taking him for walks among the stones and boulders in the Mill Brook, but he finally became too much for her (though I believe she found another home for him, where he could continue being a pet). Further up the road in Heath, we met a woman keen to raise goats as a hobby, but the young kids we saw on her property at the time have long since disappeared.
These failures become understandable when one reads of the sheer hard labor involved in raising goats in Brad Kessler’s Goat Song, which Kessler’s poetic style does not disguise. The book makes a good companion and intriguing counterpoint to Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, about her year-long quest to live off her land or that of local farmers. Where Kingsolver is polemical, Kessler is lyrical and philosophical (and far more economical with words). Where Kingsolver gives us current information about government policies and the sad, wasteful state of our food supply, Kessler delves into our pastoral and etymological history—all the English words that derive from Indo-European, Greek, and Hebrew for goats and herding, along with slivers of poetry and wisdom on same, passed down from the earliest civilizations to the present. Where Kingsolver may leave us feeling frustrated at the imperfect state of our of lives and our government—most of us don’t have the time, the land, or the money to eat as much local produce as we’d like—Kessler leaves us feeling ennobled by our rich pastoral heritage, even as we experience it vicariously through his labors
Surprisingly, this tiny, erudite volume involves a certain amount of suspense: when one of the goats sickened, I couldn’t stop reading until I learned the outcome. Ditto when the herd was threatened by coyotes. (The battle with the coyotes calls to mind Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer, where two characters duel over the merits of conserving vs. killing these predators.)
Romantics will revel in the connections Kessler discovers between pastoralism and the notion of a lost paradise, as well as his discussions of shepherd-kings, poet-herders, and the haunting music of herding. Animal-lovers will understand better what they already intuit but society too often denies: that out of our deep connection to animals arises our humanness. Foodies will enjoy Kessler’s blow-by-blow description of cheese-making, although theologians and devout Christians may wince at the parallels he draws between cheese-making and Christianity, however much the two crossed paths in ancient monasteries.
By the end we understand that this rich tale has been Kessler’s own spiritual journey, even as it has rubbed off on us and contributed to our own enlightenment. “A goat has led me here,” he writes in his penultimate paragraph. “I’m the boy in the Yiddish tale who’s followed her all along—she always knew the way back home.”