Goat Song
A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese
BeginningsYears ago I fell in love with a farmhouse in West Virginia. The house sat at the head of a hollow -- wide-board floors, a rusted tin roof -- the 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 state -- New 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 homeplace -- his sister did. He burned the ... read full excerpt from: Goat Song: 'A Seasonal Life, A Short History of Herding, and the Art of Making Cheese ebook
