The Bidwell Park Goats

The goats live with a directness that calls our complications into doubt.

by Lin Jensen

The goats are telling us something: I’m possibly the only one in town who has noticed this. Most don’t know they’re being told anything at all. The goats themselves aren’t conscious of doing any telling. But the telling is real, and those who are exposed to it are getting the message whether they realize it or not. I only recently realized it myself. But its discovery serves to explain why the goats are such a compelling attraction to the townspeople.

Of course one element of their attraction is the sheer novelty of keeping a herd of goats in the middle of town, but for that matter anything that happens in Chico’s Bidwell Park is sure to draw attention. The park is the dominant geographical feature of the town, a slender parcel of land following the banks of Chico creek all the way from the eastern foothills down to Main Street where it merges with the grounds of the California State University. It’s hard to go anywhere in town without running into the park. Our character as a community is formed by it. It shapes who we are. We are gathered into an intimacy with it like that of a shared language. It accompanies us in our homes, on street corners, at Sunday brunch in Cory’s Restaurant. It sits among us at the Chico Symphony, at the baseball stadium, in council chambers.

It is not that uncommon for us humans to be drawn into sympathy with some accidental feature of our surroundings. If you spend your childhood in a backyard under a great weeping willow tree with a swing hung from it, you carry the sweep and descent of those shading limbs with you the rest of your life. You bend without breaking, and when you least expect it, you find yourself swinging back and forth in some cool recess of your mind. Had the willow been a pine, you’d be a different person. If you live long enough in a two-story house, you always carry an upper story on your mind. Your actions forever bear the imprint of a staircase and little that you do seems entirely horizontal. In this same way Chico is a town with a park on its mind, which is one reason why the goats are such a big deal.

We got the goats to keep down the blackberry vines that invaded Bidwell Park, choking out the native plants, cutting off access to the creek, threatening the canopy of sycamores and valley oaks that line the riparian corridor. The goats were an alternative to herbicides which none of us wanted to use if it could be avoided. So a contract was drawn up and, in the spring of 1999, just as the blackberries were sprouting new growth, Danny Mitchell pulled his trailer into Bidwell Park, set out some electric fencing around a patch of blackberry vines, and released a herd of eighty goats into the enclosure. You couldn’t miss them. The enclosure was within hearing distance of the Community Recreation Center, and within sight of the parking lot at One-Mile pool with its five lifeguard stands and its picnic tables. The herd was visible to traffic on Vallambroso Avenue and from the front yards of houses adjacent to the park. You could smell the goats from the doorway of Chico’s main post office. Everyone who came to pick up their mail knew where the herd was.

The goats were universally popular from the start. They weren’t satisfied to let you do all the looking but would study you in turn, their dark eyes curious under soft lashes peering at you from the other side of the fence. They telegraphed responses with their ears, which were soft and floppy or stiff and pointed depending on the breed. Their whole goaty posture was extraordinarily expressive, the slightest tilt of a head conveying an emphasis as readable as are the facial expressions and hand gestures accompanying human speech. They seemed able to express the equivalent of smiles or frowns or to even make inquiries through attitudes of body.

A few of the nannies had suckling kids. Baby goats are irresistible. To see one is to have cuteness defined for you once and for all. So Chico’s children came in droves. They arrived by bicycle and on foot. They came with parents or grandparents or older brothers and sisters. They were carried on backs, pushed in strollers, or towed along by hand. Busloads of them arrived from area grammar schools.

When the novelty wore off, I noticed something. I noticed that long after most children lost interest the adults usually hadn’t. They stayed on. They lingered by the enclosure, reluctant to leave, their children fidgeting at their sides, tugging at them, asking to go. It was then I began to understand what the goats were telling us. I’m sure I wasn’t alone in this. It’s just that the others were, and remain to this day, innocent of having received any understanding at all. I can best explain this by describing how the goats eat blackberry leaves.

They eat them with a single and sustained concentration. By "single" I mean that their eating is all of one piece. Goats have long prehensile tongues. Their mouths are flexible and mobile. They use these instruments with an intelligent precision. They project their faces with their dark eyes into the most daunting confusion of blackberry thorns and capture leaf after leaf, extracting them without the least hesitancy or uncertainty. To watch them is like watching the violin section of a symphony orchestra. Every musician is exactly on the point; no one strays from the task even the slightest bit. The goats eat with this kind of undistracted absorption. They show us what it really means to pay attention. For the moment, it all seems so natural. We wonder if we could learn to mow our lawns or answer the phone or fry eggs with any comparable presence of mind.

The way the goats eat pretty well describes the way the goats live. We can see exactly how they live because, being contained as they are, they don’t go anywhere else or do anything other than what they are doing. They browse among the blackberry vines and shrubs. They eat a little grass that comes up in the clearings. They rest in the shade of the sycamores and oaks. They breed and give birth and suckle their young. They drink from the creek and bed down together at night. There’s not a whole lot to see. It’s a wonder anybody hangs around to watch.

But that’s the point. The goats live with a directness that calls our complications into doubt. Watching them, we begin to discover the inadequacy that underlies our need to acquire, the fear that drives us to so relentlessly consume. The goats expose the source of our greed. In the alleys behind our houses, trash barrels distributed by North Valley Disposal await collection, bearing within them the remains of the great harvest we have required. Among the discarded containers of paper and foil and plastic, among the emptied bottles and cans, lies the waste of our own depleted lives. We know then the expense of spirit squandered. We can clamp the lid back down but we already smell the odor of regret in our nostrils. We yearn at such times for the harsh hand of need, the exposed spine of ourselves beneath the flabby excess. We long to nibble blackberry leaves on the banks of Chico Creek.

Sunrise and sunset are simultaneous under the eye of the sun, which sees day and night as one turning before the face of an undivided light. Thus apparent opposites merge, multiplicity vanishes without subtraction or loss. Within the little universe of the Bidwell Park goat enclosure, all additions of two or more add up to one. The goats are telling us that at the irreducible core of our lives we are single and whole. We do not need to argue with circumstance. We are not litigants in a suit against conditions however confusing or painful or dull they may seem to us. Whatever the complaint, we can rest our case in simplicity itself, where mind and act are one and the same.

From the Winter 2001 issue of the Environmental News.