My early teen years were enjoyably spent as a member of a pack of girls who lived as much as possible on horseback. Far from the enormously expensive avocation that riding has now become, our horses cost a few hundred dollars, often lived in our back yards, never had a whiff of professional training, and were dead solid broke, merely from being ridden through hundreds of hare-brained adventures, day after day. Little could faze a horse ridden backwards, swum across small lakes, 'tailed' up mountains, dressed in pajamas, and used as a ladder in apricot orchards. We all were 4-H kids who did Equine Vet Science and Advanced Horsemanship projects and so forth. But we were still just kids.

In my twenties I worked on several farms, where I pitched in with milking, churning butter, making hay, digging potatoes, slopping pigs, and the like. But I never had full, sole, adult responsibility for livestock, until now. I suppose someday I'll get used to it.

I bought three doeling goats because it seemed the least expensive entree into livestock-keeping, just in case I didn't like it. I felt quite cautious, after the Duck Fiasco. Not that I don't like it! I adore my goats. Only, I am often overwhelmed with by what I don't know about keeping them.

My goats came to me with several health issues. Slowly I've been accumulating advisors, diagnoses, treatments. I've waded through totally contradictory and confusing advice, and had to decide who to believe — usually without ever meeting the person. And I know I am just at the very beginning here — I haven't even bred them yet.

I don't even know how to feed the little dears. The person I bought them from told me to toss them in a brushy field and they would be fine. Maybe a handful of grain in the evening to get them tame to me. Eventually I realized that my goats weren't growing very fast, and started them on alfalfa and a commercial goat concentrate, only to be told by a second person that alfalfa was bad for goats, and she never fed grain. The books I had said the complete opposite! My head spun.

The only thing I was completely sure of was that I didn't know anything. But slowly, slowly, I am piecing things together. I am rebuilding my waterer, my mineral feeder, and my hay feeder, all of which would have been fine for sheep, but don't work for my fussy, feed-wasting climbers. I've got my goats on what I hope is the right worming and vaccination schedule, thanks to some very generous advisors. I've learned to trim hooves and give subQ injections, and am assembling what I need to learn to read fecal samples. And I may even manage to get my ladies bred eventually.

I sometimes wonder how people who make a living at this manage to keep from going out of their minds with anxiety. I have noticed that people who make a living outdoors — not just goat farmers or cattlemen, but also carpenters, loggers, and heavy equipment operators — tend to be rather calmer individuals, on the whole, than those whose livelihood in contained inside buildings. Is it that the natural world, with its inescapable vagaries of weather, is intrinsically calming, or that all the fidgety people flock to the city?

Today at the grocery store I bumped into a acquaintance who said she was trying to get together a group of local people who are interested in "living more sanely." More sanely, as in grinding your own flour, baking bread, keeping bees, dairy goats, and chickens, making sauerkraut and yogurt, drinking comfrey tea. Things we all did when we were hippies in the 1970's, in other words. I said, count me in. Why not?