Das Gefoulenschmeller

More on the Levingston's goats
by Ken Harris

Kids, nursing and otherwise, were a fairly common occurrence in the Levingston back yard. To keep their nannies fresh, the Levingstons at one time kept a billy goat, or, as they call them in Germany, ein gefoulenschmeller. Billy goats have a universally bad reputation which they richly deserve. They are depraved and beyond smelly. The females, naturally, adore them. But no one else does, not even the goat breeders who apostrophize them as necessary evils.

One day Sweet William escaped from the Levingston yard and began to consume the neighborhood shrubs. No one else was around and so, against my better judgment, I managed to ignore Sweet William’s foul odor and grabbed him by his horns. I soon found that I was not going to drag that goat anywhere. If I pulled, he pulled harder. Finally, it occurred to me to push. I pushed and he pushed harder. I let him push me all the way into his goat pen where he belonged. Leaving him with his adoring nannies, I spent the next hour failing to scrub goat musk off my hands. I carried the smell with me for a couple of days. Goat musk would make a useful substitute for ambergris should there ever become a world shortage of this dubious commodity.

Needless to say, Sweet William was not my favorite person in the neighborhood. But one cold winter morning I saw something that wrung even my calloused withers. Sweet William had a cold.

It was a January morning, early, and it gets cold in Southern California. Not Minnesota cold, but cold enough to preclude nude sunbathing. Sweet William had found a sunny spot against a shed wall in the Levingston’s back yard and was trying to pretend it was warm. His hair jutted out. His back was hunched. His eyes were swollen almost shut. His runny nose defied description.

My heart went out to Sweet William, but from a distance. I wasn’t getting any closer to that smelly thing than I had to.

The Nursery

The Nursery by Ken Harris ©February 2008

El Monte, California, Spring, 1959. We lived in El Monte, California, the very first home we owned, with our dogs, cats, horses and daughter, Patricia, who had been born the previous December. On Star Street. Our neighborhood had modest homes, large yards, sewers, mail delivery, trash pickup. Most people would qualify the area as suburban.

And yet, many people had horses living in their back yards. At the foot of Star Street lay easy access to a trail that could take you all the way to Long Beach and the Pacific Ocean. A bachelor had built a large barn of hollow tile concrete for his horses near that access. The barn had a “hay loft” with a card room and a wet bar. I don’t know if they rode horses much, but there were people always hanging around. We could sometimes smell and hear the residents of the nearby dairy.

And our neighbors, Okie Levingston and his wife, Doris. kept a back yard full of own quarter horses, a cow or two, goats, chickens. If it mooed, clucked or baaed, it probably lived in the their back yard.

So many animals took up a large part of the Levingston’s time, energy and income. Doris said that many times she would blow the family cash on feed for the animals and then check the barn to see if the chickens had laid any eggs for supper. Also, the animals made it hard for them to get away and do anything.

This became a real problem for Doris because she wanted the two of them to visit her parents in Tulare, a farm town (city now) in Central California for the weekend. She asked if we would mind their animals for them.

We had no problem with that. Feed some people hay and the others mash and don’t get the meals mixed up. No big problem. We would have to milk Willa Mae, but we could do that. We had given them Willa Mae to raise their two kid whose mother had died, but they were weaned. In fact, everybody was weaned. No problems there.

Piece of cake, we told her. The two of you go off on your weekend, drink beer, tell lies, have a great time, we told her. And so they did, leaving at o-dark-thirty on Saturday morning, long before we were awake.

When we went over to the Levingston yard, after feeding our own animals, to an enthusiastic chorus of animal sounds, and we began to feed. But we noticed one new little kid, one we had never seen before, black with drooping white ears. And this one wasn’t weaned. The way she looked at the hay, it might as well have been from Mars. She had no clue about what to do with it.

Joanne had milked Willa Mae already and she went back to our house for one of Pat’s nipples. I enlarged the business end with my pocket knife, and slipped it over the mouth of a Coke® bottle filled with Willa Mae juice. The kid eagerly attacked the bottle although frequently butting my hand that held the bottle, trying to make the milk flow faster. She thought my hand was an udder and I just wasn’t releasing milk fast enough.

She finished her bottle of milk and I looked up to find myself surrounded by other admiring young animals, including a rather large calf. They had all been weaned, sure enough, but they weren’t really enthusiastic about it. They made “me next” sounds, but we scattered them back to their yucky hay.

When the Levingstons returned we told them what happened. It turned out, they had told us the truth. Their animals were all weaned. However, a “friend” who didn’t know they would be gone that weekend had dropped the kid off in the wee small hours. I guess he had a goat he didn’t need and thought to himself, “I’ll drop it off at Okie and Doris’. They like goats.” You’ve got to be careful of friends like that.

Trash Pick-up

Trash Pick-Up
By Ken Harris © 2004

It is Tuesday morning, April 13th, 2004 in Tucson, Arizona, and the trash and recycle men have just come by. The trash and recycle men are different people driving different trucks and handling different containers. And the men don’t actually handle the containers. Thanks to the magic of hydraulics and clever engineering design, their truck does that for them.

It was different years ago (said the Old Man in a quavering voice). Specifically, I’m thinking of 1958. We had bought our first home in El Monte, California for less money than a used Korean automobile costs today.

The house needed was a DUMP! We took three pickup loads of trash, including some dead chickens, to the unsanitary landfill AND burned sulfur candles in the house before we could even move in.

Our house also had some design flaws. The bedroom closet could only be accessed through the back yard. The bathroom shower stall stood in the middle of one wall while the wash basin stood directly opposite on the other wall. The basin drained through a pipe sunk in concrete onto the floor of the shower stall. A half dozen shaves coated the floor of the shower stall with a rich deposit of scum composed of shaving soap and whiskers.

The kitchen was ten feet wide with the stove and cupboards against one wall and the sink and the refrigerator against the other wall. Joanne was very pregnant with our first-born and there wasn’t enough room between the appliances for her to walk. She had to sidle between the stove and the refrigerator, and as she did so her abdomen turned on all of the burners. Not to worry. She turned them off in the same manner on her return trip.

Clearly, we needed to remodel our home. We added a 20 x 20 living room and enlarged the kitchen so that two pregnant women could sidle between the appliances backside to backside. Heck, we had enough room for a dozen pregnant women to do an entire dance review. The entire house was lighter and roomier.

But rehabbing was not without its problems. Melding Romex® with knob and tube wiring presented a challenge. And friends were not always available. As time went on, we had fewer and fewer. This explains why Joanne, who was expecting to whelp our first child momentarily, was on the roof helping me put on new composition shingles when Willa Mae screamed for help.

Willa Mae was a Nubian goat we had acquired. Our theory was that by the time our baby needed milk, Willa Mae would be fresh and there would be plenty of goat’s milk for the infant. So, when Willa Mae screamed Joanne flew off the roof, down the ladder and into the barn to help with the delivery. The kid was presented breech first. Joanne had long, thin, strong hands and she was able to work the kid out. Unfortunately, it was born dead. So were the other two kids that Willa Mae was carrying.

My first problem was getting rid of the kids. I could have buried them, but it was trash pick-up day. We had already filled one 55-gallon oil drum with trash, so I took a second drum and layered the kids in with other trash. (When you’re remodeling, you always have lots of trash lying about.)

When the trash men came I met them at the gate to try to persuade them to take the second drum. A large, economy-size gentleman who looked like he played with tractor tires on his day off assured me that since we paid for one barrel, that’s all he would take. He agreed, however, to let me cram the contents of the second barrel into the first one, if I could. I succeeded in merging the contents of the two barrels, but the result was very heavy. I could barely move it. It weighed well over 200 pounds. But the barrel presented no problem for the trash man. He casually picked up the barrel up shoulder high and shook the trash into the bed of his truck. Fortunately for me, he did not notice the unusual contents of my trash.

Having given away the kids, our problems were solved, but Willa Mae’s were just beginning. She flowed copiously, as any successful female mammal should, and I thought I was going to have to learn to milk a goat. Not to worry, Joanne assured me. While I might not know which end of the goat to grab, Willa Mae was a pro and we would get into a successful routine quickly.

But just as I was coming to grips with the prospect of milking a goat, our neighbors had a kid whose mother had died. So, kidless mother, motherless kid. Simple solution to simple problem, right? Wrong. Willa Mae did not see it that way and she rejected the kid with head butts and kicks.

Our neighbor solved the dilemma through the magic of Vicks Vaporub®. She smeared a gob of Vicks on Willa Mae’s nose and another under the kid’s tail. Willa Mae accepted the kid as having the right smell. She would have accepted a plunger as having the right smell. In a couple of hours the Vicks wore off and Willa Mae resorted to her kicking, butting ways.

But after two days of repeated Vicks applications, Willa Mae accepted the kid and everyone was happy. Especially me, because I didn’t have to milk the goat.