The Sound of Goats in Centre Hall

When the lambs is lost in the mountain, he said. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

- Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian

By the recycling dumpsters down in Centre Hall, I am pushing a trash bag of cans into a dark space when I hear the goats. They make goat sounds from across the big road, from their pen in a small field behind the Dunkin’ Donuts, and I hear them and I stop what I’m up to. Many, many years ago, I tell myself, I was a dirt farmer in a far off land. In a past life, I say, I must have known that sound/ these goats/ that bleating/ and now it travels back at me/ across so much time/ across eons of humanity/ to hit me upside the head right here, right now.

It’s maybe 8:45 on a Tuesday morning. Later, I will head to the one school for a meeting I don’t want to go to. Before that I will write this thing, darting myself in and out of the light that shines like cheap chrome off my responsibility. I have an obligation to create something out of nothing here for people who pay me. Where will it come from? Where will it take me? I never know.

But here I am. Cans and plastic jugs and now I can hear goats across the way and I’m zeroing in on something. I can feel it.

What though?

And why?

And how?

I drop the sack of cans into the bin and take a few steps towards the sound of the animals. I have seen them so many times I couldn’t even begin to put a number on it. 300? More maybe? Probably. They are intersection goats, living out their days in this couple acre patch of grass right off of a crossroads that gets busier and busier every year. Interestingly enough though, I believe they are also intersectional in this other way too. It’s like, the goats are audible reminders of another era. Back when this place was pure rural instead of the country flare’d Penn State suburb it is now.

Once, goats like these ones must have made the same sounds as they are making right this second. And those sounds were more than likely heard by the very cougars they say roamed the vast forests that surrounded the sparse farms that peppered the valley here. 150, 200 years ago, a man might have heard his goats kicking up a fuss out by his small barn and he might have wandered out there, or he might have just ignored them, depending on how that man read the wind, so to speak. He’d have known what to do. A man back then, unlike me today, he’d have felt it in his bones if those goats hammering away meant they were about to be eaten by a wild animal/ or if one of them was nipping on another one’s ass, or something like that. Then he would have acted accordingly, I suppose. But I don’t possess any of those kind of old powers, that ancient country magic. My guess at why a goat is sounding off is on par with my guess at the number of stars in the night sky. I can take a stab at it, but even so. What’s the point?

I see the goats every morning when I am driving the kids to school. The commute is a long one and the goats catch my eye, twist it out of the mundane socket I have it stuck in and lay it out on the filthy dashboard so it can soak the specialness in. Because seeing goats is special even if you see them a lot. These ones have liver-tinted spots and flappy ears and I know enough to know that if I tossed a cigarette butt or a piece of broken glass into their pen there they would probably bend over to eat it same as if it was a carrot dipped in sweet summer honey. Most goats don’t mind. They will eat barbed wire if you wad it up and throw it at them. No one in the car ever says anything when we zip past these animals. My kids seem immune to certain things. Like a lot of kids around here, they see their fair share of farm creatures. That kind of charm wore off many moons ago for them. Cows, pigs, whatever. They don’t care enough to even look at the damn things. I don’t judge that one way or the other, I guess. Kids get older and they drift from that stuff. Especially when it’s all around them.

Me though, I grew up away from goats and so when I hear them this morning I am as curious about them as I am almost every school morning when I watch them for a few seconds from the driver’s seat. I have never heard them before today though. It’s a treat to finally put a few voices to the faces. Peering out from behind the recycling monstrosity, I can see a line of six or seven cars at the Dunkin’ drive-through. Croissants with egg, bacon and cheese people. Boston Creme-ers. Large coffeeheads ignoring the goats as if the goats never existed and do not exist today, even though their vehicles place them only a few yards away from the pen.

The world is changing always. It falls away slightly when you grow up, but then- as you get older for real- it begins to actually try to run from you. I think I can see time moving now. I think it rolls swift and focused, uninspired by anything but this absolute need to be flowing away from me. Fewer and fewer are the chunks that tumble off the rushing train, land down in my path. Less and less are the once common clusters of years for me to pick up. Now I barely find a lone hour or two. They lay there sometimes, but mostly the train roars away and I wander around and I can’t find a single moment to salvage for some day down the line when I might need it.

This is it, Time tells me. You. Those goats over there. These folks in their gleaming Subarus and their pickup trucks and their work vans and all? Each of you is running low, man. Low on hours. Low on minutes. Low on seconds. Just low, low, low.

From where I am now, looking at the goats from behind a dumpster, I use my imagination to launch myself at them. I shoot my eyes like spears into their tough bristly ribcages. There, in the fresh hot dark of the body of a goat I have only ever known as a drive-by, I am embraced by the beast, by his humid interior. The heart is neon, a shining bar sign down the street, but as I reach out to touch it I feel the liver, like a hot mud pie, as my arm runs up against it and the goat shudders to imagine what all is living down in there. The thing is, the cave of a goat is as good a place as any to lay it all down, I reckon. I feel myself wearied by living these days. I sense my own tricky energies slumping up against fat shady oaks. Resting like some straggling foot soldier, I am too tired to wave the flies away. The inside of this local goat is a whole goddamn novel to itself and I never saw that coming. Here, I can be exhausted but also sense this looming past and this mystical future while I nod off. Here, I feel surrounded by not just the utter goatness of this womb I’m in now, but also I get this feeling of being a part of something big. Of something meaningful and tender and wild and true. I know it sounds mad but maybe I belong in a goat. Maybe I am struggling so hard these days because I keep hurling myself right by the very thing I am supposed to be.