ThomCalandra.com: An Essay, "Goats"

"Goats"

By Thom Calandra

We live along Richardson Bay in Northern California, not far from San Francisco. On one of my twisting walks out the front door, along Shuck Drive in an unincorporated area called Strawberry, where a wooded lane cuts through the Golden Gate Baptist Seminary grounds, I often walk or jog across the campus, especially in early mornings when I'm waiting for the kids to finish swim team training at the big pool at the bottom of the hill. Beneath the eucalyptus and cypress trees on campus sit the seminary's dormitories, cottages actually, and row houses, for our future thumpers, I suppose, our next wave of Baptist theologians and ministers and preachers, and their families.

On many days, you can see the graduate students reading their books as they sit on the porches of the cottages. In summer, the seminary imports goats from somewhere across the bay so they can chomp down buffet style on the property's numerous hillsides, a strategy for mowing the lawns that seemed ecologically sensible and cheap until this summer, when one of the rigs hauling the goats on Highway 101 wiped out. More than 200 of the goats were killed on the freeway, just a few miles north of their new home in Mill Valley, 243 to be exact. Many of them were smothered inside the truck when the rig tilted and fell. I'll skip the details of the accident scene except to say the owner of the goats, and the folks from the local humane society, were shaken and trembling. The owner, I read in the paper, even recognized one tri-colored goat pulled from the wreckage.

When I was running across campus the other morning, there were the goats, fenced in by a makeshift electric rigging and grazing peacefully. I thought maybe these were some of the survivors of the accident, along with the driver and a passenger. The folks that tend to the goats, the herders, live in a little trailer across from the dormitory cottages, and on this morning I could hear Latin music, some kind of salsa or rumba, coming from their mobile home. The goats, by the way, are Spanish goats, a breed that's very good for mowing large lawns and fields.

I wondered whether the goats knew what was going on, whether they knew their community of goats had been reduced by some percentage because of the accident on the freeway. Most of us probably would wonder the same thing. I found myself saying a little prayer for the rig's driver and the owner of the goats and the passenger in the big rig, and I said a prayer for the goats. I wondered if the goats knew they were volunteering for dangerous duty.

The Author

Thom Calandra’s novel “Pablo By Numbers” was excerpted in autumn 2007 on the StockHouse.com group of web sites in Canada and the USA. The selection, "Goats," is derived from the novel. Thom was a cofounder and a columnist and broadcaster at CBS MarketWatch, now Dow Jones MarketWatch. He resigned in 2004 after failing to disclose the selling of stocks he was recommending in his investment newsletter, The Calandra Report. Thom settled his case with the Securities & Exchange Commission one year later and thanks everyone connected to the matter, including the commission, his attorney, his family, friends and former subscribers. Thom is in the process of writing the novel, "Pablo By Numbers." His ThomCalandra.com also features essays from Thom. Thom and his family live in Marin County, California, near Richardson Bay. Thom can be reached easily at thom.calandra@gmail.com. He presently is an investor in Bambi Francisco's Vator.tv, a video venue for innovators and their angel backers.