Goats Respect Me, Here’s Why
In the summer of 2015, I decided to work on a goat cheese farm in France. Sounds romantic, exotic, adventurous, right? Two days before hopping on a plane to the coastal city of Nice, I called the farmer and asked him what I should pack. “You need boots,” is all I could get from his broken English. I nodded toward my fresh Columbia boots, which were shiny and still emanating that new shoe smell. But it wasn’t until I got to the Miami airport that my decision to live at a stranger’s farm and milk his goats got to my head. I cried in the car and prayed that the afternoon thunderstorms would cancel my flight.
Almost everything I do is to expand my arsenal to impress girls, which is why I chose to study French in college (and I had to fill the language requirement). My level one teacher was a beautiful, petite American who spoke French fluently and helped me fall in love with French culture. I soon found myself only listening to French music, studying French cities and participating in French clubs after class. But it wasn’t until my sister immersed herself in Italian culture by working on a Tuscan vineyard that I thought I could take my short-lived passion for French language to the next level. She participated in the WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms) program, which lets people work on farms all over the world in exchange for room and board. Being a native Spanish speaker, I knew that the only way I could really know French was to be in France, so I started looking for farms. It was summer in France, so I narrowed my preferred location to the Côte d’Azur, home to pristine beaches and the famous Cannes Film Festival. Farmers aren’t the best with technology, and my background searches often came up empty. Once, while searching for a beehive farmer’s site, I saw it was taken over by ISIS flags and gruesome images, so that was an easy no for a Jewish kid from Boca Raton.
I ended up choosing an award-winning goat cheese farm in the small, medieval village of Tourettes-sur-Loup, edged between Vence and the world’s capital of perfume, Grasse. I only had a YouTube video of the farmer, who’s name was Bruno, with his flock of goats as evidence that this farm in fact existed and I wasn’t going to be beheaded on national television while my mom tunes in to The Bachelor. This was all during the height of ISIS’ encroachment into Europe, and just weeks before I was supposed to start work, a terrorist attack occurred at a factory just three hours away. But, hell, I had to learn fucking French.
To this day, I have never had a more memorable landing than to Nice. Other than being weighed down with doubt and worry over traveling alone for the first time, I looked out my window and saw the whole coast slide past me, showered by a hot, desert Orange from the sunset.
I flipped the switch and went into French mode. Bruno was going to pick me up in Vence, so that’s where I had to go. “Comment voyager à Vence?” I asked a travel agent. He told me to take a certain bus line across the street from the airport. I put my giant Gregory backpack on and walked to the stop. You could smell the fear off me. I missed the first bus because I didn’t flag it down and thought it would stop for my highness. I had to wait an hour and a half for the next bus.
I held my backpack on my lap as the bus moaned up the narrow roads to the prealps. The last sliver of the sun had already set by the time Bruno picked me up. On the phone he spoke maybe 10 words of English, but it must’ve been a different Bruno because this Bruno spoke zero English. Regardless, I responded in broken French. As we climbed even higher via zig zag roads, I could see the city of Nice shrink, and the view was breathless.
As we pulled up to the ferme de fromage de chèvre, I saw a young middle eastern girl talking to her laptop on a picnic bench. It was Sanaa, the only other volunteer on the farm from the northern city of Lille. My four weeks as a goat cheese farmer would start bright and early the next day, and Sanaa would turn out to be my savior.
While Sanaa slept in the guest room of the main house, my later arrival gave me the luxury of staying in a small trailer the size of a closet, with no air conditioning and plenty of bugs I’d never seen. Adventurous, right?
The next morning, I met Sanaa at a trailer right behind mine, which served as our kitchen/living room. She spoke some English, but I was adamant about her sticking with French so I could learn. Her smile was infectious. She had the warmth only a person in love could have. “Allons,” she said. “Les chèvres nous attendant.”
The heat in the morning was the same at noon, relentless. Sanaa led me down a freshly paved road to where the goats would be waiting. She had a long stick, but I hadn’t discovered what it was for yet. Sanaa yelled, “Beedoo, Beedoo, Beedoo, Beedoo!” in rapid fire. “Now you try,” she said. “Beedoo. Beedoo. Beedoo?” Yeah, no shot. She yelled it one more time, even louder. All of a sudden, I could hear the sound of goats and the bells ringing around their necks.
The gate was five wires that ran across horizontally, connecting to the larger fence. Forty goats huddled together. Mothers and their kids. Bugs orbited around their whipping tails, as I stared at each one in amazement. If I thought the locals in Nice could smell the fear off me, these motherfuckers could taste it. “How are we going to fuck this guy’s day up?” each goat was thinking. I was the new boss, and only later did I realize every one of these animals would become my worst nightmare.
Sanaa and I opened the gate and the flock pushed forward in one motion, brushing past my legs. Sanaa smacked the stick on the pavement and wasn’t afraid to keep the goats in line. “Shhh!!!” she yelled when a baby goat veered toward a stranger’s house, while I jumped like a bitch when a mama goat charged at me. My first impression was terrible.
We brought the goats to the main house and prepped the milking room. Ten goats were milked at a time, with each goat designated to its own narrow station. We filled small buckets with corn to keep the goats distracted while applying sucking machines to both teets. The utters were swollen with milk from their overnight walk around the mountain. The milk would get pumped to a large tank, which would filter the milk and send it through a small pipe to a smaller facility right behind the main house. Once every ounce of milk was gone, we lifted each goat’s tail and picked out the ticks that had latched themselves to the anal sphincter. Even with gloves on, this part made me gag, no matter how good I got at it.
Bruno also gave both of us a plastic bottle with a small nozzle, filled with dark brown liquid that served as a disinfectant for the goat’s utters. Quite often, these utters would develop large sores from insects gnawing at the skin and goats resting on rugged rocks. If we were lucky, these sores would stay raw and we’d just rub the hydrogen peroxide mix onto the wound, which would make the goats kick back and yell. But if the sores had crusts, we’d have to pick them off, which really made them yell, and pour the liquid over the freshly bleeding wound. What the actual fuck had I gotten myself into?
As Sanaa was milking her last goats of the morning session, I could see her constantly swatting at her arms and legs. “Fleas, you say right?” I looked down at my arms and saw small black dots latched onto my skin. I pulled one off and squeezed it. Blood spurted out. I tried picking off the other ones, but those things jump fast and far. It later became second nature to do a “flea check” every five seconds while milking, and swipe them before they bit. Unfortunately, we both got infected with parasites later on.
The toughest part of the day came after milking the goats. Once we cleaned every inch of the milking station, we’d have to walk the crew down a steep, shadeless path during the hottest part of the day. Cars would often drive by us, and it reminded me that there was a world out there with easier ways of doing things. Every day I thought about hopping into a car and escaping. Although there were electrical fences on both sides of us, there were small openings to other pastures, and we could not for the love of God let the goats get there. Keeping a flock in line requires the most acute attention, and I learned that the hard way. During one of my first trips down the mountain, I didn’t see that one of the gates to a pasture was open. Sanaa yelled from behind the flock, but it was too late. Two goats had veered left onto the field, and the rest followed them. We spent an hour chasing goats with large sticks in our hands. Sanaa started crying and I just kept running and yelling like an idiot. By the time Bruno came to save us, the forty goats had spread all over the field.
Once we reached a smaller opening toward the bottom of the mountain, we’d release the goats onto a hillside, where they would spend the next 14 hours looping around the mountain to the spot where we picked them up that morning. Sanaa and I made our way back up the path, drenched in sweat and pinched by thirst. I noticed Sanaa hadn’t had a sip of water, and I later learned she was observing Ramadan. She did all this shit without food or water during sunlight hours. I couldn’t believe it.
My trailer was too hot to nap in, so I spent my first few afternoons plowing through David Sedaris books while being baked alive, which provided a good respite. Later in the day, we had to prep the cheese. It all took place in the building behind the main house. We took off our shoes, and put on rubber clogs and black aprons before entering. Where the cheese was made, cleanliness was kept. The facility had white square tiles and light yellow walls. There was a large metal slab, sinks and a giant tank in the main room, where the milk from the milking station would flow into. Bruno would acidify the cheese and create the right mix. We simply took the curdled cheese from the previous day and salted it and put it on the aging racks.
On the first or second day, I got to try one of the aged cheeses with Sanaa. It looked like a small, personal pie, covered in green and purple fur, which I later found out was a naturally occurring mold. I cut a piece and ate it. Sanaa looked down at the cheese. “Did you eat the outside part?” she asked. I nodded and her eyes widened. It was all so quick. My stomach turned and in an instant I was in the bathroom, begging God to spare me.
Nights were peaceful. Sanaa and I would cook dinner together and watch French shows on a small TV. We talked about life in our homes, the people we loved, the people that broke our hearts, and how the French news stations were negatively portraying her people. My nights with Sanaa were one of the few times I felt happy to be there.
Every night, I would return to my trailer and journal three pages-worth of what happened that day. I had to write fast, because the longer my light was on, the more time I gave the bugs to find me. One night, as I was falling asleep, I felt tiny legs crawling on my chest. I turned on my iPhone light and saw a red spider staring back at me. I tried falling asleep faster after that.
My biggest fear was that Sanaa would leave before me. By the third week, I still hadn’t led the flock by myself and my test finally came when Sanaa got sick. I had to prove this to her and myself: I was going to lead the goats down the mountain. I grabbed the stick and released the goats that morning. Anytime a goat even thought of testing me, I’d yell and wack the stick on the ground like I was God Himself. I flocked them alone in the morning, and down the mountain at noon. I was so zoned in that I forgot the fence was electrical and got shocked when I grabbed it trying to stop a baby goat from crawling under it. My body was vibrating for the next hour, but when the last goat went through the fence, I released all my glory for the world to see.
Toward the end of the trip, both of us were taking the same meds to kill the parasites crawling under our skin. We never got used to this type of work or environment, but we endured it because we had each other and those nights together where we’d share stories from worlds that are so foreign to both of us. On my last night, Bruno took us to a lavender field a short ride up the mountain. Rows and rows and lavande wiggled in the summer wind. I broke a piece off the ground and kept it in one of my books. To this day, the scent rises from the pages I would read on those hot afternoons when all I wanted to do was go home. Nostalgia often distorts memories of difficult times, and although I vow I would never work on a goat cheese farm again, I find myself with one more story to tell, even if it’s best served after dinner.
