Milk of the Gods

My adventures in goat milking on Collins Farm, in five parts.

I. Inspiration
Food is delicious. We all know this. But there are some foods that are extra delicious, foods that make you drool at the very thought, foods that one would go through great lengths to obtain. These foods, of course, are different for each person. For me, chèvre, or goat milk cheese, is quite high up on the list.
Most people know goat cheese as feta, the tangy, crumbly stuff usually thrown on Greek salads and pizzas. Chèvre can also be made like cream cheese, a flavorful spread that’s excellent on toast, crackers, salad, apples and right off the knife. This substance is one of the things I would take onto a desert island; I would marry it if only it had a better personality; I would sell my own grandmother if it came right down to it (not really, but you get the picture). Actually, that’s the only downfall of chèvre: it’s darned expensive. At Safeway, a potato-sized log of low-quality goat cheese runs around five bucks. For a really good, locally made kind, you can pay three times that much. In fact, in my college days, my monthly grocery budget looked a little like this:
Fruits and vegetables (organic, of course): $60
Dry beans, rice, flour, tofu and yogurt: $50
Coffee: $20
Chèvre: $50
Well, something like that, anyway. Anyway, the point is, I like chèvre. Since coming to the farm, however, I’ve adopted a mostly local diet (my new motto is, “Will work for vegetables”), which meant no goat cheese. Until now.

II. The Goats

I have to admit that the goats have played a sadly minor role in my life on the farm so far. I don’t think I’ve even mentioned them on this blog before, and seeing as how everyone’s online these days, they’ve probably noticed that. So I’ll offer a formal apology and waste no more time in introducing them.

Miss G (left). This old goat belongs to Andrea, the fiercely independent mother of four who works with me at Arrowvale. In her prime, Miss G produced a gallon of milk a day, effectively nurturing Andrea's kids through their formative years in addition to her own. When Andrea moved into a house without a yard, Miss G shacked up here, where she seems pretty happy. She’s fourteen, which is older than goats are even supposed to live, but though she’s a gummy, graying, rack-of-bones old granny (probably a granny several times over, in fact), she is the indisputable matriarch of the goat pen. Miss G loves kale, sunflowers and banana peels, and will head-butt anyone who gets in the way of her eating her fill. She’s too old to be milked, so I’ll move on to the stars of this story.

Spotty (center). Surprisingly enough, Spotty is white with black and brown spots. This spring, she gave birth to two little white goats, who we recently weaned along with Dotty’s single offspring. (Among goats, giving birth to twins or even triplets is the norm.) Spotty is a friendly goat who keeps her beard clean and would never dream of stooping to the shenanagins of her younger pen-mate. She loves just about anything, especially squash, banana peels and carrots.

Dotty (right). True to her name, Dotty is black with white spots and crazy, but more like a motorcycle racer than an eccentric aunt. She wears a blue dog collar, which helps when you’re trying to catch her, but getting close enough in the first place is the real challenge. Dotty has simple tastes, preferring goat feed (grain) to most other foods, but likes to try what the other goats are eating so she can spit it on the ground and crush it under her hooves. She smokes Marlboros and has a tattoo of a snake on her left shoulder.

III. The Milk
A few fun facts about goats and their milk:
Goat milk is consumed by more people worldwide than cows' milk.
Goats are the earliest known domesticated farm animal.
Goat milk takes on the flavor of whatever the goat eats. If the goat has lots of sweet clover, the milk will be sweet. If she gets into something really bitter, watch out.
The ancient Greeks and pagans worshiped a god named Pan, who had the legs and feet of a goat and played the original pan flute. He was notorious for his lustfulness, going around making love to nymphs and instigating orgies. It is said that in order to remove this clearly dangerous being from the cultural lexicon, early Christians modeled the devil after the goat.
In Hindu mythology, the god Shiva also appears with the horns of a goat or bull, an incarnation known as “Pashupati”.
Male goats (“bucks”) smell foul. I’ve never smelled one, but numerous sources have told me they are fond of rubbing urine in their beards and generally being disgusting. If you keep a buck around the doe goats, their milk will also start to smell this way.
Goat milk can be consumed by people with an intolerance to cow milk, but scientists aren’t really sure why.


IV. The (not so) Tragic Departure of the Little Goats
All summer long, Andrea and I have been eying the udders of Dotty and Spotty wistfully. Their three young ones, given the opportunity to nurse long past the time they might have otherwise been weaned, got all the milk. There wasn’t anything we could do about it but laugh at the overgrown kids when they crawled on their knees to get under their short mothers. Really though, these little goats were a pain in the neck. They crawled through the manger where we would feed them and stand in everyone's food, pooping on it and causing Miss G to roll her eyes in disgust. They dug a hole under their little barn so they could escape. And they cried whenever they thought they could trick somebody into feeding them.
Finally, last week, the little goats found a new home (a relative who needed them to give her bored border collie something to herd), so we undertook the difficult task of separation. The three little ones went down to a pen by the barn, and the moms stayed in their pen at the top of the campground. They cried for a day straight and Spotty escaped several times to go see her little ones. It was all very heartbreaking and would have made a very good Disney film where the baby goats are sold to a cruel circus master and embark on a long journey back home. In reality, all that happened was that Spotty and Dotty seemed to get over it pretty quickly, and the little ones started to get hoarse, sounding like squawking seagulls by the end of the second day. In the meantime, I closed in on our milky bounty at last.

V. The Milking
The day of the first milking was also Andrea’s day off, which put the duty of training me on Ann’s shoulders. I was desperately in need of instruction, considering I’d never gotten milk out of anything but a plastic bottle and my interaction with the goats has been limited to giving them their grain, filling their water bucket, and poking kitchen scraps to them through the fence. In preparation for milking, I found a four-gallon bucket and scrubbed it clean, then reported back to Ann. She eyed my bucket doubtfully. “Don’t you think that’s a little large?” she asked, politely. I shrugged my shoulders, so without another word we headed over to the goat pen.
Spotty and Dotty are pygmy goats, which means their heads reach no higher than four feet, and their udders dangle a scant eight inches or so above the ground. In fact, pygmies aren't even bred to be dairy goats; they're supposed to serve as petting zoo animals or as companions for lonely elephants in captivity. I observed their unfortunate lack of height when the first goat was on the milking bench in front of us, and immediately realized why Ann had had doubts about my optimistically sized bucket. I went to the kitchen for a smaller plastic pail and returned.
Spotty was the first one to come through the gate, so we started on her. Luring her onto the stand with grain, we placed a halter around her head. I tried to hold her still while Ann, who grew up on a dairy farm and ran one here for fifteen years, bent over behind the goat and began pumping out white jets of liquid like she was brushing her teeth. Good, I thought. This isn’t so hard after all. After a bit, she gave me a turn, so we switched positions. I placed my hands on the two fleshy teats and squeezed.
Nothing happened. I tried again, putting a little bit more muscle into it this time. Still nothing. Ann tried to explain how the trick was in closing your fingers one at a time, starting with the top one. I couldn’t seem to relay this information to my fingers, which simply pressed the teat uselessly into my palm. I had a the sudden, draining feeling that this was one of those skills bred into farmers, like knowing when the rains are coming or how to grow a pumpkin to the size of a wheelbarrow, and I would never get it.
In the meantime, the good-natured Spotty was putting up a heck of a fight. She and Dotty hadn’t been milked before, and I imagine the feeling of it was pretty weird. She kicked, she squirmed, she shook her head. I stayed stubbornly in place, my hands between her back legs, trying to gain in thirty seconds a skill that I knew would serve me well for the rest of my life. All I could manage, though, was to avoid her hooves when they came flying at me.
At that point, Ian, a friendly Australian from the Yukon who is on an extended camping stay here with his family, strolled up. “Want me to hold a leg for you?” he inquired. “Sure,” Ann and I said, and he grabbed one of her back legs. That put an end to the kicking. I applied myself with renewed determination, squeezing and pulling and muttering under my breath. Then, suddenly, I saw a white mist erupt from one of her teats. I tried to duplicate this result on the other side. After a few tries, a small stream of milk sprayed sideways into the air. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.
When Dotty got on the stand, the project turned into a group effort. Reinforcements were called; Bob stood at Dotty’s head with Ann while John, Ann’s brother, and another fellow he works with joined Ian in holding various moving parts of the goat. A few other campers strolled up to watch this diversion. Farmer Bill, a neighbor who cuts our hay, rolled by in his tractor and threw in a few pieces of sage advice. I could feel sweat tricking down my hairline, fueled by frustration and the bright early September sun. After I'd gotten about half a cup, I handed it off to Ann. She milked most of it out, then gave me one last turn. I gripped her udder more confidently this time, observing that it was significantly less full-feeling now. We were nearly there. I squeezed out a couple of jets of milk, and Dotty kicked the pail over on me.

The next day, Andrea instructed me in the fine art of milk storage before we got to milking. In essence, always use a cloth to filter your milk, and use it up within a couple of days or it starts to get, as she put it, “goaty”. This factor may explain why goat’s milk isn’t popular in developed countries like the US and Canada, where milk travels long distances and sits on shelves before being consumed in a deteriorated, super-goaty state.
After we had gathered our clean containers, our udder-cleaning cloth and the all-important grain bait for the goats, Andrea and I went out to the pen. Spotty volunteered first again, hopping up onto the new milking bench that Bob had constructed the night before. Rather than hunching behind the goat to milk, Andrea showed me a different technique – sitting next to the goat, facing the rear, one shoulder into her side. I gave it a shot and slowly but steadily began coaxing milk into the pail. With my ear to her belly, I could hear the food gurgling down to her stomach and smell that clean barn-y smell that is one of the best parts of being on a farm. Gradually, I developed a rhythm, which worked for about ten seconds until my hands started to cramp up. Andrea expertly finished the job and we moved on to rebel Dotty.
Goats are smart, and Dotty figured out this game fast. At the sound of grain hitting the feed bucket, all three goats rush to the gate like cats after a can of tuna. Since Spotty is the boldest, she usually gets there first and slips out before the others when we open the gate. Dotty, though, hangs back, looking at me with wild eyes that seem to say “Come on in here and catch me. I dare you.” So I slip in, shutting the gate behind me, and face off with the little black goat. We size each other up, locking eyes and planting our feet firmly on the ground. Dotty makes a feint to the left. I charge directly forward, putting the rock pile in the center of their pen between us. She gallops joyously around it and to the other side of the pen. I follow slowly, keeping low to the ground, arms outstretched. Cornered, she makes a desperate lunge to sail by me. I grab her collar on the fly and stumble sideways for a few feet as she continues her trajectory. Andrea cheers and opens the gate, and I drag her to it. Before long, she’s on the milking bench. The fight isn’t over, but it’s certainly less intense than yesterday’s. Half an hour - and a few sore fingers - later, I’m in the kitchen following Andrea’s recipe for home made chocolate pudding.
This pudding is deliciously rich and not a bit goaty, but my craving for chèvre has not yet been satisfied (it takes at least a gallon of milk to make cheese, and we get about six cups a day). The adventure, in other words, is not over yet. But my fridge is now stocked with jars of milk and the time of the cheesemaking is near. In the meantime, go make some chocolate pudding – just be sure to use whole milk for maximum fatty goodness.

Andrea’s Fabulous Chocolate Pudding

1 c sugar
1/4 c flour
½ c cocoa powder
4 c whole milk

Whisk together dry ingredients in a small, heavy-bottomed pan. Add enough milk to make a paste (about 1 ½ cups) and whisk until lump-free. Add the rest of the milk and whisk smooth. Heat over a medium-high flame until mixture boils, stirring constantly. This will take about 20 minutes. (We recommend doing your pudding exercises in this time: squats, leg stretches, curls with heavy objects lying around the kitchen. You can then enjoy pudding guilt-free. Alternatively, grab your internet access device of choice and watch this video repeatedly.) Once boiled, remove from heat and cover, stirring occasionally until cool. Eat warm or refrigerate and consume within three days.

100 chickens, 50 carnies, one camera

Port Alberni's Fall Fair last weekend opened my eyes to a whole new spectrum of rural life. Over the course of twenty-four hours (sleeping in a borrowed tent-trailer with Andrea, the biggest Fair enthusiast I've ever met), I witnessed not only the usual puke-cyclone rides and pie judging, but also power tool racing, tractor pulling competitions and logger sports. The real reason I was there, however, was to man an agricultural display put together by a group of local farmers (including Collins Farm). We brought out our prize produce, grains, canned goods and mysterious food preservation implements (dehydrator, pressure cooker, juicer, etc) and explained it all to fairgoers as they strolled by. Hopefully, they learned something and didn't confuse us with the sideshows. I also had a chance to chat with Wayne Smith, who for the last few years has been growing grains like wheat and rye in Port Alberni, filling the "last 100-mile-diet niche". Thanks to him, eating 100% locally is now slightly more realistic for people living in the area. It's a very exciting time to be on Vancouver Island, at least from an agricultural and food security standpoint (especially since where I left off in Oregon, the Bean and Grain Project was just in its second year). I feel like I'm seeing the local food revolution unfold before my very eyes. But more on that in another post.
Rather than try to piece together a bunch of photos into the blog format (Blogger is wonderful, but its photo uploader is as useless as a flat wheelbarrow tire), I'm trying something different this time. The entire album of fantastic, fur-filled, foody fair photos - with captions! - should appear in the slide show below. (It's not perfect, either. Click the big green "play" button, then push the smaller "pause" button that appears toward the bottom of the photo to scroll through them manually.) Better yet, click here to go to the album directly.

Quatch: The hunt for Bigfoot comes to my front door

We get some interesting guests up here at Arrowvale Campground, where I spend most of my time outside the farm garden. The average summer weekend produces an entire cross-section of the Vancouver Island tourist population - family reunion-ers, partying teenagers, backpackers, displaced trailer park residents, lost Europeans in rented RVs, and surfers on their way to the beach. By far the most interesting crew, however, were the Sasquatch hunters who recently blessed us with their presence.
“Hunters,” of course, is not the preferred term for members of the Bigfoot Researchers Organization, or BFRO for short. After all, as one told me quite seriously, you don’t hunt Bigfoots. You must lure them in. How? Well, you can broadcast a sound-engineered version of their calls into the forest in the middle of the night. Or, you can entice Bigfoot using his favorite food – pancakes.
Despite the scientific pretenses, the group of thirty or so Sasquatch enthusiasts seemed more into questing for live treasure than documenting data, although they did much of both during their three days here. The international team of wilderness explorers, wildlife enthusiasts, rogue scientists and freelance videographers were loosely organized around the mission of capturing irrefutable evidence of Bigfoot’s existence. And they had chosen British Columbia, specifically Vancouver Island and in particular our little valley in which to complete this mission. Of course, it took me a little while to recognize the honor.
Unlike Bigfoot, I do not possess any remarkable skills in extrasensory perception (more on that in a moment). So, when a man about forty years old rolled up in his fifty-foot RV with Florida plates, I made the mistake of assuming he was another rich tourist checking in for a week of relaxing in his air-conditioned yacht on wheels munching smoked salmon and gruyére cheese. But when he came into the office to register he seemed like an amiable enough person, so I asked him whether he’d gone ahead and installed a landing strip on the top of his gargantuan mobile home. He informed me that he in fact needed the space afforded by this state-of-the-art vehicle in order to store his equipment. What equipment, I asked. Oh, video cameras, microphones, lights, that kind of stuff. I asked if he was filming some sort of reality show.
“Oh no,” he said. “This is a bigger deal than you think.”
“Oh yeah? Should I be excited?” I responded, not bothering to hold back sarcasm anymore.
“I can’t tell you anything about it now,” he said mysteriously. Then he ordered a strawberry-banana smoothie to take back to his RV.

I asked Ann about our mysterious guest as soon as he left. Rather than try to explain, she handed me a business card with an emblem of a large two-legged beast drawn in the style of the Island’s indigenous tribes. “Bigfoot Researchers Organization,” it said, and underneath, “Jim Thurgood, Investigator.”
“There’ll be a whole group of them down there,” she told me, indicating the cluster of campsites in the trees near our house. Jim was the first of the crew to arrive. They were to camp with us for three days, going on three “expeditions” into the nearby forests to search for signs of Bigfoot. Sasquatch. The Abominable Snowman. They were completely serious. And they were literally outside my front door. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

Jim came back later for more refreshments and I let it be known that I was on to his secret. We chatted about sightings in the area (there had been several promising ones), the best time to spot a bigfoot (at night) and how the group was planning on finally bringing legitimacy to its chosen field of research (by capturing clear footage of the beast itself). My newfound fascination with Sasquatch established, I hinted that because of my extensive journalism training I would be the perfect person to assist the camera crew out there in the dark (actually, I wouldn’t know which end of a video camera is up). He took the bait. Why not come along? He told me he’d run it by the group’s ringleader when she arrived the next day. Meanwhile, he said, it’d be best to do some research. Check out the website and read up on just what it is we’ll be looking for out there.

That night, I called my mom to tell her the exciting news about Sasquatch. She laughed.
“You know, ‘quatch’ is German for nonsense,” she reminded me. Despite living in the US for the past 35 years, my mother has never lost her good German sense of cultural superiority. It was just the confirmation I needed. Anything your parents scoff at is pretty much guaranteed to be interesting.
Next, I followed Jim’s advice and hopped on the interwebs to see if there was anything to his story. Googling “Bigfoot” and “Vancouver Island” actually turned up quite a few hits, but the BFRO's website was, as promised, a gold mine of information. I learned that 2,000-10,000 sasquatches are estimated to exist in North America alone. I spent a brief moment looking over the pages and pages of sasquatch reports and sightings. I also found some useful information on sasquatch identification:
Appearance: Ape-like. Long, reddish-brown to black hair (not fur!). Six to ten feet in height.
Smell: “Intense, disagreeable stench, comparable to the odor of smegma.”
Gait: Averages 5’ in length. Sasquatches walk without straightening their knees.
Top Speed: 40 mph.
Habitat: Forests. They tend to be migratory, though they do build an occasional “nest” out of branches and moss.
Call: A loud scream, roar or howl. Also, “Giggling, laughing and crying sounds have been heard, sometimes in response to appropriate events.”

I skimmed long explanations about why so few decent pictures of sasquatch have ever been produced (they’re nocturnal, nobody ever has a camera handy, etc.) and learned what a sasquatch eats for dinner (deer, elk, raccoons, beavers, ducks or rodents). But the most interesting section of the website by far is the archive of aboriginal Canadian and Native American bigfoot legends.
According to the site, most Native tribes across North America have some sort of story about “big man” in the woods. Sixty separate terms for "Sasquatch" have been identified among these stories. My favorite comes from the Salish, who inhabit southern British Columbia and the Island.

A Nehalem man was not married. He would go hunting and permit the married people to have the meat he got. One summer he killed an elk, and he saved the blood. He took the elk's bladder and filled it with the blood. He made a camp near there. He placed that bladder of blood near his feet, lay down, and went to sleep. Wild Man came and helped himself to the elk meat.
The man awoke. He was too warm, he was sweating. "Goodness! What is the matter?" he asked himself, looking about. It was like daylight, there was such a great fire burning there. Wild Man had placed large pieces of bark between the man and the fire so the man would not get too hot while he slept. You see, he treated that fellow well. When he spoke to him, Wild Man called the man "My nephew."
The man awoke to see Wild Man, that extremely large man, sitting by the fire. He had the fat ribs and front of that elk on a stick, roasting them by the fire. He said, "This is how I am getting to be. I am getting to be always on the bum, these days. I travel all over, I cannot find any elk. I took your elk, dear nephew, I took your elk meat."
That man stretched himself, he had forgotten about that bladder of blood. He kicked it with his feet, causing it to make a noise. Wild Man looked around; he said, "It sounds as if a storm were coming." (A Wild Man does not like to travel when it is storming.) Wild Man was afraid of that noise, he kept kicking that bladder of blood. He said, "Yes, a storm is coming." Wild Man asked, "My dear nephew, would you tell me the best place to run to?" That man showed Wild Man a high bluff. "Over in that direction is a good place to run," he told him. Wild Man started out running. Soon the man heard him fall over that bluff.

Poor Wild Man, always on the bum and falling off bluffs in the night.
Although many of the stories are similar to this one, describing humans reacting in what might be considered a natural manner (scared out of their boots or angry that sasquatch has stolen some food), it seems that at least some tribes had a more peaceful relationship with the bigfoots. They considered him a “big brother,” an inter-dimensional being (much like a spirit or ghost) that would appear in times of change. According to the introduction, “Some elders regard him as standing on the "border" between animal-style consciousness and human-style consciousness, which gives him a special kind of power.” Another medicine man says, “He is both spirit and real being, but he can also glide through the forest, like a moose with big antlers, as though the trees weren't there...”
That would explain the lack of video footage. It seems that a successful sasquatch researcher must be on the lookout for the paranormal as well as the simply big and hairy. But all the similar stories and detailed descriptions got me thinking. Maybe there was something to this “quatch” after all.

The next day, a few more BFRO Investigators showed up. As I sipped my morning coffee on the deck outside our office, one took a seat at the next table. Ann, as eager as I was to get me on an expedition, introduced us. His name was Ingmar, and he’d come all the way from Sweden, where he worked as an archeologist, to take part in three separate Bigfoot hunts. The first was in northern California; the second on the BC mainland. This would be his last before heading home. In contrast to Jim’s casual, salesman-like approach to describing his search for Sasquatch, Ingmar – with intense blue eyes, a shining bald head and height rivaling the Wild Man himself – was all seriousness. I asked him what made him interested in bigfoot research. He asked me the same question right back. But after warming up a little bit, Ingmar proved an animated and enthusiastic believer in the bigfoots. His interpretation of the available data has convinced him that a “higher primate,” a creature that evolved from the same line that produced Homo sapiens, exists in many remote regions of the continent. By using the term “higher primate”, he clarified, he is not implying that sasquatches are more evolved than human beings. Still, he admits, some aspects of their behavior cannot be explained through traditional scientific knowledge.
“This animal does not want to be found,” he told me. On his expedition on the mainland, the closest he got to a sighting was when he and a partner heard loud crashing in the trees nearby. This experience is typical of those who purposefully or accidentally encounter bigfoots in the wild. Bigfoot always senses a human presence, Ingmar said, and moves the other direction, sometimes taking the time to try to scare off potential pursuers first. While acute hearing, smell and vision might allow bigfoots to remain so elusive, Ingmar suspects they may have a sixth sense about them – perhaps ESP – that tips them off when people are around. But he’s not saying anything for sure.
Later that morning, as I was washing the lettuce we brought up from the garden, the expedition's honcho, Grace, stopped by. She looked about 50, with neatly coifed blonde hair and a tight-lipped expression. Ann brought up the question of my participation in the expedition.
“No, not possible,” Grace said, crushing in one sentence two days’ worth of fervent hoping on the part of the crew at Collins Farm. Many people had gone through great effort, making many sacrifices, to take part in this expedition, she scolded us. Also, there was too much of a safety risk involved in bringing member of the “public” along.

Despite Grace’s discouragement, I continued to pick the brains of the friendlier BFRO researchers whenever I got the chance. That afternoon, Ingmar brought his photo album up to show us pictures of bigfoot prints he’d found in the snow of the Sierra Nevadas. The way we all crowded around the book and oohed and awed, you’d think Ingmar was a delighted new father. The prints were clear enough, but he only ever found one at a time in the patchy snow along the high mountain road. They were longer than his own rather large feet and twice as wide. As he described excitedly how there was absolutely not another human being in the area to create fake prints and how the measurements fit body proportions calculated from photographs of Sasquatch, I felt myself again being swayed.

The evening of the first expedition arrived. They had picked a site where there had been recent reports of bigfoot “activity”, where they would monitor the area from the hours of midnight to three or four AM. I was beginning to think maybe it was a good thing that I wasn’t going along.
The next morning, a couple of the BFROs showed up for coffee, bleary-eyed. We eagerly questioned them. The biggest event of the night, they reported, was that one of the drivers had gotten her car stuck on a rock.
The second evening, they traveled to a nearby lake, but evidence of Bigfoot there was similarly lacking. Jim speculated that it had been raining too much lately, meaning that the bigfoots weren’t being forced to come to large bodies of water to drink. The group remained hopeful; I heard not a glimmer of doubt among those who waited out the daylight hours around the office. But I was also beginning to sense a continuum of bigfoot fanaticism among the BFROs. There were those, like Ingmar, who dedicated most of their free time (and cash) to the pursuit of Bigfoot. Then there were others, including one father-son duo from Kansas that I talked to, who considered it a good excuse to travel somewhere they’d never been before. Dan and Jason were helicopter mechanics in the Army. Their buddies at work had laughed at them, they told me, but the now-infamous 1960’s Patterson footage (of a bigfoot walking, then turning to face the camera before disappearing into the woods) and other photos convinced them. You never know what’s out there in the woods, they figure. You just never know.

The third evening’s expedition brought “exciting” results. No, not a sighting. No prints or smegma-like stench, either. It was a bigfoot call. A roar, actually – one too powerful to belong to a bear or cougar. They’d caught it clearly on their audio equipment. Sadly, though, I was not authorized to listen to the recording, but they did say they'd put it on the website whenever they decided the public would be ready to handle it. (I’ll update when that actually happens.)
After that, the BFRO researchers packed up rather quietly – and sleepily, I suspect – and went their various ways. I’ll admit to falling victim to bigfoot-mania myself for those three days. I avoided the woods at night and scanned the path to the garden during the day for big footprints. And I didn’t think to look into Grace’s use of the word “sacrifices” until her entire crew went home.
A couple of days later, my BFRO afterglow subsided, and I did a little more digging on their website. I found that in addition to paying for their own travel, lodging and food while on expedition, members of the BFRO must pay $300 a pop to participate. No word on what that fee actually goes to, since the organization doesn’t seem to do any of the normal research-organization activities (advocate for wildlife habitat; or provide money to independent scientists). Plus, the costs of equipment like Jim’s is all covered by the organization’s founder, a billionaire by the name of Matt Moneymaker. For real. And in a final twist of good fortune, Matt – who goes on most of the expeditions but always stays in a hotel – needed to stop by the campground on his way out of town to pick up some items left for him by his comrades.
Matt Moneymaker is a bit of a bigfoot celebrity. He’s been on Coast to Coast, a conspiracy and paranormal-focused AM talk show, and he was interviewed (then ridiculed) by Fox News. Tempered by a lifetime of charming people for the sake of animals, Moneymaker (whose name, he says, was badly translated from the German “Geltmacher” – literally, “gold maker” – when his ancestors immigrated to the United Sates) has adopted a persona that’s a cross between the ShamWow pitchman and Steve Irwin.
He certainly didn’t look as I’ve always imagined billionaires to look when he stopped by that afternoon to get his box of stuff. He was clean-cut but dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and talked a bit too loud. We couldn’t resist asking him, as we’d asked the rest of the BRFO researchers probably dozens of times, why there weren’t more pictures of bigfoot. He went into Irwin mode, describing an instance on another expedition when he’d been close to a whole swarm of the beasts.
“They were right there in front of me!” he told us, “Like this!” He rose up on the balls of his feet and lifted his arms over his head, bigfoot-style. “I could smell them! They stank! Ten feet away – they were throwing huge boulders and tree branches! We had to take cover!” He continued on a rant about people never believing eyewitness reports because we expect everything to be televised these days, concluding that one day he'll make his documentary about Bigfoot and then we'll all be sorry. At the end, he smiled again, thanked us for hosting the BFRO, and made his escape as we sat in stunned silence.
After he left, Ann commented in her usual dry-as-a-bone style: “Boy, he was a bit defensive, eh?”

So ends the tale of the BFRO at Arrowvale. In retrospect, I’m not so disappointed that I didn’t get to go on an expedition. Bigfoot would not have provided nearly the same level of comic relief and personality as his would-be discoverers. Still, when I go out at night, I keep my ears (and nostrils) open. You never know what’s out there.