The Dogtown Chronicles: Our Life and Times with Sheep, Goats, Llamas, and Other Creatures

By Doris Ober

A middle-aged couple of escaped New Yorkers become shepherds in the rural outpost of West Marin, California, and learn much about life—and about death—from the experience. The Dogtown Chronicles is a memoir, a love story, and true animal tales featuring two Scottish Highland steer, Jacob sheep, San Clemente Island goats, llamas, a horse, and a dog; with cameo appearances by many other animals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Doris Ober
• Release date: Mar 6, 2010
• ISBN: 9781883843014

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The Dogtown Chronicles:

Our Life and Times with Sheep, Goats,

Llamas, and Other Creatures

by

Doris Ober

The Dogtown Chronicles: Our Life and Times with Sheep, Goats, Llamas, and Other Creatures

Copyright 2010 Doris Ober

Smashwords Edition

Second U.S. Edition 2010

In association with White Wolf Press, LLC

Published by Villca Qutu Publishers

Dogtown, CA 94924

USA

http://www.dogtownchronicles.com

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

in memory of Betty Ober

July 13, 1912 – October 28, 2008

Contents

Introduction

One: Moe and Curly

Two: In the Beginning

Three: Woody

Four: Our Flock and Our Boy Lloyd

Five: Jacob Shows His Colors

Six: Triple Deaths

Seven: Lulu and First Lambs

Eight: Goats, Part One

Nine: Goats, Part Two

Ten: Sharif, Part One

Eleven: Slaus, and then Quentin

Twelve: The Population Factor

Thirteen: Mephisto

Fourteen: Life After Lion

Fifteen: Animal Stories

Sixteen: Sharif, Part Two

Seventeen: Relative Calm Before Relative Storm

Eighteen: Sheba's Memorial

Epilog

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I had been making notes about our life with animals ever since Moe and Curly, two Scottish Highland steer, came to Dogtown in the spring of 1986. They weren't my first animals. As a child, I had a series of small turtles whose shells invariably softened and they died and a sequence of parakeets named Petey who learned to speak a few words and then died, too, of one thing or another. My father had allergies, so there were no cats or dogs.

I had cats when I was in my twenties, though: Marlon and Henry, and then Kilo; and I kept a dove in my thirties in San Francisco. But none of this prepared me for the grand animal experiment I entered into in my forties when I came to live with Richard in his handmade, honey-colored, redwood house in Dogtown, an enclave tucked into one of the country's most beautiful parks, the Point Reyes National Seashore an hour north of San Francisco.

Soon we had two American Tabby kittens, though they were not a harbinger of things to come. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young's song, Our House, was perpetually in my mind: With two cats in the yard…Life used to be so hard.

Life hadn't really been so hard, but Richard's was a very, very, very fine house, as the band said. It was less than 1,400 square feet, but 35 feet tall and nine stories—though some floors were only a few steps up or down from others. Richard had not been thinking about getting old when he built the house 12 years earlier.

It sat on a ridge above the Olema Valley, resembling an unfolded wooden Chinese puzzle, all unexpected angles and slanted roofs. It was made of glass and redwood that was once Pier 41 in San Francisco. Richard thought the wood might have been milled in Dogtown when it was a lumber town after the Gold Rush. Overlooking the valley, an outrageously large redwood deck floated off the back of the house, two corners shaded by mammoth live oaks many centuries old. They looked like petrified modern dancers in their mossy dress, their heads glossy in spring, buzzing with oak moths in summer, dispensing acorns in the fall.

But it was many years before I saw oak trees that way. I was born in Manhattan. I had made detours, but I considered myself a city person. Life in a village with a population of 30 was, to put it mildly, different. The closest town with a market was four miles south. There was a bank and a pharmacy ten miles north. Dogtown consisted of about a dozen houses, Jack's Dogtown Pottery, and Thorny's window-making shop. It was a long way from New York City.

Dogtown, I came to find out, was not an uncommon town name in mid-nineteenth century America. It described those instant towns that grew up outside of a mine or logging camp, rowdy places with bars and brothels and bad reputations—and too many stray dogs. There are still four Dogtowns in California today, though there's not much left of the other three: just a street sign at one, a bronze plaque bolted into a rock at another, and nothing at all at the third.

When their mines or mills closed, most Dogtowns were abandoned, or if they outgrew their rough beginnings, they changed their names to something more refined. Our Dogtown in western Marin County was typical. By the 1870s its population was ten times what it would be a century later. In those early days it had a Main Street with two stores, a school, a boarding house, a blacksmith, carpentry, and wagon shop. It thought well enough of itself by then to change its name to Woodville. And that's what you'll find on most maps still, though townsfolk and the local press never did refer to it as anything but Dogtown.

So it was for nearly 100 years, until Richard, the person whose life's journey I would join less than ten years later, petitioned the Board of Supervisors of Marin County to restore the original name. It became official by unanimous resolution in April 1976, perhaps the least controversial action required of that organization that year. His activism earned Richard the unofficial title of Mayor of Dogtown.

* * *

Richard was also a New Yorker, 12 years older than I was, and 12 years farther along in understanding the pleasures of a country life. We met at a party in San Francisco. My client, Richard's friend, the historian Jim Holliday, was moving to Carmel with his new wife, Belinda. Jim's Pacific Heights home was filled with African masks and Belinda's bright watercolors; on that night there were also serious-looking men in three-piece suits, and women in dark stockings with coifed hair and gold and diamond jewelry.

I felt as if I'd wandered into a New Yorker cartoon. These were the upper crust of the Bay Area's social-scholarly-literary pie. Richard didn't seem like one of them, in a blue blazer and wine-colored turtleneck, with silver hair and crinkly salt-and-pepper beard and deep laugh lines at the corners of his eyes. He was the berries, though I didn't know it yet. In fact, at first his excellent looks made me cautious. Very handsome men are sometimes vain, and Richard looked like one of the pen-and-ink portraits in the corners of old maps: the West Wind, or old Sol himself.

When we met, Richard had chickens, honeybees, and eight geese in a pond. He also had a dog named Phoebe, who shocked everyone by dying of a heart attack when she was only two years old. I met Phoebe once but never had the chance to know her. I sometimes wonder if things would have turned out differently for Richard and me if there had been a dog in his life when we first knew each other.

When we had been friends for almost a year, Richard asked if I'd like to housesit for him while he went to India for a month. I had a book project—Dogtown would be the perfect place to work. All I'd have to do was gather eggs and close the chickens in at night.

* * *

To tell the truth, I was a little anxious, alone in the country in a house out of a fairy tale, with its fuse boxes and meters, and propane and water tanks, and hot water heater, and pumps, and cut-off valves, and sprinkler systems—there was even a way to cover the entire house with foam in case of a fire storm—all of which Richard showed me and explained in detail in some deluded belief that if there were a problem while he was gone, I would know how to solve it based on his patient tutorial.

But there were no problems. The house embraced me.

It sat in a circle of sunshine surrounded by big oaks and bay trees and Douglas firs. At the top of the dug-out steps up to the house a redwood tree stood about twenty feet tall. It had been a six-inch sapling given to Richard as a housewarming gift 12 years earlier. Alongside the redwood grew an English laurel, and the two trees seemed to reach out to one another, the tips of their branches nearly touching. At the top of the steps, you could turn left onto the front deck and the glass front of the house, or turn right and follow a path past lemon and peach and apple trees to the chicken coop and more fruit trees: apples, plums, a pear, and fig.

If you walked straight ahead from the top of the steps, you came face to face with the Vierra strip, a tongue of grassland and wildlife corridor about a hundred yards deep stretching between Richard's deer fence on one side and the dense woods of the national park on the other. Great animal theater occurred in that strip of land, which I could watch from the bedroom at the top of the house. For instance, the month I housesat I saw eight fallow deer, some snow white, grazing in the strip, plus a family of raccoons practicing acrobatics there, and a big gray-and-reddish bobcat frozen over a gopher hole. And every other day or so a herd of giant brown-and-white Hereford cattle would walk over from the Vierra barn and crowd the strip, rubbing their backs on a downed oak tree for a good scratch before returning home.

I left the property as infrequently as possible, though I did walk out to get the mail every day, down the halfmile-long driveway that curved through groves of eucalyptus trees and woods of oaks and bays, Ceanothus, hazelnuts, firs, red alders, coffeeberry, elderberry, willows, and wild plums—and across the meadow with its friendly, waving grasses. It was quite a steep descent—a 200-foot difference in elevation from the top of the hill to the meadow on the valley floor. Every day I gave thanks for the glassy pond and the honking geese, for the work that waited for me in the golden house, and for my huge good luck at being there.

The occasional bats that flew through the bedroom at night didn't even disturb me. I'd just dive under the covers until the coast was clear. I was reading Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat. It all seemed exactly right.

When Richard returned from India I didn't want to leave the house. Did I mention it was covered in passionflowers then—big loopy pink flowers on a perennial green vine that lay like a comforter over the two roofs at the entrance of the house.

So I stayed.

Chapter One

Moe and Curly

I had never had a relationship with an animal bigger than a fat cat when, that spring, Richard enthusiastically suggested we get a couple of Scottish Highland steer. I was shocked. I had imagined that one day in the distant future, Richard would say that he wanted another dog. Cattle never occurred to me.

Imagine how they'd look down here in the meadow, he said. Imagine driving down from the house and meeting one on the road! The best thing about these steer was that they wouldn't require anything from us other than a cattle guard to keep them in. They'll live in a salad here, he said. They would be free to ramble over his ten acres of meadow and woodland, to drink out of the pond, eat the fruit that fell in a circle under the wild plum tree in the meadow in spring and the blackberries that fell off the fences in summer. Once a year the vet would come out and inoculate them against various parasites and viruses. Other than that, Richard assured me, they'd take care of themselves.

I could indeed imagine driving down from the house and meeting one of the steer on the road, but my fantasy was a dark one. And naïve as I was about animals then, even I could see the red flag waving and winking at us over the idea that they would take care of themselves.

But Richard had a vision and he was eager to convert me to it. He had found a cattle ranch north of Monterey, a four-hour drive from Dogtown, where there were many Highland steer to look at firsthand, and where we could talk to someone who knew about the realities of owning them. We drove down the coast with the top down in Richard's newly acquired 1978 Alfa Romeo, the sun shining, the sky bluer than blue, and Paul Simon's optimistic Graceland playing on a cassette, the music trailing after us in the air like gossamer.

* * *

It was a very posh cattle ranch, with rolling hills and apple trees and beautiful barns and fences. I would come to learn that you can tell a lot about the quality of any animal operation by observing the fences. In fact, the rancher with his very good fences seemed to take Richard's idea of having two young steer as pets/lawn ornaments in stride, and he even agreed the animals would take care of themselves. He assumed we would keep them until they were grown and then butcher them, but when he told us about the quality of their lean meat and that they'd be ready at two years, Richard and I looked at one another in semi-horror.

Scottish Highlands are definitely a wonderful sight, with their long horns and red shaggy coats, and they qualified as a priority breed, according to the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, with little more than 2,500 registered in the United States annually and a population of just more than 10,000 worldwide. The welfare and continuation of rare domestic breeds of animals was one of Richard's big causes. Although