CSotD: Sophie explains it all
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I was a senior in college in 1972, at about the height of the back-to-the-land movement. My wife and I had no firm idea of what we were going to do after I graduated, but we subscribed to the "Mother Earth News," which has since gone Yuppie but was a lot more hippie then, and we bought a copy of Rolling Stone's how-to book, "The First-Time Farmer's Guide."
Yes, we were taking advice on farming from the Rolling Stone, which is what makes today's edition of "Dog Eat Doug" so amusing to me. Apparently, Sophie has come across old copies of "Mother Earth News" and "First-Time Farmer's Guide" and is taking them as seriously as we did.
There were a few warning flags. When Rolling Stone talked about having lots of groovy eggs, all I could think of was chickens with corduroy eggholes, which made me giggle, but when they came out against vaccinating your livestock, the 20th century person within me said, "Well, now, wait a second …"
I also suspected that there was a reason that every Mother Earth News story about keeping goats — and there were a lot of them — began with the insistence that goats don't stink. Which, after four or five or six repetitions, made me begin to suspect that goats must really stink.
But what the Mother Earth News stories about goats never mentioned was that goats don't just continually give milk and that, in order to get that great milk from which you can make yoghurt and cheese and all sorts of groovy things, Mrs. Goat needs to become Mama Goat and that this has to keep happening on a regular basis if you want milk on a regular basis.
If you've ever seen a baby goat, you can see why this Inconvenient Truth was not being trumpeted. We were already split on the concept of eating rabbits, and baby goats, I already knew, are a whole lot cuter than rabbits. The solution, of course, was to either (A) keep them forever or (B) give them away to other first-time farmers who, for some reason, had not already begun to compile their own infinite collection of once-baby goats.
Or give away them to real farmers and then not look around for them the next time you visited. And don't stay for dinner.
Our overall plan, which was certainly as well-formed as Sophie's (Remember Sophie? This blog entry is about Sophie.), was to find a small farm near a place where one of us could get a day job while the other stayed home raising naked, creative children with tousled curls of hair and dirty feet, collecting the groovy eggs from the undiseased-though-also-unvaccinated chickens and making yoghurt from the milk of the ever-fresh, never stinky goats.
So when we saw a book called "Five Acres and Independence," it sounded perfect. That was just what we wanted — five acres and independence, and here was a book that would tell us how to get it!
Unfortunately for our dreams, though certainly "fortunately" in the long run, this book appeared to have been written by someone who actually knew something about farming and was not unwilling to explain it in great detail and without telling you how groovy it was. Instead, he seemed to emphasize the hard and constant work involved, the never ever being able to take a vacation and the likelihood of screwing things up even if you had some idea of what you were doing.
Apparently, the chimpanzees would maintain the equipment about as well as the goats would mow the lawn without supervision and the cows feed themselves.
It was a bummer, but there are worse ways of discovering these things than by reading books. Or cartoons. (Remember cartoons? This is a blog about cartoons.)
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