The Stampede And The Space Cadet

The Stampede And The Space Cadet

“Dig up a new angle on last month’s stampede in the Quarry,” the reporter muttered as he stormed out of the newspaper office. “He just wants to get me out of his hair and keep me away from the good stories.”
But as he drove out of the city, the simple beauty of the sky and hills and trees worked in his spirit and he began to look forward to time away from the fast pace of the city streets.
As he turned off the highway to the windy Quarry road he reviewed the facts of the story. Years before the Quarry had been turned into a vast, terraced farm for exotic angora goats, whose wool and meat were the basis of the local economy. Last month, an itinerant preacher had caused the valuable animals to panic during some kind of exorcism and the whole herd had plunged into the lagoon at the bottom of the huge pit. What a stinking mess they made as they quickly drown and began to rot. He needed a new angle, a new perspective indeed, and hopefully one that was down wind.
He drew up to the gate and spotted the Cowboy’s pickup by the office. He thought, “Well, at least I can ask how things are going now that he is out of a job managing the thousands of sheep.” Poor guy, he was probably packing his bags and sending out resumes, if he knew how to type.
The Cowboy rocked quietly in the hammock he had slung between two shady oak trees planted at the edge of the top level. He had made himself a lookout so he could keep a close eye on the goats during the few hours a day when he wasn’t down among them. As the reporter approached he turned and motioned to a comfortable rocker nearby. “Sit a spell and take the load off,” he invited.
The reporter gazed over the edge, expecting to see and smell rotting bodies as he had a month ago. He was pleasantly surprised at the clean air wafting up the incline. “How did you get rid of the stink! “ He exclaimed.
The Cowboy smiled as he replied, “Well, when you have dead body you put it underground. So we dug a big hole, brought in some earth movers and buried them all right there in the pond. Course we had to do a quick environmental study, and all that nonsense, but its done. They’re dead and gone and the living earth will recycle them into good fertile soil.”
The reporter had never thought of death and recycling rotting bodies in a very good light before, so he had to think about that for a bit, looking out over the now quiet Quarry. “But now what will happen to the Quarry and what will you do now that you are out of a job managing the operation,” were his words while he really thought, ´I can’t imagine there is too much demand for a manager of a quarry full of dead goats.´
“Now that is really good question,” replied the Cowboy, “I’ve been chewing on that same bone for days. You know, it’s funny how the same thing happened when I was a kid. You see, my daddy owned the Quarry after his daddy died. The good stone petered out, the townfolk didn’t have any work, my brother and I couldn’t stand our daddy and left town, and my parents didn’t know what to do about any of their problems. It was my momma who got the idea of the goats, it just came to her one day as she sat in the shade of these trees she had planted. She used to come bring lunch to daddy, and they would sit here and watch the men and machines make money for them.”
“She could see the end of the Quarry coming, the breakup of the family, hunger and idleness creeping up on the town, and I guess she could feel the tendrils of darkness closing around my brother and me. More and more she would sit and rock, in that very rocker, thinking and seeing and praying. “
“One day she said, ‘Daddy, when the Quarry runs out, we should landscape it and run goats.”
“Course Daddy laughed at her like a crazy woman, but that idea stuck in his mind like a burr. One time she drug him on vacation to some Island up in Canada that has a quarry that was made into some gardens, to see what could be done. Daddy wouldn’t cotton to the idea of flowers and a tea shop, but he saw money in the goat idea.”
Momma and Daddy worked it all out in their heads for a couple years before the stone ran out. They’d have to get permission to change the land use, learn which goats would make money for them, how to raise them, retrain their employees, put in a meat plant and smoke house, find craftsmen to work with the wool, and develop new markets.”
“It was a huge change for them, but it took their minds off worrying about me and my brother. It kept them going all those years that I never called home and my brother slipped deeper into booze and drugs and craziness.” The Cowboy fell silent as he remembered those years.
The reporter sat quietly thinking of his own crazy years, not too distant, not quite over, seeing his own parents keeping busy to avoid thinking about him. Eventually he gently nudged the Cowboy to get back to his story, “So how did you get back here as the manager?”
The Cowboy came slowly back to the present, “ah, well, Momma got sick, Daddy got old, my brother went totally crazy and had to be locked up. Daddy finally got in touch and begged me to come back to help with Momma, and we had a peaceful year before she died. Its funny how things work out, I had drifted all over the world and ended up on a sheep ranch in Australia, there’s where Daddy found me. So when Momma died I just stayed here and kept things going until Daddy went.”
“But the stampede last month, you lost all the goats! Didn’t that ruin things for you and the town? And the crazy guy, I never understood what really happened there?” The reporter sensed that there was a deeper story behind the facts he had heard.
“That’s another funny thing, about the goats. Yeah, they were our town investment, our savings fund, our source of income. You know, everybody pooled their money to buy the first herd, and it kept the town going and growing when everything else dried up in the area. But we had a ten year surplus of wool on hand for the weavers, the old employees either died or retired and their kids have gone into computers, not cowboy boots. It was time to move on, only we couldn’t see it. Maybe I needed to be up here on the rim rocking and praying instead of down with the sheep all day. It took the stampede to wake me up.”
“And the exorcism that they went on about was very simple. Daddy had taken in this crazy kid years before, his name was Space Cadet, let him roam the Quarry as long as he didn’t go where the goats were grazing. He would come and go, spaced out most of the time, but being near the animals calmed him down. There were times when he was lucid and would ask questions about the flock, and pet the kids. I always thought that he and his crazy buddies would benefit from working on a farm, planting and seeing the earth produce, feeling the earth speak to them through their hands and feet and knees. That is how I found peace, grubbing out the stalls and tilling the manure into the soil, watching the sheep lamb, sleeping out under the stars. And since the Healer came and got the nasties out of the Space Cadet he has been helping me bury the dead goats, and begin to lay out a garden. See way down there, he’s over to the left, and a couple of his buddies have been coming to help and listen to him talk. It looks like the Quarry is going to recycle dying people into good soil, just like it is doing with the herd.”
The reporter thought for a while more, then mused, “yeah, but wasn’t that a pretty steep price to pay, a priceless herd of productive goats traded for a new life for Space Cadet?”

The Cowboy smiled, “I don’t think so. You see, Space Cadet was my brother.”

Gerry Gutierrez, Cuixtla, Mexico, 1990