A Little Madness

“We’re sad here, of course,” said my friend, newly returned from Orange County, “but it isn’t so stressful.”

This is true. In our bucolic isolation, we can quietly contemplate our sadness, so that at times it becomes a kind of luxury, something elegant and bittersweet.

Less stress, but plenty of absurdity. As the Cheshire Cat so aptly put it, “We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.” And a little madness can be a fine coping mechanism.

I’m thinking of a certain blue-eyed neighborhood goat that follows passers-by like Mary’s little lamb, but with no particular loyalty. He’s a needy creature, completely lacking boundaries, and although he isn’t my responsibility, I worry about him. Last week I saw him jump into a surfer’s SUV while the guy was wriggling out of his wetsuit, and he positioned himself in the driver’s seat as though he had a destination in mind and was glad to finally be on his way. The surfer was more annoyed than amused, and shooed him away to find another stranger with whom to bond.

“He has no sense or defenses,” says another of my friends. “He’ll end up like the white turkeys.” He was referring to a rafter of white-feathered wild turkeys we observed parading through the canyon a couple of years ago, a startling manifestation of some mutation or recessive gene, but soon to become their own tragic lesson on blending in. The very next morning we saw a heap of white feathers by the mailboxes and in sad little piles along the road, and we haven’t glimpsed a white turkey since.

The owners of the goat-who-has-no-boundaries also own three or four dogs and several horses, and are pretty laissez-faire about tending to any of them. The dogs tend to bark at walkers and chase cars, often running out onto the main road. I talked to one of the kids in the family about looking out for them, for everyone’s good, but he believed that the problem was the proximity of his house to the road and short of moving the road, he didn’t think much could be done. “You don’t know how hard it’s been for us,” he said. I suppose I don’t.

Meanwhile, rodents have been chewing out the engine guts of our neighbor’s car, an experience we all have at least once, and I’m struggling to figure out how to use the lumpy celeriac and bitter black-green kale that keeps appearing in the veggie boxes we have delivered from Jacob’s farm each week. The little girl up the hill is celebrating her fifth birthday in a silver crown and a leopard skin catsuit that she refuses to part with, although it is torn and tattered, and I saw her dancing alone on the driveway as I passed, for she is a child who waltzes with sunlight.

And of course the phone died in the middle of a work conference yesterday, and on any given day, the mail may or may not be delivered, and a few of our locals are grousing about the government conspiracy that would have them wear masks, but it’s easy to stay away from them.

At 3 a.m. the coyote gang cut loose in a great cacophony of howling, and the crash of waves and rattling of a passing freight train were carried on the wind, a peculiarly lonely soundtrack.

Nothing is normal. We tread water, trying to find the humor, trying to stay connected. Seldom has our fate seemed so absolutely out of our own hands. They keep saying things will be better, but we don’t know when or what it will look like, and it’s true, we’re not so stressed here in this refuge, but we’re laughing through tears.