My first morning at Mountain Lodge Farm was a particularly cold one. The brisk, rich air of eastern Washington whipped around the barn and weaseled through its wood siding. Inside, the farm’s thirty-or-so resident goats nestled into their stalls, resigned to the day’s heaviness. 

For the most part the day was peaceful, and I was set to work quickly, fetching and distributing hay and water, cleaning stalls, and checking pregnant goats for signs of labor. I had my eye on one in particular—Paloma—who’d been ill-at-ease all morning: a bit shifty, perpetually unsettled. When I called over the barn manager Sherwin to get her opinion, she confirmed my suspicions. Paloma was definitely in labor and I was tasked with keeping her company as things progressed. I sat in her stall and stroked her coarse fur. I admired aloud the white speckled patterning that ran down her neck. I tried to keep track of her breathing. 

After a while, she began digging into her hay and straining her neck forward. Her breath was coming quicker. She started to push. Sherwin joined me in Paloma’s stall and the two of us cooed and petted and waited in tense anticipation. An hour and many pained bleats later however, there was still no sign of a baby. “Something’s not quite right,” Sherwin said, glancing around the barn. 

Then she knelt beside me, Paloma standing gingerly in between us. “No one else is here,” Sherwin said, “so you are going to have to hold her while I do this.” She squirted a glob of lubricant onto her hand and shifted towards Paloma’s rear. 

“Just give her a big hug,” Sherwin instructed, “She’s going to push against you, but you’ll have to resist. I need to dilate her manually.”

A few tense minutes later and the baby arrived just as it should: front hooves first, followed by the head, body, and back limbs. I watched in awe as it spilled onto the straw-bedded floor, already wriggling and kicking its lanky legs. Sherwin scooped it up in a towel and placed it in my lap, “Get him warm and dry,” she instructed, “there’s at least two more on the way.” 

I wasn’t supposed to be there. Not on a goat farm. Not in Washington. Not even on that side of the country. I was supposed to be in Boston beginning my second semester of college. While my peers shuffled into lecture halls preparing for “English Literature of the 19th Century,” I was here, in the depths of a Pacific Northwest forest, suctioning birth fluid from the mouths of newborn goats. I thought of the tiny university dorm room where I had been not so long ago. Where I had cried for hours and hours, day in and day out. I recalled the fluorescent lighting in the cafeteria where I had only ever eaten alone. The microwave-oatmeal dinners, the desperate calls to mom, the dashes back from class attempting to hide my tear-stricken face. I had thought college was what I wanted. It had made sense to go—everyone else was doing it. I told myself I was ready. 

But life had caught up with me. Three years earlier, my father had died unexpectedly. Alone and across the country, facing unfamiliarity around every corner, the grief I had not allowed myself to feel came pouring in. I had never known such overwhelming sadness as I felt then. Life became senseless. I walked around campus staring at the crowds around me, wondering—in the deepest most desperate way—why anyone bothered to live at all. I wanted to scream at them. Don’t you know it all means nothing? Don’t you know everyone will leave you? I sensed death around every corner, lingering like a shadow I could never quite outrun. For long hours, I sat in my room staring at the walls, counting the days until I could return home. Until I might, somehow, feel like me again. 

But in Washington, things were different. Here was this tiny being: a soaked, helpless, wobbly little creature who looked at me like I was the whole world. Minutes earlier he had been only an idea, a bulge in a stomach, a shadow of possibility. Now, here in my arms, was life, a heartbeat and the beginning of a new story. 

After I graduated high school, my mom had moved our family from California to Washington in the hopes of some kind of new beginning. I spent my days there languishing in the earth’s quiet beauty. I walked to pick up dinners for picnics and porch nights. I read beneath the shade of towering hemlocks. I strolled through farmer’s markets, inspecting line-caught salmon, cider, and zucchini blossoms, and eventually discovering the cheesemakers who led me to Sherwin and the farm. In Washington, I stopped fearing my life and started facing it instead. 

Three years earlier, on summer vacation with my family, I had seen life leave the world. I had discovered my father’s body floating in a lake and watched as he was dragged from the water, head lolling, arms limp and floppy at his sides. I had seen the emptiness in his eyes as they rolled backwards, the dead weight of his body as it was dragged onto the rocks. I remember knowing, long before it was confirmed by the police, that he was gone, though we would never learn exactly how. 

But here, on that obscure and beautiful farm in the PNW, was life. And somehow, it was not all that different from death. Occasionally, during a birth, one of the babies would emerge limp and breathless. We’d set to work on it immediately, rubbing its body to get blood flowing, and pushing a pipette into its throat to suction out lingering gunk. I thought in these moments of the fluid that had spilled from my father’s mouth as they pulled him out, of the chest compressions the EMTs had administered. Seconds passed like minutes. The barn grew quiet. During these instances, time seemed not just to slow but to stop. As if the world—as if life itself—had been placed on pause, had been held, suspended, between here and there. 

We hang in such a delicate balance. Breath to breath, push to push. We fight bringing life into the world and we fight to keep it here, and sometimes, the time for fighting passes. Following my father’s death, I was always angry, always fighting. Fighting my mom, my brother, myself. Fighting to make sense of a senseless world. A world in which, on a bright Tuesday afternoon, you went out water-skiing and basked in the sun and came back and your dad was dead. 

On the evening of the first anniversary of my father’s death, my mother decided we would scatter his ashes in the ocean. We lived in California, he loved the beach, it was what he had wanted. I, permanently angry and disgruntled, had been forced to attend against my will and was therefore determined to remain as miserably unengaged as possible. I followed a wide ten paces behind my mom and brother as they trudged through the sand. I kicked my feet. I scoffed. When we came to a clearing and my mom asked if we wanted to say anything I looked the other way in silence. Behind us not far up the beach, a couple was making out on a towel. I watched the guy move his hands unabashedly towards the girl’s butt. I saw his tongue. I turned back and my mother was calf-deep in the water, awkwardly trying to maintain her balance amidst the waves. Her cuffed jeans were dark with wet at the bottom, her hair was awry. In a flourish of choreographed drama she dumped the container of ashes and threw forward the sunflowers she had been carrying and we watched as the powder and the petals fell unimpressively into the gray water. The end-trail of a wave passed and tumbled the bits back towards the shore. There were ashes on her pant legs as she stepped out of the water. The couple behind us was half naked and horny. On the sand, crumpled yellow petal bits collected like wreckage. My mom raised her gaze and looked at me hopelessly and I turned away, my heart burning with hate. For so long, I knew nothing else. 

In Washington, though, daily tasks at the barn kept me grounded in a way nothing else ever had. I saw the immediate repercussions of actions and tasks as I performed them. I heaved an eighty pound bale of hay through the barn and ten goats got fed. I cleaned out a stall and three new babies fell asleep in fresh bedding. On the farm, the responsibility of sustaining life took precedence over everything. Every action had a purpose, a place in the larger system. There was no frivolity, no unnecessary ceremony. We did what was required to keep the system moving forward. To keep life living. On lunch breaks, I sat outside in the sun, inhaling the deep pine of the Pacific Northwest evergreens. I watched the light glinting off moss-spotted trunks, the haze of the dawn dissipating into the mountains beyond, undulating and fading like cream into fresh coffee. Almost every morning on my drive in, I’d round the last bend and find a herd of elk making their way across the road. They moved slowly, bobbing their heads with satisfaction, the weight of their hooves evident in each determined step. Their huge bodies hung in the mist like apparitions.

By peak kidding season, after almost twenty different mothers had given birth, the barn was overrun with babies. The pens moved like great oceans of fur; undulating tides of black and brown, rushing waves of spotted white and cream. The goats hopped and binkied and wiggled their little bodies every which way as they went. When they were excited, they leaped (literally) off of the walls. You couldn’t be around them and not feel happy. Often, I would arrive early and stay late searching for tasks, for any excuse to linger. Once the babies had begun to bottle feed, they couldn’t get enough of people. I’d enter the pen and a chorus of little clopping hooves would greet me. When I sat down, they’d hop into my lap and on top of my back, bleating and sniffing incessantly. It was pure joy. 

One day, I was heading into the barn when I saw, near the entryway, the carcass of a lamb hanging from one of the wood beams outside. The creature had been slit down the center revealing inside it various organs and guts in shades of crimson and blue-black. The flaps of skin on either side hung like an open door. Blood dripped slowly from the base of the corpus and pooled on the dirt-ridden stone below. When I asked Sherwin about it, she explained that the lamb had died unexpectedly in the pasture the night before, with no visible injuries or signs of ailment, so they were performing an autopsy. “It’s important that we figure out what happened,” she said, “to protect the others. Maybe it ate something. Maybe it was some kind of disease.” They’d save the skin and any other parts that could be used once they had determined the cause of death. Until then, here hung the carcass. It swung almost imperceptibly in the breeze, the pale curls along its back flicking. Somehow, the longer I looked at it, the less striking it became. I followed the veins moving up and down its flesh, noted which organs I could recognize. Inside the barn, the baby goats called out for attention. There was work to be done, milk to be warmed; I headed in.

On the farm I came to know life and death in the most blatant of terms. Mortality became no less significant but perhaps, in a way, less scary. The beginnings and endings of life were daily phenomena, essential to the system’s constancy. 

On a particularly damp morning I arrived at the barn early and could sense that something was amiss. The staff was tense. Sherwin—typically unfazed—was dashing around, palpably anxious. After a couple frantic loops of the barn, she caught sight of me and paused to fill me in. The day before, one of the goat mothers had given birth to four kids, including one little runt, who was struggling. The baby was healthy, but small, and getting pushed out by both her siblings and her mom. She wasn’t going to make it without intervention. The morning after, a different pregnant mother had been rushed to the vet for surgery during a difficult birth. The mother had survived but lost her only baby in the process. Now, she was on her way back to the barn, dead infant in tow. Sherwin was hoping to engineer a miracle. When it arrived, she took the corpse of the lost baby and rubbed it over the struggling runt, mixing their scents. After the infant-less mother had been shown back to her pen and settled, they brought her the runt baby, smelling just like the one she had lost. The mother did not think twice. She set to work on the little thing right away, cleaning her off, licking around her tall ears and beneath her small stomach. The baby wagged her tail as hard as her frail body could manage. 

When I stopped to check in on the pair later they were fast asleep, the little baby girl sated with milk and slumped against her new mother. I watched them for a long time, admiring the way the curves and patterning of their bodies nestled neatly together. I had thought it was a miracle but seeing them then, I understood the event as something far less. With a little help, life had simply found a way, an unexpected detour when the presumed path had crumbled into the sea. When I left that day, I walked past the small pile of turned over dirt where the body of the dead infant had been buried. I thought of my father’s ashes. Of the way his body might’ve looked burning. I thought of the carcass of the autopsied lamb, split open and bare; I tried to imagine flames licking at its flesh. What goes first? What is left behind in the end? 

It was afternoon and the farm was quiet. A slight breeze washed over the hillside and the evergreens’ spindly limbs shuddered. I realized I was cold as well; the adrenaline of the day had worn off and my legs were beginning to ache. At home, my mom would be waiting for me. I would pick up sunflowers on the way.