Goats and Martin Van Buren

I dreamed I was in a play and forgot my lines.

Ordinary, common, garden-variety, low-level anxiety dream, right?

Except in this dream, people kept smuggling me copies of the script, and I kept losing the script, or opening the script to the wrong page, or finding out the script was written in the only variant of neo-Dravidian I'd failed to master in graduate school…

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A client wanted a piece on the social behavior of goats.

I quite like goats.

Here is a goat hired by the National Park Service a couple of years back to do something about out-of-control groundcover in the Vanderbilt park:



Goats are very social creatures. You can’t have just one goat.

Oh, I mean, you can, but the goat is likely to be very unhappy. Because goats want to be with other goats.

I kept thinking about this all day yesterday.

As in: Do goats actually like each other the way humans like each other?

Any two random goats will have a happy, fulfilling life together in a barnyard, but in order for humans to have a happy fulfilling life with other humans, they have to like them.

What does like mean anyway? How is it determined? By compatible tastes, interests, moral codes? By pheromones?

It is a Great Mystery.

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I had been planning to go to California over the Memorial Day weekend.

But by the last week in April when I still hadn’t bought my ticket, I realized: I don’t want to go to California over the Memorial Day weekend.

Oh, there are people I want to see, and few of those people live in the SF Bay area anymore, so this trip could be more than a Revisit-the-Scenes-of-the-Greatest-Hits-of-Your-Youth pilgrimage. Those types of pilgrimages always end up being depressing.

Ichabod is in Mendocino. Barbara still has the mansion in Piedmont but I would arrange to meet her at the Petrified Forest in Calistoga. One Eleanor is in also in Piedmont, but the other Eleanor is in Fort Bragg along the coast. Then there’s the Santa Cruz contingent.

I don’t want to have to deal with the stuff in storage, and of course, I must deal with the stuff in storage.

I suppose not wanting to deal with the stuff in storage is a good part of the reason why I don’t want to go to California.

Anyway, I told Ichabod I wasn’t coming. He didn’t seem all that disappointed. I suppose that’s par for the course for most men in their 30s. They love Mom. But Mom is wayyy on the periphery.

I do have to go to California at some point. Labor Day? It will happen if I force myself to buy a ticket this week.

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L once had two AirbnB guests whose hobby was visiting Presidential gravesites.

Economists from mainland China.

I thought this was one of the most charming hobbies ever!

I mean—just so deliciously wacky, right?

So, in their honor, I planned a Martin Van Buren Day yesterday.

I know, I know—it didn’t sound all that exciting to me either.

But, hey! It gave me an excuse to drive. To fill my tank with gas! To tell the world to kiss my ass!

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I love Columbia County. Mystical, magical, but at the same time, scrubby, impoverished.

Martin Van Buren, for those of you who don’t recognize the name, was the 8th President of the United States. Generally regarded by historians as mediocre.

Kinderhook, which is Martin-Van-Buren-Ground-Zero-ville, is the heart of the old Dutch influence. It is quite the charming little village. Surrounded by farms and apple orchards.



Valatie, Claverack, and Kinderhook were settled in the early part of the 17th century, at the same time as Nieuw Amsterdam.

Though the adjective “Knickerbocker” is a term generally applied to Manhattan, I think the word’s been coopted: This is Knickerbocker Country; Ichabod Crane lived here. Martin Van Buren, born in 1782, didn’t speak English till he was 12. He spoke Dutch. He remains the only ESL President.

Here is Martin Van Buren’s Kinderhook mansion. I suppose it was more impressive in the 19th century than it is now:



Here is Martin Van Buren’s grave in the adorable Kinderhook cemetery:



By way of contrast, not so very far away in the same cemetery, here are the graves of some enslaved people:



Outside the South, New York was probably the state most gung-ho about slave ownership. Columbia County was not very enthusiastic about emancipation; in fact, it was one of the few New York counties that failed to raise a Union regiment in 1861.

By this point, I was quite Martin Van Buren-ed out and decided to return home.

I stopped for ice cream in Red Hook. That was probably the high point of the trip.

‘Cause, truth be told, Martin Van Buren wasn’t very interesting then.

And he’s much less interesting now.