In search of the goat man

Misadventures in the city

By Beth Connors-Manke

I went looking for the goat man on what may prove to have been the hottest day of the summer. Halfway up my street, I realized the potential folly of my plan. Waves and waves of heat were rippling from the sidewalk. It was almost too hot for humans, so who would walk their pet goat on a day like today? I didn’t even know if goats could survive in urban heat like this. The more I walked and the sweatier I got, I realized that I probably didn’t know what a goat really looked liked. I had images from some book from childhood, but that was about it. On top of my utter lack of goat knowledge, I didn’t have any strong leads on the goat man.

Rumors had been circulating that there was a man on the north side who had a pet goat. That was my most solid piece of information. Some suggested that he only spoke Spanish; others conjectured that his goat had been stolen for a while, but that goat man had recovered his beloved pet. Several reports said he walked the goat with a rope leash. I figured my best shot was to start walking around and asking people if they’d seen the fabled man who walks a goat.

Being as it was about 100 degrees, I didn’t find many people milling about on this Wednesday morning. I’d catch people who were walking to their cars or who had stepped out for just a moment to yell across the street to a neighbor. No, they hadn’t seen a man with a goat, they said, while they shot me a look that read something like What’s wrong with you, girl? I’d queried the manager at the taquería. No luck. I had a feeling that later neighbors would say to each other, Did you see that lady looking for the man with the goat? I’d be part of the myth.

I was pretty convinced of my folly when I stopped in front of a house with two older men sitting on the front porch.

From the sidewalk, I kindof yelled up to them, “Have you seen a man who walks a goat?”

“A GOAT?” One of the men yelled back.

“A GOAT.” I yelled back, louder this time.

I could see that you crazy, girl look coming over their faces. Then, the front door opened and a woman came out. She’d heard the end of the conversation. Yes, she’d seen the goat man. The men’s incredulity shifted from me to the idea of a man with a pet goat on the north side.

The woman told me that she hadn’t seen the goat man since “they burned down his trailer.” I didn’t ask who “they” was, but I did find out that he’d been living in a trailer behind a house in the area. I thanked her, received blessings from the old men, and headed up the street. If it were true that goat man had lived in a backyard trailer, that would explain, I thought, the pressing need to walk the goat. The house lots on this street were scaled to be urban so that there naturally wasn’t a lot of expanse for a goat to frolic (or whatever goats do to pass the time)—with a backyard trailer there would be even less.

My only other lead came from the last guy I asked before heading back to my air-conditioned homestead. Legs dangling off his front porch while a white kitten sidled up to him, my informant said he’d last seen the goat man a few weeks ago, over by Griffith Market. The cops had seen the man walking his goat and stopped him—to take a picture with man and goat. No, the goat man wasn’t in trouble, my informant said, the cops just wanted a picture with him. But surely it’s illegal to have a goat in the city, I thought to myself. Maybe the cops made one of those on-the-spot moral decisions often required of them: they decided having a goat was less of a crime than having crack or beating your wife.

As it turns out, it’s not a crime to have a goat—or any farm animal—on the north side. I called LexCall 311 to find out. As long as the animal has shelter and is well cared for, there’s no problem. In fact, I was told, someone around town keeps a pony.

Downtown country

So let me tell you why I went looking for the elusive goat man: I’m baffled by the fact that I’ve ended up living in Lexington, close to downtown, and it’s more country than anywhere else I’ve been.

When I told our esteemed publisher and editor-in-chief about goat man, Editor Mayer wanted the goat to come mow his lawn. (I consider that country, but maybe that’s just Danny style.) Friends on our street raise chickens, as does a guy one street over, who, I am told, is the “chicken supplier” for this side of town. My better half and I are even part of what has been deemed “The Chicken Summit,” which includes one family raising chickens, one woman keeping bees, and a few family units (mine included) who are agriculturally worthless but can contribute lumber and chicken feed. It seems that the more urban I get, the more I end up with people who understand urban as it probably was in immigrant enclaves in big cities at the turn of the twentieth century: people deep in the city living like displaced farm folk.

Gone country: A downtown garden on MLK

It has never been my intention to live country-urban, but we showed up in Lexington when the local food movement was gaining steam, and we’ve ridden along with the train—mostly as freeloaders. My point here is that the city—or the north side at least—seems to be changing in character, and it’s taking us along with it. About a month ago when I spent a Saturday morning with the S.E.E.D.S. entrepreneurs, those kids raising and selling fresh produce on the north side, I was struck by the divided nature of the morning. For a few hours, we were in the relative peace and tranquility of the London Ferrell Community Garden. I can move into another world there, even with cars racing by. The second half of the morning was spent on Seventh Street, a tight street with fenced-in front yards and porches near the sidewalk. The stretch where the kids were selling their vegetables had the intimate feel that downtown areas can have since everything, and everyone, is so close. The kids were easily moving back and forth between farm and market with no dissonance. They just rode up the street.

Different urban models

Recently, in a conversation about how Lexington should plan and grow, Detroit came up. Like other ailing rust belt cities, Detroit proper has to radically re-think city planning. The idea: country-urban. As Associated Press writer David Runk notes, Detroit wants to turn “large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile.” In other words, it’s a revision of the idea of urban density. Instead of trying (fruitlessly) to persuade suburbanites to come back to the city and relinquish their automobile dependence, Detroit figures that it needs to regroup its residents into viable neighborhoods and raze empty buildings. Vacant lots would become orchards or vegetable farms. “City” would mean something else entirely. It would mean a patchwork of substantial green spaces and reconstituted neighborhoods.

Many planning and public policy people are keeping a close eye on Detroit’s model. It could be the wave of the future for cities. But fortunately, I would argue, not for Lexington. The reason Lexington should be glad that Detroit isn’t an appropriate model for its future is because, well, Detroit had to collapse before it could put forth such a radical change in American city design. In a 2007 Harper’s article, Rebecca Solnit speaks to the complexity of looking to Detroit as an exemplar: “This is the most extreme and long-term hope Detroit offers us: the hope the we can reclaim what we paved over and poisoned, that nature will not punish us, that it will welcome us home—not with the landscape that was here when we arrived, perhaps, but with land that is alive, lush, and varied all the same.” While Solnit sees Detroit as “a stronghold of possibility,” she doesn’t ignore the reality: “It is a harsh place of poverty, deprivation, and a fair amount of crime.”

Lexington isn’t Detroit, just as the north side—despite its reputation—isn’t Compton (as my friend Christian reminds people.) Lexington needs to continue to stress urban density, making housing close to our urban core affordable for people working full-time at McDonald’s, to young professionals, to retirees. We need to support and improve “blighted” areas, not dream about knocking them down. We need to tuck our gardens in wherever we can, as In-Feed and Seedleaf (among others) do. We need to think about country-urban the way the goat man seems to: living in a small home on the north side and walking a goat around town, maybe mowing people’s lawns along the way.

But, you may say, it sounds like the goat man is a poor immigrant. Why should he be a model? Well, why not? If urban living was, in part, pioneered by barely surviving immigrants in early twentieth-century New York and Chicago, why shouldn’t the goat man tell us something about how urban Lexington can work now?