This couple just smiles, and says 'goat cheese'
GRAY, Maine - Major life changes usually have predictable catalysts: a job offer, a divorce, a windfall, or a health crisis. Less likely is something as mundane as a plate of goat cheese, but that's what was responsible for four Alpine dairy goats, a rambling 106-year-old farmhouse in rural Maine, a baby girl, a book, and everything else that's happened to Margaret Hathaway and Karl Schatz in the last few years.
Hathaway, 31, isn't sure it was the cheese that set her off on a 40,000-mile journey to learn all she could about goats. "That's how Karl remembers it," she says, sitting in her dining room, which overlooks a large vegetable garden and an overgrown apple orchard. Schatz, 37, joined Hathaway on her cross-country adventure and took the photos for "The Year of the Goat: 40,000 Miles and the Quest for the Perfect Cheese." Their own goats were purchased to make cheese, but so far the goats haven't produced any milk.
What the young couple agree on is that after living for a few years in Brooklyn, they both began to pine for an agricultural life. Hathaway, who had spent a year working in cookbook publishing, was a manager at Manhattan's Magnolia Bakery. Schatz was an online photo editor at Time magazine. Before they met, both had lived abroad: Hathaway as a Fulbright scholar in Tunisia, and Schatz as a documentary photographer in Russia and Poland.
"We've seen that the world isn't so wasteful," says Hathaway. "Goats seemed so versatile and useful. We loved that they could make do anywhere."
There was only one problem. Beyond their love of goat cheese, they had little experience with goats, or farming for that matter. But somehow goats continued to capture their imaginations, and cosmic signs pointed them toward a life beyond Manhattan's skyline. The most auspicious of these was that 2003 happened to be the year of the goat in the Chinese zodiac.
Thus the decision to leave the city and their jobs, and spend the year crisscrossing 43 states in their Hyundai Santa Fe - "The Goat Mobile" - with their dog, Godfrey, to figure out if goats were in their stars. "Luckily, when we met our first goat, we liked it," Hathaway says. The couple witnessed a Halal goat slaughter in Maine, milked goats in Washington, ate goat BBQ in Tennessee, and watched meat goat auctions in Texas. And, of course, nibbled lots of goat cheese.
Hathaway and Schatz blogged about these experiences and more on their website, yearofthegoat .net. "We started out thinking of it as a Web documentary," says Hathaway.
"We had the idea of educating people about goats," adds Schatz. "We were learning so many amazing things about these animals, and the website was one way to pull all that information together." After the couple married in 2004, Hathaway wrote a book proposal, which sold when they settled into their farmhouse.
Today there's a Subaru Outback ("Maine's state car," jokes Hathaway) parked next to the Goat Mobile in front of their house. The four goats are Flyrod, Chansonetta, Percival Baxter, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, named after historic Maine figures. Godfrey the dog is still with them, and Charlotte, 14 months, has joined the crew. Hathaway and Schatz are founding members of Portland's Slow Food convivium, and the couple keeps in touch with other like-minded local farmers through the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners' Association.
They're raising chickens and ducks on the four acres that are cleared. They had planned to make goat cheese, but sparks didn't fly when they introduced a buck to their two female goats this fall, which means no goat milk. Instead, they'll spend this year trying to live off the meat and eggs from their chickens, as well as the produce from their garden. Maybe someday they'll run a community-supported agricultural group or sell cheese at the local farmers' markets. That is, if Flyrod and Chansonetta get lucky.
Later, in the orchard, Hathaway, with her tumble of brown curls held back in a bandana, thinks carefully when asked if she could have imagined this life 10 years ago.
"I was a senior at Wellesley, so no, I wasn't thinking about living on a farm. But this," she says, standing among the apple trees, "this feels right and whole to me." 