For the love of goats, nearly 300

CORINTH, Vt. -- In a vintage farmhouse on Cookville Road, three goats lay curled in a hollowed-out recliner. A troupe of them idled in the sunroom overlooking a mountain vista, and a small one stood aloft on a battered microwave oven, surveying the premises he and his brethren command.

There are nearly two dozen goats scampering about this house, where soiled hay covers the floor and stairs, measuring more than a foot deep in places, and goat carcasses are piled under a blue tarp just outside the front door, awaiting a proper burial.

Ever since winter, when temperatures dipped to cruel lows and the goats began dying, the tin-roofed white house without heat and scant furniture has been their home, much as it is for Chris Weathersbee, a onetime Washington journalist turned aspiring cheese-maker and follower of a Buddhism-inspired religion that dictates no harm to animals.

"Every time one of them goes, they take a little more of me and a little more of my spirit," Weathersbee said, as he lay curled on his side in the hay, blowing air into the mouth of an ailing baby goat cradled in his arm.

Conditions at Weathersbee's home are, it goes without saying, unusual. The state has been monitoring Weathersbee's mental state and keeping tabs on his herd for several years. Officials recently seized 44 goats deemed unhealthy due to malnutrition, leaving nearly 300 others on the 30-acre expanse that Weathersbee's mother -- the novelist, Mary Lee Settle -- helped purchase for her son several years ago.

Yet what to make of Weathersbee, a large man who speaks with crisp diction and offers expansive, if at times elliptical, thoughts, is another story, the subject of debate and confusion for town residents and local officials alike.

It is one complicated by mores of a state long a haven for city folks who decided to drop out and return to the earth for a lifestyle of their own, at times, eccentric choosing. Indeed, ask around Corinth, a town of 1,400 residents about 20 miles from Montpelier, and a chorus of voices rises to argue that a man who chooses to live with goats should be allowed to do so.

"We are earth people in God's country," said Thomas Shea, a paint contractor in town. "That's why everyone wants to come up here and be a part of it. They bring their problems with them from the city, like this fellow. But what they ought to do with him is leave him alone. It's his property."

Linda Pastelnick, the town clerk, said, "In Virginia, that house would have been condemned. Here in Vermont, we do things a little differently."

Others, though, say conditions at Weathersbee's house are unsanitary and unsafe for the goats, as well as for him.

"Here's an old man who had a good idea that went awry," said Carrie Sandin, an editor at Northern Woodlands, a forestry magazine. "In a city, if this was a woman with 30 cats, someone would have stepped in, a social worker, somebody."

This being rural Vermont, state officials say, by law, there is little for them to do. The 63-year-old Weathersbee, they have determined, is neither a threat to himself nor to others and cannot be involuntarily detained or committed. In February, when the state seized the 44 goats, Weathersbee of his own volition accompanied State Police to their local barracks, where he was questioned and released.

"Mr. Weathersbee doesn't look at things the way you or I do," said Lieutenant Walter Goodell, of the State Police. "But that does not make him a threat to himself. There is no law that says he can't live in a barn."

The Central Vermont Humane Society, which initiated the investigation into his goat caretaking, says there is a name for his type. "He is a classic case of an animal hoarder," said Sherry LeMay, the director of operations. "There is such a thing as loving too much."

For his part, Weathersbee waves off questions about his mental state with a reference to a monastic life bounded by vows. "I'm on my own path," he said. "It's too difficult to think about what others think. I've done my thing as an intellectual and as an artiste, and it didn't do me any good. It didn't help me get ready to die."

As to the goats, Weathersbee says a combination of bad luck and state indifference has contributed to their population explosion and residence in his home. If the state had given him the loan he asked for, he said, he could have built proper fences and kept the males away from the females and had a proper barn in which to keep his herd of Nubians, Alpines, and Nigerian Dwarfs.

Yet now that he has all these goats, he says, he will not send them away, for fear that they would be slaughtered, which he says would violate the tenets of the Buddhist-inspired religion he follows, the name of which he asked not be printed. Instead, he has banked hope on a group of Tibetan monks who he says have expressed interest in taking control of the property and the goats and who have indicated they would allow him to remain on the premises.

"I haven't spoken directly to the monk," Weathersbee said. "I am dealing with an intermediary. But I have to go on the faith that the Buddhists will come."

Weathersbee was raised in England and attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he studied chemistry. He did not graduate, according to school records. He worked as a journalist, eventually becoming editor of the trade publication Clinical Chemistry News in Washington and was later a freelance writer.

Eccentric is a word that attached to Weathersbee early on, along with remarkable and bright. "He would always take on incredibly challenging projects and approach them from a very creative standpoint," said Scott Hunt, a one-time colleague at Clinical Chemistry News. "He is very hard to categorize."

Weathersbee describes his route to Vermont from Washington as circuitous, with stops in Texas in pursuit of a woman and New Hampshire in search of a simpler life. Vermont was to be the place he settled, something his mother had longed hoped for and decided to help finance, pouring thousands of dollars into the farm, by both their accounts.

"He wanted to live in the country; he was tired of the rat race, the usual story," said Settle, who won the National Book Award in 1978 for her novel "Blood Ties." She now lives in Virginia, after spending two years on the farm with Weathersbee and Weathersbee's former girlfriend and son, both of whom have also departed.

Settle says she cheers her son for caring for the goats as he does.

"He's absolutely rescued those goats," she said. "It's been a terrible winter up there. He never missed getting feed for them. He brought the weaker ones into the house when the the average temperature was 20 below. It was very sensible."

For now, Weathersbee survives on pasta and tomato sauce; his goats eat hay he wangles on credit. Callers inquiring about the goats are turned away, the promise of the Buddhists' arrival, his ticket to stay on the property, churning in his mind.

"I don't claim to be a philosopher," Weathersbee says as he sips milky tea from a mug that moments earlier he allowed the front-yard cow to lap. "But this is true: Wherever you go, there you are."