Best Laid Plans!

We had quite the day here on the farm.

A friend brought her two goat kids over for disbudding. Along for the ride were their mama goat (lounging in the back seat like a hairy queen), and her adult son, who has Down syndrome, riding shotgun. She had thoughtfully lined the back seat with a tarp and some big towels to catch any stray poops. They’re Nigerian Dwarf goats, so they didn’t take up much room—physically. Chaos-wise, they’re full-sized. The seat coverings would have been a great idea. . . if the thing that happened next hadn’t happened.

You know what they say about best laid plans.

She pulled into our parking area, turned off the car, got out, shut the door, and walked over to let me know she’d arrived. You see where this is going, right? You can probably already hear the ominous dun-dun-DUN in the background. She left the keys in the car. Her son, who is deathly afraid of dogs (and honestly not wild about the goats in the back seat either), heard our dogs bark and did what made perfect sense to him—he locked the doors. All of them.

She tried everything to get him to unlock them. Nope. Not happening. I think he was pretty sure that if he let her in, she’d try to drag him out into the Land of Barking Dogs. He’s nonverbal, but he understands some sign. She signed for him to unlock his door. He pointed at her door like, “Nah, you go open yours.” She signed back that her door was broken and she needed him to open his. He stared her down, then slowly turned his head like, “Nice try, Mom. Not falling for it.”

So we called the police. They don’t cover our town. They gave us the state police number. Called them—they don’t unlock vehicles anymore but would be happy to send a wrecker. I called my neighbor with a tow truck—he’s in South Carolina visiting family. Of course he is.

This, friends, is why God invented AAA.

The first thing they did was thank me for my 21 years of membership. Touching. Really. But what I wanted was someone to come unlock a goat-filled, poop-sprinkled vehicle before it turned into a rolling barn. They agreed to send someone—about 45 minutes away. Not ideal, but it’s not like we were in a position to negotiate. I should also mention that the weather was freezing rain and roads were getting slicker than a greased pig. Our AAA guy was not going to be happy.

So we waited.

She kept trying to coax her son into unlocking a door—any door. The goats, meanwhile, were staging a slow-motion barnyard uprising. They stomped the tarp, shuffled the towel, and began sprinkling goat berries into every single crevice of the back seat. I’ve seen better containment in glitter explosions.

We ordered pizza and passed the time by watching the steady spread of poop distribution.

When the AAA guy arrived, he looked confused. He saw someone in the passenger seat and assumed we’d gotten back in and forgot to cancel. She sprinted over to explain that no, the man in the passenger seat was not a willing participant. Nor were the three goats in the back.

He got to work. Less than 10 seconds later, pop—door open. And suddenly he’s face-to-face with three goats. I don’t know what he was thinking, but I’d bet money it was something along the lines of, “This isn’t in the employee handbook,” follo
wed closely by, “Please never send me here again.”

And here’s the kicker: one of the back windows was cracked open an inch. My husband had tried earlier to wedge a pole through it to reach the lock in the front—but couldn’t quite get to it. Turns out, the AAA guy just slid his tool straight down and popped the back door lock in one try.

Hubby admitted he hadn’t considered that. In his defense, maybe it was because goat heads were pressed to the glass, and trying to eat the pole like it was an hors d'oeuvre on a stick.

We tipped the AAA guy for braving freezing rain, my friend hugged him, we finished our pizza, and then finally got around to the original reason for all this: disbudding the goat kids. She made it home safe, though the roads had gotten worse by then.

The rest of the day was calm. Actually, a little boring by comparison.

But I guarantee she’ll be finding goat berries in that car for the rest of its life. And that next time, she’ll take her keys. . . and maybe a shop vac.

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