Introduction Voiceover: You're listening to season three of Future Ecologies.
Hey folks. What you're about to hear is a project that's been years in the making. It's new territory for us, both figuratively and literally. My co host, Adam will be taking the reins on this series. And to be honest, he
hasn't told me exactly where it leads. All I know is that it starts here – with the story of a rancher in the borderlands of the American Southwest: An iconoclast whose relationship with the land would come to shape one of the most important social movements of the 20th century. Just so you know, the second half of this episode mentions suicide. It's heavy, but brief. Okay, let's get to it.
In the spring of 1970, an unexpected visitor showed up in 16 year old Ann Russell's classroom in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California.
He arrived one day at john Woolman School, which is in Nevada city on a ranch – it's a Quaker school. He was friends with the principal, but I didn't know that he just arrived with his goats and his dog.
The dog's name was puck. The man's name was Jim. And the two goats that he brought with him that day, were part of an invitation that he had come to deliver to Ann and her fellow students at the Quaker school.
We had a lottery, he announced that he wanted to lead this group of eight students to practice living in harmony with the land.
The plan was to spend six months on a ranch in southern Arizona with Jim, his wife, Pat, puck, and the goats. He didn't sugarcoat it, the academic program would be demanding, and the accommodations humble. The goal was to practice radical simplicity.
I didn't really know what it meant – what Jim was really talking about us doing but he had this schpeel that he gave, and he said "dedicated hedonists need not apply". And so of course, I put my name in the hat.
At the time and told me she was open to anything from dedicated hedonism to radical simplicity. And it just so happened that Jim Corbett, a man who hewed much closer to asceticism than hedonism was the one who showed up at our school that day, with his goats.
I remember he pulled out a name and he said "Ann", and Ann Sotelo started to scream with joy. And then he said "Russell" [laughs].
And so in September of 1970, Ann and seven of her classmates arrived sight unseen, at a small ranch in the Sonoran Desert, outside of Tucson, Arizona.
And we had a little house on the ranch, Jim had a big house.
The students learned to milk goats, dig pit houses, and ride horses. Classes would take place outside under an old mesquite tree, and would feature lectures by Jim on the topic of the day, followed by discussion. The students were captivated.
He was a very compelling person. And part of it was, he had a vision for how society and maybe just starting with a few people could live with the earth. And he was relentless about thinking it through – about how it could work, about the philosophical underpinnings. And it was really attractive to a lot of people.
To some, this might sound like the makings of a cult, but that was kind of the milieu you have the 1970s. These were Quakers students interested in alternative lifestyles and getting back to the land. And if Jim was a cult leader, he was far from typical.
You know, he was a kind of a wizened, skinny person. In fact, he made he was started... when we were down there, he was making smoothies for us out of goat yogurt, and we were gonna market it as Jim Corbett's health drink with a picture of Jim on the label. Nobody would buy it [laughs].
The discussions and smoothies were memorable, if not marketable. But the culmination of the students semester in the desert was a two week expedition into the Galiuro mountains with Jim and herd of goats with names like White Queen, Sansha, Nero, Dearly Beloved, and Magpie Socialite Piddleteat.
Pretty much everybody had been backpacking, I think, but we were urban kids from you know, I don't think our family as being wealthy but we were able to go to a private boarding school. So we're privileged kids. And this was not something we had ever done.
The students along with Jim would be part of the herd. This meant that each student had to spend time with a goat until they imprinted on each other, so that the goats would stay with the students and allow them to milk them without restraints.
Before they knew that we were theirs, that they were ours, that we were together – they would, you know, they would fight. When you first milk a goat, she doesn't know you, she'll kick and try to get you out of her way. But then, Nero, my goat, she just looked at me suddenly, just these melting eyes – like I was her baby. And then she wouldn't let me out of her sight.
Now that they were bonded, they were ready for goatwalking.
We loaded up our backpacks. We had only oatmeal – oatmeal and Cream of Wheat for a little variety [laughs],and raisins, and brown sugar, salt, and then we had the goat milk. That was what Jim said. He says it in his book, that for your nutrition, that's really all you need. That's what you need. And whatever we could collect.
Collect, that is, from the desert. For two weeks, this group of aspiring back-to-the-landers would literally be living off the land. And when the day finally arrived...
We took the truck and horse trailer full of goats into Tucson, got maps in town, and then Pat dropped us off on the Cascabel road.
If the side of the road seems like a strange place to drop off a group of students and goats, it's because they ran out of gas.
And when I think of this now, I think, you know, being an adult and a parent, the things that they did with us, took so much courage. And they ran out of gas, and we ran out of gas, and we unloaded the goats, and climbed through the fence and onto public land. And Jim told us, you know, this is public land, we own it. And we headed toward the mountains. And we didn't – we weren't starting where we thought we were going to start. So Jim, you know, there was no water source
initially. And we didn't know where the water was going to be.
The only water around was what they had brought with them. But Jim was adamant: those canteens were off limits.
You know, we're privileged kids. Our lives were threatened because there wasn't enough water. And Jim said "No, you can drink milk, warm goat milk". Not terribly appetizing when you're really thirsty.
Still, despite their collective thirst, the students saved the water for the goats. Like Jim said.
You know, goats, they become bonded with you when you know. And there's a social structure within a goat herd. And we became part of that social structure. And that was part of his philosophy is we're not separate. We're part of the herd, we're part of the desert. We can be part of the desert in a low impact way. We had a tremendous amount of respect for him. We thought he knew everything.
For those two weeks out in the desert, the herd of students survived on goat's milk.
And oatmeal. We loved we loved our oatmeal. We looked forward to every meal with oatmeal. A lot. We had food dreams, though. And in the morning around the fire when we were cooking our oatmeal, we are talking about food dreams. And one of them – one of the guys had lived in Switzerland and he talked about raclette: melted cheese over bread. Oh, yeah, we lost we all lost a lot of weight. We lost our spoons. And when we lost our spoons, we made chopsticks.
They covered a lot of ground and the terrain was
exposed hillsides and dry washes. One day, they came to a particularly steep hill covered in the aptly named shrub, cat claw
It was very steep and to keep from sliding back you'd grab a bush so you get scratched and we were wearing shorts because we were clueless. So then we get all scratched on our knees – hands and knees. It was awful, really awful.
Just when it seemed like they'd never make it. One of Ann's classmates saved the day.
He said "well, it's not much like sailing". And that just made me crack up. It made everybody crack up and we were able to somehow struggle to the top of this ridge because he made us laugh.
Under the harsh blue sky, they found a sense of peace.
And then on the top of the ridge we locked up the ridge a little ways and we hit this grove of maple trees that had lost their leaves. So the branches were all gray and naked. It was gorgeous.
There were lots of quiet moments during those two weeks. And on one of those quiet goatwalks, Jim turned to Ann.
So Jim asked me what my calling was. I didn't know. I said "I don't know". And he said, "Well, you should think about it. Because you're smart enough, somebody will find you useful if you don't figure out what your life is about". And it was like, oh – that has stuck with me... forever.
After two weeks in the desert, Pat drove out with the horse trailer and collected the herd from their final days camp. A little leaner, perhaps, but filled with a sense of accomplishment. And for Ann, like so many other people who would come into contact with Jim over the years, the experience
changed the course of her life. Underneath the humble exterior of this philosopher turned goat herd was a true visionary, activist, and conservationist who would inspire generations of people in the Borderlands and beyond, to care for the earth and for one another; to seek what he would call a sanctuary for all life. And so much like Jim, I'd like to extend an invitation for you
to join me on a sojourn into the desert, sight unseen. Jim Corbett and his goats are, of course, the central characters. But the story is so much bigger than you could imagine. And it's still playing out to this day in the Borderlands of the Sonoran Desert, and across North America, from Future Ecologies, this is Goatwalker, part one: "On Errantry". My name is Adam, by the way, and I'll be your host for this
series. for regular Future Ecologies listeners, you may miss Mendel's voice, but they're still in the mix, just in a more editorial capacity, so that I can tell this story that I've been working on for nearly four years now. I first discovered Jim's work and ideas in a tiny one-room goat hunting cabin in the subalpine rock fields of Pitt
Island in British Columbia. The unseeded traditional territory of the Gitxaala First Nation. The goats in question were not actually goats at all, it turns out the mountain goats of Western North America are actually considered antelope goats, and are more closely related to musk oxen than true goats. Also, I wasn't really there to hunt them. I was part of a field crew led by Gitxaala UBC professor named Charles
Menzies, who you might remember from our Kelp Worlds series. We were attempting to trace the roots that his ancestors would have used to hunt mountain goats. And walking in their footsteps, we did catch tantalizing glimpses of those iconic, snowy white ungulates up there that summer. But that's another story. Now, as it happened, summer up in the coastal rain forest of Gitxaala territory is like no summer that I've ever
experienced. This is a part of the world where bogs can form on steep hillsides, just due to the sheer quantity of precipitation. Camped out for weeks on end in the subalpine, we'd often retreat to this cramped, one room cabin, and wait out the periodic rainstorms, which could last for days. As a result, I spent a lot of time in a small room with the field crew, keeping the stove hot and reading books. I can't really
remember what I brought to read that first expedition. But I quickly realized that everybody else in the cabin was reading books about mountain goats, with titles like "A Beast the Color of Winter", and "Mountain Goats: Ecology, Behavior and Conservation". I realized belatedly that I should get with the program, and so on a trip back home, I grabbed the only goat-related book in my house which bore the unusual title:
"Goatwalking: a Guide to Wildland Living – a quest for the peaceable kingdom."
I was dimly aware that the book was a gift to my partner from a farmer friend of ours, but that was about the extent of it. I settled up in my bunk with my sleeping bag, and cracked Goatwalking open for the first time.
Two milk goats can provide all the nutrients a human being needs, with the exception of vitamin C and a few common trace elements. Learn the relevant details about range goat husbandry, and something about edible plants and with a couple of milk goats, you can feed yourself in most of the wildlands – even in deserts.
From the very first words of the preface, I was hooked.
Civilized human beings don't fit into untamed communities of plants and animals as members of the community. Instead of adapting to wildlands, we tame them. The goat-human partnership can fit in, which opens the way for errantry. Goatwalking is errantry that takes the goat-human partnership's adaptation to wild lands as its point of departure.
I had to pause here. Goatwalking seems straightforward enough, but what is "errantry"? I'd only ever heard the word used in the famous novel Don Quixote, so I looked it up. Merriam Webster defines errantry as follows: Errantry is the quality, condition, or fact of wandering, especially a roving in search of chivalrous adventure. If ever there was a man wandering in search of chivalrous adventure,
it was Jim. The rest of the preface gets even stranger, but I want you to hear it in full to offer you the same experience that I had reading it for the first time.
Errantry is primarily concerned with communion, which in our age focuses on the harmonious adaptation of human civilization to life on Earth. The first decisive step into errantry is to become untamed – at home in wildlands. To be at home in wildlands, one must accept and share life as a gift that is unearned and unowned.
When we cease to work at taming the creation, and learn to accept life as a gift, a way opens for us to become active participants in an ancient Exodus out of idolatry and bondage, a pilgrimage that continues to be conceived and born in wilderness. Leisure, solitude, dependence on uncontrolled natural rhythms, alert concentration on present events, long nights devoted to quiet watching. Little wonder that so many religions originated among herders. And so many religious metaphors are
pastoral. This dimension of the pastoral experience is as accessible to the Goatwalker, as it was to a pre-industrial shepherd watching the night pass over. Wildlands can wake us to forgotten harmonies, if we return as participants who belong there, rather than as appreciative aliens or subjugating conquerors. As a survival technique, independent of the market economy and land ownership, goatwalking works very well, but is as self-defeating as any other
self-centered activity. No one survives for long. As a way to cultivate a dimension of life that's lost to industrial man, goatwalking may put us in touch with a mystery more real than we are. Goatwalking is a book for saddlebag or backpack to live with for a while, casually. It is compact and multifaceted, but
for unhurried reflection rather than study. It is woven from stargazing and campfire talk to open conversations rather than to lead the reader on a one way track of entailment to necessary conclusions. I prove no points. This is no teaching.
Okay, so perhaps you're thinking that Jim spent a little bit too much time by himself in the desert. Or perhaps you're put off by the religious phrasing and undertones in this passage. Maybe you're intrigued and want to dive in a little bit deeper. I had all of these reactions, all at once. And since this was the only book that I'd lugged up to the cabin with me in my pack, I just decided to accept Jim's
invitation and follow him into the desert. When I emerged several days later, I realized that I'd encountered a truly original thinker, captured within a book that was like no other that I'd ever read. I knew that there must be more to this story. And when I got home, I couldn't really find anything else out there. So I decided to try and tell it myself. It took me a couple of years and starting a podcast to finally start searching for the right person to help me tell it.
First, I got in touch with a local Tucson radio station. And they told me that I had to speak with a man named John Fife. So, I gave him a call. And I was surprised when he picked up after the first ring. I was actually caught a little bit off guard, and so I somehow managed to only record his side of the conversation. Anyway, one of the first things that I asked him was whether all of that stuff about goatwalking was actually true.
Oh, yeah. I mean, that was Jim's iconic way of teaching philosophy. He would teach them desert survival with a goat, go out on these month-long treks, and teach philosophy as he was spending evenings around a campfire and hiking during the day. And he used the desert survival as a kind of metaphor for how one philosophically survives in in an alien and hostile culture.
So it was legit.
Of course.
We ended up talking about their friendship, their disagreements, and where I could find a copy of Jim's second book published after his death.
Everybody who has one has it locked up in a safe somewhere.
No luck there, I guess. And then I mentioned that I was considering a visit to Tucson to spend some time in the desert, and that I'd be honored to meet him and record an interview, if he was willing.
Well, don't get carried away. Before you come down, you need to understand that Jim was the brightest, most intelligent person I have ever met. I was only smart enough to know to pay attention to Jim, right? And not – not get in his way. But if you come down, I mean, the closest people to Jim are Pat and his colleagues at at Saguaro Juniper who lived and worked with him out there after sanctuary.
Pat, you'll remember from the intro was Jim's wife. I asked him if he could put us in touch.
Yeah, sure. I'll just give you her phone number. Her number is --- --- mule, M-U-L-E. I don't know. It's just the way Jim explained it to me and I haven't forgotten. "Oh yeah just
--- mule!"
I booked tickets and told John that we'd be in touch.
Okay. Good night.
That October, I was on my way to Tucson. I didn't go down alone though. I was joined by my partner, Ilana, and our friend Teresa. Teresa is originally from Tucson. So she acted as our guide. And Ilana is the kind of person who other people just open up to it helps that she always knows the right questions to ask. But I also think that she has some kind of invisible gravity that just draws people in, and causes them
to unburden themselves with her. A dubious gift practically speaking, but for an interviewer, an undeniable asset. Coming as we were from the Pacific Northwest, the dry heat that greeted us as we stepped out of the terminal in Tucson was a welcome shock to the senses. Outside, the silhouette of a towering saguaro cactus against the star-filled night sky was enough to give this amateur botanist an elevated heart rate.
But Tucson would have to wait. The next morning, we struck out for the small remote town of Cascabel, several hours to the east of Tucson on the beautiful San Pedro River. We have to go speak to a woman about a mule.
Come on Lumpy, come on Nimby, come on Clue!
[Gate opening]
Lumpy? How do you get a name like lumpy?
[Unintelligible]
I'm sorry [laughs]. Can you say that again? It's short for what?
Lumpen proletariat.
Lumpen proletariat?
Well, when I first got this horse he seemed like such a big lump and he's not actually. He's one of the cleverer horses you'll ever meet. Come on, Lumpy!
I hear the galloping!
Here they come!
[Sound of galloping in distance as horses approach. Then horse breaths, and the gate closing]
This is Pat Corbett: the woman who taught Ann Russell and the other John Woolman students how to ride horses, and who still keeps and rides horses to this day. But that's not how she started out. For decades, had worked as a librarian.
Well, I'm old enough to have careers for women were not as open as they are now. And so there was kind of a choice between being a nurse, being a teacher, or being a librarian. And I knew I didn't want to be a nurse, and I didn't really want to be a teacher, so that left being a librarian, which I did like – I enjoyed that.
Pat and Jim met when she was 23, and they were both enrolled in library school at the University of Southern California.
Well, I thought he was kind of odd, but the better I got to know him, the more I enjoyed it, obviously, because we ended up getting married.
They ended up being a good match. And they were together until his death in 2001, at the age of 67. Everything that Jim did, Pat would play a major if somewhat unsung role in. Well, almost everything. The goats were definitely more Jim's thing.
I just figured I have a full time job and I wasn't gonna milk goats and that was okay. He didn't mind. I just didn't have Jim's enthusiasm for spending vast amounts of time out sleeping on the ground. When people would ask me if I went goatwalking with him, I'd always just explain that I'd go with him until my supply of ham and cheese sandwiches ran out, then I'd go home.
In many ways, it was Pat's support and practical nature that allowed Jim the freedom to roam the desert for weeks on end.
People would say "Oh, what does your husband do?" "Well, let's see. I guess you could say he's a goatherd, philosopher cattleman", and I'd get this very strange look.
So what exactly is a goatherd philosopher? Well, on its face, it's quite simple. Jim was a philosopher and he spent a lot of time with goats. To go deeper, you have to be willing to spend some time with his first book Goatwalking, which takes some decoding. It's dense with references to Don Quixote, the Torah, Chung Tzu, and Henry David Thoreau – equal parts survival handbook, memoir, religious text, and
philosophical treatise. Jim draws liberally from Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Quakerism, which means you have to be willing to adapt to the idiosyncratic use of religious language in his writing. But at Goatwalking's core is a simple message, captured beautifully in the subtitles that mark its first chapter:
Going out; Doing nothing; Getting nowhere; Losing hold.
It asks us to put aside our bottomless need for productivity and entertainment, and to try – even for just a short time – to be at home in wildlands. You could do this any number of ways. And for Jim, goatwalking was his portal. It was a way to become feral for a time in a society that all but makes this impossible.
Goatwalking happens to be the easiest way I know to feed myself by fitting into an ecological niche, rather than a social hierarchy. It also happens to be the only way I've discovered to share and bequeath the outlook and practice of symbiotic covenanting with a technocratic society.
For Jim, covenanting is a social activity whereby a community fulfills its sacred obligation to wildland communities to protect, care for, and hallow them. Hallow – as in to honor as being holy. You know: "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name" – words which are imprinted in my
head from years of Bible school. But for some reason, despite my deep, reflexive mistrust of this religious language, which I associate with personal feelings of betrayal, Jim's writing casts these words in a different light.
Goatwalking is errantry that is primarily concerned with opening a way through adversities faced by any people that covenants to treat no one as an inferior, enemy, or alien. To choose freedom is to cease collaborating with organized violence, but ceasing to collaborate means errantry of one kind or another. In the eyes of Pharaohs and slaves, it means straying out into the desert.
Right there, next to that biblical reference to the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt, there's that word
Errantry. It's not remotely biblical. As I've said before, it's a reference to Don Quixote, who fashioned himself a
a man who wanders in search of adventures and opportunities to prove his chivalry. For Jim, who wandered errant in the desert with his goats, ruminating on ways to live non-violently in a technocratic society, the irony that Don Quixote was tilting at windmills was not lost.
Errantry mean sallying out beyond the society's established ways, to live according to one's inner leadings. This looks like, and in a sense is madness – Quixote's madness. Both the lunatic and the visionary create a life outside the ready-made roles prescribed by their society.
Prophets, mystics, and fools all seem to merge from the margins of history – from the desert. And it can be hard sometimes to tell them apart. Impossible, perhaps, if their resolve is never tested. As it happens, though, Jim would find himself tested in a way that few of us will ever be. But in order to fully appreciate the story I'm going to tell in this series, I think it's important to understand just how Jim came to be a goatherd philosopher
cattleman. Because this man that I have become fascinated by, who would go on to do such extraordinary things – I don't really want to put him on a pedestal. He was just a man. And many people stood beside him during his trials, both literal and figurative, some of whom I speak to in the series, and some of whom will go unnamed. He was in some senses extraordinary, and in others, just ordinary. But there is a quality that I
think makes him stand out from most of the rest of us. If we're being honest with ourselves.
It was, I guess, so apparent right from the start that he marched to his own drummer, and if he thought something was wrong, he just did it.
I grew up - let's see, I was born in 1933 and grew up in and around Casper, Wyoming.
This is Jim's voice captured in a series of tapes by journalist Miriam Davidson in the mid 1980s. Aside from a few videos that I was able to dig up, these tapes, which Ms. Davidson and the University of Arizona have generously shared with me, are the only recordings that I have of Jim, and as a result, you'll occasionally hear Ms. Davidson interjecting in the conversation. Jim grew up in the conservative culture of depression-era Wyoming, but his
parents were educated and worldly. His father had been a lawyer in the Ozarks, but had lost some of his eyesight in a car accident and had to support his family, with three children, on a teacher's salary, which wasn't very much in those days. To supplement, they'd live off the land at times.
You know, we lived out a lot. We'd go out just – virtually all the meat we ate, and we ate a lot of meat because it was the cheapest, easiest thing was, you know, deer, moose, elk, and so forth. And then, during the summer vacation, we would simply take a tent, and move up into the Tetons and live up there.
Wow must have been fun!
Yeah, it was good. But it was a very independent kind of life.
Jim came by his love of wildlands honestly. He must also have inherited some of his deep personal convictions from his father.
My father had a very strong sense of justice, a strong social conscience.
His lifelong fascination with religions, however, doesn't appear to have come from either parent.
I can remember, when I was nine years old, I learned about the Baptist and they said, they can fix it up so I'd live forever, and that sounded like a good idea. And so I started attending church. I can still remember at one point all full of myself, coming back home and telling my mother that when I grew up I was going to be a preacher. She looked at me, and she said "Well, you'll get over it" [laughs].
In some ways, he did, and in some ways, he didn't. His mother's cynicism about religions apparently did rub off on him though, because he quickly dispensed with Christianity and its extravagant promises of life after death. He never did become a preacher. But he did form a deep, lifelong friendship with a man who did. A man that I've already introduced you to. Good morning,
I'm John.
Adam.
Adam?
Nice to meet you at long last!
Well, welcome.
After meeting Pat in Cascabell, we returned to Tucson and met up with John Fife at Southside Presbyterian Church. Whereas Pat shared Jim's economy with words, John was gregarious and welcoming. And Southside itself was beautiful, with an inclusive circular worship area that was far removed from the pew and pulpit chapels of my childhood. We took a seat in his office and picked up right where my phone conversation with him had left off.
Jim grew up on a sheep ranch in Wyoming. And everybody recognized – folks I've talked to from his childhood – everybody recognized he was smarter than everybody else in Wyoming.
When it came time for Jim to graduate high school, it was clear that he needed to look beyond Wyoming. For his undergraduate, he went to Columbia University on a full scholarship, graduating in just three years with a perfect 4.0 GPA. Up next was an invitation from Harvard to get his master's in philosophy.
And I've talked to guys who were in Harvard with him and they said "Oh, yeah, Corbett was a smartest guy. We knew. And there was a big gap between Corbett and the second and third smartest guys in the class". So it was obvious.
Jim Corbett: a goatherd with a master's in philosophy. But the goats would come later. Right after graduating from Harvard, Jim volunteered to be drafted into the army. His justification?
Well, I was drafted – in fact, I volunteered for the draft. And I just grew up thinking once you get to that point, you're going to be drafted, might as well get it over with.
This was the mid 1950s, before Jim discovered Quakerism, and not long after the Second World War and the Korean War. Coming from Wyoming, Jim was raised at a time and place where serving was viewed as an inevitability for young men. But as you might have guessed, the army was not a great place for someone who marches to the beat of their own drum,
I was drafted into the army. And because my commanding officer considered me a demoralizing influence –
And why did he say that?
Oh, I just – I was.
How so?
I just did everything that kind of showed I didn't have the proper respect and discipline, but not in ways where they could actually –
You mean your shoes weren't shined and your hair wasn't combed?
Yeah all that sort of thing.
That's funny.
So anyway –
I wonder and you weren't afraid of what they would do to you or...?
Oh, yeah, I tried to avoid...You know, I'm fairly good at being out of the way when they swat [laughs].
During his stint in the army, Jim married a girl named Mary Lou from his hometown of Casper, Wyoming. And they had three unplanned children just before and after he was discharged. The marriage only lasted five years. And in the end, Mary Lou left without warning and took the children with her. Jim, just entering his late 20s, was suddenly adrift.
Yeah, I went through a kind of controlled
wandered around, went off to Berkeley for a while – holed up there, reading nothing, virtually nothing, for a while, but Bahasa Indonesia.
What?
I had to look this up Bahasa Indonesia is a standardized version of Malay that is spoken in Indonesia. During his time in Berkeley, Jim would just go back and forth to the library, checking out books in Bahasa Indonesia. He settled into a pretty deep depression.
I was turned around, you know. Self absorption kind of reached a point of committing suicide, I guess.
In Goatwalking, Jim writes about this moment,
Sitting in the cheapest room I could find in Berkeley, I often concentrated on my heartbeat. When I concentrated on it, the stillness expanded and each beat became a sudden clutching – to keep from slipping away into final stillness. Each beat let me know that my heart still cared enough to clutch for life. As caring withered, the stillness grew, and the clutching weakend. Late one night, as I sat waiting with indifference for each next beat of my heart, I realized that it was slowing much more
than ever before – to a stop. The last strands of caring gave way. I let go. Out of the stillness that I thought was death, love enlivened me. Or something like love that doesn't split, the way love does – into loving and being loved.
And it was at that time that when I kind of put my personality back together again, I had the reorientation that made me decide that must be a Quaker, from what little I knew about them, and I looked up the meetings.
For those unfamiliar with Quakerism, it's a non violent religious movement that branched out from Protestant Christianity. Only a small percentage of Quakers participate in the kind of meeting that Jim is describing, though. In these meetings of friends, Quakers will worship by sitting in silence with one another. If any person is moved to provide testimony, then they simply do. Otherwise the affair
is silent. For Jim, the stillness of love that doesn't split, the stillness of the Quaker meeting, and the stillness of the desert would become his spiritual Foundation – one that he could return to, over and over. A lot happened in Jim's life between his time in Berkeley in the early 60s, and his goatwalks with the John Woolman school in the late 1970s. He studied to be a librarian met and married Pat.
And unsurprisingly, he spent a good deal of time during the Vietnam War in the 1960s as an anti war activist, specifically targeting young draft aged men, like he had been a decade before and encouraging them to become conscientious objectors. But two other things happen during this time that are worth noting. The first is that he was suddenly struck by a mysterious autoimmune disease,
It attacked bodily organs caused swelling of muscles. There were quite a few different symptoms. And it was diagnosed as being one of dermatomyositis periarteritis nodosa, or systemic lupus erythematosus. The diagnosis actually, that had come when I was at the University of Oregon, was one where it seemed unlikely that I live more than a year or so. So you know, it was a fairly severe kind of situation.
This unknown, debilitating shape shifting sickness preyed on Jim for several years, as he worked as a librarian at post-secondary institutions in Oregon, Arizona and California. Pat wasn't at all sure that he was going to survive.
But then eventually, and this was some years later, we moved over to California, so he could go to the UCLA Medical Center, and the doctors out there said "Well, I don't know what you had before. But I tell you what you have now: you have rheumatoid arthritis", which, you know, it sounds kind of awful. But we kind of celebrated that diagnosis, because it was better than the alternatives.
Jim would live. But for the rest of his life, his hands and feet would be visibly contorted, and he would experience near constant pain. Ann noticed this during her time with Jim on the goatwalk.
He was in pain a lot. But he just – he said you just sort of notice it, and then kind of put it away. You're never unaware of it, but you don't let it dominate.
Although he might not admit it. The pain gave him a resolve that allowed him to continue on ahead when others would have been discouraged.
I guess it made it so that I always feel a lot more grateful about still being alive, if that's about it.
Even as he managed to continue working despite his illness,he second thing that happened during this period was that he just kept getting fired for taking stands on things. First, he lost his job at Cochise College in Arizona, because he insisted on defending a decidedly unpatriotic piece of artwork on exhibit there. It was an issue of freedom of speech. And then, after taking a position at Chico State in
California, he took a stand on academic freedom. It was 1969, and there were widespread protests and a strike all across the California State system. But Jim wasn't interested in any of that.
It was kind of traditional left wing stuff with lots of slogans and raised clenched fists and all that kind of stuff, and without in my opinion, the kind of respect for truth that one needs. That is, all of the these faculty members at that time that were getting involved in protest had to identify themselves as an oppressed class of some kind. And coming from having lived much of my life cowboying, sheepherding, and whatnot, I didn't see a lot of oppressed
people on the faculties of the California State system. And I thought it was a lot of nonsense. So I wasn't involved in the traditional left wing stuff, and I couldn't stand their meetings. In any case, so I was actually fired for holding a one person strike [chuckles].
I find this piece of tape so revealing. The actual details of the issue are tedious. Jim objected to the firing of another faculty member and tried to right the issue internally, before eventually writing some incendiary things in a local paper. But the fact that in this time of intense political turmoil and social change, Jim had honed in on a perceived wrong that everybody else was overlooking, and it taken a lonely stand with really nothing to gain and plenty to
lose personally. It's a recognizable pattern. After Chico, Jim and pat moved back to Arizona, and Jim spent a lot of time doing the things that came most naturally to him. ranching, herding and activism. It's during this period in the 1970s, when he would develop this practice of goatwalking
Jim's a rancher – by history, by all he learned growing up about how a herd relates to the land, and all of those interactions and all of the relationships that that you need to understand for the... for both the land and the herd, and the person who's the herder and how that interaction sustains and grows, the whole ecology of all of those relationships. And he put all of that together from from probably his earliest years, but continued it his whole life.
It's an incredible gift that he brought to the land and to the desert here. And his unique quest to figure out how one survives in an extreme ecology, like the Sonoran Desert, with
This practice of errantry, or sojourning, feral what the desert provides, and one goat for nutrition, right? He figured all of that out quickly. And then practiced it – Practiced it and practiced it with groups of students he brought to the desert on desert treks, while he taught them desert survival with that one goat, which is why he called i
goatwalking. And then use that experience to help them unde stand what they have just expe ienced as a metaphor for how ne survives with integrity and f ith, in the midst of a toxi culture, which, which trie to destroy everything ecol gically and humanly. And so it w s... it was pure genius in pr ctice. into the wild lands. It's an ancient spiritual practice. But Jim discovered a unique way to practice and teach it in the
modern era that has few, if any analogues. I've personally spent many, many hours milking goats, and a good deal of time walking with them as well. I've also spent many days and nights out in wildlands. I've even done a couple of 10-day silent meditation retreats, which were some of the most challenging days of my life. But putting all of this together, I keep trying to imagine the kind of freedom of thought, of movement, experience, and revelation that Jim's practice of goatwalking
might offer. It's the reason that I went down to Tucson, and it's also the reason that I return to goatwalking over and
to bathe in the wisdom and ideas born of those desert nights. And Jim's ideas were about to be put to the test.
When we started to be aware of the repression, and the death squads, and the torture, and the persecution of the church – the gunning down of the Archbishop, the killing of 17 priests. A Catholic priest and I, who had been doing a lot of social justice work together in the barrio here, said, you know, we need to make sure people here are aware of the repression in
El Salvador for people of faith. And Jim came to me at that point, and said, "John, I don't think we have any choice under the circumstances except to start smuggling refugees safely across the border. So they're not caught by Border Patrol or immigration authorities". And I basically said "really, how do you figure that Jim?"
I mean, that was the kind of thing he did, you know. If he came involved in something that he thought was important, and needed something done about that he might be able to do, then he was very likely to go do it or try and do it.
So were you prepared for how quickly all of this would have happened?
No, I didn't have a clue. Somehow it just came upon us. If you're around Jim, things like this would happened. And then somehow you just sort of took it for granted.
You know, we never got you to do we never got you to introduce yourself and tell us your name and where you are.
Well, my name is Pat Corbett, and I was married to Jim Corbett, who was one of the folks responsible for starting the Sanctuary Movement.
That's next time – on part two of Goatwalker. Goatwalker is produced by myself, Adam Huggins and Mendel Skulski, for Future Ecologies. For photos, citations and more information about the people and events described in this series, please visit futureecologies.net. In this episode, you heard Ann Russell, John Fife, Pat Corbett, Jim Corbett, and Miriam Davidson. Narration by Phillip Buller. Music was by Hidden Sky, People with Bodies, Ben Hamilton, and
Sunfish Moon Light. The Goatwalking Theme is by Ryder Thomas White and Sunfish Moon Light. Special thanks to Ilana Fonariov, Teresa Maddison, Susan Tollefson, John Fife, Pat Corbett, Nancy Ferguson, Tom Orum, Gary Paul Nabhan, Gita Bodner, Amanda Howard and the University of Arizona, Charles Menzies, Sadie Couture, Phil Buller and Jan Adler, Michael Smith and Cathy Suematsu, and Danny Elmes. Future Ecologies is an independent production, supporte
by our Patrons. To join them g to patreon.com/futureecologies This series was recorded on the territory of the Tohono O’odham, and produced on the unceded, shared, and asserted territory of the Penelakut, Hwlitsum, Lelum Sar Augh Ta Naogh, and other Hul’qumi’num speaking peoples. It's important to acknowledge that the public lands that Jim would walk his goats on are also stolen Indigenous lands, as are the lands that we produce this podcast on. Thank you for listening and see you next time.