A person with wealth can make themselves interesting by buying experiences, but some people are intrinsically interesting from the core because of the way they approach life, regardless of circumstances. Leora was such a person. She became a mentor and inspiration to me and changed the directory of my life. Dubbed “the goat woman of Oakville, Washington”, I met Leora when she asked Evergreen State College students for farm volunteers. Evergreen had one of the first Sustainable Agriculture programs in the country, which drew young idealists like flies. My husband Ron brought me to meet and stay with her for awhile and our 7-10 page handwritten letters were exchanged over the next ten years after we returned to Maine, until one of them was returned stamped “Deceased”.
Leora was about 4’8”,of an undefined age somewhere beyond 70, and her farm was a motley collection of animals and a couple of shacks at the end of a long dirt road into logging country. Stories were told about her when the school bus turned around at her drive at the end of the road and kids saw dead sheep or goats pushed out the window of her home. Her poultry freely nested throughout the tiny house amongst tall stacks of journals, books, and correspondence. One back room was used as a hospital environment for animals she was nursing back to health. If they did not make it, and were too heavy to move, she pushed them out the window so that she could then move them with her old pickup. A side addition housed Posy, an 800 pound sow, Leora’s intelligent companion. Leora’s faulty woodstove had a terrific downdraft and filled her house with smoke in the rainy climate. There was a frig containing antibiotics and vaccines Leora used freely on herself when needed. The freezer housed a filthy cardboard motor oil box containing the most exquisite museum quality Inuit garments I had ever seen, including long mitts sewn with the faces of wolves on each forearm. I helped her milk the goats by hand on a kitchen counter and she showed me how to make oatmeal the best way, with butter and goat milk. I ate below the smoke by sitting on the floor. I chose to sleep in the hay in the barn, for better air quality, where I was awakened by torrents of sheep piss and obnoxious Guinea Hens a mere feet away. On the positive side, there were three enormous Great Pyrenees to protect me, an ancient collie dog, and a sweet old mare.
It was revealed over time, while Leora showed me how to deal with sheep’s hooves and lambing and goat milking, that Leora had been born to an Inuit family of healers in Unalakleet, Alaska. She herself never, and would never, call herself a shaman (or the word in her native language, whatever that was) but her freezer treasures came from her origin and ancestors there. In her youth there was little contact with the outside world, save bush pilots on rare occasions. She had no early “education” as we know it, but was absolutely most thoroughly taught by her people. One day a pilot came, they eventually married, she went with him to Southern California, became a veterinarian, and they bred horses there until her husband died in his small plane in a crash. Leora was still reasonably young, but had broken her back in an incident with a stallion. She gradually moved northward over years, and also reverted to who she was in her Unalakleet life. Health problems and unconventional life choices left her impoverished in what most would consider a squalid home. Despite outward appearances, and health problems, Leora felt wealthy in animals, ideas, and plans for the future of her farm! She was an undeniable intellectual genius, reading widely on all subjects, and apprising her political representatives of her opinions regularly.
While she taught me many things, in a completely offhand way (which I learned later was a Native way), a couple of conversations and her encouragement led me to study Animal & Veterinary Science, rather than art or writing which came more naturally to me. One, which literally took place with Leora standing on a stump, was when she pointed to the ground and asked me to observe. It was the remnants of the spine of her prized ram, whose genetic superiority and lineage I had already learned about. She proceeded to share in minute detail every aspect of what had happened since his body was left in that spot after death. This story, because she told it in the form of a story, incorporated the entire cycle of ecological life, from the scavengers she allowed to share it right down to the smallest decomposers, along with the deconstruction of proteins and reconstruction of carbons, and the flow of energy throughout the storyline. Although she knew it in all its biochemical details she always framed it as a story of sharing and of beauty, never in terms of machines (reductivism) or human values (in terms of sadness) or anything “woo woo”. She told it as it was and is. I was an instant convert. Later, I made sculptures about this, after returning to art.
Another story was about Pinky the Hermaphrodite. Pinky was a champagne colored goat who led the rest of the white Saanens like a Pied Piper. Leora explained the special nature of Pinky by explaining a bit of embryology in what was understood in simplified terms back when Leora studied. Now it is understood in far greater complexity. Leora summarized by saying that each fertilized egg (we are talking mammals here) is on a “default program” to become a female, and diverts to differentiate into a male only when certain genetic switches activate. She also explained that before fertilization, the egg selectively determines, based on barely known factors, which sperm to allow through the cell wall, but I am getting into the weeds here. Suffice it to say that with my pitiful science education up till that point, I was open mouthed with amazement! Pinky, who had physical aspects of both genders, was not uncommon in the mammalian world either! Despite being sterile, Pinky was socially invaluable to the herd, and led them. The billy goat, who stunk and was disagreeable, had his role, which was off to the side of Pinky’s role. Leora had a world view that incorporated and accepted all-inclusively everything the natural world produced, and made a place for it respectfully. This is NOT to mean that she raised more than one billy goat or rooster. She was very pragmatic.
Years after the letter came back “Deceased”, we made the pilgrimage to Leora’s land with our two children in tow. Every structure and animal had vanished and the field was a field. A neighbor told us that she had bequeathed it to another young couple who had befriended her. They camped there in a tipi each summer with their kids. By total chance, through the network of soil scientists, my husband Ron learned online of a man who knew some more of the details of the razing of the shacks. In email he asked about the box of treasures in the freezer but nothing was known. He was able to share a photo of a statue of a bear that had been placed on the land, with a plaque telling Leora’s real name: Grinning White Bear, She need only to exist to enrich the lives of those she met.
