BEARDED MARAUDER

THE BEARDED MARAUDER
Our biggest adversary during the ALLURA project turned out to be a 85 pound horned devil that went by the name of Billy, which denoted the type of beast that we are referring to. This mutinous goat plagued our work-days at every turn. He broke into our wood loft and pooped on our marine-grade plywood, he ate bag lunches, he chewed on expensive boat pieces, he jumped on the hood of a purple Mercedes, he chased down two Grandmothers and constantly tormented the two little girls who lived nearby. It seemed that his reason for living was to bother us and that his escape from boredom was to stall us whenever possible. No matter what kind of barricades we set up to keep the little prankster away from the wood loft, he would work tirelessly to break them down and again we would find him standing proud on top of a $10,000 stack of plywood. One day after chasing him off, we were shuffling wood into a truck through the top window of the barn. After about 20 minutes of pushing wood out of the window Ryan bent over with his hands on his knees to take a breather. In that moment, alone in the wood loft, Ryan sensed a certain presence and had that instant, sinking feeling you get when you think you are being watched. Sure enough the horned bedraggler was behind him and having a staring match with Ryan’s backside. He was scraping his hoof on the ground in true Billy fashion and threatening to buck Ryan right out of the second story of the barn. Ryan looked between his legs and caught the beast in a deadlock stare - from the most vulnerable position. It was a reaction more than any kind of plan: Ryan jumped in a 180-of-fear and spooked the goat off using a combination of adrenaline and the nearest length of lumber. This was our lesson learned from having an animal for an adversary: goats and boats don’t mix. We succeeded that year despite our nemesis. We even had a chance to take pity on the poor goat, because it seems that after we were done storing things in the wood loft he felt that the game was still on. No one knows how many days he might have pranced around in celebration of having control of the wood loft. His proud victory dance must have gone on too long though, because we returned later to find a Billy sized hole in the loft next to a wood pile. The loft was about 12 ft. up and to the best of our investigative knowledge it seems that he must of leapt from the wood pile and all at once punched his little hooves through the particle-board loft only to plummet further to the hard concrete below. He survived and lived on to sabotage many more of our projects, but he never spent much more time in the loft or in the barn for that matter. The goat taught us some valuable lessons: never turn your back on a problem even if you think it has gone away, never gloat too much over a victory and don’t forget: gravity works.

“Except for the first day, before the beast got his sea-legs on, I had no peace of mind. After that, actuated by a spirit born, maybe, of his pasturage, this incarnation of evil threatened to devour everything from flying jibs to stern davits. He was the worst pirate I met on the whole voyage.”- Joshua Slocum