Jim Corbett was not your typical rancher. Over the course of decades roaming the borderlands of the desert southwest, he developed a practice that he referred to as 'goatwalking' - a form of prophetic wandering and desert survival based on goat-human symbiosis. For Jim, 'goatwalking' provided both physical and spiritual sustenance, and allowed him to become at home, for a time, in wildlands.

To many, this modern-day Don Quixote would seem an unlikely figure to have sparked one of the most important social movements of the 20th century, but to those who knew him well, it was hardly a surprise. Even today, his influence is felt throughout the borderlands of the Southwestern United States, and beyond.

This is the story of a man behind a movement – the biographical first part of a 4-part series.

From Future Ecologies, this is Goatwalker, Part One: On Errantry.

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As of August 2021, Jim Corbett’s "Goatwalking" has been re-issued in a new 2nd edition. You can purchase a hard copy or an e-book here

A 2nd edition of "Sanctuary for All Life" is also now available from Cascabel Books on Amazon or Barnes and Noble

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

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

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".

this is Goatwalker, part one:

My name is Adam, by the way, and I'll be your host for this

this is Goatwalker, part one:

series. for regular Future Ecologies listeners, you may

this is Goatwalker, part one:

miss Mendel's voice, but they're still in the mix, just in a more

this is Goatwalker, part one:

editorial capacity, so that I can tell this story that I've

this is Goatwalker, part one:

been working on for nearly four years now.

this is Goatwalker, part one:

I first discovered Jim's work and ideas in a tiny one-room

this is Goatwalker, part one:

goat hunting cabin in the subalpine rock fields of Pitt

this is Goatwalker, part one:

Island in British Columbia. The unseeded traditional territory

this is Goatwalker, part one:

of the Gitxaala First Nation. The goats in question were not

this is Goatwalker, part one:

actually goats at all, it turns out the mountain goats of

this is Goatwalker, part one:

Western North America are actually considered antelope

this is Goatwalker, part one:

goats, and are more closely related to musk oxen than true

this is Goatwalker, part one:

goats. Also, I wasn't really there to hunt them. I was part

this is Goatwalker, part one:

of a field crew led by Gitxaala UBC professor named Charles

this is Goatwalker, part one:

Menzies, who you might remember from our Kelp Worlds series. We

this is Goatwalker, part one:

were attempting to trace the roots that his ancestors would

this is Goatwalker, part one:

have used to hunt mountain goats. And walking in their

this is Goatwalker, part one:

footsteps, we did catch tantalizing glimpses of those

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iconic, snowy white ungulates up there that summer. But that's

this is Goatwalker, part one:

another story.

this is Goatwalker, part one:

Now, as it happened, summer up in the coastal rain forest of

this is Goatwalker, part one:

Gitxaala territory is like no summer that I've ever

this is Goatwalker, part one:

experienced. This is a part of the world where bogs can form on

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steep hillsides, just due to the sheer quantity of precipitation.

this is Goatwalker, part one:

Camped out for weeks on end in the subalpine, we'd often

this is Goatwalker, part one:

retreat to this cramped, one room cabin, and wait out the

this is Goatwalker, part one:

periodic rainstorms, which could last for days. As a result, I

this is Goatwalker, part one:

spent a lot of time in a small room with the field crew,

this is Goatwalker, part one:

keeping the stove hot and reading books. I can't really

this is Goatwalker, part one:

remember what I brought to read that first expedition. But I

this is Goatwalker, part one:

quickly realized that everybody else in the cabin was reading

this is Goatwalker, part one:

books about mountain goats, with titles like "A Beast the Color

of Winter", and "Mountain Goats:

Ecology, Behavior and

of Winter", and "Mountain Goats:

Conservation". I realized belatedly that I should get with

of Winter", and "Mountain Goats:

the program, and so on a trip back home, I grabbed the only

of Winter", and "Mountain Goats:

goat-related book in my house which bore the unusual title:

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.

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.