Caution: this is going to sound made up for the purpose of parable or fable. Do not slide down that rabbit hole. This story is not made up, and there is no purpose for it at all, except to discover if any of my faithful readers have an explanation for what happened. I will try to set forth every fact possible so that no clues will be lost.
OK, now I’m sounding like Arthur Conan Doyle, and that wasn’t intended. Sorry. The incident was simply too confounding for reason.
Nancy and I were driving from Chapel Hill to Baltimore, I believe. I think it was spring break in law school and we had arranged interviews with a couple of firms there. All right, good point: already my first two sentences are hedged. I will try to be as precise as circumstances allow.
We must have left late in the day, for we stopped at a motel on either I-85 or I-95 near where the former branches off from the latter in Petersburg, Virginia. (Yes, another equivocation.) It was right off the interstate, virtually underneath the overpasses. But it was a nice place, clean, comfortable, and sound-proofed enough that we couldn’t hear the traffic. This sound proofing may or may not have been important.
Once we had checked in, we took our bags to our first-floor room. I pulled back the curtains, and I saw with delight that there was a sliding glass door leading out to a lawn. Which was full of goats.
They were multi-colored, thirty of them at least, all milling around on the grass right outside our door. Were we to open the door, they could walk right in. A couple of them gazed at me from six feet away; they were just chewing and staring.
What were they doing there? Now one reads about goats being trucked in to clean up vacant lots, as they’ll eat anything. Back in the benighted ‘80’s, one never heard of that. Anyway, whoever maintained the grassy areas around the interstate highway was thorough; there was hardly anything for anyone to eat.
As I said, we were virtually underneath the overpasses, and I couldn’t see anything that would have prevented the goats, like a particularly determined group of protesters, from clogging the freeway and backing up traffic for days. As tempting as it was to step outside and among them, we were also guided by I hope a healthy fear of animals about whom we were correct, I think, to have hesitation. This was no petting zoo. What if they decided that we didn’t have their best interests at heart? They had horns, most of them. I pulled the curtains closed.
I believe that our short access road had restaurants, and no doubt we enjoyed a healthy repast (OK, now I’m just joking) at one of them. Then we were off to a blissful sleep, thinking it would be interesting to check in on the goats in the morning. I wonder if we had trouble sleeping, thinking about the interviews the next day. I have no memory of thinking about the goats, except briefly and in amusement. We probably laughed at the improbability.
Upon awakening, I remembered the ungulates, and wondered what they were up to. I pulled the curtain back. No goats. No goats at all. I stepped to and fro to obtain vision over the entire lawn, wondering if someone had moved them to another part of the property. No goats.
Unaccountably saddened by this turn of events, Nancy and I moseyed down to one of the fast food restaurants for breakfast. I imagine I had some sort of breakfast biscuit; probably Nancy had the same, though probably hers contained less cholesterol. Back at the motel, we checked out.
Once the business was complete, I asked, “What happened to the goats that were outside our room last night?”
The young lad behind the desk, with his bad haircut and clip-on tie, looked at me blankly. “Goats?”
“Yeah, the goats outside our room last night. There was a herd of goats.”
The fellow looked at me a little more intently, then down to his paperwork. “There aren’t any goats.”
I couldn’t give up this easily. “Really? There were like 30. They came up to our door. Our sliding glass door.”
He shrugged, put our paperwork away, and turned to the desk behind him. Obviously this conversation was over.
Nancy and I have often mentioned the Phantom Goats over the years. Probably they aren’t as prominent as the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot, not to everyone else, but we’ll never forget them. I hope they remember us. A couple of them sure stared at us hard enough.
In 1958, when I was 14 years-old, I saw a UFO. It was real, not a phantom.. I watched it for 2-3 minutes as it hovered and then danced around overhead at about 2 o'clock before darting off to the horizon at unearthly speed. No one has ever corroborated or explained what I absolutely witnessed..Your goats were not a phantom either; you and Nancy can corroborate each other's experience. Though extraordinary, I have no doubt it happened just as you describe. Reality is complicated. That's why Kathy and I only stay at Hampton Inn. No surprises, no goats -- at least so far. --Steve