Episode 2: The Darker Side of our Guanaco Adventure

But, it turns out that’s not always the case…

The same is true for humans. When Greg and I encountered some bad things during our move we could have let our instincts take over and stop our plan of buying a farm and changing our lives, but it turns out, we didn’t.

“Well if someone said this is how you are going to move from suburban California to an island off the coast of Washington. You are going to buy wild animals, the person you buy them from who is supposed to take care of them is going to die. You are then going to find one of the universe’s most difficult personalities to take care of them. None of that is going to be easy. You are going to have all these physical confrontations with them. That’s how you are going to move. That’s how, at retirement, you are going to change from one state to another and settle down to a nice easy life. Would you have gone, yeah that’s how I want to plan that out and do it,” Greg said.

“Yeah, I would say, no thanks. Let me go somewhere else and find another story that I want to step into.” Lisa replied.

“Right,” Greg said.

“But, we didn’t do that–at no point did we say stop. We just leaned in and said, now what?

We all have instincts that click on when we encounter bad things, but sometimes rather than screaming or freezing or running away, it’s possible to react to them differently.

I think of it like this: If you are going to change your life, you are going to encounter obstacles.

And some of those obstacles might even be dangerous. The bigger the change, the more likely it is that you will find yourself on shaky ground at some point along the way. So, No matter how good your plan sounds or how well you’ve thought it through, you have to be ready for the bad stuff. But think about this, the way you react to these scary things could mean the difference between actually making the life you want or going back to where you came from and never making a change at all. If you don’t let the fear take over and instead If you lean in– If you take a breath and keep going, you might be surprised at how good things can feel.

Welcome to A Fiber Life.

In this episode, I want to take you to the darker side of our guanaco adventure.

In episode 1 it seemed easy. We just followed the Yes’s and everything seemed to fall into place. But here, in episode 2 I want to tell you about how hard it was. I’m going to tell you how we faced poor animal conditions and injury, even the tragic death of someone very important. By the end, once you hear these stories, You might be as surprised as we are that during this difficult time neither of us screamed a warning cry. Nor did we go running away and let our instincts take over –instead, we were changed by it all. And the funny thing is.

Our guanacos were changed too.

So by now, you know Dana Foss from episode one. She was the woman at Lambtown who offered to sell Greg her guanacos. And, hers was the farm Greg took me to where I had instant recognition that I wanted them and said “There you are”.

Well, our story picks up from there–we did buy some guanacos from her. But, since we hadn’t moved to our Whidbey farm yet, she offered to board them for us while we were getting ready to move.

Not only that, Dana offered to teach us all she knew about raising and caring for guanacos.

We made an arrangement where we could come to her farm on a regular basis to get to know our animals, to do a little pasture pick up, and to learn from her. She even offered to teach me to spin.

This generosity of Dana turns out to be the way she ran her life. She was a key figure in her community as a festival organizer and beloved friend and grandmother.

And, remember from episode 1, her husband Ed had died that year which left her with grief and lots of farm work to do.

It seemed like the perfect arrangement and I had visions of afternoons on her porch, spinning guanaco fiber while admiring our animals out in the pasture.

But things weren’t quite that ideal on our first visit to Dana’s farm.

When we got there Dana didn’t want us to clean out the pastures, she wanted us to clean out the little shed that Arwen lived in, Arwen was her prize female. So I said sure, but I didn’t realize that there was probably 18 inches or so of hardpan manure in that shed, so the process of shoveling it out was…

“It was like excavation,” Lisa said.

“Right, it’s like we probably should have brought some explosives or something,” Greg laughed.

Just for accuracy here, it was more like five inches, but for sure, it felt like 18 inches of hard-packed manure. It was a lot of scraping and a lot of shoveling and endless trips to the manure pile to dump the wheelbarrow.

And then to finish off our job, we brought in decomposed granite to recover the whole area. Once we raked that out, I had huge blisters on my hands and felt soreness in muscles I didn’t know I had.

“You know, at the time I wasn’t horrified. I was just like, I’m here, I’ve got my muck boots, we’ve got our shovel. After the fourth hour, I think I was a little tired of it. But at the time it was like, Yeah. This is the job and this is what farmers do,” Lisa said.

“Right—and what did we learn about guanacos??!!,” Greg exclaimed.

“Well, we didn’t learn much, but Dana did give me that stack of books. It was all of her old books about alpacas and llama care,” Lisa said.

Having shoveled and raked for 4 hours, I guess Dana decided it was time to give us a little lesson in haltering these guanacos.

“The other thing she did was she was like, Ya, let me show you how you halter them. Do you remember that?” Lisa asked.

“Yes,” Greg responded.

Let me tell you a bit of background here: Dana had one special guanaco named Arwen. She had been raised and trained by Dana’s husband Ed. Because of the level of handling at a young age, she acted differently than all of the other guanacos in Dana’s herd. She was the one that Greg saw at Lambtown. Arwen was also the one that came up to me when we first visited and gave me a kiss. I think it’s safe to say you can just think of her as the farm ambassador–the meet and greet girl who was irresistible. And, in that regard, not a great representative of the species as a whole with her lack of instinctual fear response to humans.

“Oh-what sweet guanacos, no spitting, just kissy kissy,” Lisa said. So Dana, with her bad shoulder, shows me, you just stand on the side of the head and you reach up and you slip the halter on and you buckle it and you put the lead on it and then here you go, Lisa, you could walk her around. I was freaked out, Arwen wasn’t particularly cooperative,” Lisa said.

“You didn’t know what you were doing and you were afraid,” Greg said.

“Dana didn’t have any clue that I didn’t have any clue and I ended up sort of walking in circles,” Lisa said.

“Small circles,” Greg said.

“I wanted to be done really fast,” Lisa said.

“We still knew nothing,” Greg said.

“Right, we still knew nothing,” Greg said.

So do you hear it in our voices, no warning cry? We were Just helpful, innocent guanaco students, not learning what we needed to learn.

“I remember feeling very wholesome, also it was an experience that none of my friends or clients could have guessed that I had spent the morning shoveling shit out of…” Lisa laughs. “It was like a secret mission or something,” Lisa said. 

“The weird thing was, that my take on it was that Dana needed help and we were going to help her. Now we were getting ourselves into something that we didn’t understand and that the arrangement that we had made with her was not panning out. It was just—oh—she needs help and we are going to help her cause that helps the animals,” Greg said.

I think what Greg is saying is important here. That we could have seen Dana’s place through different eyes. We could have thought of it as a business arrangement. And get very worried that it was one that might not go so well. Or one that we wouldn’t want to continue participating in.

“Right? It was so sort of innocent and friendly. It was like, oh, now we have this person in our life now who we are going to hang out with and help,” Lisa said

There was another potential warning sign that we chose to ignore there at Dana’s. Remember how I said Arwen wasn’t a good representative of guanacos in general?

“The other animals were not interested in being around us at all. But the irony for me was that I didn’t even see that as a red flag. Or something I should be that concerned about,” Greg said.

“That is very weird because if we encountered that now, we would react completely differently. We would have eyes that saw things that we didn’t see. And if we were looking to acquire animals,” Lisa said.

“We would go, these animals are going to be difficult…” Greg said. “It’s odd.”

Okay, you might be thinking, an 18-inch deep pen full of hard-packed manure isn’t really the worst obstacle. It’s not that big a deal. And difficult animals–well they can learn to deal. But wait until you hear the next obstacle we encountered.

Okay–I put the guanaco scream in there because I think it’s really appropriate. Here goes. 

“Do you remember coming to tell you the news?” Lisa said

“Oh yea,” Greg said.

“What do you remember?” Lisa asked.

“Um, I was in the bedroom and you came in and said, I just read on FB that Dana died,” Greg said.

“I mean, how else can you say it?” Lisa said.

“And I said, what?” Greg said.

“And you said, I just read on FB that Dana died,” Lisa said.

“And I said, Oh my God. My initial reaction was grief, but then what—who’s over there taking care of the animals,” Greg said.

“Right, our animals. Oh my God,” Lisa said.

It was New Year’s Eve. It was late and we weren’t really celebrating so I was scrolling through Facebook. And I read a post on Dana’s profile.

“It was a post that Dana had bequeathed her herd of guanaco to a person, and this person was looking for a place to house her guanacos. And I was like, wait that’s some of our animals,” Lisa said. “Dana was the only one left besides her granddaughter who had any close relationship with these animals. Her husband had died the year before, he was very involved with animals, but there was no one else who had that kind of relationship with the animals. And they didn’t have tags and they didn’t have microchips. And they all look basically the same unless you get to know them, then you can tell them apart,” Lisa continued.

“That’s correct,” Greg said.

“So not only has Dana died, but any information about our animals or who they actually were or any that information was gone with Dana,” Lisa said.

“So I went into research mode figuring out how we are going to get our animals. Which was a whole nother challenge—FB sleuth…We didn’t know what we were going to do with our animals. Contact all these people—what should we do with our animals. We still live in suburbia, they can’t be in our backyard. What are we going to do with these animals?” Greg said.

“To me, that’s a whole other thing. It’s like, why didn’t we say. Forget it,” Lisa said.

“Really. We spent the money, it’s sunk costs, let’s let it go,” Greg said.

“It’s too hard,” Lisa said.

“Yeah,” Greg responded.

“Just let it go,” Lisa laughed.

“I don’t know, that didn’t occur to me,” Greg said.

“It would have been on so many levels a relief,” Lisa said.

“Right, because we have a house to rehab, to sell, we are in the process of moving 1500 miles to a new state. It would have been very easy to say, let’s let this one go-we will figure it out when we get moved,” Greg said.

“And Dana had said that she would help us move them to our new place. It was all easy…until it wasn’t,” Lisa said.

“Exactly,” Greg replied.

Nope, we didn’t say forget it. And, Here’s something that might surprise you. It sure surprises me. Instead of reacting to our instincts, going into fight or flight mode, guess what we did.? We leaned in and we leaned in hard.

“I went to visit Dana’s daughter who was now in charge of the estate, in charge of the animals. And said, we own some of these animals and she was like, that’s fine and um, you’ll need to find a new place for them. And I was like that’s fine, we are going to work on that. And then I said, and oh-by the way, can we have some more? and she was like, yeah if you want to buy more you can buy more,” Lisa said.

“Not only did we not go running away,” Lisa said.

“We doubled down,” Greg said.

“We doubled down. What’s another couple of wild animals?” Lisa joked.

So now we had to find another place to board our larger herd of guanacos. And that’s not an easy thing to do. I called all the people I could think of. I Googled people who owned guanacos to see if they could help. For the record, that search turned up 3 or 4 farms in the entire US.

“I contacted one woman who said, whatever you do, don’t contact Paige. And Dana had already warned us. She said, “I don’t know if you want to deal with Paige, but you know…” Lisa trailed off. So what do I do?”

“I think it was the last person on the list, so you called Paige,” Greg said.

“So I called Paige,” Lisa said.

“So the last person on the list is Paige and I call her up and she says yes, that we could board them at her place,” Lisa continues.

And she said she would in fact help us load them in her trailer and take them up to her farm and

So we did.

So we go to Dana’s farm, it’s pouring rain and muddy and freezing cold. Paige is nearly two hours late, but finally, we see her drive up the drive with her rusty trailer. It literally had duct tape keeping the side window closed. It’s me and Greg and a few of Dana’s relatives and a very fast-talking, loud woman who had been sort of living at the farm and supposedly taking care of the guanacos after Dana died.

We don’t know anything about anything, remember? And we’ve never worked with large animals. We’ve never loaded anyone into a trailer. There is mud so thick it covers our boots. It was a pretty hard day.

“And loading those animals into the trailer was not like leading Arwen,” Greg said.

“That was such a bad day,” Lisa said.

“These animals were completely and totally wild,” Greg said

I have a confession to tell you. I was so naive I carried my iPhone into the mucky pasture ready to video the whole thing–as if it’s going to be smooth and easy and I only needed one hand to do the job. It turns out we needed all hands on deck, and even then it was awful.  

“The caretaker says gimme that halter and she saunters into the pen that we had cleaned up,” Lisa said

“Go halter coacher, the male,” Greg said.

“And she shuts the door and all we hear is mayhem inside there. How is she going to do that? And then she comes out and throws the halter on the ground and says, that’s not going to work. And I think at that point she quit the show. She was done.” Lisa said.

Now we had one less pair of hands. And our first plan, of haltering our male and leading him into the trailer was clearly not going to work.

“So we built that shoot out of plywood and extra gates and it was very rickety and not straight and there were corners that he could have easily had just gone out down the lane,” Lisa said.

“It was just like mayhem trying to get them in the trailer,” Greg said.

Another plan involved corralling all of the females into a tiny fenced area so that we could corner them and halter them. This was a disaster.

“Georgia trying to climb the fence to get away…” Greg said.

“So awful,” Lisa said

“And ripping her toenail off on the fence and bleeding all over the place,” Greg said.

“It was so bad,” Lisa said.

“Yeah,” Greg agrees.

“Makes me so sad,” Lisa said as she remembers Paige helping them load the guanacos into the trailer.

“Did you see where the gash was?” Paige asked.

“I don’t see…” Lisa starts to respond when there are large crashing sounds.

“Go, go, go!” someone shouts.

You hear Paige here talking about all the blood we were seeing. It comes from a video that I did attempt to take on my iPhone. Which, as you can hear, ended up in the muck.

“Easy, easy. You all get in there…Go, Greg doesn’t jump away. Come on mama, come on mama. What do you want me to do? I need you to help me push her. We get her and the baby is going to go in.”

Guanaco owner 101. Oh boy.

“Eventually we did get them into the trailer, you and I who had no experience at all moving farm animals, the three of us get them into the trailer,” Greg said

“There’s one moment I have to say, for all of our difficulties with Paige, there’s one moment that I am completely treasure. It was after our animals were loaded, still, at Dana’s, she was going around putting halters on them inside because we needed to have halters on them to unload them. And she told me to get up on the wheel well of the trailer and look into the window. She said, come here, come here quick. She said this is your chance. You can tell them that they are going to be okay because they are calm and they are safe here. And just breathe on their noses a bit. And of course, I was like oh my God I don’t know if I can do this?

But it was a very good moment. But I was still traumatized by the whole thing,” Lisa said.

After we loaded them, we caravan to Paige’s place. She drove the trailer and we followed in our car. It was nerve-wracking the whole way because all I could think about was the difficulty we were going to have of unloading them.

So we go up there, an hour and a half drive and we have to unload them. We took them all together, and they took a really long time coming out, they were scared and I was completely terrified that they were going to bolt and go somewhere else other than the paddock. There wasn’t a shoot, it was a wide-open space we had to cross with them.

And then we led the girls straight into that, I don’t know what you would call it.

Greg: paddock would be a nice way to describe it.

“Dog crate with a tarp, chain link box with tarp all around the sides. So it was pitch black in there and that was supposed to keep them calm. And then I don’t remember—and then we brought them hay. And that was it,” Lisa said

“We are inside with our three girls, yes we are, we are right here,” Lisa says as she’s unloading the guanacos.

“And you’re not going to spit cause your ears aren’t back, yeah,” Greg says

Can you hear the exhaustion in our voices? We are happy and tired and still a little scared. We had overcome that obstacle and it seemed like a really big deal.

“So then we had the animals at Paige’s,” Greg said.

“So then we had the animals at Paige’s,” Lisa said.

Here we are inside the pen at Paige’s.

“How would you describe the day?” Lisa said.

“Exhausting, but rewarding,” Greg said.

“How would you describe the day honey?” Lisa

“Yeah you guys were in the trailer, you got moved, it’s okay,” Greg said.

“Baby girl, Angie love,” Lisa said to a guanaco.

“It’s okay,” Greg said.

It’s okay….one mentor dies and the next mentor…well here’s what we remember.

Paige basically, to say that she was a difficult human being is probably one of the biggest understatements anyone could ever make. She had some real problems. And it was her place. I mean she really liked her animals. And she really cared for them. But as good as she was with her animals was how bad she was with people.

“That’s so accurate,” Lisa said.

“It was really difficult because she was supposed to be teaching us how to care for the animals and she did. She did help us halter them and try to lead them. And I was somewhat successful with Angie. Not totally, but I was somewhat successful,” Greg said.

“But Paige’s way of teaching was sort of unrelenting criticism about what was happening,” Greg said.

“She had to be the one who knew it all and was right about everything,” Lisa said.

“The one in charge,” Greg said.

“And so then even if you were doing well she still needed to be better,” Lisa said.

“Well even if you were trying to do well she needed to be better than your effort,” Greg said.

“Right,” Lisa said.

“It was really difficult, Greg said.

Remember how Dana showed how easy it was to halter Arwen? And how none of our animals acted like that when it came time to load them into Paige’s trailer. And how Georgia tried to jump a 6-foot fence in order to get away from being haltered? Well, we had to halter our guanacos. We knew they hadn’t been cared for since after Dana’s husband passed. And they hadn’t been sheared in years. And the females were likely pregnant. All this required vet care, which required capturing them and haltering them. Which we didn’t know how to do…and it looked pretty impossible. So we did it the way Paige showed us.

“And then she would tell us to do things to halter the animals. For instance, what it required was herding all of our animals into one small space. Basically,” Lisa said.

“Inside a little tiny room,” Greg said.

“Inside dark, completely pitch dark, tarp-covered, chain link crate basically and then go after the one that you want to halter by squishing the other ones against that one. So then there’s all this body contact. Like really squishing hard. So the ones that aren’t getting haltered get to kick the humans who are not trying to halter,” Lisa said.

“Right,” Greg said.

“And she’s all the time narrating…get the, get that,” Lisa said.

“Don’t let go, whatever you do,” Greg said.

“Don’t let go, Greg, aww you did it to me now,” Lisa said.

“I know,” Greg said.

“You little—oh man. She didn’t swear but she was so bossy. And also badass like it was a funny thing,” Lisa said. Anyway, those were some bad scenes in that horrible chain link crate. So I don’t think that was very good learning on our part. Learning what we didn’t want to do with our animals,” Lisa said.

“And I don’t think we knew enough at the time to know,” Greg said.

“No,” Lisa said.

“These are not good practices,” Greg said.

“This is not okay,” Lisa said. “And then the other thing I always felt we had to do more than I was comfortable with. Like when we were leading, practicing leading. We would go up there, we would get these animals haltered, we would get through that and then we would practice walking them around. And I would be done. And I felt like I was in tune with the animal. And I felt like that was a success and I want to end on a good note. And she would say, Nope take another lap. And I would always not want to go against Paige’s word because then you have really bad conflict and really bad criticism. But if you go against your own word—then—well we both got really injured. We both ended up really hurting our shoulders,” Lisa said.

“You can tell that all the stress that the animals were put under with haltering them, you could tell when they had had enough. Okay, this is it, I’m stressed out, this is where I want to end. With Paige that’s where we couldn’t end it,” Greg said.

Our animals were stressed and we both got injured in the process. It was our male who was the most difficult. One time We had him on a double lead and Greg had to walk away for a moment while I held the lead. When Greg came back, Coach charged me and slammed his chest against mine, then swung his powerful neck one way, then yanked it the other way.

“I was trying so hard to be a good guanaco owner and follow Paige’s instructions not to let go that my shoulder was injured. And for months I had horrible images of being attacked by him, Greg said.

“My shoulder was really bad, I remember feeling relieved that I was on the DL. It gave me the excuse,” Lisa said.

“Of not leading them anymore,” Greg said jokingly.

“It’s so bad,” Lisa said.

“In looking back on it I’m amazed that I don’t remember either one of us saying to the other, you know, maybe this isn’t the best idea in the world in terms of how to move. And how to start this new life. I think it just all felt like something we were going to get through and that at the end of it we would be here with this new imaginary life with these animals,” Greg said.

My shoulder did heal, mostly. And Greg had a shoulder injury from the same guanaco that has mostly healed. In fact, we’ve healed more than just our physical injuries.

In remembering back on all these hard things, I decided to ask my daughter Ruth what it all looked like from her vantage point. She had just started college at the time but did witness some of the play-by-play events.

“Watching you and dad go through the kind of journey through that…and the expectation at the beginning and the plan of what it was going to be and then moving to really hard things happening that were not part of the plan and finding a deeper love for what your life is now after going through that journey has been really lovely to watch. I think it’s a very cool journey to watch and have modeled for me because I think it’s very important to learn how to accept the unexpected and the unplanned and find a lot of joy in that,” Ruth said.

Remember I said at the beginning of this episode, that I thought guanacos were always ruled by their instinct and they were always going to react with the fight or flight response when something scared them? And remember that I told you I found out this wasn’t the case?

Well, I want to share one more moment with you. This is a moment that both Greg and I hold dear in our minds. It happened in the first 6 months after we brought the guanacos to our farm. We were on our own with learning–no more mentors, just the two of us having to face it all together. And it was still tough, but we continued to try. And we continued to lean in.

After months of working with our animals with a gentler approach, I was working in the catch pen with Angie. We had adopted a method that was calmer and had logged hours taking baby steps toward getting them to allow us to approach and put on a halter. We had given up forcing the issue.

I had a catch rope around Angie which was fine with her. She didn’t indicate that she was going to spit at me or kick me. And then she let me halter her without any objection.

All that wasn’t new. It had happened before. But again, we had banked a lot of trust and approached the whole endeavor more peacefully than they’d ever experienced.

There’s a video of this moment. In it, I snap the lead onto her halter and look up at the camera with a smile on my face. I’m touched that it is so easy. And then Angie begins to lean into me with her soft neck. And she begins to nuzzle my ear with her fuzzy mouth. And she sniffs around my face and head so gently. My eyes got big and my smile is even bigger. You can hear Greg whisper, “Oh my god”.

“Oh my god,” Greg whispers

He is amazed and touched by the interaction. Angie leans in a bit more and I tell her she’s a good girl.

“Hi sweetheart,” Lisa said to Angie.

That afternoon when she and I left the catch pen I wasn’t the terrified guanaco mama I had been at Dana’s and she wasn’t the startled or screaming guanaco who once wanted to run away. We both leaned into our fears and were both changed for it.

“When I look out on the pasture and I see all of our beautiful animals out there. Especially if they are in the big back pasture with all the trees and the huge boulders and they are just chomping away as peaceful as peaceful can be it feels like all that we went through is from another world. Like it didn’t…” Lisa trailed off.

“It feels like it was part of another life,” Greg said.

“Exactly,” Lisa agreed.

“And not just a chapter, a part of a prior way of living and being,” Greg said.

“Yeah and so then isn’t that interesting to think about. For all of the obstacles and challenges we were changed by it,” Lisa said.

“Yes,” Greg said. And it is a lesson about if there’s an obstacle, sometimes you are better off leaning into and getting to know it rather than trying to move away from it.

“Yeah, like avoiding it is avoiding more than just the obstacle,” Lisa said.

“Right,” Greg said.

“We’d like to hear about times when you were able to lean into your fear? What kind of good things happened as a result?

Thanks for listening to A Fiber Life. Tune in in two weeks when we talk about one of my most favorite subjects–poop! We’ll be asking the question: “what do you do with your crap? And why should you care?

Thank you for listening. If you’d like to be notified every time a new episode is released and to learn more about our adventure on the farm, sign up for our newsletter at afiberlife.com

A very special thanks to Christine O’Donnell added Steve Kuzj of Bright Sighted Podcasting. They helped with everything, including script writing, editing,