Crisco of Backbone Bluff
They will tell you Crisco was a feral goat.
That is legally accurate and spiritually insufficient.
For fifteen summers he held court on Backbone Bluff above Table Rock Lake, in that folded country where Missouri and Arkansas argue about whose postcard it is. Tourists pulled over. Kids pointed. Somebody always had a carrot they were not supposed to offer. Crisco accepted diplomacy on his own terms, which is to say: sometimes.
He was not a pet. He was not livestock. He was infrastructure — the living landmark you told out-of-town cousins to look for if they got lost between the lake and the next barbecue sign. Eureka Springs Safari Park knew his name. So did people who never learned the park’s.
In late July the heat did what Ozarks July heat does. Visitors saw him stumble, pant, flick that tail like a metronome set too fast. On Saturday the 25th he lost the bluff. Goats can swim. Goats prefer not to audition. He did not come back up.
Sunday the volunteers arrived: White River Dive Company out of Branson, Sea Tow out of Hollister, GPS and patience and no invoice. They found him about forty feet from where he went in, twenty-two feet down. No obvious trauma, the diver said. The park brought him home to be cremated. Laura Ann Sanders thanked the crews the way you thank people who showed up for an animal who never signed a consent form.
Professor Gruff insists we not write “he is in a better place.” Gruff’s theology is pasture-based. “He had the best place,” the editor said, tapping the map. “He had a bluff, a lake, and an audience that asked nothing except that he keep being visible.”
So this is the unauthorized biography, three paragraphs too long:
Crisco lived to the far end of a mountain goat’s clock. He made a piece of public rock feel private and a piece of private life feel public. He collected photographs the way oaks collect lightning — not on purpose, but inevitably. When the heat took his footing, strangers with boats and tanks treated his body as if it mattered, because it did.
If you go to Backbone Bluff this fall, the view is the same. The goat is not.
That is allowed to sting a little.
A celebration of life, the park said, would be announced. We recommend bringing nothing you would not want a goat to investigate, and leaving with the same rule The Goat Ranch uses two counties north: don’t open any gates you cannot close.
Rest easy, old man. The bluff remembers.