7-minute read time.
According to a simple Google search, a goat path can be many things.
It can be a grassy meadow. Posted about in the Amish Country News, the Goat Path is defined as the unusually shaped piece of land that stretches through some of the most used Amish farmland in the county. Its shape is due to the fact that, at one point, it was meant to be used as a roadway, and the land had been terraformed to fit this function. Before the renovation could be finished, the project was abandoned and allowed to return to its natural state, granting local farmers to use it to graze their animals (1).
A goat path can be a trail, such as the Goat Path trail near Mc Elhattan, Pennsylvania, a popular trail for birding, hiking, and walking that takes the average person around 4 hours to hike (2).
It is sometimes called a desire path or a desire line, an unplanned trail created by natural erosion caused by human or animal traffic. The more the path is used, the more noticeable it becomes. Across the campus of my undergraduate college, several goat paths can be found, especially in areas where the paved walking path makes the distance or journey more complicated and longer.
In hoarder circles, a goat path or goat trail is a unique term for the clear pathways used to navigate the clutter in a hoarder’s home. It might wind through the mountains of items in the same pattern the individual typically takes.
The goat paths in my mother’s home are stuck in my memory.
When I lived there, the floor was covered as soon as you entered the house. My mother’s goat paths can be defined as areas of space with items smushed down enough that you were forced to walk on them rather than on patches of bare ground, at least in the large living spaces. As you entered the front door, the only accessible entrance to the abode, you were promptly met by the junk on the floor. The door itself could barely be opened, but when you did manage to push it open, you had to climb into the living room using the meager goat path created by my mother, my brother, and myself. Then, once in the living room, you had the option to turn left or right.
If you took the goat path to the left, you would take a few steps and be met with the stairs that led to the second floor. If the house was in liveable, normal condition, taking a left in the living room would give you a couple of options: going upstairs or into the kitchen and basement hallway. With my mother’s condition, access to the kitchen and basement hallway from the living room was completely blocked off, and since we were able to get to those areas through the kitchen itself, it was not worth trampling over the mountains to make our goat paths.
The goat paths as you went up the stairs were more barren. The stairs were almost always clear, besides a few stacks of items, like books or movies, pushed to the side of them. I figure that my mother’s hoarding left that area alone because she feared one of us would fall down the stairs one day. The upstairs hallway was relatively clean of junk on the floor as well, although I always remember there would be some sort of object shoved against the wall. In the pictures I took in 2022, you can see cans of cat food, piles of books, and boxes of random items stacked almost neatly against the side of the space, leaving just enough room for us to pass by.
Then, you could walk into one of our rooms off the hallway. My room, almost always kept clean, had no need for a goat path. My brother, who is easily entrapped by the laziness and messiness of hoarding, typically had a disorderly room but left a wide goat path through the middle to get to his bed. My mother’s room, which was barely touched unless to sleep in, had a single small goat path leading to the side of the bed she slept on. That room was the worst of the three bedrooms.
The last two rooms upstairs also had their own versions of goat paths. The office, which contained two large bookcases stuffed with old children’s books neither my brother nor I read, alongside the litter boxes that were kept in pristine condition, mostly had pet supplies traipsed across the floor, not high enough to be a bother when walking but making the room look chaotic. The bathroom, which really only ever had trash and clothes on the floor, was kept clean enough that you could pretty much step around the entire small bathroom, as long as you didn’t slip on a pair of pants or a lone sock.
If you had originally decided to enter the house and take a right from the living room, you had one path available. This goat path had a few offshoots, but because of the downstairs’s open layout, you could only take the one main route. This goat path circled from the living room, past racks of CDs and piles of random finds from Facebook Marketplace, into the dining room, where the unusable table sat with its towering stacks of possessions. It ended in the kitchen, with its cupboards shoved full of old food inhabited by maggots and moths, and a refrigerator with melting vegetables, so old and rotten that they had turned to liquid mush.
The offshoots of this main winding path led to the couch in the living room, the downstairs bathroom, and the basement. The couch, one of the few areas the family convened together, eventually filled with items once I moved out. The downstairs bathroom, the floor heaped with clothes, was only functional for using the toilet and the washer and dryer. The bathtub and the sink were too full to use. The goat path leading to the basement was cut short on the basement stairs once you met the black garbage bags filled with previous years of junk, remnants from when I tried to clean the house years before when I only had the option to push the hoarding out of sight rather than out of the house.
The goat paths that helped my family travel through the hoarding of my mother’s home slowly became less and less pronounced as my mother’s mental health declined once I moved out of the house and to college. I was not there to support her or keep the paths open. At one point, around two years ago, shortly after my attempts to help my mother clean up in a way that respected her control failed, I decided to stop entering the house.
The next time I entered the house was after we were given the clearance to enter the building to grab our prized possessions once the firefighters left the scene. When I entered the dwelling that day, I could see the goat paths through the smog and smoke. We followed them around the house, trying to find the possessions we wanted to take with us. I took the goat path to the staircase, rescuing a small Tiffany lamp that I always wanted to use. The Tiffany lamp was never turned on when the house was still in use. I don’t even think it had a light bulb in it, but I always loved its look and wanted to keep it. Then, I followed the goat path upstairs, past the shattered windows and blackened walls. I went through the halls, entering my room, which had become overrun with my mother’s hoarding since I left and she abandoned her room to adopt mine as her own. As I entered the room, my eyes welled up with tears as I was forced to make a goat path in a place I never had to before to reach the closet where my high school diploma sat, waiting for me to liberate it, smelling faintly of burning plastic. Since that day, I vowed that I would never again be forced to take a goat path in my home.
References:
- https://amishcountrynews.com/the-goat-path/#:~:text=Everyone%20who%20lives%20in%20Lancaster,for%20decades%20in%20Lancaster%20County.
- https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/pennsylvania/goat-path
