Neil Vigdor
There was not a moment to spare.
The doors to the TriMet bus, which was heading west on Tuesday morning towards downtown Portland, Oregon, had started to close when they opened for two stragglers.
Neither paid the fare.
Kids ride free – or so they thought.
Not in the case of these two juvenile goats, which transit officials and police said had escaped from their enclosure and ventured onto a lime green FX2-Division bus.
Security camera footage chronicled their strange escapade, showing some other passengers doing a double take before shooing the goats off the bus after the driver reopened the doors.
Their jaunt prompted 911 calls and drew comparisons in Portland to the famous 2002 foray of a coyote that wandered onto a light rail MAX train, which was not in service at the time, and inspired a music video and another song.
“They don’t have a valid pass,” the driver playfully told the other passengers as the goats exited the bus.
The goats belong to a family that lives less than two blocks from the bus stop and are named Billy the Kid and Billy the Goat, Lrae Anderson, who identified himself as the owner, said on Friday.
“I couldn’t believe that they actually went across the busy street and tried to get on the bus and all that,” Anderson said.
“They got on like they’ve done it before.”
Anderson, 48, a rapper who also goes by the name Copper Loc, said his children — he has four sons — sometimes forgot to close the gate of the goats’ enclosure.
A neighbour brought the goats back to their home the same day, Anderson said, noting that he had since installed a lock and improved the fencing.
Anderson said the family had acquired the goats about three months ago after moving to the property at the suggestion of a friend, who told him they would feed on plentiful blackberries from sticker bushes on the property.
Since their escape he had learnt that they were pygmy goats, he said.
Footage of the horned interlopers, which TriMet posted last week to Instagram, had amassed more than 5.4 million views, according to the transit agency.
“The video of them boarding the bus has definitely sparked something in people’s imaginations,” Tyler Graf, a spokesperson for TriMet, said in an email on Friday.
But not every passenger paid much attention to the escapees, video footage from inside the bus showed.
“I see the one lady,” Anderson said. “She’s sitting there, and she’s on her phone and she didn’t even notice the goats on the bus. I was like, ‘What are they doing?’”
As he was preparing for a hip-hop show in Seattle scheduled for Saturday, Anderson said the episode had provided musical inspiration.
“I’ve already started making a song about the goats,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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