The Dogs of Bedlam Farm

by Jon Katz

  They both carried the same cross on their shoulders and shared the same heritage, however. And from that moment, the two were inseparable. Carol and Fanny sometimes visited the sheep; if stray dogs or other presumed dangers approached, they circled the flock, kicking and braying. Who said donkeys weren’t useful? It would take a brave coyote to challenge this pair.

  When Fanny came near Carol’s hay or oats, Carol lowered her ears and nudged or kicked the little donkey away. Otherwise, the two were never more than a few feet apart. At sunrise and sunset, they experienced a bit of donkey madness, racing playfully back and forth across the pasture.

  Rose wanted to get in on the fun and tried to herd the baby donkey. That didn’t work, but they sniffed, nose to nose, and Rose once in a while deigned to give Fanny a lick. They were almost exactly the same age—seven months.

  However good-natured, the donkeys were no angels. One night in late November, on the eve of the opening day of deer-hunting season in New York State, I came out to make my final rounds. It was so dark I didn’t notice that I hadn’t latched the gate properly, and when it swung open quietly behind me, Carol and Fanny, who’d come out to greet me in search of a cookie, made a break for it.

  I’m afraid I took this personally. What more could these two want than a daily bucket of oats, gourmet donkey cookies, a pasture full of grass, and, lately, fresh hay every day? But like dogs, they had alien minds. I doubt I’ll ever know what beckoned to them out there, but both donkeys hustled past me toward the road. I tried to get ahead of them but Carol just brushed me aside. Here was their famed stubborn streak in action.

  This was a particularly terrifying time for donkeys to be running around loose. The following dawn the woods would fill with men with guns, and any large animal bounding along at sunrise had a good chance of getting shot. Meanwhile, they were cantering up the road.

  Orson would just tear after the donkeys and most probably get kicked; Homer had been ignoring Carol for weeks, so why would she pay him the slightest attention now? Once more I turned to the puppy. Rose was faster than the others, and tireless, always ready for work, great in a pinch—and here was another pinch. So I sent her off after the renegades, and she loped around in front of them before they could disappear into the darkness.

  Donkeys are independent-minded, but they don’t like trouble. Carol looked down the road, into the forests beyond, then turned her head and spotted or sniffed the cookie I was waving around. She turned back and Fanny fell in behind her, just as a truck came barreling down the road. I waved my flashlight and the driver slowed. “Good Rose!” I yelled. The Queen of Bedlam Farm.

  Despite the breakout, I was grateful to Pat Freund. The donkey pair enriched our little encampment. Though I never asked mine to haul firewood or carry me to town, they served other functions. For months, I heard coyotes, but never—knock wood—saw one. The donkeys might very well have been the reason.

  And every night before bed, reeling from fatigue—I was sore all over from herding, barn mucking, hay toting, and other aspects of animal care, not to mention housekeeping chores—I staggered out to the barn for “munch and crunch,” which quickly became a ritual.

  I stuffed a granola bar into my pocket, went into the pig barn for two buckets of oats. Sometimes I also brought along a boom box. When I turned on the feeble overhead light in the barn, Fanny and Carol were always happy to see me. I’d sit on a bench by the barn door. Across the driveway I could see Orson, Homer, and Rose staring unhappily from the window, but this was my moment with the donkeys.

  It was an unlikely love fest. I played them all sorts of music at night, from Sinatra to Missy Elliott, but our mutual favorite was the last CD the great Johnny Cash had recorded before he died. We were fond of listening to “Give My Love to Rose,” “Bridge over Troubled Water,” or “Personal Jesus” as we had our nighttime snacks, my donkeys waiting for their ear-scratching.

  After a while, I turned the music down low or turned it off, and sat in the quiet, munching along with Carol and Fanny. Then I’d give them each a pat, collect the buckets and wrappers, gather up my boom box, and head back to the house, where a joyous reception from three anxious border collies awaited.

  Chapter Six

  DOG LOVE

  LAURIE HARRINGTON WAS SMILING FROM THE BACK ROW AT A book reading in Hubbard Hall, the lovely old opera house on Main Street in Cambridge, New York. She appeared a bit apart from the other people in the room, uninterested in them, locked onto my dogs, especially Orson, whom she’d read about in my first dog book. She was eager to meet him, she later told me; he’d been through so much; he was such a great guy.

  She was the last in line to get her book signed—not, I suspected, by chance. With everybody else gone, she’d have more time to talk, more time to get down on the floor and hug Orson.

  I would have recognized her almost anywhere as one of the Dog People. There are innumerable subcultures and enclaves within America’s vast, complex dog universe—breeders, hunters, rescuers, trackers—all in their own canine worlds, talking on their own mailing lists.

  The Dog People are a group that tells more about us than about dogs. They live a life as bounded by dogs and other Dog People as possible, as emptied of everybody else as they could arrange. “If I could buy gas only from dog people, I would,” Laurie once e-mailed me. “I don’t really want to deal with anybody else. I don’t fully trust people who don’t love animals.”

  People like Laurie—mostly, but not all, women—have become familiar to me, to anybody whose life or work centers around dogs. They attend dog adoption fairs and dog book readings, lots of events. Though they have human friends, those friendships are usually connected to dogs. They are curiously interactive: obsessive phone talkers, Net trawlers and messengers, list subscribers and e-mailers. But most of their computer use also relates to dogs—their rescue, care, adoption, and well-being.

  Laurie was clearly one of their number. She had wavy hair dyed brown, and wore faded jeans, a T-shirt celebrating a local rescue group, and battered running shoes. Her canvas bag was stuffed with dog treats and snacks, and she was carrying a dozen faded snapshots of her dogs, living and dead.

  Her face displayed a panoply of emotions as she displayed her photos: Bear was hit by a car in 1986; Wimpet was killed by a pack of marauding Rottweilers; Angela lived to be sixteen before dying of cancer in Laurie’s arms. “My dogs don’t die in vet’s offices on linoleum floors,” she explained. “They die with me at home.”

  When Laurie talked about how much she loved her dogs, or how much they loved her, she was radiant, her face suffused with joy. Yet I felt ill at ease with her; she made me nervous. Perhaps she seemed too intense, a bit odd. She appeared to have crossed some line, in her love of dogs, that I didn’t want to cross.

  She had e-mailed me a number of times before the reading, inviting me to come see her. She lived on a four-acre strip near Argyle, with eleven dogs, six that were “mine,” five that might not be, she didn’t know yet. “Some people might feel my life is a sad one,” she had e-mailed me, “but I feel it is a beautiful life. I am happy, happier than I have ever been, and dog love is why. It’s hard to explain it to people, hard for others to understand.”

  She could tell me, though, and I did know. That, of course, was why she invited me out to her place; that’s what bound us.

  LAURIE WAS EAGER FOR ME TO MEET HER DOGS, FOUR OF whom were outside in her van right now. These were her “traveling troupe,” who went everywhere she went—to the market and the doctor’s office and the Rite Aid. She had asked to bring them into Hubbard Hall and had been rebuffed. But when I left the reading, she was waiting outside to introduce us.

  Her van had seen a lot of miles, judging from the worn tires, the grime, the scratches and dents. The seats in the back were permanently folded down to support a cozy nest of blankets, strewn with bones.

  I started to smile at this rolling dog crate until I remembered that the back of my pickup cab was configured exactly t
he same way, with quilts, fluffy sheepskin, and rawhide chews.

  Finding her waiting out in the parking lot long after everyone else had left, I had another twinge of discomfort. Laurie was perfectly sweet, the very embodiment of harmless. And yet . . .

  This seesawing became a part of my relationship with Laurie and people like her. It involved a sense that they were different from me, and a reflexive idea that they were frankly a bit weird. Yet simultaneously, I felt a fascination, a desire to get closer and know more, a nagging sense of kinship that meant we might not be so different after all. Laurie would probably understand how I felt about my dogs, how much I loved them, what they meant to me. She wouldn’t have to be told, wouldn’t think it strange.

  She radiated pain, and increasingly over the years I had come to see pain around the periphery of the love between dogs and humans. Sometimes, pain was the source of dog love, the reason for it. I knew that was the case with me; I suspected it was the case with Laurie. Maybe that was our connection.

  Outside, telling me her dogs’ names, Laurie asked me again if I wouldn’t stop by her place, meet her other dogs and her friends.

  Any writer knows to be a bit cautious on a book tour. Readers sometimes assume they know you better than they do, or they attach to a character you’ve described, as Laurie had with Orson. Few authors go visiting people they’ve just met at a reading. Somewhat to my surprise, though, I accepted the invitation.

  The truth is, I wasn’t very interested in Laurie’s dogs. I don’t love many dogs beyond my own; I avoid playgroups and playdates, activities like agility and obedience classes. While I’m drawn to sheepherding, I dislike the tension of herding trials. In fact, large gatherings of people and dogs are rarely fun, for me or my dogs.

  “I’ll come by,” I said, “but to be honest, my motive is probably to write about you.” She shrugged; that seemed as good a reason as any.

  Though I wasn’t particularly curious about Laurie’s dogs, I was interested in her life, and especially in how much her life reflected my own. Were we really part of the same phenomenon? I’d come to this remote corner of upstate New York without my family to spend extended periods with three border collies—how different could I be?

  POOK FOR THE BIG GRAY BARN OFF ROUTE 40, LAURIE HAD told me. There’s an ad for a restaurant painted on the side. Take a left down a dirt road. There’s a picture of a golden retriever painted on the mailbox. If all else fails, turn off the engine and follow the barking.

  A din erupted as I pulled alongside her house. The yelping and shouting wafting from indoors gave me pause; it wasn’t going to be a quiet evening. I pulled the three take-out pizzas I’d brought from the backseat and headed toward the door. “Just stand out there for a second,” yelled a voice I recognized as Laurie’s. “We’ll do this in stages.”

  The door opened a crack and three or four dogs came tumbling out and plowed into me. A white blur—a bichon frise—followed and, as Laurie screamed a warning, lunged for my ankle.

  “Darryl,” Laurie shouted. “Get back in here, now!” She scolded the dog, but didn’t apologize, simply assumed that I understood this was part of the package. The bichon retreated, growling peevishly. A retriever jumped up into my crotch, and a nasty tussle erupted between a shepherd mix and a terrier. Laurie and two other women came running and separated them, dragging them to crates in different rooms.

  Together, we all moved inside.

  I saw and smelled what Laurie meant about not wanting non–dog people to come over. This wasn’t a house for everybody. It wasn’t dirty, but it clearly reflected the presence of many dogs, some not yet housebroken. The odor was overpowering, even oppressive: dog food mixed with animals and accidents. Fur rose in clouds from the carpets and chairs.

  Laurie had a soft spot for the often-unadoptable mixed breeds from shelters. Her troupe—all but one rescues—currently included shepherd-husky mixes, pit bulls, and terriers, plus Heinz 57s of indeterminate parentage. Along with health problems like hip dysplasia and arthritis, their behavioral issues were prodigious, mainly aggressiveness toward people and other dogs. Some couldn’t be touched or bathed. Most had come from the South, where, Laurie told me, more dogs are available for rescue than in the Northeast.

  The biters were housed in crates and kennels in what once was a family room, separated from the rest of the house by toddler fences. A couple of dogs were sweethearts who rarely caused any trouble, but the shepherd mixes were in nearly continuous riot, knocking down the gates, challenging me and other visitors, terrorizing the smaller dogs.

  Laurie was unable to monitor the continuous movement—the squabbling, peeing, eating, and playing of all these dogs. No single person could have, really. Her relationship with the dogs was, by necessity, reactive. She was constantly shouting warnings or commands—“Ben, don’t chew that table leg! Sophie, get back into your kennel. Hannibal, stop growling!” Sometimes they listened, sometimes not.

  So we were different, weren’t we? My dogs weren’t encouraged or allowed to play in the house. They chased sheep and geese, went for multiple walks, visited parks and forest preserves, pursued balls and Frisbees just about every day of their lives. But inside, the house was mine. I needed quiet, partly because of my work, partly due to my nature. Inside, my dogs were as calm as Labs. Outside, they could be as crazed as safety and circumstance permitted.

  I herded separately with each dog, often had separate training sessions besides. At night, the dogs took turns visiting me, jumping up on the sofa for a pat and a scratch. In my experience, some of the strongest relationships occur when dogs spend lots of time with their owners; it helps the dogs feel secure, and means somebody is around to correct bad behavior and reinforce good habits. None of that was really possible in Laurie’s house.

  I waited, as you sometimes do in homes with rambunctious small children, for Laurie to quiet everything down so we could have our pizza. Instead, she and her friends—not one of them introduced herself—intervened in one squabble after another. Laurie did ask if I was hungry. But there was no table—the dining room was filled with crates and grooming tables—so we ate our pizza slices standing at the kitchen counter. Fran and Dana (I learned their names later), two Dog People from nearby Cassayuna, had several dogs of their own they were planning to bring inside from their cars after dinner. They needed some playtime, Dana said, more socialization.

  “It can get pretty raucous in here,” Dana cautioned.

  But no such explanation was necessary. As we ate, more free-for-alls erupted, dogs jumping for the pizza, barking and whining at one another and at us.

  “They’re excited,” Laurie said a bit apologetically. “They’ll calm down a bit.”

  I made some excuses and left quickly, the mayhem too jarring compared to my quiet farmhouse. I said I’d be back the next week.

  While Laurie adored her dogs, her knowledge of them was skewed, limited; she saw them mostly in terms of their perceived emotional lives. Sophie was aggressive because she had been abused. Ben had separation anxiety because he’d been abandoned by a roadside. Several had been days or hours from euthanasia for their health problems. All had been kept alive by her devoted, selfless care.

  Most of the dogs seemed to know their names, but none seemed to have been trained, nor would it have been possible, given how time-consuming it was to take care of them. Stacks of pills, bandages, and food supplements overflowed the kitchen counter.

  It would be difficult, almost impossible, for Laurie to live this way in a suburb in New Jersey, or most places. The barking and whining would disturb the neighbors; the aggressive dogs would bring lawsuits and probably the authorities. It would be too expensive to find a place with enough space. But here, wooded hills and vast farms were Laurie’s neighbors. Even if somebody discovered how many dogs she had, nobody had any reason to care.

  OUR RELATIONSHIP WAS, FROM THE FIRST, BOUNDED BY DOGS. I visited Laurie almost weekly and spent long stretches on the phone, talking her through some of
the innumerable crises that beset her household. Yet she never asked a single question about my wife, my daughter, or my work beyond my life with dogs. She never volunteered anything about herself that didn’t relate to her dogs, either, unless I asked.

  These visits were always both compelling and troubling. They inspired—no, required—me to look more deeply into my own evolving ideas about dogs.

  Writing about dogs for some years now, experiencing intense ups and downs with a complex and troubled dog, talking almost daily to dog lovers on the street, at parks, and online, the more disquieting implications of dog love were something I still hadn’t really come to terms with.

  One thing Laurie and the other Dog People understood was the depth of my feeling for my dogs, the sense of overwhelming affection that came over me—and them—at certain moments. I can hardly describe how much Orson had come to mean to me, and with Laurie, I didn’t have to. She understood, too, that pain is often the genesis of dog love.

  Though I write about the intense interactions between people and their dogs, I had a sense that I was ducking the truth. I value self-awareness; the psychoanalysis I underwent for most of a decade was one of the more penetrating adventures of my adult life. So what was I hiding from? If dogs are often a vehicle through which we reenact powerful needs and dramas in our lives, as I believe, then what were mine?

  This is the dark side of dog love, the part that sappy dog-story spinners, trainers, and breeders and rescue people never mention. I can’t blame them; I don’t want to talk about it either. But part of my upstate sojourn was a search; Bedlam Farm was an intense, round-the-clock laboratory in which to explore the roots of my love for dogs, why I needed them, and whether I had crossed some boundary into unhealthiness.