by Jon Katz
I was also proud of everybody, including myself. We had worked hard for this moment, earned it; our lunch had a triumphal feeling. We had come through the move, the winter, and the lambing largely intact. For newcomers, we’d suffered relatively few losses.
The ewes had risen above their obsession with food to do a fine job of mothering. All they needed was shearing and hoof trimming. Almost all the lambs were fat and happy and healthy.
Carol had overcome her illness and was appreciating the spring. Fanny was as loyal and loving as any dog. Rose had risen to the challenge thrust on her somewhat prematurely and saved my hide. Orson was blossoming into a dog who wanted to work but was also learning how to be still.
I hadn’t done so badly myself.
I composed, in my head, an after-lunch speech to the assembled company, praising the ewes for their fortitude, thanking the donkeys for their faithful affection. I nearly raised my water bottle in a salute to Rose and Orson, and I reserved a few kudos for humans, too: Anthony, Ray and Joanne, Paula. Myself.
I didn’t give the speech, of course. Talking at length to animals is a no-no when you spend the winter alone with them. Just one of those ground rules, like no more than one scotch on a dark and stormy night.
OVER THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS, THE GRASS GREW TALLER and greener; I stopped feeding the ewes hay and grain as the pastures grew lush. In late April, a shearer came to denude the flock and I sold its fleece to a local spinner—my first revenue from the farm, I bragged to Paula, though it amounted to $3.50 and a dozen eggs.
It was time for one of my biggest decisions about the sheep: who would go and who would stay. Some friends urged me to keep them all; I had sufficient pasture for a flock of thirty. And after all, we’d been through a lot together. Carolyn was willing to let me keep them. But Anthony and my other Hebron neighbors brooked no sentimentality. These were livestock, livelihood.
I felt in the middle of these camps. These sheep weren’t pets. If I were going to call my place a farm, I had to make sensible choices in the interest of the flock. For herding purposes, fifteen sheep was plenty. With thirty, the trough and the training pen would get crowded and it would be difficult to steer them all into the barn for vet visits and shearing. I’d have to order twice as much hay, after I’d already invested a daunting fortune in barns, fencing, and feed.
Besides, I felt increasingly conscious of the trials of the farmers around me. How could I justify keeping twice as many animals as I needed, eating hay and costing money? A true farmer struggling to make ends meet who heard about that wouldn’t like it.
Yet I felt more attached to the ewes after lambing. How much more intimately involved with animals could you get?
I’d land in the middle, I decided. Some sheep had to go, but I would keep a slightly expanded flock.
A number of people had called, offering to buy sheep—people with herding dogs who wanted dog-broke sheep, several butchers seeking mutton or lamb, locals who wanted pets for their kids. I said no to them all.
Instead, I called Bob Wood, a farmer over in Pawlet, and we struck a deal: he’d add some of my sheep to his own flock and transport the others to market in Rutland, and we’d split the proceeds.
Dr. Alderink came by to review the herd with me. She pointed out the ewes that looked most vital and those that appeared weaker. I consulted my notes so I could weed out the poor mothers, those who’d abandoned their lambs or been careless with them. The devoted black-faced ewe with twins? A keeper. The one who’d stranded Murphy with inadequate milk? She had to go. I planned for ewes and lambs to either go or stay together. Though they were no longer nursing, the lambs were still likely to stay close by their mothers; I didn’t want to separate them.
On a rainy Sunday night, Bob Wood drove over with a wooden box in his truck bed. Rose and I gathered the herd and pushed them into the barn, where Bob and I grappled to load my designated sheep into the truck. The scene was chaotic, ewes and lambs bellowing and scattering every which way, Bob and I lunging and grunting and cursing.
It took a good ninety minutes, and when he finally left—full of praise for Rose, and leaving me a bottle of his own maple syrup as a gift—I suddenly saw the black-faced ewe racing around, looking for her babies. Somehow I had put her twins on Bob’s truck by mistake.
I knew better than to call him and try to reshuffle the flock. So I left the barnyard.
“It was hard,” I told Anthony. He and Holly had invited me for dinner. He rolled his eyes. But all night, I couldn’t sleep, listening to the ewe bleating for her twins. “I’m so sorry, girl,” I told her next morning when Rose and I took the sheep to the meadow across the street. She ate hungrily, but paused frequently to look around forlornly and complain.
For two days, as the ewe baahed fruitlessly, I cursed my carelessness. She settled down on the third day, consoled somewhat by the bits of carrot I slipped her when the others weren’t watching. In fact, she became my favorite, the one who’d put her nose in my hand for a scratch. Still, I’d done her wrong.
But I had twenty healthy sheep, my herd for the foreseeable future. They were all responsive to Rose (though she still favored Brutus), and she seemed easy and confident with this number.
They would have a good summer. The artesian well was running, providing a constant supply of fresh, clean water. I had plenty of pasture. The vet had given them all their shots, their hooves had been trimmed and their fleece shorn. Barring some unforeseen obstacle, they could munch their way clear to the first frost.
Already I was thinking ahead to future pleasures and ventures. A Lab breeder in Pawlet I’d visited a couple of times raises some of the most beautiful dogs I’ve ever seen, and she was expecting a litter. Annie, who works at Gardenworks, down the road, asked me the other day if I wanted two young goats. And my friend Sheila wondered whether I might consider giving a home to her gimpy rooster, affable but lame and getting on in years. I identified with him.
I didn’t need any of these new additions, Paula pointed out. She was right, but that had never stopped me before.
I’D COME TO THE FARM IN PART TO EXPLORE THE IDEA THAT our own humanity was linked to our love of animals.
Was Carolyn right in the question she posed, what seems like a very long time ago? Can working with a dog really make you a good human?
Probably not.
Can it make you a better one? Yes.
Do you sometimes need to be better to have the dog you really want? Absolutely.
Shrinks, friends, spouse, editors have all worked on me over the years to be more patient, less impulsive, less angry, and more focused. My own rage and confusion at the state of bedlam in which I grew up has plagued me all my life, an unwelcome and unwanted legacy.
Dog love is a powerful, perhaps underappreciated force in the life of someone like me. If dogs are a measure of my humanity, the legacy of my winter at Bedlam Farm is that I did do better.
If Orson is herding well, then I must be growing less angry and more patient. If Rose has developed her amazing skills without interference from me and my big mouth, then I have learned something about patience and trust.
If I could muster the strength to give Homer to another family, then perhaps I am grasping the real meaning of love.
I often wonder—if we humans did a better job of taking care of one another, would we still love dogs so much? I doubt we’ll ever know.
BEDLAM, AN IDEA WOVEN THROUGH THIS EXPERIENCE, SUGGESTS our struggle to survive in a bewildering, sometimes cruel, and chaotic world. It reflects our human ability to mistreat one another, but also to improve. This is a fundamental difference between people and dogs: they adapt, but we can change.
The story of the Bethlehem asylum, my farm’s unlikely godmother, still captivates and sometimes haunts me. It was a story about so much more than a place. Bedlam was a nightmare in the seventeenth century, its inmates brutally confined, horribly abused, restrained, humiliated, mistreated.
Over time—centuries—conditi
ons there improved, along with human learning and compassion. The idea of paying for the privilege of throwing rocks and tomatoes at hospitalized mental patients horrifies us now, but just a few hundred years ago it was deemed no different from going to the theater.
I have more than once felt the fuzzy line between normalcy and other people’s notions of insanity. People have told me my whole life that I’m crazy, and I used to think they must know something.
Now I believe that no one can really judge—or know—what’s in another’s mind. It’s impossible to locate the boundary between what most people think is rational and what isn’t. It made no sense of any sort, for instance, to spend so much money to buy a farm in a remote corner of upstate New York and gather donkeys and sheep and dogs there. No one I knew thought it sensible. Yet it’s turned out to be one of the best, most meaningful experiences of my life. For someone in late middle age, I’ve come to believe, such change can be vital in keeping one’s eyes open to the world.
Even Bedlam, originally a metaphor for inhumanity, eventually became a model of enlightened medical care, a metaphor for progress instead of cruelty.
I’ve been learning a lot about the world’s first crazy house. In the spring, Tag Heister, a researcher at the University of Kentucky’s Department of Psychiatry (and a fellow dog lover), sent me a 1989 book—The Discovery of the Art of the Insane by John M. MacGregor. It included an eighteenth-century etching by Paul Sandby; the cartoon, which is housed in the British Museum, is titled “The Author Run Mad.”
The image shows a barefoot artist (said to be modeled on William Hogarth) clad in a rakish feather hat, a book open at his feet, a chain attached to one ankle. He’s working on a drawing—a story sketched on a wall.
The etching is funny, yet not funny. It gives me the chills. Looking at it, I sense how easily I could have been that author.
He is in a cell in Bedlam, a primitive thatched bed behind him. On the rear walls are elaborate religious drawings, including several animals (one looks like a dog). He’s holding either a long paintbrush or a pointer. Judging from the satisfied expression on his face, he is working on a good story, oblivious to his surroundings. The book seems more important to him than the fact that he’s being held in a notorious lunatic asylum, the object of ridicule and public humiliation.
I think of the young boy who came across me in the meadow one afternoon while I was out grazing the sheep. He was bicycling on a track through the woods and nearly plowed into us. He stopped, took in this large and rumpled man with his battered Yankees cap, dirtied jeans, and walking stick.
“You the dog guy?” he asked.
I nodded, and he seemed relieved to bicycle off down the hill, too polite to throw tomatoes.
My imagination reaches out across time to this mad author thrown into Bedlam. I couldn’t shake the feeling I not only understood what he was doing but was at work on a contemporary version of it in a world which, for all its flaws, has improved. It still punishes individuality sometimes, but now allows the mad to wander freely and acquire farms and dogs and sheep.
I imagine him pleased with this progress, the Bedlam author from hundreds of years ago, a rotund man in his outlandish hat and flowing cloak. Apparently unaware that he’s in a crazy house, indifferent to others’ view of him, he is not in a beautiful place, but he’s making something that’s beautiful to him, constructing his own reality.
It seems relevant to me.
I, too, sometimes think I’m in a crazy house, and others must think me crazy, at times, to be here. I also happily do my work amid almost indescribable chaos, and no matter what’s happening outside, I’m always happy and engaged to be telling my story.
But there this mad author and I diverge somewhat. My Bedlam is different.
I am not mad here, but clear and calm.
I am not transformed, but allowed to be wholly myself.
I am isolated, but have never felt more connected to people.
I am not imprisoned, but free.
I am not cut off from my family and my roots, but am brought back to them.
I am not living alone with dogs, but permitting my dogs to lead me somewhere I need to go, and it has been a great trip. We have more distance to travel together, I’m sure, before we are through.
Read on for an excerpt from
Going Home
Finding Peace When Pets Die
by Jon Katz
Published by Villard
Introduction
It was my birthday, August 8, 2005. I had just brought Orson home from the vet’s office, where he had been put down.
My other dog, Rose, who reads me better than any other living creature, froze when I got out of the truck. From her post on the hill with the sheep, she watched me take Orson’s body out of the truck, her eyes never straying from the unwieldy package.
Rose herded the sheep over to their feeder, then turned, came quickly down to greet me, and sniffed Orson through the large plastic bag the vet had given me. She had spent every day of her life with Orson and was almost always around him. I wondered how she would react. She would smell his death, of course, and know it instantly.
As detached as a crime-scene investigator, she took note of the bag, and of Orson’s smell. She gave the sheep a stern warning look over her shoulder and fell into place alongside me, as if she had expected this to happen. Nothing surprised Rose. I loved her for being so adaptable. It was as if she was telling me, “Hey, life goes on. Let’s get this done and get back to work.”
The late-afternoon clouds swept over the mountains and cast the hill in shadow. With Rose by my side, I made my way toward the top of the pasture where a handyman had dug a grave. Orson was the heaviest thing I have ever had to carry, in so many different ways. In that bag, along with the limp body of my dead dog, I carried a piece of my heart.
I had to stop two or three times—to put him down, catch my breath, swat the flies away, wipe my face with a handkerchief, gulp from the bottle of water in my back pocket. Each time, Rose waited for me. My back and legs hurt and I was in shock. Orson had died with his head in my lap, looking up at me, and I’d felt as if I might come apart. I didn’t. I didn’t want him to pick up on my fear or sadness at the end of his life, so I just smiled and said, “Thank you.”
In 2000, a loving breeder in Texas told me she was seeking a home for a border collie who had failed to make it as a show dog. He was intense but intelligent, she said. He was beautiful. He had issues. I brought him into my life for reasons that are still not clear to me.
Orson did not turn out to be an ordinary dog in any respect. He crashed into my life like a meteor, and was so charismatic, rebellious, and explosive a personality that I abandoned my life as a mystery writer and media critic, began taking sheepherding lessons, bought Bedlam Farm, and ended up with a menagerie: donkeys, sheep, steers, and, for a while, some goats. I loved Orson dearly, although he drove me crazy from the moment I first picked him up at Newark Airport. Animal lovers know that troubled creatures are sometimes the ones we love most.
On the farm, Orson wreaked havoc, which was his dominant characteristic. He dug under and leapt over fences. His notion of sheepherding was to grab the largest ewe and pull her over onto the ground. He was intensely arousable. And, unfortunately, overprotective. Orson nipped at workmen, package-delivery people, neighbors. He bit three people, including a child. My beloved dog defied treatment from the best and most expensive veterinarians, holistic practitioners, trainers, and animal communicators. He was simply beyond my ability to repair or control.
Still, Orson taught me a lot about my own limits, and he also sparked a process that made me not just a writer but a writer about dogs, farms, and rural living. He was the dog who changed my life.
One of the many gifts Orson led me to was Rose, another border collie. Working with Orson, I came to love border collies and was mesmerized by the rituals and practices of herding sheep with them.
I got Rose when she was just eight weeks o
ld. A small, beautiful, black-and-white creature, she was, from the first, my partner on the farm, helping me with herding and lambing. She battled coyotes and pigs, fought off rabid feral cats and skunks, and twice saved my life. Each time, I had fallen on the ice during an awful winter storm and knocked myself out. I would have frozen to death in the bitter cold if Rose had not awakened me by nipping on my ears.
Like Orson, Rose has had a profound impact on my life, making it possible, in many ways, for me to live on a farm. She and Orson were as inseparable as they were different.
Orson gave me so much, and I repaid him by ending his life. He was troubled, damaged, and I spent years trying to fix him, to no avail. I talked to my vet and we agreed that he should be euthanized. There was nothing left to try, no more money to spend. It was an agonizing decision, but I had to trust that it was the right one.
It took me a while to get Orson up the hill that day. Rose no longer paid overt attention to the bag, yet I could tell she was aware of it. She was always with me when there was work to do, pleasant or not.
The grave site at the top of the pasture was a beautiful spot, with a commanding view of the farm and the hills and valley beyond.
Orson would love it up there, I hoped. I dug the hole deeper to prevent predators from getting into the grave. Sweat soaked my clothes now, and the flies feasted on my arms and face. Ever vigilant, Rose sat nearby watching me and keeping an eye on the sheep below.
After I buried Orson carefully, I placed the marker, a flat slab of stone carved with his name, at the head of his grave. I shook my head. I wanted to cry but could not, though the pain I felt was piercing.
I had lost dogs before, but not this dog, and not in this way. This one really hurt.
I was awash in guilt, grief, and loss. And I was alone. I didn’t know how to deal with the pain I was feeling, or how to mourn this dog, whom I loved beyond words and owed so much. He had been such an integral part of my life—not only had he inspired me to change my life for the better, but he had lived each of those changes with me. We had traveled all over the country together—on book tours, to herding trials, even to the University of Minnesota, where I taught for a few months.