by Jon Katz
It was the worst possible combination for the barn roofs in my area. You could almost hear the barns and rooftops groaning under all of the weight.
It was a rough winter on my farm, and we checked the barns almost every day. Our slate roofs held, although when the snow did slide off, it was so heavy it was dangerous to be near when it fell, and many of the slate tiles came with it.
Several times a week, I drove down Route 22 in Washington County to go shopping, visit friends, get to the hardware store.
I love old barns and have taken thousands of photos of them. When I walk into a barn, the farmers usually nod and wave to me, and when I ask permission to take a photo, they all say, “Sure, help yourself.” No farmer has ever asked me what I am doing with the photos or even why I am taking them.
So it was wrenching when the barns started falling. By February and early March, it was impossible to go more than a few miles without seeing a big old beautiful barn toppled over.
And these, we all knew, were not temporary losses. Nobody built big cedar barns any longer. The wood was too expensive, insurance was too high, and many of them were on properties that were no longer farms but second homes or country residences. When farmers needed new barns, they used aluminum or other metal structures or even plastic tarpaulins.
I drove by a beautiful old farmhouse on Route 22 and saw that one of its two barns had collapsed. Most of these old barns were filled with junk. If the farmers were lucky, scrappers came by to take the metal inside in exchange for hauling off the wood. Some carpenters love using old barn wood for their restoration projects and will sometimes pay for a collapsed barn’s demolition.
But most of the barns just began rotting where they fell, and most of them are there still, ghosts from another world.
I must have driven by that old white farmhouse a hundred times without ever really looking at it. In the spring of 2011, after Simon had been with us for a few months, I was driving northbound on Route 22 and I looked over at the fallen barn—it framed the old farmhouse in an evocative way, making a statement about what I perceived to be the abandonment of rural life by the country’s political and economic system.
It was surprising to me, but when I looked this time, I was startled to see Simon standing in front of the barn, head down, grazing on the new grass coming up.
I couldn’t imagine what he might be doing there, how he got there, or how a donkey that looked so much like him could be in that pasture and I never saw or noticed him before.
I wondered if I was tired or woozy. I pulled over to the side of the road and then pulled into the driveway in front of the old farmhouse. It was curious. There were no cars, no signs of life. When I got out of my car, I saw that the donkey was not a donkey, but a pony, an old Appaloosa pony. I remember that moment so clearly. It was compassion I felt looking out at that scene, the same compassion I felt for Simon. This feeling was to alter my life.
There was something both poignant and powerful about the image; the horse must have been there all winter, and for many winters before that, and yet I had never noticed him. Why did I see him now? And why would I see Simon standing there, when the pony looked nothing like Simon? The pony’s long coat was a yellowish white. I could see even from that distance—about one hundred yards—that he was covered in burrs, and his fur was matted. Perhaps this was his barn that had fallen? I wondered if he had any other shelter. A second barn was standing to the left of the pony, weathered but intact.
Simon had sensitized me to the plight of animals on farms. No one had noticed him, either, lying nearly dead in his pen, and if someone hadn’t finally called the police, he would not be alive.
Looking more closely, I saw that the pony was very old, and that he appeared well fed. I called out to him, “Hey, pony,” and he looked back and forth, as if he could not quite locate me.
I went to the front door and knocked. I saw lights on inside and thought I heard a radio playing. I knocked a few times and waited about five minutes. I wanted to take a photo of that old pony standing in front of his collapsed barn. It was a metaphor for rural life, I thought. It was an emotional image, and timeless, and it touched my heart. But I wanted to ask permission. Even when it appeared that nobody was home, I never went on anybody’s property without asking permission. I had never been denied it, but I still wanted to ask.
As I turned to leave, disappointed, the door opened, and an older woman stepped out. She was quite beautiful—erect, tall, with white hair. She looked at me curiously, but her eyes were blue and piercing. I guessed her to be in her late sixties. She was 102, as she later told me. Her name was Florence Walrath.
She loved horses—had had them all of her life, she said. She was one of the founders of the Cambridge Saddle Club. The pony’s name was Rocky. “He doesn’t look as good now as he once did,” she said. “But then, neither do I,” she added, smiling.
Florence had a remarkable presence. Something about her commanded attention; she had an uncommon dignity and confidence.
I saw right away that she had trouble hearing me, but I pointed to the camera and then at Rocky, and she nodded and said she understood.
“Well,” she said. “I’m deaf and Rocky is blind. He’s thirty-three years old, and he knows his way around the pasture. You are welcome to take his picture. I won’t let you take mine,” she said, and she shook my hand and began to close the door. “Me and Rocky, we’re just riding it out together.”
I went over to the pasture gate and took a few shots. It was easy to compose that photo, I remember. Rocky was grazing with his head down right in front of the collapsed barn, which I could see had once been quite beautiful.
A maple tree stood in front of the gate, creating a perfect composition. The surviving barn was on the left, its red wall framing the left sight of the shot.
There was this old pony in front of a collapsed barn, both symbols in their own way of a lost world. The photo affected me. It said much about the country, about rural life and its plight. Why had I not seen this before, or felt it before?
I suppose that Simon was the reason. I guessed it then; I know it now. Animals have always been powerful symbols for people: magical helpers, protectors, guides, and companions. A friend of mine, a shaman, e-mailed me that year to tell me that Simon had appeared as a spirit guide for me, to lead me to new experience, to open me up to feeling and emotion. Maybe so.
I went to visit Rocky regularly after that first visit. Florence Walrath often came out onto the porch to talk to me. She was getting frail, weaker, and she could not hear or see well. Still, I valued the brief contact we had. She was a charismatic, strong person. She told me she would never leave her home, despite her failing health. I believed her.
Rocky had about five or six acres to roam in, and was kept outside without shelter. Florence said she couldn’t bear to part with him, and was losing the energy to take care of him. I would come by with some apples, walk to the fence, and call out his name. In the beginning he would turn and hide behind the barn when he heard me.
Eventually he came close and I climbed the fence—most of it had fallen apart, leaving the pasture open to the road. After a few weeks, Rocky came over to me, sniffing, and I handed him the sliced apple open in my palm. He searched for it with his nose, took it gently, then put it on the ground where he could break it up and chew it.
He had lived alone in that pasture for half his life, always without shelter. He found his own water, grazed in his own spots around the pasture. In the winter, he was given grain and thrown hay out of the back of the barn. The men at the feed store still talk about going out to Florence’s farm with huge bags of grain for Rocky, and if the weather was bad, finding hundred-year-old Florence shoveling a path for them in the snow. Some woman, they said.
Florence loved Rocky, but in the particular way of the practical country farm girl. Compassion, for her, was not gourmet treats, blankets and heaters, visits from the vet, or worries about how he was faring in the rain or snow. Flor
ence’s gift to Rocky was life. Beyond that he was pretty much on his own.
When I first put photos of Rocky up on my website and on my Facebook page, I was inundated with messages of concern for him. Poor pony, a blind creature out on his own, his barn collapsed. Could I save him? Bring him to a rescue facility? Take him to my farm? Build him a new barn? Get him to shelter?
Rocky never seemed needy to me, quite the opposite. He was astonishingly skilled at getting around and taking care of himself. He seemed to have made a series of paths around the property and he followed them. One was out to the south pasture, out near the fence (which had no wire in it—Rocky could have walked out any time but knew not to). Another led to the rear of the farm where there was water running in a stream.
Yet for so many people, compassion meant seeing him as helpless and in need of rescue. From the first, I was bombarded with messages about helping Rocky, getting him a new barn, good grain, even a new home.
For Florence, who loved Rocky dearly, compassion was much simpler. He had his own pasture, a stream, some hay in the winter, the basic elements of life. He was free to live his life as a pony. Florence had no regrets or guilt about that.
In bad weather, Rocky hugged the rear of the barn, avoiding the worst of the wind and snow. He led a life of complete freedom, going where he wanted when he wanted, and the ground was safe and familiar to him. Even if Florence could no longer take meticulous care of him, she had loved horses all of her life, and the two of them seemed powerfully aware of each other.
To me, and to many of the farmers I knew in the area, Rocky had a great life. He lived as freely and safely as any animal did in the wild, and the farmers always talked about how lucky he was.
I did have my own concerns about Rocky, however. I saw that his teeth were bad and needed work. His hooves had not been trimmed in years. There were saw burrs and thistles all over his coat, and cuts and scrapes from walking blind into tree limbs and brush. I wondered if his vision could be helped, or if he was totally blind. Nobody really knew.
I came to see Rocky almost every day, and then Maria came to join me. She fell immediately and hopelessly in love with Rocky. Neither of us had ever had a horse. Although horses were equines like donkeys, they were very different.
Maria loved the donkeys, and they loved her back. She has a particular gift for communicating with animals—a way of listening to them and approaching them gently and calmly. When she walks out of the farmhouse, every animal on the farm starts meowing, braying, or barking.
When we came up to Rocky’s fence we always held out apples and carrots. Rocky would approach, use his nose and ears to locate us, and then come close. Eventually, we would climb over the fence and come up to him, calling his name so he could hear us and figure out where we were.
Food is a language with animals; I have never known one that did not bond to people who fed them regularly. We brought Rocky grain to fatten him up. Our connection to Rocky grew stronger, and there were many sweet afternoons out behind the barns. Rocky loved to walk with us behind the farmhouse in the fields. When it snowed or rained, we made sure to stop by and check on him. There were old horse and cow stalls in the barn, but they were filled with junk and old furniture, and we knew Florence could not have handled the manure and the other problems that putting Rocky in the stall would cause.
Just as Simon brayed, Rocky neighed when we pulled into the driveway. He knew the sound of our cars and the sound of our voices. He loved Maria, and would almost sigh in contentment when she brushed him, sang to him, and talked to him. It was a free life, we thought, but perhaps a lonely life. Horses, like donkeys, are herd animals and love company. Wouldn’t it be nice, Maria and I often said to each other, if the donkeys or sheep were here to keep Rocky company? He could follow them around and perhaps find new grazing areas.
Maria felt a profound compassion for Rocky; she connected to him in a way I had not seen her ever connect to an animal besides her dog Frieda. His blindness, his age, and his gentleness all touched her deeply.
Maria and I are very different in our approaches to animals. Animals such as dogs and horses and donkeys do share one thing—they are intuitive readers of human emotion. I think men in general, me in particular, are less open emotionally than many women. One of the ways in which animals communicate is through emotion—they smell, see, and sense our moods.
Maria is an intensely and overtly emotional person. She will often cry—it is not a sad thing, just a way of expressing herself. She cries in the same way some people talk. She has powerful nurturing and intuitive instincts, and unlike me, hers are right out in the open. She is an artist, and she uses these feelings to create her work and express herself.
She has a powerful way with animals; she is both a healer and a whisperer. She seems to understand how to approach them in an open, nonthreatening, and yet affectionate way. She speaks to animals in a soft but enthusiastic voice that always seems to attract and calm them. She understands the power of food in human–animal connections, and she understands as well how to be still around animals, to let them smell her, approach her, relax around her. They are at ease with her. They tolerate her touching them, brushing them. There is no wariness.
It seemed that Rocky had not been touched for a long time, perhaps in years. It took a month or so before he began to visibly attach to Maria. He became comfortable with her. While he always let me approach him or take his photo, he got skittish if I tried to touch him or brush him.
That was not the case with Maria. She began talking to Rocky the second she entered the pasture. Maria seemed to instinctively know how to reach an animal like Rocky. As she got close, she kept speaking to him, so he could locate her and know where she was. She is exquisitely sensitive to others and knew a blind animal would be comforted by hearing a constant voice.
“Hey, Rocky,” Maria would say in her soft voice. “How’s my little pony?”
As Rocky became more comfortable with us, and we with him, I saw that Maria was also becoming much more deeply attached to him. At first, she approached him tentatively, holding an apple out with her hand. She was soft-spoken and, like me, reluctant to show too much enthusiasm or reveal too much of herself.
A friend of ours, Paula Josa-Jones, a longtime horse lover, came up to visit us, and we took her to see Rocky. Maria and I were both amazed at how emotive she was, at how much feeling she showed him, how enthusiastically she was moving her body and her hands. She was much more verbal than Maria and I had been, her voice pitched higher and louder than ours.
She touched him along the neck, brushed him, and rubbed her hands along his back.
Rocky seemed to revel in this burst of energy and demonstrative show of affection. Maria and I felt sluggish in comparison, almost like mutes. And it was striking to see how Rocky responded. He snuggled up to Paula, almost danced in response to her. He became more animated; her attention seemed to bring him back to an older, more comfortable and happy place.
Maria changed after that. She also became more emotive, allowing herself to talk to Rocky in a different voice: to show, not just speak, her affection for him, to move with him and around him. And Rocky changed as well. If he was comfortable around Maria before, he seemed to adore her now. He whinnied loudly when he heard her voice, came running to see her, pressed his head against her, and stood still for long minutes while she talked to him, sang to him, and brushed the burrs out of his mane and coat.
He was shaggy and unkempt when we first met him, but under Maria’s careful ministrations, he looked sleek and clean again, and seemed to feel better. He was livelier, clearly affectionate. It was an amazing thing to see, the way these two loving creatures took to each other. I think Rocky did for Maria what Simon had done for me: he opened her up and challenged her to be more outgoing, less guarded with her emotions.
We went on walks with Rocky down to his creek on his path. He seemed an eager tour guide, happy to show us his world, a place he had occupied for more than thirty years
, half of them alone.
Rocky’s world was a beautiful place, and his ability to deal with his blindness was a powerful thing to see. Sometimes we would see him bang into the side of the barn, or a fence post, but generally he knew every foot of the pasture, where to walk, when to stop. Rocky was a healthy, happy pony.
But I was not able to convince many animal lovers on the Internet. Every day I was besieged with messages and e-mails begging me to find him shelter, to get him to another farm, to build a special barn and enclosure for him. I tried to explain that this was a loved animal, a lucky animal; that he led as good a life as any pony in the world. But the schism in understanding was too wide, and I gave up the argument.
In the animal rescue world, compassion often means emotionalizing. It means keeping animals alive by any means at all costs, whereas in what I call the real world of real animals, it was much more complex than that, at least to me.
Florence told me that she had once thought about putting Rocky down. She thought it might be the most compassionate thing to do to an animal living outdoors by himself, with an older person who couldn’t do much more than feed him and visit him. She said she couldn’t bring herself to do it.
But Florence never really saw Rocky as piteous, and neither did I. More and more, we seem to need to see pets and animals as piteous and troubled, perhaps so that we have a reason to be loving and nurturing, opportunities for which are increasingly dwindling in our culture. I never felt Rocky was in dire trouble on that farm. He might have been made more comfortable, but Florence didn’t have the money to do that. Rocky loved Florence, and she loved him. True, he did not have some of the amenities pets have—a warm cozy room, lots of attention, regular checkups by a vet. But he had more than enough. How could I explain that it would have been cruel to move an aging, blind pony to another farm? To change his routines? It was inspiring to see the way he navigated those paths, finding the water stream even in winter.
Maria and I were both in love with him, as we were with Simon. Although these two animals were different, they touched deep chords in us, chords of mercy and compassion.