by Jon Katz
There was a reason why Rose’s nips on my arm startled, even terrified me, why her messages came to take on far greater importance even than the life of a lamb.
Those nights brought me back to my very brief time with Lucky. I had dark troubles in my childhood stemming from one traumatic night. I don’t remember much more than someone coming into my totally darkened room on the upper floor of our tiny wood-frame house on the east side of Providence. I heard him coming up the stairs, one creak at a time. My parents were not at home that night. I remember him opening the door as I felt a powerful terror unlike any I had experienced. When my parents came home, they were shocked to find my door open, and to find me crying and hiding under the sheets in a urine-soaked bed.
The police tried to get me to draw pictures of the man who came into the room, but I either didn’t see him clearly or terror blocked my memory. I remember his breathing.
Various doctors tried different therapies and my father lectured me every night about choice and determination, but there was only one time in my early life that I did not wet my bed after that awful night, and that was the time Lucky came home with me and slept in my bed.
Lucky and I shared the first dialogue I ever had with an animal, even though I could not have understood it as such at the time. I believe he came to me to help me begin the long and arduous task of learning to trust, to be open and safe.
Every dog or animal I have had has been a magical helper on that journey. Lucky was the first. I sometimes think Rose was his spirit reincarnated, that she came to finish the work he began. I believe in spirit dogs. I believe they come when you need them and leave when their work is done, or when your needs change. Lucky was the first living thing to understand me, to sense my pain and fear, to help me climb over it.
In the six weeks he was with me, I never wet my bed once, and when he was taken away, I wet the bed every night until I was in my teens. Bed wetting shaped much of my early life, and so did the accidents I had in school, to the rage of my teachers and the ridicule of my classmates. I know now that this affliction is common in abused children, a powerful symptom of early trauma and abuse. I did not know then, nor did my father, who told me I was weak and lazy, that I could stop anytime I wished, if only I mustered the will.
I never answered him during those nightly lectures, but the truth is, I would have cut off an arm to stop wetting the bed. I could never go on a sleepover or have one in my home. I only went to camp once in my life, and never dared to do it again. It was a dreadful nightmare.
Lying in my bed in my dark farmhouse, I began to make the connection between Lucky and Rose, between my need to communicate with animals and the powerful messages they had been bringing to me.
I had come to my farm on a hero journey to find out who I am, to heal the wounds in my life, some inflicted on me, some I inflicted on others. Joseph Campbell writes that the hero journey is about leaving familiar places and heading out into the unknown, where there can be great danger and confusion. If you are fortunate, he writes, magical helpers, often in the form of animals, will appear to guide you and help you feel strong when you are afraid.
I came to see that Rose helped me through those first difficult years on my farm in many more ways than I had imagined.
At the farm, on a remote hillside, I often woke up in a sweat, in a panic. Freud believed that when we suffer a traumatic experience, we often replicate it in order to try to solve it. I was hundreds of miles from family or friends or any of the things I was used to. Back home, I was never more than a few feet from people, from help.
On the farm, it was a different experience.
In my years of therapy, I asked the same question over and over again, the question every traumatized child asks: “Where was everyone? Why did no one see or hear? Why did no one come? What did I do to deserve this, to bring this great shame on myself?”
I never got an answer.
I remember one night on the farm, I woke up in a sweat, my heart racing in an awful panic. I was nearly paralyzed with fear, the room was dark. I thought—as I had so many times—that someone was coming up the stairs. I was, as usual, alone.
I often have dreams, and they are rarely good ones, and this night was no different. I thought I heard Rose talking to me, telling me it was okay, I was not alone anymore, I was not a child any longer, I was not helpless anymore.
“It’s all right,” I felt her saying. “I came to tell you that you are all right, you will live your life, you are safe here. You can let the fear go; it’s just a space to cross.”
I had this powerful sensation of light and connection, as if something strong but gentle had burst through the wall of fear that had surrounded my nights for so many years.
I thought of Lucky, sleeping in a box on the floor, of how I picked him up and put him on the bed next to me. And then I thought of his rheumy eyes, his shaking and trembling, his saying an unmistakable good-bye to me.
I opened my eyes. I heard the wind outside, but it was different. There was Rose, standing by my bedside. I started to get up, confused and dazed. Was it a lamb? A coyote? A high wind? All things Rose might wake me up for.
But it was none of those things. It was something different. Rose was not nipping at me, not rushing to the window, not trying to get me up and on my feet. She was not warning me of some problem or danger in the pasture.
She had come to speak with me, to give me a message. I could feel it. She stood staring at me with her dark green eyes. I knew—felt—that she had sensed my fear, and responded to it. Perhaps this was why she had come; perhaps she really was Lucky returning to me.
Maybe all of the dogs in our lives are one and the same dog, coming back as long as they are needed, going home to change bodies and refresh and be healed and made strong again, for their strenuous and complex task of changing a human being.
I am here, Rose said. You are not alone. You can figure it out. Talk to the little boy. Tell him it is okay, that he is not alone anymore.
It was the most important conversation I had had up to this point with an animal. It touched the deepest parts of me and brought them to life. It integrated the adult with the child, and helped to narrow the gap between them.
I thought back to Lucky, and his purpose. In my life with animals, I have learned they have messages for us, communicated to us in different ways if we are open to them and willing to work to understand them. Sometimes their messages are symbolic: Lucky telling me I was strong and could succeed. Sometimes they are literal: Rose telling me lambs had been born.
Lucky came to ease the loneliness and fear of a troubled child. His message was strength and safety.
Julius and Stanley came to help me with the sometimes frightening transition from corporate life to a creative life.
Orson came to tell me to move my unhappy life forward and enter into a compact with nature and the animal world.
Rose came to tell me I was strong and could survive alone on a farm.
All of these creatures had things to tell me. Each one guided me to a deeper understanding of animals and helped me understand how to communicate with them.
Rose was to save my life more than once. We talked to one another so often and in so many different ways that it became second nature to me. When we went out to work in the mornings, I simply pictured the tasks we were there to perform—moving the sheep, taking them out to the pasture, bringing them into the barn, holding them in place for the vet.
When I was anxious about a ram, Rose would get in front of him and back him off. When I lost a cell phone, I closed my eyes and pictured it and Rose went and found it.
Rose filled so many crucial roles in my life that had previously been missing or that hadn’t been fully realized by those who were supposed to play them.
She was my mother—she was devoted to me, loved me, offered her life to protect me.
She was my partner—she shared the joy and travail of the farm.
She was my teacher—she helped me come
to a wiser understanding of animals, far beyond the experience of having a pet.
She was my spiritual guide. The wolf lived and was present in Rose. She would turn into something wild and powerful in an instant; she connected to the animal world. And that was the mystical part, she was, in some ways, unreachable, beyond my comprehension. There were parts of her I could not talk to, could never understand, that she would never show me.
I loved Bedlam Farm. I wrote eight books there; it was a beautiful and inspiring place for me. It was the place where Rose and I lived together, worked together, learned together. It took a physical toll on both of us, though; the winters were brutal, the labor hard and unrelenting, the pastures steep and challenging.
Rose took more of a beating than I did. She was butted by rams, run over by ewes, raked by hidden barbed wire. Her paws were shredded on rocks, sliced by glass and nails. Every day was hard for her in different ways, and she had only one speed: fast.
One morning, I woke up and she was not lying by my side. She was not patrolling the hallway outside my bedroom. She was not looking out the window to check on her sheep.
I heard her call out to me, “Help me.” The message was clear and sharp. I got up, grabbed my robe, and ran downstairs. I knew she was at the back door. It was the only place she would go if she was struggling and could not get to me.
I found her lying there in a pool of vomit. She was trembling and breathing heavily; spittle ran down her chin. She had had the first accident of her life with me, a puddle of urine on the floor.
“Oh, Rose, Rose,” I said, dropping to my knees. I held her, leaned over her, whispered in her ear that I was there, that I would help her. Her sharp and clear eyes were clouded and glazed; she seemed disoriented.
She turned and saw me, focused on me. I felt her tail wag.
She looked me in the eye. “Help me to leave,” she said. “Don’t let me be like this.”
Rose was the strongest, most independent, and least needy dog I ever knew. She was proud and never backed down from any duty, confrontation, or fight. She never curled up in my lap or whined for attention. She was at her happiest when she was outside with the sheep, watching them, moving them, being with them.
I had no confusion about what she was telling me, no doubt and little grief. Rose was in charge of her own destiny. She had come to help me, to stand with me as I learned to heal my fears. She did not wish to live an impaired or piteous life, or to be seen in that way.
I cleaned her up, picked her up, and placed her in the car, wrapped in a blanket. We drove to the veterinary hospital. Suzanne, our vet, examined Rose and shook her head. She thought there was severe neural damage, perhaps a stroke or a burst blood vessel.
Rose had struck her head or been struck in the head many times in our years together. I could, if I wished, take her to a veterinary neurologist in Massachusetts, Suzanne said. They could do an MRI; perhaps there was a tumor.
But she knew and I knew that I would never do that. Rose would not have wished for me to do that. I do not believe that the measure of love for an animal is to keep them alive at all costs.
Instead, Rose and I had one of our most important and meaningful conversations. It was time, she said, for her to leave the world, and bring her work elsewhere. Thanks to her, I was stronger; the nights had lost their dread for me. I was confident about running the farm. I knew how to give shots to the animals, when to call the vet, what kind of fences I need, what kind of water lines to run to the pasture, how much hay to buy and who to buy it from.
I had spiritually collapsed on the farm, nearly broken down completely in my confusion and aloneness. Rose brought clarity to my life, and gave me some strength. I do not know if I could have survived without her. I had gotten divorced and found love again all during my time with Rose.
Suzanne and I reached the same conclusion. Rose was deteriorating before our eyes. I was determined to help her keep her dignity.
When I told Maria what I wanted to do, she burst into tears and challenged me. “No, we can’t put her down!” she pleaded. She was angry, I could see it.
And then I cried, too, perhaps deeper and longer than I ever had before. I told Maria what Rose had said to me, lying by the back door that morning. She was asking me for my help, as I had asked her for hers so many times.
Please, please, help me to go, let me go.
Maria understood; she agreed. We put Rose down the next day.
I will always talk with Rose. Talking to animals is a mystical and ethereal thing. Once you open up the channels of communication with an animal, you become part of a rich and fulfilling conversation that can continue for all time.
Rose enters my consciousness all the time on the farm, when I am herding sheep, doing chores, walking up a steep hill. She came to visit me when I was in the hospital recovering from open heart surgery and she stands by my side whenever I wonder how to deal with all the things one as to deal with on a farm.
I think of Rose often, every time my border collie Red goes out to organize the sheep. My wish for her is the same, that she is running in a golden field, grass stretching to the horizon, sheep everywhere who need to be gathered up, led to pasture, taken home to the safety of their barns.
Be strong, she tells me. Be strong.
6
The Great Collapse
A friend who works in the financial industry called one afternoon in September of 2008. He was watching CNN. The economy was crashing; he had lost all of his savings in one afternoon. The world has changed, he said.
I walked out the back door of the farmhouse. I looked at the Kubota tractor I had purchased to move the giant, round bales of hay I had to buy for my two steers and dairy cows. I saw the sheep on the hill. I saw the cows in the back pasture. I saw my border collie Rose, who was still with us at the time, though lately she had been struggling to keep up with the sheep, her legs trembling and sore after years of hard work. She looked at me in a way she had not looked at me in all her years at my side. This is over, she said to me; this is something different.
Looking back, I ought not to have been surprised by the Great Collapse. I think Rose saw it coming; perhaps that’s why she decided to leave me so long before her time. She was, I think, trying to send me a message. Animals have instincts we do not have; they sense things we do not know. I doubt she knew what a mortgage or stock market was, but I am sure she sensed a great change coming in my life, in the world around her. Many memories are fuzzy in my life, but not the fall of 2008. Within a few weeks, my first wife and I decided to end our thirty-five-year marriage. This, coupled with those rapidly dropping numbers in the stock market, was the beginning of a breakthrough for me. These events were to help me see the world anew, to understand animals in a different way.
Overnight, I became a terrified five-year-old with a ninety-acre farm, a lot of animals, and a book contract. I was living a life I could no longer afford, did not understand, and could not maintain. And I was very much alone.
The Great Collapse became a bridge between one life and another, one way of understanding animals and one another.
I thought by that time—I had been on my farm for nearly four years—that I had learned a great deal about animals and how to understand and communicate with them. Indeed, I had learned a lot. I was listening to the animals and they were changing my life. But it was nothing compared to what was to come.
We often project our needs onto animals, and when the Great Collapse came, I had two animals in the house—Rose, who ran the farm with me, and Lenore, a loving black Lab who helped me feel less lonely. I sang to her every night before I went to sleep. I didn’t see until much later how sad a scene that was.
There were other animals on the farm then, too many. I had two Swiss steers, Elvis and Harold, a beef cow named Luna, three goats, six chickens, thirty-six Tunis sheep, and four donkeys.
Was I an animal hoarder? I certainly didn’t fit the hoarder profile: the house was clean and in good condition, I had ple
nty of money (or did before the collapse), lots of pasture, good hay, and a pump that drew fresh water. I could care for them well.
But there was something wrong with my relationship to the animals around me. I had lost perspective. I was using them to fill holes in my life. I had too many animals to know them all well, to really understand and communicate with them.
And in a sense, they had helped me to lose control of my life. I had gone a little mad up there on that hill, in those winters, continually hauling hay and water and calling expensive vets. I had been so insulated in the world of the farm that I could no longer see my own life clearly.
When I came back from a book tour in 2008, Anne, my bookkeeper, was waiting for me in the study. She had an awfully gloomy look in her eye.
“It’s time to panic,” she said after a long look at the bills and the books. I had run out of money. There was very little on the way. I didn’t need to be told twice. I panicked and ended up sitting in a therapist’s office in Saratoga Springs, New York. I have lost my life, I said. I want it back.
They say getting divorced is like being in a car crash every day for a year. It’s an awful thing to have to separate from a good person who did nothing wrong, but our marriage just didn’t work any longer. She loved her life in New York City; I loved my life in the country. We could not find a space in the middle, not even after so many long years together.
Like many people who get divorced and deal with feelings of guilt, I wanted her to be secure and I wanted the conflict to be over. So I gave away most of the money I had to end it. I didn’t regret it then, and I don’t now. It was the right thing to do.
The recession and the resulting collapse of publishing as I had known it took the rest of the money. No more big advances, no more regular royalty checks.
That was not the end of it. The recession had collapsed the real estate market as well as the stock market. I put Bedlam Farm up for sale, expecting to recover some of my losses, to build a new nest egg.
No one even looked at the property for nearly two years, and it was another two years before anyone bought it, and then only for a third of the original asking price. The farm wiped out the meager savings I had left.
