The Dogs of Bedlam Farm : An Adventure with Sixteen Sheep, Three Dogs, Two Donkeys, and Me

by Jon Katz

  ID 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 well 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 farms 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-conditions 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 peoples notions of insanity. People have told me my whole life that Im crazy, and I used to think they must know something. Now I believe that no one can really judge-or know-whats in anothers mind. Its impossible to locate the boundary between what most people think is rational and what isnt. 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 its turned out to be one of the best, most meaningful experiences of my life. For someone in late middle age, Ive come to believe, such change can be vital in keeping ones 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. Ive been learning a lot about the worlds first crazy house. In the spring, Tag Heister, a researcher at the University of Kentuckys 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. Hes 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). Hes 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 hes 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 couldnt 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 hes in a crazy house, indifferent to others view of him, he is not in a beautiful place, but hes making something thats beautiful to him, constructing his own reality. It seems relevant to me. I, too, sometimes think Im 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 whats happening outside, Im 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, Im sure, before we are through.