There are four walls in the dining room, of course, and we have scraped, sanded and painted two of them. Maria’s unfinished art work is on the left, she has lots more she wants to do, we both love having an original artwork embedded in our new dining room wall. The orange/yellow brightens the room and the whole downstairs. Tomorrow, the toughest wall, the one opposite where Maria is painting, lots of water damage, a big safety shield for the wood stove that we have to take down.
It’s after 9 p.m. at the farm, and my legs and back are shot, there is chaos and exhaustion in our house, but Maria and I are bearing down on our dining room wall restoration project. For most of the night we split it up this way, I sprayed and scraped, and she spackled and painted. It takes about five applications of warm water laced with fabric softener to get the wallpaper soft enough to scrape.
I think I got a blister from pumping softener into the spray bottle, but it was also fun to do this with Maria, two obsessives unable to stop without the help of the other. We were accompanied by Aretha Franklin, Bonnie Raitt and Bob Dylan, three good companions. (Lorde is my cardiac exercise companion, and sometimes, Itzhak Perlman.)
For the vast majority of my life, I hired people to do this sort of thing, I knew even less about walls than I did about nature. I am happy that is changing. I can easily tell plaster from wallboard now, I look for second and third layers of wallpaper, common in old farmhouses, I know to scrape gently and carefully, not to push it but to keep applying the warm softener spray. I am pretty good at it now, and Maria follows through, doing the high spots and applying the plaster and paint. She knows how to do this stuff, she has restored many an old house.
She doesn’t love it, but is good at it. I am coming to love it, and we are great at it together. This is the last dingy room in our small farmhouse, we did my study and the living room. It will greatly brighten the downstairs, we might even eat at the dining room table instead of the living room when its finished. We are both exhausted, we will go to bed soon enough. Tomorrow, we take on the final wall, the one behind the wood stove.
That wall is tough, there was a lot of rain and water seepage there, and a huge safety screen for the wood stove. We will need help getting it down. But there are two days to go before the weekend ends, and we will be at it again early tomorrow. I love learning new things and doing new things and taking responsibility for our home, which we love. There is nothing like putting your own blood and sweat into your home, and doing it together.
Our decision to heat the house mostly with two wood stoves has really paid off. The oil company came by last week to fill the tank, and it cost us $127, an 80 per cent reduction from last year at this time. We have figured out how to use the two stoves efficiently, even on the coldest days (we use the oil heater for about 30 minutes on especially cold days). We are learning how to live simply and efficiently every day, and we are committed to living in nature with animals as a focal point of our lives and my work.
The dining room wall project is just a day or two from being completed. My body squawks after so many hours of scraping and stretching, but it has held up well. Maria can go almost forever, then she just crashes and sleeps like the dead. This is a good kind of tired.
For several years now, my wife has been making fun of the way I dress. It has been suggested that I need more fashion sense, this coming from a woman who routinely wears her wedding dress to shovel manure in the barn. More than 35 years ago, when I became a full-time author, I took my fancy ties out to the backyard and burned them, along with most of my dress shirts, all of my suits and upscale slacks.
Since then, my fashion sense has been consistent. I wear jeans, sometimes chino pants, blue chambray shirts and blue sweaters. I wear gray or blue wool socks every day of the year. Every day, to write, to go out, to go speak, on book tours and speeches and interviews. I don’t like to think about what I will wear, I just like to wear it.
Once a week or sometimes more often, I change the jeans and the shirts. That’s about it for me. Maria bought me a bright yellow polo shirt two years ago, and I liked the idea of it, but I also felt I looked like a mutant canary, I didn’t like it after awhile. Things have more or less stayed right there until today, we went to our local bead and graphic store, “Over The Moon Beads” on Main Street. I buy my incense sticks there and socks and bracelets for Maria sometimes.
Today, she turned the tables on me, and bought me pair of very colorful socks for sale, and I said I would wear them. It just came out, I felt I was ready for some kind of a change. Perhaps I need one. The shirts and jeans aren’t going to change, but some color in my socks doesn’t seem like a bad idea, although I think I will feel very conspicuous when I wear them. I’ll report back tomorrow. Maria is quite excited.
So another jarring twist in the Wonderland controversy that surrounds the carriage horses in New York.
If the mayor gets his way, carriage horses will soon be illegal in New York City, ferrets (cousins of weasels, technically) will soon be legal again.
Ferret enthusiasts, emboldened by Mayor deBlasio’s determined efforts to ban the New York Carriage Horses, are pressing New York City Health officials to rescind the ban on ferrets in New York. The deBlasio administration, which seeks to be seen as “animal friendly,” has quickly and enthusiastically agreed. The city says it will recommend that the ban, imposed in 1999 following concerns about rabies and weasel and ferret bites on children, be rescinded. It is likely to happen at the end of the month.
Ferrets, say city officials, are no more dangerous than many other pets kept in New York City and are banned in very few places. If you are shaking your head in bewilderment, as I was, at the reasoning behind legalizing weasels but banning horses, it is time to take a deep breath and reason on. All you can do is take a deep breath and think. Reasoning and facts are the only way get through this maze. I’ve said before that the White Rabbit is in charge of animal rights in New York, and he is busy these days.
Ferrets are mammals, they vary in length from 7 to about 9 inches in length. They are carnivores, they feed on small animals, and have often been considered vermin. Some ferrets have fed on poultry from farms or rabbits from farms and commercial warrens. They often appear cute and furry, and are generally affectionate. People love to cuddle with them, they are, in many ways, the stuffed teddy bears of the animal world.
Ferrets and weasels have been domesticated as pets for centuries. Like dogs and most carnivores, they sometimes bite their owners and children, they sometimes – rarely – carry rabies and other diseases. In many ways, weasels are safer than dogs in urban environments since they are rarely let outside to make contact with diseased animals. And they do less harm to children than dogs when they do bite.
The ban against the ferrets (along with rhinoceroses, bats and poisonous centipedes) was ludicrous in many ways, but the mayor and his aides do not seem to grasp the irony that ending a ban on ferrets makes the ban on the carriage horses appear even more thoughtless and foolish. There is simply no sane rationale, consistency, or logic applied to questions relating to the future of animals in our world, especially in cities like New York. Animal rights has come to convey anything determined groups of human beings decide it is, at any given moment, what they want, depending to their needs and impulses.
Ferret rights activists have campaigned for years for their legalization, but true defenders of animal rights have joined naturalists in arguing that apartments and condominiums are not a natural or proper environment for carnivorous mammals. Ferrets – unlike the carriage horses, who have always been stabled in barns and city stables – belong in nature, not caged indoors for their entire lives.
Cuddling with people have never been the sole rationale for the existence of animals, not in a political environment that says work for animals is abusive and they should not exist solely for the entertainment of people. Still, barring extreme health and safety issues, it is not the place of the mayor of New York to ban them. Still, the weasels are helping us to see the extraordinary hypocrisy in the campaign against the horses.
The comfort of humans and their entertainment are the sole purposes of ferrets in the city, and the sole argument for their legalization.They do no other work, have no other function. Where, I wonder, are the animal rights groups who are pursuing the carriage horse ban so vigorously, claiming it is abuse for animals to entertainment people? If the horses belong only on rescue farm, where, I wonder, do they think weasels belong?
I am not into banning weasels or ferrets, many ferrets have not been in the wild for many years, but It seems that morality in the animal rights world, much like the mayor’s office, is fluid and selective. It’s expensive, too, it costs a lot of money to get a mayor in New York to be animal friendly.
One of the first thing one learns in exploring the carriage horse controversy is this reality about animals:
To the mayor and his supporters in the movement that claims to speak for the rights of animals, all animals are rescue cats – piteous and dependent beings to either be caged and crated and cuddled and leashed and sheltered for life, or removed from dangerous and exploitive contact with people and sent to private rescue preserves to stand around and rot.
Ferrets do not work with humans, like dogs and cats, their function is to be pets. Ferrets love to be cuddled, they often issue sounds interpreted as happiness and bursts and squeaks of joy called “dooking.”
Carriage horses do not like to be cuddled, they do not engage in dooking. A happy horse lowers his head, cocks a rear leg, and snorts. The horses have worked in New York City for 300 years – a lot longer than ferrets have been pets in the city. They have provided sustenance and employed to many thousands of New Yorkers, pathways for generations of hard-working immigrants, given rides and entertainment and pleasure to many millions, contributed tens of millions of dollars in taxes to the city government, and heightened the history and romance of one of New York’s great treasures, Central Park.
It is sad that the people righting for the rights of weasels believe see the efforts to ban the horses as something that is friendly to animals. It is just another form of the new abuse.
No carriage horse has ever bitten a child, or transmitted rabies to a human being in the city.
If is, of course, very fashionable in politics and culture these days to be “animal friendly.” And after all, who isn’t? It sometimes seems that every dog in America was abused by one person or another, and there are many people who believe it is unconscionable to get a dog from anyplace but an animal shelter (where, I wonder, do they think those snappy border collies come from on TV?).
But what does it mean to be “animal friendly?” If the carriage horses ought to be banned because it is immoral for them to haul light carriages in New York City, why is it “animal friendly” for ferrets to be locked up in apartment prisons for years so that people can cuddle with them at night when they get home from work? Why it is “animal friendly” to take large horses bred to work and be with people – farm more trainable and temperamentally and genetically suited to life in cities than ferrets – and leave them to wither and deteriorate with nothing to do and no exercise on rescue farms, or more likely, end up in brutal slaughterhouses?
To be animal friendly to me means understanding and respecting the true nature of animals and acting in their best interests, not just in ours. There is no good reason I know of to ban ferrets from cities, even though I would not be comfortable owning one. There is even less reason to ban the carriage horses, they are healthy, safe and content in their work and in their good care. They are far better regulated and supervised than any weasel will be in New York.
It is cheap and easy for politicians to score points by claiming to be “animal-friendly” while almost continuously demonstrating their arrogance and ignorance about animals and by embracing policies that harm many. If they city will listen to the pleas of well-intentioned ferret owners and meet with them regularly, and jump through hoops for them to get their ferrets back to demonstrate how virtuous they are, how can they justify their refusal to even meet with the people in the carriage trade, or even consider ways to make the horses lives better and safer?
The carriage trade people tell me the reason is that that millionaire real estate developers gave the mayor a lot of money to ban the carriage horses and leave their stables open to development. I am reluctant to believe it. I’ve written a hundred times that I have seen no concrete evidence of this but every day that this unnecessary and unjust controversy continues, it seems that it is the only theory that makes sense.
The carriage horses and the people who live and work with them are as important as ferrets or weasels and the people who love them, they deserve the same consideration and support. I am glad the ferret lovers are getting their weasels back, freedom is not only for people who do what I do or like what I like. Safety aside, it is not for the city government of New York to tell us what animals to live with or which law-abiding citizens can have their work and property taken from them. Perhaps one day the ferret people will see that the people in the carriage trade are their brothers and sisters, they are on the same side, the same thinking that banned their pets wants to ban the carriage horses. What is just and humane for one is just and humane for the other.
Horses have contributed more to New York City than all of the other animals there combined. Working animals have written the most glorious chapters in the history of animals and people. How sad to think the only animals that can be legal in New York are those confined to crates in apartments and whose whole reason for existence is the emotional gratification of urban people, cut off from the natural world and the true nature of animals.
