16 October

Community: Pizza Night, The Round House Cafe

by Jon Katz

 

The Round House Cafe

Every Friday night, even into the autumn early darkness and chill, Scott and Dominick set up their tent in the parking lot beside the big wood-fired oven behind the Round House Cafe. They take out their tubs and tins of vegetables and cheeses and garlic paste and sausage and bacon bits, all fresh meticulously cut and stored, and wait for their orders. On a busy night, they will make more than 40 pizzas, on a slower night like tonight, 14 to 20.

It was chilly tonight, and getting dark early, I imagine they will shut pizza night down until the Spring in a few  weeks, although Scott is notoriously stubborn and strong-willed and proud about his pizza. He gave me a long lecture on how to make garlic paste tonight, Maria, who was standing alongside me with Red, interrupted: “Scott, you know he will never do that.” Scott smiled, shook his head.

Mark from Salem Farm Supply came up to me and introduced himself. “You don’t remember me,” he said, a bit shy. “I sold you a tractor.” I did remember  him, and I remembered the tractor, it was an act of pure madness, it cost $20,000 and I got it to haul round bales around for Elvis, the 3,000 lb Swiss steer I should never have accepted him as a pet. I loved Elvis, but Swiss Steers (it came from the Gully Farm, I later learned) are not pets, and they cost a fortune to feed.

When I came out of my crack-up, I looked at the tractor, looked around and realized I had lost my mind. I had lost control of my life.  Elvis left shortly, the tractor followed. Even in the Great Recession, there were farmers who wanted it. I did love riding around in it, it had an Ipod connector, I remember listening to Kanye West in that Kubota, rumbling around the pasture with a huge round bale on the fork.

I nearly toppled over a dozen times, but I felt like hot stuff. I wasn’t hot stuff, I was falling apart. If they shouldn’t sell guns to the mentally ill, they shouldn’t sell tractors to aging writers from Providence.

Mark had no idea he had sold the tractor to a lunatic, and if he did, he was too polite to show it. A nice man, he lives just over the hill from our new farm.

The pizza is, in fact, quite special, Maria and I go every Friday, we sometimes meet friends there. I wouldn’t be shocked to see he and Dominick standing out there in the middle of a snowstorm, feeding the wood into the stove, taking orders on his Iphone from the cafe a few hundred yards away, the first cell phone Scott ever owned, it was covered in oil and cheese.

People and kids show up in a stream, some to say hello, some to watch. After the cafe closed, he and Dominick will spent 45 minutes cleaning up, putting the tables a way, dismantling the tent, taking the tins of food back to the cafe for washing. Then back next Friday.

Scott and Dominick are a powerful pair, they have worked together for some years, they work steadily and communicate intuitively. This is a part of the thing so many of us want, and so many of us fear we are losing: community.  A place to gather, meet other people with know, catch up, watch a passionate chef do his work, support a local business. And have a great meal, the pizza – a white pizza with freshly rolled dough, mozzarella, riccota, garlic paste, scallions and a few bacon bits – the pizzas all cost $15.

We’ve spent three or four times that and not had half as good a meal. There is no chain or franchise restaurant that could come close to the quality and the taste and the atmosphere.

We appreciate our evenings at the Round House on Friday, they are as much about community as they are about food. Both are important.  If Scott and Dominick are there in the winter, we will be there too.

16 October

The Magic Of The Horses: Blue Star As The Future

by Jon Katz
The Blue Star Horses
The Blue Star Horses

If anyone doubts the meaning of the horses to human beings, or their ability to call out to us, they should come and see the big horses of Blue Star, who came to Bedlam Farm last weekend. People cried at the very sight of them, they came to touch them, look at them, listen to stories about them.

I should say that these are the horses that many people in America believe should be banned from our cities and towns, and hidden away in rescue preserves or sent to slaughter, they say they have no place in our crowded and distracted world. These horses remind of us what they have meant to people, something Native-Americans know but most Americans have forgotten, or perhaps never known.

Horses helped build our world, they have guided and saved countless people, our history is interwoven with theirs, the bond they have forged with people exists today, everyone who came near them saw it.

Pamela Rickenbach is a prophet carrying this message to the world – keep the horses among us, find work for them to do, do not banish them or send them away to oblivion or slaughter. We are at a crossroads, these animals are vanishing from the earth, and everywhere they work and live among us, they and the people who keep them are under assault, relentlessly harassed and persecuted and accused of crimes.

I asked one person after another: do these gentle and sentient beings deserve to be banned from the company of human beings, driven from our cities and towns, isolated from the everyday lives of people? No one said yes.

The Blue Star is is the future of animals, to love them, to love people, to remind us that we must live in harmony or perish together. Many people no longer seem to believe in a happy or hopeful future, they are awash in fear and anger and violence, they have abandoned our home, the earth. It sometimes is difficult to pause and recover our sense of a depth and meaning in life.

The horses remind us to broaden our vision, renew our hope, recover our spiritual memory and our past. These horses and the people who flocked to them are fellow creatures of this world, they enjoy a life of purpose and happiness, they are entitled to their unique dignity. They are connected to us in ways most of us cannot understand. They cry out to continue theory their work with us, and not be abandoned in the rush to greed and argument and distraction.

16 October

Open House Hangover

by Jon Katz
Open House Hangover
Open House Hangover

We have an Open House Hangover here, we are sleep-walking, going through the motions in some ways. We go to bed early, sleep late. I want to stick my head in some dry ice.

It’s been a week since our big weekend – a one day Creativity Conference at Pompanuck Farm and a two-day Open House at Bedlam Farm. We are exhausted still, and working still to deal with the aftermath – bills, receipts, fatigue, emotions. The Open House has evolved way past our original expectations for it, and we have learned that we have to deal with differently in the future.

I don’t know precisely how many people came to these events, I think it is well over 1,500. The Round House said it broke all records for business and traffic Saturday and Sunday, so did Battenkill Books, the Over The Moon bead and socks shop and three other businesses in our town of Cambridge.

People ate up the big horses of Blue Star, Jim McRae’s sheep shearing and Ken Norman’s farrier work. Maria said she sold more art than she had ever sold, and is selling more still online. We were barely prepared, and the preparations grow: portable toilets, pamphlets and books, getting Tyler to handle the traffic,  help in the studio for Maria, Deb Foster to handle the donkeys and pony.  The staff is growing. We scrambled to get chairs and water, fix broken gates and lumber. There are always some boundary issues to be sorted out, we just can’t be available day and night for three or four days, but that is our problem, we will sort it out.

A bunch of poets read their poems, Pamela Rickenbach gave a beautiful speech, Red and Fate showed off their herding skills a bunch of times.

By the end of the weekend I could barely walk, things are getting better. A gifted chiropractor eased the pain in my back and found my feet to give them more support.

Many good people came far to see us and that was both exhilarating and draining. I try and talk to each one, but I often can’t.  It was lovely to see Mary Kellogg reading from her next volume of poetry. Maria is still sorting out the artist payments and receipts, I am still trying to get into the end of my book. I am close, but I haven’t shaken off the fatigue yet, or the aftermath. The Creativity Conference was successful in my mind. I never think when I go to a public event of all the work that goes into it before and after. I will think about that now.

About a hundred people came up to me and told me the most wonderful stories about their lives, my blog, my photos, their art, their photos, their determination to live their lives in a meaningful way. Each year, we learn that this is the message of the farm, even if we don’t know it. And we usually don’t. I think of Lisa and Rodney who read on my blog that they should never quit on love, and they didn’t. They are married and very much in love.

The dynamic has changed over the years. In my former life, I did these things alone until Maria appeared, and then we did them together. We are in sync, both pointed in the same direction. People are eager to meet Maria and talk with her, they want to see Fate and Red, the cats, the donkeys, the pony. They are much loved animals.

It takes weeks of advance planning and at least a week to recover. We have yet to re-arrange Maria’s studio so she can get back to work. We will devote the weekend to that.

It was a very affirming weekend, I met so many good and loving people, so many people celebrated friendship with one another, we both had the feeling we had done something worthwhile. The animals entered very much into the spirit of the weekend, they spoke the people here and lifted them up. I think a million photos were taken of the farm.  A lot of people asked me and Maria why we do it, and I can’t really say. It just feels good and it clearly does good for many people. I guess that’s why we do it, a festival of encouragement and a  brief respite from the raucous world.  I will have to leave it to others to say why.

Will we cut back next year? Absolutely not. Maria is going to focus the June open house on art in some very creative ways, she can talk about it herself. I’d like to expand the Creativity Conference to two days right before the Columbus Day 2016 Open House. Pompanuck Farms wa a great place to hold it, I hope we can return.

Next year, we will have to face the growing cost of the Open Houses and ask for voluntary donations – probably $10. Nobody will be turned away, there will just be a basket where people can help defray some of the costs.

We will invite the big horses back, and the shearer and farrier too. Ed Gulley might even put on a milking demo and continue his expanding life as an artist. I guess that’s why we do it. We do it out of our love for one another, our farm, the animals, and our work. We want to share all of those things. We feel we owe this to the world, the good and the bad.

So thanks for  reading about it, looking at the photos, cheering it on, up close, and from far away. I’m going to put the earphones in the Ipad and listen to Van Morrison for awhile, I think he is often speaking directly to me. Tomorrow, my short story class resumes, that is the thing about life. It never stops happening.

And I remember what works for a handover. Some milk, some aspirin, some rest, some music. Some love, some time.

16 October

The Persecution Of Joshua Rockwood: “They Used To Arrest The Horse Thieves, Josh.”

by Jon Katz
Joshua Rockwood
Joshua Rockwood

In the days after Joshua Rockwood was arrested, booked, photographed, fingerprinted, and asked to post bond as a flight risk, he decided that he did not wish to hide like the criminal he was being portrayed as being by the police and the media, he decided he would hold his head high. He would not be ashamed because his mug shot had been broadcast by local television stations as an evil abuser of the animals in his care.

And it was hard to go out and face the world after that, he didn’t know what to expect. But Joshua does not run from struggle, and does not back down from principle.  He took a deep breath and walked into his local supermarket. A local farmer was sitting at table across the market floor drinking coffee, and when  Joshua came in, he shouted: “they used to arrest the horse thieves, Josh!” In the movies, they often hung them.

Our ideas about the taking of horses has evolved since the days of the farmer’s memory. Increasingly, taking someone’s horses for no compelling or proven reason without a hearing or process of any kind is not seen as theft, but as an affirmation of animal rights, a noble gesture on the part of heroic people who love animals.

And when it comes to animal rights, it seems that conventional rules of justice no longer apply, even to people who work with animals and love them  dearly – like Joshua – and make their living by raising them well and treating them kindly. This new idea of abuse and cruelty is the work of an Orwellian world of ideologues and fanatics, not animal lovers seeking the promote the welfare of animals. The animal rights view of the human-animal bond is harsh and extreme, many people support the idea of animal rights but know little of the movement’s true ideology. Read the founder’s own words: Peter Singer and Tom Regan.

Animals should not be eaten by people, work for people, entertain them or be owned by them. Anyone who holds a different view is an enemy.

The movement’s enemy list grows and grows.

Farmers are enemies. Carriage horse drivers are enemies. Pony ride operators are enemies. Circus elephant trainers are enemies. Poor people who want companion animals are enemies, old people who want dogs are enemies, people who work long hours are enemies.People who breed dogs or own them are enemies. Pamela Rickenbach of Blue Star Equiculture is an enemy.  People who believe working animals should work are enemies. Medical researches are enemies. I am an enemy, my border collies herd sheep.

And Joshua Rockwood is an enemy. If you are judged by the enemies your keep, I am in good company.

Our notions of justice are malleable and curious.

A hundred years ago, no sheriff would have dared or even thought to arrest Joshua Rockwood because his horses hooves needed trimming or a pig had a  (possibly) frostbitten ear in -27 temperatures, or because a water tank had frozen in the worst cold wave in generations or because the horses had eaten their hay from the night before and it was scattered over the ground. A mob would have stormed the jail and run him out of town. Most of the country lived on farms, and they knew what farms were like, and what animals were like, and what was cruel and what was not, and what was  avoidable and what  wasn’t.

Until World War II, most Americans lived on farms. Today, 90 per cent of Americans live in cities along the coasts, and have lost any sense of what a farmer’s life is like or what an animal really needs.

If a farmer was in trouble generations ago, and struggling through a brutal winter, the police didn’t raid his farm and take his animals and arrest him and seek to destroy his livelihood, they helped him get through the hard time. So did his neighbors.

Joshua’s arrest tells us that we no longer understand any of these things, especially what a farm is like or what the real lives of animals are like. That is the point, I think. We have lost any sense of community or compassion in a polarized and fragmented world.

Joshua Rockwood will soon be entering the second year of his awful ordeal, a mindless persecution that has threatened  his personal life, his well being, and West Wind Acres, the healthy food farm he has been working so hard to establish in Glenville, N.Y.

Motions are being filed and considered, there is no fixed date set for the trial he is determined to have.  Joshua has said repeatedly he will not plead guilty to a single thing he has not done – he has already refused at least one deal offer. One thing he has not ever done, according to veterinarians, friends, fellow farmers – and me –  is to be willfully cruel or abusive to any animal. He has, like every farmer, run into the buzzsaw of life and reality. Farms are hard places, life happens all the time.

It is hard for me to believe this folly will ever come to trial, the town fathers seem as embarrassed by it as farmers everywhere are up in arms. It could have been me, it could have been them, and if you have an animal and live in a cold climate, it could just as easily be you.

Joshua’s arrest earlier this year on 13 charges of animal cruelty has become a sensation, especially to embattled farmers who have never felt more vulnerable in a culture that seems to have forgotten what farms are for and what farms and animals  are like. A culture that has permitted the the idea of animal rights and abuse to mushroom out of control and beyond reason, mercy or rationality.  And that is really at the heart of this painful story of a young and idealistic farmer caught in a brutal and unexpected winter cold.

What are farms really like, and how can farmers be supported rather than misunderstood and persecuted?

In March Joshua, who is married with two young children,  was arrested by local police after a raid sparked by one of the new battalions of secret informers, a kind of private and extra-legal militia created by the animal rights movement to spy on the animals of private citizens on a wide range of charges while generally ignoring the nine billion animals living in controversial and often brutal conditions on industrial factory animal farms. He was accused of failing to provide sustenance to his horses, cows, sheep, pigs and chickens,  failing to have a heated barn and adequate shelter and of not having water sources that were not frozen.

Before the police raid, two different veterinarians came to West Wind Acres and reported that his animals were well fed, hydrated and cared for. That did not seem to matter. Rockwood’s three horses were taken from him even though he was not even charged with abusing them – the police decided there was not adequate feed visible to them. The horses were fed every day from round bales of hay, the hay was scattered all over the ground. The vets found no evidence of hunger or starvation. If the horses were not hungry or starving, how is it possible for them to have been deprived of food?

The horses hooves were apparently overgrown, I’ve talked to several farriers who told me it is common for horses hooves be overgrown in the winter, it is often difficult to get farriers to travel to farms and work in the cold. Unless the growth is extreme, it poses no danger to the horses or their hooves. My own farrier, Ken Norman, looked at the photographs released to the media by police as evidence of the poor care of the horses, and he called the charges “bullshit misdemeanors.”

In order to get his horses back, Joshua is being asked to pay tens of thousands of dollars in boarding and feed bills. If his healthy horses had stayed on the very good grass they were standing on, they could have eaten all summer for free.

It is clear from the arrest that the police, animal rights authorities and many private citizens no longer have any idea what a farm is like, even as we depend on farmers for our food and have more healthy and inexpensive food to eat than almost any country on the earth.

Farms are not clean and neat places. Farmers work brutally  hard,  have little money, struggle against complex machinery, changing weather, and fierce competition from corporate and agribusiness lobbies and farms. In the winter, tanks freeze all the time, animals are fed irregularly, they get sick, stumble and fall, pipes burst, fences collapse,  hay has to be hauled and driven and stores. Even in enclosed barns, animals can get frostbitten ears when temperatures plunge, it happens all the time. On a farm, almost everything that happened to Joshua Rockwood happens all of the time.

Farms are unpredictable places, they are not neat and orderly, they do not look like the calendars from Vermont.

At his first court hearing, a score of farmers turned up with T-shirts they had whipped up quickly, they said. “It could have been us.” It could have been. I was at Joshua’s farm soon after the arrest, and saw animals ranging freely, with adequate shelter, big bellies, shiny coats.  You can check out his philosophy and nutrition standards and sales program here and decided for yourself if this seems like someone who would neglect or mistreat his animals. He is an honest and idealistic young man, he does not deserve to be informed upon by ignoramuses and hysterics and to have his life threatened by the police and local government, institutions that are sworn to protect him.

His wife and children do not deserve to live in fear. His wife is now afraid to let her children play alone in her back yard for fear that one of the informers driving by will call the police, she is afraid that if Joshua’s horses can be taken for no reason, they could well come after her children. In any totalitarian environment, the experience of being informed upon is central to stifling freedom and frightening people. Every ugly and dictatorial regime uses informers. It is alien to American democracy, it is central to the new culture of so-called animal rights.

A culture that loses it’s understanding of the people who feed them, of the food they eat, of the lives of animals, that nourishes a culture of informing and cruelty,  is broken and lost. Joshua Rockwood needs to be free to help repair the damage done to his farm and his life.

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Joshua is receiving support from all over the country, but for those people who live in the Saratoga Springs/Albany area of New York State, you can help Joshua by going to his farm meat store this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. at 2884 West Glenville Road, West Charlton, N.Y., 12010, and buying some of his much loved meat.

16 October

Young Woman

by Jon Katz
Young Woman
Young Woman

Two days after being spayed, Fate shows no signs of every having had any surgery. We stopped the pain killers Wednesday morning, she has never bothered her stitches, she quickly disposed of the cone, and this morning we went out to the Pole Barn and glowered at the sheep, testing them, giving eye. No running, but she raced back to the house like a jack rabbit.

Maria is putting her study back together again after the Open House, so Fate is sleeping next to me while I wrote, Red on the other side of the chair. I love watching dogs adapt to what we need them to be. For all her energy, she grasps Maria’s need to work in her studio, my need to write in peace. If we let them, they will be what we need them to be, that is what they do.

Fate is still very puppy’ish, but I can see the demeanor of the young lady, the dignified working dog and animal companion.

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