20 July

Red Foils Rosemary/Izzy Breakout

by Jon Katz
Red Foils Rosemary Breakout
Red Foils Rosemary Breakout

Rosemary is a powerful presence on the farm, even after one day. She is a leader, smart, independent and vigilant. I think she is still looking for her flock from the other farm. Two were left behind. This morning, all of the sheep were grazing, and suddenly Rosemary led Izzy out of the flock and made a break either for the barn or in search of her pals.

I yelled ahead to  Red to get up and “walk up” and he locked eyes with Rosemary and moved slowly towards her. She advanced on him with her head up, challenging him. He lowered his ears and tail and went into his now famous border collie crouch.

Rosemary paused, looked around, stomped the ground, and then turn and ran back to the other sheep. There is no way she would have gotten past Red, and if she did, it would be with a border collie hanging off of her neck. I think she remembers yesterday, when he got her into a special pen.

Breakout foiled. Fate did her usual spectacular job of running in circles around Izzy and Rosemary, neither of whom paid the slightest attention to her. She had a lot of fun, though, and it is always a joy to see her run.

Red is getting massage and laser treatments this and neck week, he’s walking stiffly after his brawling yesterday as we rounded up the sheep.

20 July

Farm Notes: Shutters And Books

by Jon Katz
Shutters And Books
Shutters And Books

Different kinds of news from the farm today.

– Maria is sick, exhausted, might have some kind of virus. Sent her off to bed early, if she’s not better in the morning, I’ll encourage her to go see the doctor. In this way, she’s like a guy. “What for?,” she’ll ask. “What can they do?” Er…

– Our new ewe Rosemary is doing well, we think she will be the leader of the flock, she’s vigilant, intelligent, always out front. She loves to hang out with the horse and with Izzy, our other Romney. She is not exactly blowing and scraping to Red, as he is used to, but she is doing what she is told. Mutual respect.

-Jay Bridge, a friend and also a carpenter and sometimes jack-of-all trades, got up on the ladders today and took all of the green shutters down off of the farmhouse. As Jay has reminded us, shutters were never natural to old farmhouses, not around here. They were added in the 1950’s, to make old white farmhouses like ours (it was built in the early 1800’s, long before the Civil War).

The storm windows block the beautiful old windows behind them but that is unavoidable. We both like the simpler, plainer look of the farmhouse, old farmhouses are wonders of simplicity and functionality. The foundation walls are two feet thick, an engineer told us the house has not settled one inch, as many new homes do.

Good riddance to the shutters, and thanks for loyal service. We never liked them, fixed them or really figured out how to live with them. They are sitting out in front of the farmhouse, waiting, free of charge, for anyone who wants them to come and pick them up. Jay is coming back in the morning to fix some broken slate on the roof and shave the door to the woodshed, which is tilting so much the door won’t open wide.

Our lives are simplifying, sometimes by choice, sometimes by circumstance.

-Took Red to get a massage at the vet’s today with Cassandra, he was a bit sore and stiff after his tough workout rounding up Rosemary and battling with her protective ram and two pals. Cassandra said  his back and rear legs were sore. Laser next week.

-Negotiations over my next book continue. My proposal was politely rejected. That is not awful news, it happens on the first round more often than not, especially given the pressure publishing is under now. If you can’t take it, you’re in the wrong line of work.

The good news is my publisher wants me to do another book and my agent and editor and me all want me to do another book. I have a new idea which everybody seems to like and am working on a new proposal.

Most of my book ideas over the years have been rejected initially. Books are somewhat of a compromise – what the writer wants to write, what the publisher thinks they can sell – and the new one I proposed – channeling James Herrriot and E.B. White and Wendell Berry to write about the lessons of my farm and the animals here -is appealing for me.

My talks with my agent and editor have been very helpful to me. They believe strongly I have more good books in me and want me to stay on the course, while maintaining the blog, which is where my heart is much of the time. One does not have to take away from the other.

In a sense, this kind of thing what I do on the blog, share my life on a farm and the stories of the animals who live here. The animals are at the heart of it, but increasingly, I am widening my range of writing and subjects and developing my photography.  I like writing about rural life and the people I encounter here.

I love E. B. White’s writing style, and there are many things bright and beautiful here, including my wife. So talks continue, nothing in publishing is simple,  I think we will work this one out.

Several of my best-selling books – The Dogs Of Bedlam Farm, Soul Of A Dog, Dog Days – were narratives of my life in a small town in upstate New York with a farm and some fascinating animals. A year of lessons from the farm, starting in September, would be a very natural book for me to write.

I’d like to return to that format once again. We’ll see what happens, I’ll fuss a bit over the proposal and then send it along.

20 July

Treasure Hugs Our Pony

by Jon Katz
Treasure Hugs Our Pony
Treasure Hugs Our Pony

Our new friend Treasure came by the farm to bring Maria some wool she had collected and also to visit the animals, thank Red for his help and hug our pony. Treasure is an animal lover and rescuer, she also works with Native American artifacts. She is going to make me an arrowhead, she said, from a piece of slate.

She threw her arms around Chloe and hugged her for several minutes. Chloe stood still.

She had to leave, her baby goat is sick. She hugged every living thing, with great emotion and an open heart. All of the animals reacted to her.

20 July

A Landscape Re-Imagined

by Jon Katz
Landscape Re-Imagined
Landscape Re-Imagined

Today, looking up at the beautiful, fast-moving clouds in the sky, I thought it was an IR sky and took my camera up to the top of a nearby hill to see if I could capture the feeling of the morning, which was crisp and beautiful. I could almost reach out and touch the clouds up there, but I was intrigued to see how my camera might re-imagine the landscape on a hill I very often photographed.

The camera saw blue where I did not, made the cloud beautiful and dramatic and drew attention to the beautiful old farmhouse right down the hill, into the valley.   The camera is always processing light in surprising ways. Today the green was blue. Truly, the camera had re-imagined the landscape for me, and in interpreting the light differently, helped me to re-imagine it as well.

20 July

A Camera For Christina, An Artist And A Warrior For Animals And People

by Jon Katz

A Camera For ChristinaPhoto By Christina Hansen

I have been pestering New York Carriage Driver Christina Hansen for a year or to let us help her buy a full-frame digital camera to take her stunning Iphone photography to another level. Two weeks ago, she finally agreed to let me organize a campaign here on the blog – not on a crowdsourcing site – to raise the $3,000 she needs buy a new Nikon D750 camera.

So here goes, another small act of kindness in a fractured world, another opportunity to do good on behalf of a deserving person.

More than anyone in New York City, Photographer/Carriage Horse Driver Christina Hansen has captured the heart and soul of the horses and people who make up New York’s iconic carriage trade. She was also instrumental in giving the carriage drivers – an embattled,  discouraged, disorganized and idiosyncratic collection of free spirits – a voice when they were in great danger of having their work and way of life taken from them.

She has done as much as anyone I know to promote a wiser and more honest understanding of working animals and their role and history in our lives. She is fighting to keep animals in our world.

For years, the carriage drivers were vilified, de-humanized and encircled by some very powerful people who have lost touch with the true nature of working horses and the real lives of animals. And who sought to curb the freedom and property of honest and hard-working people.

For a long time, it seemed almost unthinkable that the carriage trade could survive the brutal and sustained assault by the city’s arrogant mayor, an unyielding millionaire obsessed with banning them, and a coalition of real estate developers and well-funded organizations that coveted their stables and claimed to speak for the rights of the horses. But who lied repeatedly about them and their care and seemed to know nothing about them.

The carriage trade has prevailed, the horses have been saved from great danger. A way of life has been preserved. Christina Hansen has played an enormous role in this. I am indebted to her.

“She was instrumental in saving the carriage trade,” a senior Teamster official told me of her work. “I can’t begin to tell you what a difference she made in getting our story out and in dealing with some of the very difficult politics inside the carriage trade.”

Christina moved to New York City from Philadelphia in August of 2012 to fight for the trade and the idea of working horses, that as been the focal point of her life the past four years. She became the driver’s most articulate and quoted spokesperson. For years, animal rights groups claimed the horses were being starved, overworked,crowded in unspeakable cells, neglected,  tortured and abused, choking on city fumes. Reporters who never came near the stables faithfully relayed their grotesque accusations.

Christina worked day and night to rebut lies and distortions and get the truth out. And the truth did get out. New Yorkers overwhelming rejected the movement to ban the horses from the city where they have worked for so many years.

Christina seemed to have had a cell phone tucked into her ear permanently. She was always available to speak for the drivers and defend them. And the photos she began taking evolved continuously, they showed her great love of horses and the people who lived and worked with them. The touched our hearts, connected us to our own humanity and history.

Christina’s photographs painted a very different picture than the one the media and animal rights organizations had been transmitting for years. She used her didactic love of facts and accuracy and the power of her art to show the love and spirit and individuality of one of the oldest professions in the world, and one of the oldest continuous trades in New York.

Photographs cannot lie the way people sometimes can, and her work has always resonated with great power.

She was in terms, insulted, harassed,  spat at, followed by informers with video cameras, called ugly and jeered at on the street and as she did her carriage work. She was also exhausted. But she never stopped taking photographs, the mark of the true artist.

Hansen, a co-founder of Blue-Star Equiculture, the carriage trade rescue and  retirement farm, gained credibility as a spokesperson for the trade, answering the previously unchallenged charges made against them (the horses couldn’t turn around, they were fed rat-infested food, many were dropping dead of exhaustion, they were relentlessly and cruelly abused.) Her message began to get through, her photos became a testimony to the truth, an antidote for rage and distortion.

Christina talked to reporters, welcomed neighbors and residents and private citizens to the stables, invited people to come see the horses, worked with Teamster Union lobbyists,  answered again and again a stream of never-ending and demonstrably false accusations and worked to get the true story of the carriage drivers out to the public. I could not have done the work I did without her assistance.

It was Christina who first invited me to come to New York and see the horses, and who answered my endless questions about them for more than two years, who fought with me, corrected my mistakes, sent me related stories,  introduced me to other drivers. We always had a respectful but uneasy relationship, as writers often have with subjects. But it was a very productive relationship.

I came to see Christina as a friend, although we rarely saw one another, and day by day, came to see her enormous and intuitive creativity. She is a member of the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm.

In all that time, in the hundreds of interactions we had, I came to trust and believe Christina. Nothing she ever said to me was exaggerated, false or distorted. She never told a lie or hid the truth from me.

Hansen, 36, is a former history professor and life-long photographer.

(You can contribute to the camera fund in two ways:  You can send me a check  in any amount payable to Christina Hansen, c/o Post Office Box 205,  Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. If you prefer to contribute via Paypal, you can send me a donation via Paypal’s Friends and Family option, please mention that the money is for Christina so I can keep accurate records. My Paypal ID is [email protected])

At heart, Christina is a carriage driver.

“I will have been driving commercial carriages for 10 years this week,” she messaged me yesterday.

“I have had a long-ish interest in photography, having taken an honest-to-gosh black and white film photography class in college,” she wrote, “using my mom’s old Pentax camera, that she used for photojournalism, complete with all the film processing and dark room work. As a present, about 10 years ago, my parents gave me a new lightweight film camera, but that was soon stolen out of our ground floor apartment in Philadelphia, without my ever really having used it. Since then, it’s been a few less great non-DSLR digital cameras and mostly my iPhone for photos.”

She is an artist, her Iphone photographs have captured the humanity and suffering and way of life in the carriage trade, brilliantly, and day after day. She can be aloof.

A shy and sometimes brusque person to meet, her photographs spill over with emotion and feeling. They show the faces of the drivers, the intimate and overlooked relationship between the horses and the city, the powerful relationship between the horses and Central Park which was designed so much for them.

In capturing the soul of the horses and drivers, she has revealed her own.

I know how hard Christina works, how much she cares, how much she had done.

There are fewer things more meaningful that helping an artist to acquire the tools he or she needs to do their work.

Christina is already thinking of a showing at a pop-up art gallery on Ninth Avenue. I can guarantee it will be a beautiful and important show, it will tell the true story of the New York Carriage Horses, a story that has never been told.

The carriage horse controversy has triggered a new social awakening about animals, revealed the derailment and abuse of power of some elements of the animal rights movement, and inspired ordinary working people everywhere to stand in their truth and defy the overreach of government, especially when it is unjust and corrupt.

Christina has helped advance a new and wiser understanding of animals in our world, and in so doing, elevated the very idea of art. Her own transformation mirrors the miraculous rebirth of the carriage trade, just a few years ago written off as doomed.

She is very definitely one of us. She loves animals, she loves creativity, the artist inside of her is crying to come out. And I know how hard she works and how little money she makes.

(You can contribute in two ways:  You can send me a check  in any amount payable to Christina Hansen, c/o Post Office Box 205,  Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. If you prefer to contribute via Paypal, you can send me a donation via Paypal’s Friends and Family option, please mention that the money is for Christina so I can keep accurate records. My ID is [email protected])

The list price of the camera (with a versatile zoom lens) is $2,496.95, I am suggesting at least another $500 for batteries, cables, straps, card readers and the other accessories that are a part of digital photography. Christina cannot do this herself, I am privileged to be able to try to support this project on her behalf. I can’t think of a better use of the blog.

I am learning that we don’t always need a global crowdsourcing campaign, the blog works on this scale, and it also feels more intimate and uplifting for me and the people in this new kind of community. As always, no one should feel any pressure to contribute for any reason other than that they can and wish to. And thanks.

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