This storm feels dangerous to me, perhaps the worst I can remember. It rained all day, and there are predictions of up to 16 inches falling tonight. The trees and limbs are covered in ice, the power has gone off in the morning and is certain to fail tonight as heavy winds and ice and heavy snow knock down power lines more quickly than anything. The cars are sheathed in ice, the ground is almost impassable, the gates and doors to the barn and pasture are frozen solid. It is supposed to start snowing heavily shortly, and we need to get out to the barn, get water out to the animals, fill up the bathtub and every pan and bucket we can find, get out flashlights and batteries.
I don’t mind winter and am used to storms, but this one is an ugly one, I can feel it. The windows on the southern side of the house are covered in ice, the wind is beginning to shriek across the pasture. Perhaps it will veer off.
I am going to unplug the computer and turn it off, I can’t imagine the power will stay on all night and I need to protect the computer and my photos. Next year, I think we need a generator, especially with animals who need water. I hope the lambs don’t come tonight or tomorrow, there is not too much we can do. Hopefully, we’ll connect again the morning. Hope you are warm and dry and safe. I’m going to scramble to get a white clam pizza good in time for dinner, don’t want to wait too long.
Maria and I were driving home from New York City Monday, we were talking about the Gee’s Bend quilters of Alabama, the descendants of slave families, who live in a remote hamlet in Alabama still and have become famous for the quilts they make from discarded fabrics. I know how important the Gee’s Bend quilters are to Maria, they inspired her art, her quilts, potholders, hanging pieces, scarves, she gathers discarded fabrics and turns them into beautiful things, as they do at their collective.
We were talking about driving to Bridgeport, Conn. to see some of the Gee’s Bend quilts there, but there are only four, we weren’t sure it was worth the trip. Maria said she would one day love to go to Gee’s Bend and see the quilters there. We were driving up the Taconic Parkway, and I just had this instinct, I just pulled out my Iphone and started Googling the quilters of Gee’s Bend, I saw they were having a four-day workshop there in April. I asked her if she wanted to go.
Maria turned while, she never buys herself anything, does anything for herself, thinks she is entitled to going on a trip. “You need to go,” I said, this would be so important to you. Maria gulped and said, yes, she would go, she would love to go. “I can’t believe I said that,” she said.
I got busy, I tracked down Mary Ann Pettaway at the Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective (the slaves all took the name of the plantation owner) and Mary Ann and I hit off, we had fun on the phone, there was a workshop, she said, it might be full, but she said also did one-on-one work, Maria could stay at her house, they could work together a few hours a day and Maria could do her own work there, on her own time. I told her Maria would call her, I was out of it, the two of them could work it out. So they did. I did not think Maria could have made the call that day.
It was the perfect arrangement for Maria, like me she isn’t crazy about classrooms. I knew she would be anxious about doing, but we talked about identity, I had seen how powerfully affected Maria was by the Carrie Mae Weems exhibit we had seen at the Guggenheim exhibit. Her work is so much about identity, Maria was greatly affected by it. Maria has been struggling for her identity her whole life, when she gave up her art, it was lost, she has found it again.
Maria asked me several times if I wanted to go with her, if I wanted to come alone. I didn’t hesitate. This was not a trip for me, this was not something for the two of us. We have been so many places together, had so many great adventures, but sometimes one has to go alone, especially on quests. I’ve learned that lesson well. She knew it too, I could see she needed to go alone and wanted to go alone. I imagine she will be happily obsessing on the art day and night. I can’t wait to drive her to the airport, I can’t wait to hear her reports from Gee’s Bend, I can’t wait to pick her up when she gets back.
We have not been apart for many days in the five years we have been together, Maria is going off to Alabama for a week by herself, on what I can an art quest, to do something she has badly wanted to do for as long as I have known her. Everything in it’s own time, I guess. . It is a wonderful affirmation of identify for her to do something like this, she is permitting me to help pay for the Mary Ann’s fees, she wants to pay for the rest out of her own money, that is also a part of identify. I love many things about Maria, but one of the things I love most about us is our commitment to creativity, this is our soul connection, our identity. Maria always supported my getting a new camera, many spouses would not have, they would cite other priorities, other needs. Of course you should get it, she said, it is so important for you.
Maria said she couldn’t imagine my doing anything more meaningful than getting this camera, every time I wavered she urged me on, I would not have gotten it without her, she even held my hand at B&H Photo to make sure I didn’t waver. Like Maria I would have concluded I wasn’t entitled to it, identity has been an issue for me also, I never let people tell me who I am or put labels on me. I get to say who I am.
I will miss Maria on this trip, she’ll be gone for a week,I couldn’t be happier for her or feel more strongly that she ought to go. She will love it so much. She and Mary Ann are already on the phone every day.
Last night, I had to sit alongside of her while she searched for plane and car rental reservations. I shouldn’t do this, she kept saying, is this the right thing to do? I was just there for support, as she has been so many times for me. I could see her losing heart, losing faith, she was spending too much money, it would take too much time, it would be too difficult for me alone on the farm. We went over flights and arrangements, she said she had never taken a trip like this before. I watched her click on “purchase tickets” and then, “reserve the car rental,” and I saw she was trembling, she was so anxious.
Then she went and wrote about it on her blog and the anxiety lifted, her strengthening sense of herself emerged. “It was good to write it, good to say it,” she said. “I deserve to go there, I am entitled to go there.” Yes, she is, it is a wonderful trip for her to be taking by herself. I don’t think she’ll feel anxious about it again, I think she turned that corner last night. I perhaps alone know how much identity has meant to her, how hard a struggle it has been. The trip to Gee’s Bend is a great victory for identity over fear, for creativity over the suppression of the creative spirit.
I was thinking today about how I will feel the week she is gone, I know it will be lonely sometimes, I will miss her. I have been alone a lot on my life, most of it really, it is a natural position for me, almost the most familiar. On a farm, you are never really alone, between the chores, animals, braying, dogs and imperious cats. If I feel alone, all I will have to do is think of Maria on this wonderful quest, on her strength and sense of identity. She has found herself and how wonderful to go to the roots of her art, her visions and talk to the famous quilters of Gee’s Bend. I can’t wait to see what she spins and sews when she gets back.
Creativity is not a hobby for us, it is a sacrament.
You snort, my good pony, and you give me your best
For you know, and I know, good horse,
‘mongst the rich ones
How oftimes we go there as an unwelcome guest.”
– Woody Guthrie, The Unwelcome Guest.
The New York Daily News editorialized today that New Yorkers are coming to understand that there is something especially troubling and increasingly obvious about Mayor de Blasio’s plans to ban the Central Park horse carriages. The mayor, the paper said, is putting the contested, even imaginary welfare of animals over the very real welfare of human beings, of 200 carriage drivers and their families as well as the stable owners, groomers, stable hands who have maintained an iconic tradition for generations. I would add to that list the hundreds of thousands of additional victims, if one counts horse owners and lovers, tourists, children and the many people who love to see animals in Central Park. This preserved and mystical world would be greatly diminished by the mayor’s plans to force these beautiful and valued animals out of our world and replace them with fake antique electric cars.
The editorial was perceptive. In recent days there has been a dramatic awakening in New York, perhaps one that is long overdue.
Liam Neeson’s trip to the Clinton Park stables focused a great deal of attention on the stunning irony of the “progressive” renaissance supposedly underway in New York. Suddenly, many people saw the very poignant spectacle of honest and hard-working individualists being sacrificed to “save” “animals – among the best cared-for and regulated animals in the world – who need saving only from their rescuers.
These horses, claims the mayor and his supporters in the animal rights movement, must be saved from New York City so that they can either spend the rest of their lives eating hay and dropping manure or, as is more likely, be slaughtered in order to fulfill the strange animal fantasies of people who should be banned from ever claiming they support the rights of animals. It is not a right of animals to be patronized, misunderstood, deprived of meaningful work and sent away from human beings who are willing to pay for their care and well-being. It is not the right of healthy and content horses to be taken from people who work in partnership with them and sent to vanish into rescue preserves or add to the slaughter of the more than 155,000 unwanted equines who die each year in Canadian and Mexican slaughterhouses.
Leeson and many of the city’s most influential unions and merchants have pleaded with the the mayor to reconsider the ban. The horse owners and drivers have begged him to talk with them. A Chamber of Commerce poll taken this week found that 74 per cent of Manhattan’s business owners are opposed to banning the horses, and yet another survey found a clear majority of New Yorkers – 61 per cent – want the horses to stay in the city. A survey of the city’s tourists and visitors and park lovers would probably find that number closer to 100 per cent.
To all of this outpouring, a man who campaigned as the workingman’s candidate has turned his back on the working men – and women – and proposed destroying their work in favor of this idea that the horses are being poorly treated. The mayor won’t talk to the stable owners, he won’t visit the stables, he won’t consider any of the new information pouring into this debate from all over the world, he won’t spent a minute thinking or re-thinking about what will happen to the horses or the people who own and drive them if they are banned. He won’t listen to the impassioned testimony of horse trainers, owners, veterinarians authors, researchers, journalists and true animal rights advocates who almost universally argue that it is not unhealthy or cruel for working horses to work, it is essential to their health and their survival in our world. The mayor could be trying to figure out how to keep the horses safely in New York, but has instead rejected the role of the leader in favor of joining the cultural and political jihad that has been waged against the horse carriage trade for years now.
The horses, says just about every single person who has examined them, vets, horse lovers, reporters, writers, police, inspectors – are well-treated and safe, there is absolutely no credible evidence or substantiation for the charges that they are being chronically, or even occasionally, abused. The stables have been found to be clean and well maintained, the horses are well socialized and always among other horses, and only one horse in two decades had been killed or seriously injured as the result of New York City traffic (New Yorkers also seem to be discovering the mayor’s curious priorities – 250 New Yorkers were killed in road accidents last year alone.)
Talking to journalists in New York and many of the carriage people, I have been hearing a lot of suggestions that the mayor is tied to real estate developers who are lusting over the stables, a secret motive for his almost fanatic and unbending hostility to the carriage trade. I’ve seen no evidence for this, and can’t really speak to it. Bloomberg News reported recently that the specter of real estate looms over the fate of the carriage horse industry. The push to outlaw the 150-year-old carriage trade, says Bloomberg, has drawn developers like flies. “The highest and best use of this real estate is not as horse stables,” said Robert Knakal, chairman of Massey Knakal Realty Services. “The development rights are worth a heck of a lot more than the buildings currently there.”
It would seem that progressives – especially those who campaigned against real estate developers and their ties to city government – might applaud men like stable owner Cornelius Byrne, who has seen billions of dollars poured into his neighborhood, but who refuses offers of many millions of dollars to sell out, choosing instead to keep his family and drivers in the horse carriage business. But Byrne is not a hero in this curious city, he is repeatedly condemned as an animal abuser, callous and indifferent, told he needs to be put out of business, ignored by the mayor who won’t visit with him or speak to him.
I don’t recall ever seeing people who love animal rights or the environment so entwined with the cause of real estate developers and politicians, and so hostile and destructive towards the natural world.
“No fat rich man’s pony can ever overtake you
And there’s not a rider from the east to the west
Could hold you a light
in this dark mist and midnight
When the potbellied thieves
chase their unwelcome guest.”
– Woody Guthrie, The Unwelcome Guest
It seems to me that what New Yorkers have not yet awakened to, for better or worse, is the fact that their mayor isn’t just in league with the so-called animal rights movement, he is a committed member. The carriage trade people, innocent in the ways of urban politics and media, don’t seem to quite realize this yet – they keep thinking the mayor will come to his senses and come and speak with them. They struggle with constructed and projected animal fantasies about the horses, and the ever-changing reality of their critics. Sometimes it’s abuse, sometimes the stables, sometimes horses are dropping dead, or lonely, or pining for grass, sometimes it’s traffic, from a distance it’s clear there will always be something. But there isn’t much sense in the websites the mayor has endorsed so enthusiastically, if you read them carefully, and I have.
I’ve been poring over these blogs, websites and statements for weeks now and I don’t think the mayor’s position is either mysterious or conspiratorial.
Mayor deBlasio isn’t parroting what others believe when they say work is cruel and the only life for animals like horses is on rescue farms, he really believes it. Like many people who have never been around real animals, he has the strongest feelings about what they ought to be doing. In December, he told a fund-raising gathering of animal rights activists – including those spearheading the horse ban – that he was “proud to be a member of this movement.” He has stopped accusing the carriage owners of abuse, he now utters vague platitudes about the horses no longer belonging in the city. If he has any evidence for this, he is not sharing it. It is all over, he keeps telling reporters, it’s been decided, it’s must a matter of how. Except it doesn’t seem to be nearly over.
The animal rights groups are quite brash these days, they know who belongs to who, they understand where their mayor stands. “Finally,” trumpeted the website of NYClass, leader of the movement to ban the horses after the election, “a mayor who is one of us.”
But NY Class does not always seem all that media savvy, they most often seem just self-righteous and nasty. After Liam Neeson’s visit to the Clinton Park Stables Sunday, the group – widely credited with playing a major role in deBlasio’s election – put up a big jeering headline in response: Real Men Have Compassion For Animals, accompanied by photos of men cuddling their cats and dogs. I thought of a different headline might be more relevant: Do Real Men (And Women) Have Compassion For People As Well As Animals? The NYClass photo package was not nearly as persuasive as Mr. Neeson, I thought that the last thing I would ever want to do in a battle with Liam Neeson is to counter his image with an image of me cuddling my dog or cat. As always, there was no discussion of the issues raised by Neeson, just some middle-school name-calling and the suggestion that no one cares about animals in all of the world but their members.
But allll of this juvenile jeering and snarling misses the point of animals. For me, the gift of animals, the reason to treat them well, as St. Thomas Aquinas preached, is that they teach us how to love people, how to be better humans. I was touched at the stables Sunday witnessing the great love the carriage horse people have for one another. They know how to love. People like that do not mistreat animals as a rule.
What New Yorkers and the people in the animal world beyond the city are also awakening to, is what this all really means for them, for animals. It doesn’t matter what the facts show or what the truth is, the Daily News was correct: a fringe movement’s fantasies about how animals should live seems to be much more important to the mayor than the lives of needy human beings. He might have time to attend animal rights fund-raisers, but he has no time to get driven over to the stables.
Perhaps inadvertently, Neeson exposed another truth in his brilliantly-staged visit to the stables.
The assault on the carriage horses is anything but progressive. If Woody Guthrie were alive today, he would not be standing with arrogant politicians and real estate developers, he would be in the stables singing to support the sons and daughters and grandchildren of the Irish immigrants who know all about horses and came to America to build new lives for themselves. He would sing against the developers and the politicians and against the people who are trying to take their work away for no decent reason. The tactics used against the carriage trade – the big lies, the personal attacks, the refusal to negotiate, the cruelty, the intrusion of government into private lives – are a lot closer to Mussolini than to Guthrie, who was one of the authentic defenders of working people, if anyone is looking for a role model.
What is so important about this conflict is that it marks what is a new high-water mark of the people who call themselves animal rights advocates, it is the first time one of their members have been elected to run a major American city. It tells people like me – I consider myself a progressive and an advocate of animal rights – that is no longer possible to dismiss these organizations as fringe extremists. The lives of animals and their true welfare depends on us telling a different story about animals than they wish to tell. The very term animal rights has been stolen from the people who deserve it. If anyone in this painful drama could rightfully carry the title of animal rights activist, it might to be the people who are fighting to save the carriage horses, not the people seeking to destroy their work and lives.
I did not take these people seriously, I was aware of angry people constructing ideological fantasies about rescuing animals, I did not think anyone in a position of authority took them seriously. Reading their goals and philosophy has been a shock to me and a disturbing one. The carriage horses have awakened me, too. I have never known of people who speak so much about animals and know so little about them, who speak only in the most absolute terms and arguments but seem to have no interest in facts. They seem to me utterly disconnected from the reality of animals in our world, from their magic, mystery and wonder, from the people who really know them. A driving force on almost all of these sites seems to be the idea that animals exist to be rescued from evil and uncaring human beings, and so this idea of animal welfare is fueled by hatred for human beings, a demonizing of people. For the movement to make any sense to anyone, people have to be evil/
There are really no other goals that I can see, there are few ideas that would actually improve the lives of animals and keep them in our world. In my life with animals and in writing my books about them, I have found that it is impossible to love animals and hate people, one makes the other impossible. I have never seen a happy animal living with an angry person. The mayor seems to be struggling to reconcile this ideology with his role as a leader, where he is, in fact, expected to care about all of the people – not just the ones who gave him money – as much or more than contented horses. That’s what great leaders do.
The campaign to banish the horses is a serious thing for anyone who loves animals, and the horses may well pay for it with their lives. Sooner or later this kind of thinking will touch the life of every animal and every person who loves or lives or work with them. Politicians are not leaders, they are followers, and if this mayor gets his way, this idea that animals can’t live and work with us anymore will be parroted everywhere, it has already spawned a movement to ban carriage horses in Chicago. It is critical for the people who really love animals and care about their rights to speak up for them, to be heard.
From my perspective on Bedlam Farm, I am grateful for the horses, they have reminded me of what I care about in my life with animals, what is important. Like Woody Guthrie, I look at these angry and righteous and powerful people, and I say they are unwelcome guests in my world, in the world of animals. They could do much good, animals desperately needs rights, but they have chosen to do much harm instead.
People who know and love animals are in shock watching this catastrophe unfold, it is simply hard to believe the delusional ranting coming out of the mouths of the people and politicians trying to ban the horses:
work for animals is cruel, the animals are lonely and don’t have the chance to socialize, horses are dropping dead in the streets from fumes, heart attacks and strokes, all horses should be living in the wild eating grass, living on rescue farms and preserves. The animal people keep asking: what about the police mounted unit? K-9 patrols. Border collies herding sheep? Seeing Eye Dogs? Search and Rescue and Therapy Dogs? Bomb-sniffing dogs at Penn Station? For that matter, what about the hundreds of thousands of dogs living extremely unnatural lives in New York City apartments, living and walking on the same streets as the carriage horses?
Every day, I see and learn another example of the loss of reality and perspective in this controversy. Yesterday I talked about the claim that the horses are lonely and can’t socialized, quoted constantly in the media, even though the horses are never alone and are constantly around other horses. Another example today:
Hannah Galantino-Homer, a senior investigator in the Department of Clinical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania School Of Veterinary Medicine contacted me after reading my blog, she said she wanted to support the people who rely on the horses for their livelihood and are giving the horses work they are especially well suited to do. Veterinarians, she said, are overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the horses in work and “gainfully employed” instead of adding them to the growing unwanted horse population or sending them on a long trailer ride to a Canadian or Mexican slaughterhouse.
As an equine advocate, she said she wanted to insert into the debate what she said was an “extremely important fact,” that not working a horse, especially draft horses that have been selectively bred for work, is dangerous for them. There is a well-established causal link, she said, “between equine obesity, insulin disturbances (very similar to overweight humans with pre-diabetes/metabolic syndrome) and laminitis (inflammation of sensitive laminae in the hoof of a horse).
“As with people,” wrote Galantino-Homer, “exercise is extremely important in the management of weight and metabolism in the horse.” Additionally, she said, overgrazing in lush pasture – the only thing horses should be doing, according to the animal rights organizations – is also a well-established risk factor for laminitis due to the effect of grass sugar content on insulin levels and other grass sugars that can upset the digestive systems of horses.
It seems that almost every day we learn that another of the urgent and humane reasons for banishing the horses and exiling them collapses like a popped balloon, is constructed mostly of emotion and fantasy. I am no wizard and seer, the facts are lying on the street, as big as the horses, they are as ignored as the truth. Why would supporters of animal rights send 200 healthy horses into harm’s way?
We live in a mad world, a woman named Alice wrote me the other day. Yes, Alice, this is true. The carriage horse controversy leaves us with another Alice, this one in Wonderland, the White Rabbit holed up in the mayor’s office. If there is no abuse, and the horses are not unsafe, and no human beings are being harmed by them, and they are healthy and well fed, and their stalls are clean and well within the regulations for ethical stabling, and they don’t work in the heat or the cold, and they aren’t dropping like flies in the streets, or being shipped on long trailer rides to foreign slaughterhouses, and they get five weeks of vacation a year, and they are named and loved, and the experts all say they need to work to be healthy and sound, and they are healthier eating hay than eating grass all day, and they have never, ever in their history been free to roam on grass or lived in the wild, then what, precisely, White Rabbit, are we doing here?
My favorite character in Wonderland was not Alice or the rabbit but the Knave of Hearts, who always seemed to me to take the role of the writer, shaking his head in wonder at the logic of the rabbit. I think of the Knave Of Hearts when I think of the White Rabbit leading the charge against the carriage horses of New York. I remember his question – what are we doing here? – addressed to the authorities gathered all around him:
“So, do you mean to tell me we’ve come all the way here on the word of a narcoleptic rabbit?” The answer, he was surprised to learn, was yes.
But the rabbit would not talk to him or listen to the Knave, he just kept running around and around in circles, making statements, rushing to appointments. “My, oh my,” he said, “I cannot talk to you, I have very important work to do.”
**
“And they’ll take the money and spread it out equal
Just like the Bible and the prophets suggest
But the man that go riding to help these poor workers
