Day: May 15, 2014

It is a startling thing for me, it shocks me, unnerves m sometimes, I have never experienced it in my 35 years as an author. I am walking along a street in New York, I am surrounded by people,  hawkers, vendors, buses and cars.  I hear the clip-clop of a horse carriage and someone yells out to me, often across the street or around a bend or on the other side of a long line of yellow cabs: “Hey, Jon Katz, I love your blog, thanks for writing about us!”

I appreciate praise and good words, and I get plenty of both, but that’s not why I’m writing this.

I’m writing this because for me, the carriage horse experience has been an affirmation for the power of the word and of the heart, proof that writing still matters, facts still mean something, truth is still more powerful than lies and accusations and arguments. In our dizzying and polarized world, it is sometimes easy to forget that. The carriage horse story has been nothing but a gift for me, it has reminded me of why I became a journalist, then an author.

Of what it means to be a human being in search of compassion. It has brought out the best parts of me and reminded me to believe in myself, take risks, step outside of my comfort zone, of the conventional wisdom of the fickle and lazy mobs and digital hordes. And yes, of the importance of working to keep animals in our world, and among us.

There are communities of connection that I can join, where I belong.

Most often, when I walk in or near the park, the faces shouting good words at me are Irish faces, but the carriage drivers are a tribe, a community, sometimes the face is a Caribbean or Mexican one, sometimes it is Israeli or Russian or Eastern European. They give me the thumbs up, tell me about a piece they like, tell me their wife saved a post for them when they got home. They tell me their stories, talk about their horses, shyly ask me questions about my work.

This in New York City, the grand stage, where I have walked anonymously for years, working in television, meeting my editors, seeking the make it big in the toughest arena there is. I am now used to walking in Central Park, and hearing someone shout across a meadow or a path, nearly out of sight, “hey Jon Katz, thank you for your blog!”

Maria always laughs when she is there, because I blush, seem embarrassed and confused. And I am. The scenes are out of the context of my life. New York carriage drivers reading my blog every day, soaking up my writing? I can’t always make sense of it. I deny it, pooh-pooh it, it’s not true, means nothing.

And this in New York, my holy grail. My first job was as a copy boy at the New York Times, I was managing editor of US Magazine, I was executive producer of the CBS Morning News, I became a Random House author when that meant so much, I trooped into New York a thousand times to pitch books, meet with editors, give interviews, seeking my fortune like the shop girls in all of those O. Henry stories.

Many successes in New York, many defeats, many hopes and failures, dreams dashed and realized, many power lunches, trips in limos, fat expense accounts, TV interviews,  office intrigue, another world, a dozen lives ago. The carriage drivers will  never know. They think I am a strange man on a farm in upstate New York with a camera and a computer. They are right. An animal rights protester called me a lunatic, she is right as well.

One day, standing outside of the Clinton Park stables, Kieran (on the right) came up to me and shook my hand, and said quietly  that he knew who I was and that he was grateful to me. He said that in the darkest hours of the campaign against the horses, the dispirited drivers were shocked when an author nobody knew or had met and who never owned a horse and didn’t want one, had never ridden in a carriage, began writing about them in a way that lifted them up, made them feel better about themselves.

“It was like you were here,” he said, “like you knew us. We couldn’t fathom it.” Me either. I didn’t tell him what Chief Arvol said, that I was summoned by the horses to tell their story to a world disconnected from their past and their future.

“Year after year we have been attacked called names,” Kieran told me, “It’s gone on a long time, we were losing hope. We kept asking each other what we were going to do once the mayor banned us. And then you started writing about us and it seemed that we weren’t so bad, that there was truth in what we had been saying and somebody outside of the circle saw it and noticed it. It lifted us up. We will never give up now.”

I wonder how they recognize me amidst all of those crowds, how they even know what I look like. But they do, they spot me every single time. I blush, mumble, an unfamiliar thing to me, I like these men and women. They seem authentic and very warm to me. I have no idea what to say. I have always understood criticism better than praise.

Perspective is important, and I understand that I have little or nothing to do with the outcome of this struggle over the carriage horses.  And that is the truth. I am not a power media or political player in New York City, few people there have heard of me, read my blog, or care what I think. The mayor and the animal rights people are not trembling under the weight and power of my words.  That would be delusional.

If anybody turned the tide, it was a cadre of tough and savvy carriage trade people who changed the narrative – Steve Malone, Eva Hughes, Christina Hansen, the Teamsters, the people at Blue Star Equiculture – and most especially, Liam Neeson.

The articulate and charismatic actor brought 200 reporters to the stables to finally see what was so obvious – there is nothing wrong with the carriage horses or the way they are being treated.

The carriage owners and drivers have done nothing wrong, committed no crimes, broken no laws. The only abuse was of people, not horses. The carriage drivers in particular had been dehumanized, so that they could be destroyed. Liam Neeson reminded the world that they are very human, that is also what I see in them.

The big lie seemed to flatten like a punctured tire over these last few months, the battle is far from over, but it is so different than it was back in those cold January days. I don’t know if I had anything to do with that, it is for others to decide. I hope so.

There is a wondrous little community of people forming around the carriage horse people in their struggle to survive – photographers, videographers, famous Indian chiefs,  high school students with their blogs, neighbors who love to see the horses trot past them, ex-lovers, grown-up children, people who remember what their first rides in the park meant to them. Outcasts and oddballs like drawn to the horses, they show up one by one, each for their own reasons.

Yet the shouts and waves and thumbs up have meant something.  I have come to see that seeking the truth matters, seeking compassion matters, the hard work of digging facts out of fog matters. I have worked hard on this story, perhaps as hard as I have worked on any subject in such a sustained way, and it is a story that speaks in  photos as well as words. I am just beginning, it is far from over. In a sense, I have been writing and working towards this story for years, it is the story of what I write and have learned in my life with animals. How important they are, how critical it is to not emotionalize them, how they are partners in life, not simply our dependent wards.

They share our lives and reflect our lives, there is no guarantee of paradise, for them or for us, not if they wish to remain with us on the earth.

The drivers all seem to know this, this is their life as well.

Walking in Central Park last week, I heard an Irish brogue again, from high up in a carriage trotting past. This time it was Kevin. “Hey, Jon Katz, thank you for what you write, it means a lot to us. You write from the heart.” That’s my experience with the Irish, I think for better or worse, no one has ever been able to squash their spirit or their heart and soul. The animal rights people will never do it.

So thank you Kevin and Kieran. I know you think you are thanking me, but I think it’s really me who needs to thank you. You have reminded me of what it means to be a writer, even in the very complex and evolving digital age, when it is no longer really even clear what a writer is.  Words still matter, if you guys are reading my blog up in New York City.

I believe that photos and animals do not lie, and your faces speak to who you are. Thanks to  you for what you have done for me. You speak from the heart.

“New York is such a crazy, overwhelming place, it is a wonderful thing to come around a corner and be face to face with a big and beautiful horse, it grounds me, connects me to the earth, to where we all came from. It puts the city in balance, somehow more in harmony with the world. Something very powerful passes between the horses and me, I would miss them very much of they were gone. It feels like something I need, something they need.”  – Maria Wulf

(Second in a series: “To Touch A Carriage Horse In New York City.”)

The man in the Statue of Liberty suit talking on his cell phone before suiting up may have captured the American spirit more than he intended. Times Square is a chaotic, overwhelming, dysfunctional, overpowering corporate and greedy mess, I think I miss the porn shops and seedy hot dog stands, that was at least authentic. Tourists flock to it, seem to love the lights and atmosphere – it is pretty wild. But also pretty sad. Like so much of America, the square is overwhelmed by corporate marketing and messaging, almost all of the lights are peddling something, and most of the stores are corporate chain stores.

This is not, to me, the spirit of America in any way, it is a monument to greed, insensitivity, noise, excess, environmental deprivation, ugliness and really bad and visionless urban planning. I guess New York has a habit of destroying things in order to save them. Surely in this vast square, there was room for one meaningful, beautiful, inspiring thing. I wonder what all of the tourists taking cell phone photos are really thinking about us. Is America really about a three-story M&M smiling down on us?

A fascinating place, barren and without a trace of soul.