Where the Blind Horse Sings

Love and Healing at an Animal Sanctuary

Kathy Stevens

• Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781628730388
• Edition: 0
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies

Part One

First Steps

- 1 -

A Diamond in the Rough (One)

A year after we moved into our temporary residence, we began in earnest the search for a permanent home. Our criteria were simple: seventy-five acres or more, a few pre-existing shelters, and a house on the premises. For our own convenience and sanity (and that of future volunteers), we also hoped to be closer to either Kingston or New Paltz, two small cities that were both thirty minutes from our current home. The area where we lived was nearly twenty miles from the interstate. One small, foul-smelling grocery store sold junk food and rotting fruit, and the only restaurant was a diner: hardly an option for vegetarians.

Much to our alarm, a million dollars or more was the going rate for farms of that size. No matter our early success at fund-raising, that kind of price tag was way out of reach. We quickly learned, too, that much of the value at that level was in the home that came as part of the package: wonderful eighteenth-century stone houses with six-hundred-square-foot living rooms, or nineteenth-century, five-bedroom clapboards with deep farmers’ porches. There were only two of us. We didn’t need a four-thousand-square-foot home. We kept looking.

Jim Nimal and his wife became members of Catskill Animal Sanctuary not long after we opened. Like everyone else in the community, Jim knew we were looking for a place to hang our shingle. Even so, I didn’t expect what I heard when he called one June morning.

“I investigate welfare fraud,” he explained, “and one of my cases is in Saugerties, near a former racehorse farm.”

I perked up. A training farm would probably have a huge barn ... now, that would be a bonus.

“I’ve gotten friendly with the owner, a guy named Charlie. He’s pretty desperate to sell.”

“Oh, really?”

Jim wasn’t sure of the details, but he knew Charlie was anxious. With the next words out of his mouth, I was in my car and on my way:

“Kathy,” Jim said cautiously, “it’s in rough shape.”

We’d seen quite a few places that were a little rough around the edges, so the comment didn’t faze me. In fact, I was heartened, because I hoped that an eager seller plus a farm in disrepair would equal a reasonable asking price.

I pulled to a stop at the bottom of a winding, downhill drive and blinked for a long, long time. A mound of used tires—scores of them—sat directly in front of me. Behind them, a rusted horse van, an ancient excavator, a school bus on its side, an old camper, and cars from a bygone era had been brought to Fortune Valley Farm to die. The hill sandwiched between the top and bottom of the downward-sloped, serpentine driveway was evidently a massive burn pile, judging by the assortment of rusted, charred metal on its face. Box springs, metal chairs, paint cans, air conditioners, defunct lawnmowers, appliances of every stripe, including several stoves and refrigerators, had been dumped over the years by Charlie and his friends.

“Yeah,” Charlie would later explain in his gravelly voice. “No sense paying to dump it.”

But what a setting for a farm: gently rolling hills and an expanse of flat meadow—perhaps fifty acres—were flanked by wooded cliffs. Over thirty weeping willows surrounded a pond of about an acre, which was a mere hundred feet from a huge barn.

“Mind if I walk the property?” I asked Charlie, who sat in a blue vinyl chair perched outside the end of the barn.

“Go ahead,” he said between long drags on his Kool cigarette.

The land itself was wildly overgrown with burdock, nettle, thistle, and loosestrife. The grass reached to my waist, making it impossible to judge the terrain. Though the fencing was rotten and largely collapsed, enough was standing to reveal how Charlie and his brother Frank had fenced the farm when they began a Standardbred training business in 1970. (In fact, the brothers had hand-sawed hundreds of the locust posts for their property after suppliers could no longer provide what they needed.) Thirty years later, however, this land would require far more work than a vacant piece of land would: months of cleanup by a small army, some serious demolition, and the rebuilding of roads would have to take place before we could think about construction. The pond was choked with algae. I surveyed the desolate scene, and was willing to bet that the well was seriously contaminated.

I hadn’t even entered the barn. Why wasn’t I driving away from this place?

Twenty stalls, ten on each side, flanked the wide center aisle of the big barn. Two large rooms, both roughly 25’ by 40’, had been extended from the middle, so that from the air, the barn looked like a giant plus sign. Though it lacked a hay loft, the barn had all the other prerequisites: spacious stalls still lined with rubber matting, a hay storage room, and an area large enough to double as a kitchen and feed room. But it took some doing to imagine that horses had once inhabited this building. El Caminos on cinderblocks, their hoods wide open, lined the aisle. Engines and tool boxes, tires and big metal hulking things that only car mechanics could name, thirty-gallon drums and barrels with assorted metal dotted the walkway. In fact, every step down the 135-foot aisle was impeded: walk around a rusty car, crawl under a group of planks on the four-foot aisle walls of the stalls. And then there were the stalls themselves.

“That’s Jack’s stall,” Charlie said, pointing to the one that was jammed floor to ceiling with everything from framed prints to boxes of tools to cans of nails. Old mail and older clothing were strewn about. Everyone who knew Charlie knew the size of his heart, one that extended to people who needed to dump or discard old goods or to store the bits and pieces of a lifetime. Why rent a storage place, after all, when there were plenty at Fortune Valley?

Saddles and bridles, moldy horse blankets, and buggies were tossed into some stalls. “The Latrine, Past and Present” was the theme in other stalls: twenty toilets of various shapes and shades were tossed haphazardly in them. (“You need a toilet?” Charlie asked me at one point. Evidently he had been the recipient of dozens of new toilets when a local home-supply store closed. I declined his offer.) It was a toss-up as to which was thicker: the layer of dust that blanketed everything in the barn or the cobwebs in every corner.

Charlie was still in his blue vinyl chair, pulling hard on another cigarette. “It’s all he does all day long,” Jim had said. As I climbed over cans and generators and air pumps to make my way down to him, something just beyond Charlie caught my attention. In the midst of the ashes and desolation, rising in defiance of everything around them, fat red tomatoes and gorgeous green peppers—dozens and dozens—hung heavy on the vine. It was the single spot on this sad ground that spoke of something good.

“Charlie,” I said, placing my hand on his shoulder. “How many acres is the farm?”

With his massive, tawny hand, Charlie pinched his cigarette butt into lifelessness and placed it in his shirt pocket. “You can have whatever you want,” he responded.

“What do you mean?”

“Whatever you want. $75,000 for the barn, $3,000 an acre.”

No matter how much work we would face to bring fortune back to this valley, we had looked enough to know that Charlie’s numbers were fair. Indeed, even without a house, they were generous.

“Those are great prices, Charlie, but I’m asking how many acres the farm is: Sixty? Eighty? One hundred?”

“Like I said, Kat,” he began. (From this very first meeting, I was always “Kat” to Charlie.) “You can have whatever you want—the barn plus two acres, the barn plus twenty, the barn plus sixty.”

The light was dawning. Charlie really needed to sell, and he was evidently willing to subdivide pieces out for cash in hand. Whether this was legal, we’d have to find out—how much acreage existed, we’d have to find out. Charlie had broken up an original property of several hundred acres years before—“always with handshake deals”—and was uncertain of the size of the remaining property. All I knew at this moment was that I wanted this place that desperately needed rescue. The location was ideal; there was, I hoped, ample land; we could rejuvenate the beleaguered pond ... we could bring fortune back to Fortune Valley. It didn’t have a house. But no matter. Somehow, we would make this work.

The land, it turns out, was in two different towns: a fifty-fiveacre piece was in the town of Saugerties and a twenty-acre piece was in the town of Ulster. A surveyor marked the boundaries for us. Charlie and his brother also owned another adjoining piece of land of roughly thirty acres; Charlie mentioned that this piece might also be available.

We did the math. Despite the work to convert a forlorn farm into a comfortable working sanctuary (it would be an adventure!), despite the contaminated well (we could dig another one!), despite light sockets that exploded into flames when one turned them on, despite the lack of a house (we could live in a tent! we could build a cabin! we could buy a modular—or a trailer, even!), Fortune Valley Farm was a hell of a deal. If my dad had died, this would be the place to write, “I can see my father turning over in his grave.” But my dad was very much alive and in my life, and would have been mortified at the thought of my living in a trailer. Yet what was instantly clear in this moment of decision was how far down the list of priorities my own dwelling had slipped. Any old roof over my head would do. What mattered was sufficient space for the animals. (I even fantasized about building a space above the barn, but Jesse quickly squelched that idea. Never far from his city sensibility, he had no interest in hearing animals rustling in the hay beneath him, or, god forbid, in breathing in barn smell as he drifted off to sleep.)

“What do you think?” I asked Jesse.

“This is your gig, babe,” the good man said to me. Translation: you’re crazy, but I already knew that. Jesse would help with his whole heart for one more year, until it became abundantly clear that cow poop and country really weren’t for him. Before he followed his muse to New Orleans, we had nearly sixteen wonderful years that I will always treasure.

Raising the funds to purchase Fortune Valley would be no easy feat. I approached Rachel Jacoby, a CAS member who had said from the beginning, “Let me know when you find a place—I’d like to help.” Rachel was, and is, a generous woman, so I knew that she had a substantial donation in mind. Perhaps she’d buy the barn: certainly a $75,000 contribution would jump-start a fund-raising campaign.

We sat in Rachel’s backyard, each with a glass of wine. Murphy swam for sticks that I tossed into her pond.

“I’ve found our farm,” I said with a smile.

I began with the bleak details—collapsed roofs, contaminated wells, cars and refrigerators and tires tossed on a charred hillside—and waited for Rachel to escort me to my car.

Instead, she smiled and said, “This sounds like fun!” The world, I thought, needs more people like this.

And then I described the place I knew Fortune Valley Farm had once been: the pond dug by the Tiano brothers and the willows planted around its edge; the long stretch of valley bordered on all four sides by woods; the remains of a half-mile racetrack that could be the beginnings of a road through the property’s center; the big old barn in the middle of it all, which, though filthy and forgotten, stood as a monument to what had surely once been a magnificent place created by two brothers who loved animals, the land, and each other.

I described Charlie and his little dog, Duker, who never left his side, and the cast of characters that kept them company: Charlie’s friend Jack, his nephew Billy. Others, all men with time on their hands, seemed to stop by to watch over Charlie and his tomato plants. “He’s a sweet man and he needs to sell his farm,” I said.

When I described the unorthodox pricing scheme, Rachel still didn’t flinch. Instead, as I was, she was excited.

“Do you know what a deal that is?” she asked.

“Well, keep in mind that there’s no house, but yeah, it’s a good deal.”

“How many acres?”

“Uh ... that’s the weird part.” It was tough to get clear information from Charlie. He and his brother Frank had indeed sold off much of the original property over the years. Maps had been drawn and redrawn; Charlie honestly had no idea how much land he owned. “But he’s willing to let us buy whatever we want, and the land I saw is at least seventy-five acres.”

“So we could buy the entire place for $300,000?”

I thought I heard Rachel say “we”; I know I heard what she said next: “Kathy, I really believe in what you’re doing, and that’s about what I have in my checking account. Let me sleep on it, but I think I’d like to buy it for you.”

And she did.

- 2 -

A Diamond in the Rough (Two)

My friend Joyce is a raven-haired beauty whose passion, other than animals and her partner Bill, is cleaning. Nothing—not even a toaster or blender—is visible on her kitchen counter. “Too much clutter!” she explains. When asked how often she cleans her house, she replies, “Constantly.” So when Charlie kindly agreed to let us begin moving animals prior to our closing date, I instantly thought of Joyce. Mention a cleaning project and Joyce gets glassy-eyed with fervor. Her mania was just what we needed.

We rented a huge Dumpster for discarding metal and it was filled within a week. “Bring it back!” we instructed the company.

“What on earth is this?” was a frequent question in those first clean-up weeks.

“Who cares? Throw it out!” instructed Joyce. The woman was in her element.

From September through December of 2002, we kept the junk dealers happy and the recycling center busy. Goodwill and Salvation Army probably had to hire extra staff to manage the van-loads of overflowing boxes delivered to their back doors. Sweet Charlie and his friends, though not exactly speed demons, did their part: the auto cemetery in front of the barn slowly began evicting occupants. First, the tired old excavator disappeared, then the horse van. One morning, much to my delight, I walked in to discover the barn aisle free of vehicles. Now Joyce could really get moving! Though he moved in “Charlie gear,” every day Charlie made at least one trip down the road with his tractor and wagon filled with stuff. Though I couldn’t comprehend why he wanted any of it, Charlie actually bought a box car in which to store his transferred treasure. “I like to tinker, Kat,” he explained.

Getting the place into move-in condition would be a tall order. Right off the bat, we needed a new six-thousand-square-foot barn roof, roads, a parking lot, a new well, and lumber and labor for five pastures and shelters. ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part One - First Steps
• Part Two - The Journey Continues
• Epilogue: - The Journey Continues
• Bookshelf