My Gentle Barn (25 page)

We always ended the session on a triumph. In this way we began to heal the trauma in her body, but it was a slow process and would take hours and hours over the course of the next two years to completely heal her.

As Sasha showed signs of improvement, hints that she might make a full recovery, I found myself thinking,
See, Blue, we’re taking good care of your Sasha
. And it finally dawned on me that Blue’s life was not a tragedy at all. In fact, it was the most beautiful love story I could ever imagine. With a tumor steadily growing inside her, Blue had clung to life until she’d seen her Sasha again and brought her to a safe and loving home to be healed. What courage and stamina. What hugeness of heart.

I had been caught in my limited human perception, unable to see the miracle right before me. Once I settled into this shift in paradigm, I began to see everything in a different light—even the fiasco with Paige. If we had lived in harmony with our Tarzana neighbor, we would still be on that small property, limited to a couple of handfuls of animals and small groups of kids. Now we had space to rescue hundreds more animals and bring in hundreds more at-risk kids.

One morning, after I’d fed all the animals breakfast and taken Jesse and Molli to school and done my day’s session with Sasha, I sat down at my desk before the picture window that looked out over our beautiful new paradise with newly planted trees, and I took out a small notecard with flowers on the front. In the card I wrote: “Dear Paige, thank you for being our angel in disguise.”

I was not the only one who was beginning to see the world differently. After coming into this life blind, our steer, Vegan—who was now just over a year old—was going to get a shot at sight. With a gift from a family foundation in hand, we drove Vegan the two and half hours to San Diego for his surgery.

It had turned out that Vegan’s blindness was due to congenital cataracts, but it had been quite a search to find a vet who could remove cataracts on a steer. (Bovine vets generally do not have the skills required because such surgeries are not performed on animals headed for the dinner table.)

The surgery went well, and Vegan’s vision was restored to about 70 percent of what a normal cow had. A blind spot remained in the center
of each eye, but if he turned his head a bit, he could see clear as day. I sat and watched him for hours as he explored this new, visible world. Whereas he had stopped bumping into things as a blind cow, suddenly he was bumping into everything. Just because he could see the tree in front of him didn’t mean he understood that he would bonk his head on it if he walked straight into it. Sight was not yet connected for him to the physical world as his other senses were. He knew how hay smelled and tasted and felt in his mouth, but he didn’t yet know what it looked like, so he spent hours staring at it, then sniffing and licking it and nudging it around, then staring at it again. With each object or animal he encountered, he was slowly wiring his sense of sight to his other four, established senses.

As Vegan continued to explore and understand the world anew, he discovered that the beautiful vinyl fencing we’d installed—which wrapped around the metal fence posts in all of the new enclosures and had a lifetime warranty—was not as sturdy as we’d been promised. At about 1,500 pounds, and on his way to an eventual 2,000, Vegan had found that he not only could bonk into the fence, but he could begin to bend it out of shape.

One day, as Jay and I drove down the long driveway on our new property, I saw Buddha watching me from the cow pasture, her eyes following the truck.

“Look how Buddha’s staring at me,” I said. “I think she’s trying to tell me something.”

“She’s probably just saying good-bye,” Jay said. “Just wave to her.”

“No, she’s definitely trying to tell me something, Jay. Stop the truck.”

“Ellie, we’re late.” But he sighed and put on the brakes.

I got out and ran to Buddha. “What is it, girl? What’s wrong?”

Buddha turned her body 180 degrees, like a weather vane, her nose pointing at the wash below the enclosure where she and Vegan lived.

“What is it?” I asked, and she seemed to stare harder at the wash.
So I headed down the hill, and there was Vegan wandering around, licking the trees and trying to eat them. He had found his way out—or rather
through
—the fence.

In our first year on the new land, Jay and I learned all about fencing—and re-fencing. We learned about building and cementing and installing and adapting, too. And it took us that entire first year to make the land a workable, sheltering haven for both the animals who lived with us and the people who would be invited back to visit once the place was ready.

It was new terrain for us and for the animals. The vistas were grand, with craggy mountains across the road and rolling hills behind the house that turned green after a few rains. And the sky seemed to go on forever. But the terrain also came with wildlife, unfamiliar weather patterns, and a new breed of perils.

We had to make sure our children knew what a rattlesnake looked and sounded like and not to stick their bare hands into a wood pile or walk through the high brush. I so wanted to let them run wild the way I had as a kid, and yet my fear for their safety won out. The rule became:
Play where I can see you and you can see me
.

In addition to rattlesnakes, there were black widows, tarantulas, coyotes, bobcats, and mountain lions. These last were a threat to our smaller animals, so we’d had to make the fences around the upper barnyard six feet tall. The backup security was our pack of dogs, who barked whenever strangers came onto our land—whether human or animal.

In our first couple of weeks on the property, our neighbors had stopped by to welcome us to the area. When I’d gotten the dogs to stop their barking, the neighbors filled us in on some other things we needed to be cautious about.

“I know you all are city folk,” the man said. I was surprised it was
that obvious. “Since you don’t know the terrain around here, let me tell you what you’re up against. First of all, this is fire territory. You got to be careful with cigarettes and matches.”

“If you see smoke,” the man’s wife said, “you have to take it seriously.”

“Second,” the man said, “we don’t have that city water you’re used to, where you never run out. You got your well, and that’s it.”

“So take quick showers, and turn off the water while you’re soaping up,” the woman said. “You don’t want that horrible feeling when you turn on the faucet and nothing comes out.”

“And forget about that lawn.” We had a back lawn that had been green when we’d first seen the place, but it was already turning brown in the heat. “And third,” the man said, “we’ve got these gale winds out here that come up out of nowhere. They’re like hurricanes, so don’t be surprised if you see stuff blowing away.”

“Stuff?” I said, looking around at the beautiful, calm day. I could feel the lightest breeze on my face. “Like papers and trash?”

“Like your shed or your new trees. You’ve got to really anchor stuff to the ground.”

I looked at the pepper tree saplings we had just planted along the driveway.
But they’re
in
the ground
, I thought.

“You just can’t be too careful,” the woman said.

We thanked them for being so nice and stopping by, but privately I thought:
Boy, they exaggerate worse than I do
.

A week later, after we had watered our lawn and then all of us had taken nice hot showers, I was putting the kids to bed, and we heard a horrible grinding sound coming from the garage.

“What the hell is that?” Jay said. He went down to the garage and after fifteen minutes, came back up. “It’s the water pump.” He turned on the bathroom tap, and not a drop came out. Our well had run dry, and the pump was working overtime to try to dredge up water that wasn’t there. We spent the next two days with no water, except for the
bottles of water we stocked up on from the store. We even ended up having to replace the pump.

Not long after that, we had our first windy day. I was looking out the window at the young pepper trees swaying wildly and thinking,
Maybe they weren’t exaggerating so much
, when our neighbors drove up our driveway in their pickup truck. “Jay! Ellie!” they called out.

We ran out through the wind to their truck.

“Your tool shed just blew down the wash.”

Our twelve-by-twelve-foot metal shed had blown fifty feet down the wash. After we dragged it back up, we decided to take seriously everything our wonderful neighbors had warned us about.

The animals, of course, needed some time to adapt to the new environment too. Mostly they loved it. They had so much space, and there was new terrain to explore and fresh grasses to eat. But the first couple of winds blew their dinner away, and we had to install special feeders that would hold on to the hay in any weather. We also bought pool nets to strain the wind-blown leaves out of their water.

The member of our barnyard who took the longest to adapt was our pig Susie Q. From the moment we arrived, she descended into a funk even worse than on her arrival to our first property. This time she wouldn’t eat for weeks. We had one vet after another come out to examine her. All agreed on the diagnosis: depression. There was nothing physically wrong with her. We tried giving her special treats and smoothies and desserts. We even tried beer, which one of the vets said would stimulate her appetite. She wanted nothing to do with any of it.

I sat with her; I meditated with her; I showered her with love. “I get it, Susie Q. You thought you were going to that bad place again.” It was the first ride she’d had in a trailer since the trip to the slaughterhouse that she’d escaped from. “I’m sorry that scared you, but you’re not at that bad place. You’re here with me and all your friends, and look how beautiful it is.”

Finally one day, when four weeks had passed and Susie Q still was not eating, I sat down right in front of her and said, “Now look here, Susie Q! I know you believe that you’re going to slaughter, but you’re not. You’re here with me and your friends in a home where you’re loved. So you need to just cut this shit out!”