Saving Simon (10 page)

Dapple’s donkey diaries are one of the most inventive creations in literature—a chronicle not only of Spain in the seventeenth century but also of human beings who reveal themselves to be the sum total of many lunacies, great dreams, lost loves, and weeping hearts. Dapple endures, loves, rises and falls, lives and dies with every twist of the human’s fortunes. It is the donkey who defines the man who rides him.

This then, is the theater of chance: man turning himself over to the loyal animal, trusting him through unimaginable challenges, confiding in him as a trusted soul mate.

When Sancho Panza thinks he had lost Dapple, he falls apart, giving way to endless doleful lamentations. He knows he had been diminished and does not believe he can make the journey alone.

I relate to this deeply—the story of Sancho Panza and Dapple. I believe that Simon came to define at least a part of me, and to reflect other parts. We were bouncing off each other, and still do, each touching a part of the other.

And that is one of the most powerful things about donkeys for me. You can communicate with them, even without words. They understand many things. Simon knows precisely when to approach me for a cookie, or when to press his forehead against my chest to offer me comfort. Through him I saw that I was closed and needed to open up. Through him, I found a powerful way for a man to understand nurture, something I previously thought came more naturally to women.

Through Simon, I discovered the power of healing and of selflessness, and I came to acknowledge the extraordinarily pure and powerful way in which a man can love an animal. This ancient idea of humans and animals journeying together through life is real. I experienced it, and I feel it still when I go to the pasture and Simon comes over to greet me. I rub his soft nose and tell him the story of my day. We are bound together.

I watched for the woman in the minivan, the woman on the road. I suspected she might come back. When she did, I would flag her down and answer her question “What does it do?” Simon, I would tell her, teaches me the meaning of compassion. That is what he does.

EIGHT
 

With Simon, there was
this very curious feeling that kept returning, again and again.
We had met before. We were not strangers. We had done this before
. Everyone I knew kept telling me how amazing it was that I had met this donkey and brought him into my life. But it didn’t feel amazing. It felt oddly normal and familiar.

I never really felt as if I was doing something new—meeting a strange animal or beginning a new experience. It felt as if we had been together many times, and far back, since the dawn of civilization.

I had all sorts of issues in my life with intimacy and connection, but I was learning some powerful lessons about both: The more you open to connection, the more you get. The more you believe you are worthy of connection, the more connection appears in your life.

Just a few years earlier, the notion that Simon and I had a history, that we had met before, would have been laughable.
But now, sitting with him in a pasture, I just knew it was true. And so, I believed, did he. Simon and I were in a dialogue. How else to explain the instant connection between this balding, middle-aged man, a writer, bookish and brooding, and this genial, determined, and social donkey? From the first encounter, I felt as if I could talk to Simon, and he to me.

For a long while, I didn’t tell Maria that I was having conversations with Simon in my head, and when I finally did, she just laughed. Of course, she said. I knew it. I can see it. Good for you. Maria did not need to be opened up to new experience; she was well ahead of me. She talked to birds and cats and squirrels all of the time. They often suggested themes for the pot holders, quilts, and pillows she made as a fiber artist. And, she confessed, she had been talking to Lulu and Fanny for a while. I’d listen to Simon if I were you, she said.

A few months after he arrived, I decided to try a halter on Simon so that we could take longer walks. I carried an apple in my hand, and Simon came down from the pole barn to get it and see what was up. Lulu and Fanny stayed behind, watching. I knew once they heard Simon crunching in the barn they would appear, and they did. I had never halter trained either one. It never occurred to me to take them for a walk, and one would not have gone without the other.

They both were so gentle that Ken Norman, our farrier, rarely used a halter with them. He just sat alongside them and trimmed their hooves, and they stood quietly while he did. Simon was not so gentle. When Ken came to do his hooves, he kicked and bucked and nearly put Ken and me through the barn wall. I smacked him on the nose and told him to knock it off, and he did. I wasn’t sure how he would handle the halter.

I struggled a bit with the halter and had to call Maria to
come out and help me get it on Simon so that it fit right. Simon had clearly worn halters before, though, as he took it comfortably and didn’t even seem to notice it.

I was nervous. I wasn’t sure what would happen outside of the confines of the pasture and its gate. What if Simon balked? Wouldn’t return? Tried to run off? Got spooked by something on the road? He was a lot more powerful than me, and I was not sure I could control him. But there was no doubt we were going to try.

I checked the halter and walked to the gate. Lulu and Fanny were curious, watching, but of course if they thought I wanted them to come out of the gate, they wouldn’t. And they didn’t. They hung back a bit, perhaps anxious to see what the silly man was doing now.

I opened the gate, said “C’mon, Simon, let’s take a walk,” and he trotted outside of the gate beside me.

Suddenly, I heard this anxious and panicked braying from Lulu and Fanny. Each morning for weeks now, their day had begun by kicking Simon in the head, usually in tandem and often several times. But now that he was being led away, they were outraged. It was not their idea; it was not in their plan. The braying was loud and urgent, and Simon froze in the driveway.

But I had been with donkeys awhile, and I knew some tricks, too. My pockets were filled with oats and molasses donkey cookies. I stood still while Simon turned back to look at his braying companions. Lulu and Fanny were calling him back to them. They might kick him in the head every morning, but that didn’t mean he could leave without permission.

Simon was uncertain. He stood still. I waited a few minutes and took a cookie out of my pocket. Simon waited a few more minutes, and then made a decision. He walked forward to get the cookie. The ladies could wait.

The braying went on for a few minutes, but then Lulu and Fanny quieted down and watched. I thought we’d be fine as long as they could see Simon. I wasn’t sure what would happen when we made it past the driveway.

Simon chewed his cookie and studied the situation. I think he liked being with me; he had come willingly through the gate. Generally, donkeys did not like to walk straight distances unless trained to do so. Simon looked over to his left at a bank of grass, and to his right at some shrubs. He veered over to the right and pulled some leaves off of a tree.

I tugged on the halter a bit and he dug in. When donkeys dig in, there is no way short of using a tractor to move them. I had to give him time. I showed him the cookies in my pocket and started walking. He still dug in. I waited a few minutes until he got bored, and then he decided it was his idea to walk and he started walking.

We did this start-and-stop for a few minutes. I think Simon was just a bit confused and distracted by Lulu and Fanny’s pleas. But it seemed as if he picked up on the idea. He started moving, and we walked down the driveway, perhaps twenty feet. He seemed very responsive to my tugs on the halter. They were gentle but firm.

I heard a truck coming down the road and stood in front of Simon. To tell the truth, I was pretty proud of us, standing there like that. Even in the country, one rarely—if ever—saw a man walking a donkey. I was joining the ancient fraternity. Perhaps Simon knew it.

Once the pickup got closer I recognized it. It was my neighbor Carr’s truck, a battered green Toyota, the bed invariably stuffed with feed or hay or rakes and shovels.

Carr has a farm over the hill in Cossayuna. He’s a grizzled, ruddy-faced man in his sixties who periodically pulls over to
give me some guff about my farm and the way I run it. From the first, Carr had been mystified by my presence on this ninety-acre farm. “How do you make your living?” he asked me one day. “I write about dogs and animals and rural life,” I said. “Yeah,” he said, “but how do you make your living?” We have this conversation once or twice a month, but Carr can’t seem to process it.

During the last big winter snowstorm he came by and yelled out his window that he had been watching the news about the storm: “I never knew winter was dangerous till my wife got us a television!”

I could only imagine what he would make of this scene.

The truck rolled right up to us and slowed. Carr looked at Simon and then at me. He shook his head and smiled.

“Well, well,” he said. “Two asses on the road.”

I cracked up. It was a great line, and how true. I didn’t know how Simon would react to a truck idling so close, but he just took in Carr, one old donkey recognizing another, I thought. As loving as Simon could be with kids, there was also a grumpy, idiosyncratic side to him. He had been around.

I told Carr Simon’s story, and he got out to check the donkey’s wounds, which were still impressive. Then, still shaking his head, he drove off. Carr was a farmer, a real one, and I doubt he could conceive of any reason why a sane person would have a large animal he had to feed that didn’t produce anything and couldn’t be sent to market for meat. But he had gotten used to my strange ways.

I knew I would hear more about this.

After Carr pulled off down the hill and it was quiet again, I decided to cross the road. Now it was my turn to talk to Simon.

“Pal, this is a love walk,” I said. “Let’s go see Maria.” Simon
turned his head, and I was surprised to see an elderly woman walking up the hill.

My road is steep, and sometimes hikers and people out for their daily walks come up, but it is a hard walk and usually attracts only kids building up their stamina for school sports or regular hikers and power walkers. Few people made it too far, and none were nearly as old as this woman appeared to be.

“Simon,” I said, “look at the woman. She is dressed very strangely. A shawl like my grandmother used to wear, a long skirt, dirty and muddy from dragging across the road. She’s wearing sandals, like a gypsy. I wonder who she is.”

Simon was staring at her, my dogs in the yard were barking, and I looked back to see that Lulu and Fanny were staring also. The woman had a long, thin walking stick that she leaned on for support, but her gait was firm and strong. Her face was wrinkled and leathery. I saw her gray-black hair was tied back in a long braid.

There were not many people in my town and I was certain I had never seen her before. As she got closer, I could see her smiling and she seemed to be walking right toward us. I had a feeling we were her destination, yet I had never seen anyone like her outside of New York or another large city. She was exotic. Her skirt was colorful, with all sorts of symbols and patterns on it, even as the hem was covered in dirt and dust. I imagined it was painful for her to be walking in those sandals. I didn’t want to cross because then she would come up behind us, and I didn’t want to be rude if she was coming to see us.

It took her a few minutes to get up to where we were, and the closer she got the more astonishing she was. When she came near, she smiled at me and turned to Simon. She spoke to him in Spanish, and her speech was filled with trills, laughs, explanations,
and declarations. She shook my hand, and her skirt swirled and her beads, necklaces, and bracelets jangled. I hadn’t seen a gypsy in a long while—not since I was a reporter writing about them—but this was clearly a gypsy, I had no doubt about it.

I looked far down the road and saw two more people coming up the hill, both of them much younger than this woman. They looked like teenagers. She said in halting English that they were her grandchildren, and they were coming to collect her.

They had told her there was a donkey on the hill, and she loved donkeys. She had had one when she was a child and she loved them more than anything. She reached into her pocket and took out a biscuit of some kind and put it in her open palm and handed it over to Simon.

He was mesmerized by her—animals always feel the emotion of people who are connected to them—and she kissed his nose, rubbed the side of his face, and scratched his neck, all the while loving him and speaking to him in her native tongue.

Long before the teenagers reached us, she threw up her hands with a sort of helpless resignation, turned, and rushed down the hill toward her huffing and puffing grandchildren, her sandals slapping on the dirt road, her skirts pulling up the dust.

Simon and I were both blown away by this visit, speechless and wide-eyed. His ears were tilting like radar towers, and he tugged at the halter, as if urging me to follow her.