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.
“I think she is a gypsy, Simon,” I said. “A donkey lover.” The woman turned at the base of the hill, waved, and blew us some kisses. I wasn’t sure she was real, but I saw the tracks on the road, and Simon was still chomping on the hard biscuit she had given him. The three of them vanished down the curve in the road.
“This is already an adventure,” I said.
Simon started to cross the road, and then, of course, stopped right in the middle. Since cars and trucks came down the hill at reckless speeds, this made me uncomfortable, but I knew he wouldn’t stay there long, as there was tall fresh grass right on the other side.
Simon figured this out for himself and then walked across the road and started pulling the grass out. This set off another round of anxious—perhaps jealous—braying from Lulu and Fanny.
Simon was having none of that; he was beginning to enjoy his walk. So far so good. A lady with a biscuit who loved him, a man in a truck, fresh grass, cookies from me.
Donkeys are innately curious, and Simon always seemed fascinated by the world around him. Perhaps because of his lonely confinement, the world seemed compelling to him. He seemed interested in every truck, every kid, every person that he met. And this idea of exploring new territory seemed to please him.
I let him chew on the grass a bit, and then I said, “Come on, Simon, let’s go see Maria. She is in her studio.” I explained Maria’s work to him, how she made fiber art—quilts, scarves, pot holders, hanging pieces—and sold them on the Internet.
I loved this idea of explaining the world to Simon. It opened up a rich and deep vein in me. I was not the least bit self-conscious or uncomfortable with it. It seemed one of the most natural things I had done.
I do not talk to my dogs in this way, or other animals. I do talk to donkeys a bit, but especially Simon. I was beginning to understand why strange men—Jesus, Cervantes, Napoléon, Caesar, the pharaoh Ramses—had been talking to donkeys for centuries.
Something about the animals invited it, their companionability, their daydreaming, their spirituality, their curiosity.
We walked up the hill and appeared in front of the large plate glass window that formed the east side of Maria’s studio. I tapped on the glass. Maria, bent over her sewing machine, broke into a wide grin. Frieda, her Rottweiler-shepherd mix, started barking, but Simon paid her no mind. He was not impressed with the posturing of dogs. He had seen too much, and I suspect he considered dogs a vastly inferior life form.
Maria came running out the side door. “Simon!” she exclaimed, and she brought a handful of dog biscuits, which he happily devoured. We were beginning to see that he was a garbage disposal. He ate anything: leftover vegetables, pasta, bread, and crusts. And dog biscuits. Why not?
We stood by the side of the road for a few minutes, all of us beaming. I was proud of the walk; Maria was delighted by the visit. So was Simon. We hung around for a bit, and then we turned around. Lulu and Fanny were beside themselves now. We were beginning to drift out of sight, and Simon answered them with a raucous bray. He seemed to have gotten some new marching orders, as he trotted rapidly—to my relief—across the road and back up to the pasture gate.
I patted Simon. I opened the trash can filled with supplies and took out three hard oat cookies. I gave them to him one at a time, and he chewed each one thoughtfully, carefully, thoroughly. I encouraged him with some praise and some gratitude. The evening sun was settling in among the gray-crystal rain clouds, and a soft breeze was tiptoeing up the valley. I scratched behind Simon’s filthy ears, the gnats and horseflies scattering in panic, and I felt the dawn of joy between us.
Our work had brought us out into the world, defined our relationship, suggested our future. We looked out at the town together.
Have I told you, Simon, that the soul of our world is money? It is all people talk about, all they care about. Who has time in this world to walk with a donkey, get to know one, or care about them? We are too busy making decisions, saving money, worrying about our future. Platero’s world is gone, I said. I don’t know if it exists anywhere in the world anymore.
Perhaps we can re-create a slice of it here, in this small hamlet in upstate New York, far from the crowds that make the decisions that run the world. The walk felt like that, it felt good, something powerful and old, something men and donkeys used to take the time to do. Let’s do it again, Simon, I said. Let’s try it while we can.
Simon was listening to me, his ears whirling to catch every tone in my voice, every emotion. He snorted, checked my hands and pockets, and walked to the pasture gate.
I dropped the halter, opened the gate, and walked him in. I took the halter off, and he and the ladies went running up the hill to the pole barn.
Two asses on the road. Just right.