The Nosh

Cant eat PB&J without milk, right? I love watching them eat peanut butter. I think maybe they might think the same about me.

The Snow

It finally stopped snowing. The storm that had started almost 48 hours earlier dumped 28” of the white powder, what they call Utah Fresh out west. It hadn’t gotten above 22° the whole time. The wind kept up a sustained 25 mph, often gusting to 35-40, creating impressive drifts on the leeward side of everything. Now it was a glorious, crisply cold winter day with not a cloud to be seen. The neighborhood was an alien landscape of perfectly smooth expanses of crystalline white, dotted with lumps and bumps. The smooth parts were the front lawns of the homes on the street. They started at the doorstep of one house and stretched unbroken to the doorstep of the house on the other side of the street. Wait minute, street? What street? Those lumps and bumps were the tell tale signs of hidden cars. All in all, the work of a typical winter Nor’easter.

Java loves the snow. He’ll go into romp mode the minute he steps out of the house. There is a school thats a 2 minute drive from home, we often go up there because it has a huge playing field. Though it is bordered on 2 sides with woods that I need to watch and make sure he doesn’t disappear into, there is a lot of room to maraud and throw the ball or the kong. On the third side is the parking lot. When there is fresh snow, he can’t wait to get out of the car and play in it. When I toss the kong, he is on the job and goes charging after it. If the snow is deep enough, he “porpoises” as he runs-jumping out of the snow with each stride, going airborne and then landing 5 or 6 feet away and then taking off again. When he gets to the hole in the untracked snow where the kong disappeared, he does his best polar bear imitation and half stands up on hind legs and pounces on the hole. When he comes down, he buries his head in the snow right up to his shoulders, farther if it is deep enough. He loves it and I love watching.

The 4th side of the field drops off at about 40° to the running track below it. The vertical drop is easily 5’, more to one side. The wind had been blowing perpendicular to the drop for most of the storm. Now that steep slope was just a subtle grade of maybe 10°. That drift was pretty deep. I knew where it dropped off, but Java didn’t. I stood at the edge and tossed the kong down, what used to be, the hill. He’s already has a running start and launches himself off terra firma, expecting to ‘land’ on what appears to be the ‘ground’. WHUMP! He disappears as he hits the surface and just keeps going! Just like Wile E. Coyote hitting the pavement when another one of his intricate contraptions from the Acme Corporation fails him again. I couldn’t stop laughing! It has to have been one of the singularly most riotous things I have ever seen. He reappears as an albino, in posession of the kong, and has to drop into 4 paw low to fight his way back up the hill. He would try to do his porpoise move but that wasn’t happening. Each time he tried the upstroke, the weight of the snow would stop him short and his front end would drop back into it and he would come back up with a fresh pile on his head and repeat. At this point, I couldn’t tell which one of us was having more fun. He’s laughing, Im barking and when he gets to the top, we do it all over again. Neither of us could get enough. That was a good day.

The Sentries

The Loss

When I saw this photo of this poor woman about to be separated from her dog, I immediately experienced two intense, visceral emotions. First, I felt my fists and jaw clench in marginally controlled rage that anyone, any agency would take the position this was necessary, regardless of the logistics. Cheryl Cook's dog Trouble may very well be closer to her than anyone, anything in her life, without which it may not be worth living. The second emotion was a deep sadness for her, and for myself, if such a fate were ever to befall me.

I would, as the saying goes, 'take a bullet' for my dog. As a matter of fact, in Ms. Cook's situation, that's the only way I could be separated from my dog. He is, without a doubt, this man's best friend.

Safeties off.

The Miracle

Nicky’s Christmas Miracle
The second installment in the Nicky’s Nine series

It was December 23rd, 2005. Java and Nicky had just finished running themselves silly at Nell’s Rock reservoir. Usually, I park, leash them, and walk on the trail into the woods. Once down the trail about 100 yards, I remove their leashes and “release the dogs!” Off they go in a mad dash to see who is going to chase who. They tear back and forth, barking and generally engaging in genuine, unbridled joy. Java is the more independent of the two. He is more of a sniffer than a player, keeping his nose to the ground because he must investigate, what I believe to be, every trace of animal life, wild or domesticated, that might lead to something he can chase. It’s like he is just a 90 lb nose on four legs. He will go wherever it leads him, most of the time running out of sight on the twisting, densely wooded trails. Nicky on the other hand, is much more attached to me, rarely being out of sight more than just briefly. At times, he will chase after Inspector Knows but always turns around and comes racing back down the trail to make sure I am still following him. After confirming the absence of my absence, he does another 180 and off he goes. Flash back: 9 months ago, when I drove Nicky home from the rescue shelter. He was so anxious, he peed, pooped and puked in the crate on the way. Java didn’t care, he had his head out of the window sniffing for wildebeest. When we got home, I let him out of the crate/car in the garage. He charged me, burying his head in my lap and was trembling so furiously I thought he was having a seizure. That’s when I made The Promise: that I would protect him from all threats, real or imagined and that he was finally home.

When we’re done and they’re plum tuckered out, we make our way back to the car. I’ve learned my lesson about keeping Java on leash because he will bolt if he sees a cat, a squirrel, a deer. That’s not Nicky’s MO, and he was off leash. 48 hours after the shortest day of the year, it was dead dark by five. The small gravel parking area is just off of a two lane road that can get busy around that time. 50 yards from the entrance, there is no shoulder on either side because it goes across the reservoir. With only guard rails between pavement and water, there is no room for discussion.

For some unknown reason, just as we were reaching the car, Nicky bolted out of character, across the lot and out into the street. I saw him run down the near shoulder in the direction of the water. Just at the point where the shoulder goes D. B. Cooper, I watched my black dog make a ninety degree turn and run directly across the road, and without signaling. I was able to see him, moments from being knocked from this life into the next, bathed in the headlights of the car that was traveling towards him, about to cross the water and hit my dog. The next thing I know I hear myself screaming uncontrollably in a paroxysm of pure panic, like a terrified ten year old sucking up the first 85 degree heartline roll during his first ride on the Ultra Twister at Astroworld (duct taped to the nose of the first car).

My view of Nicky was cut off by the car as it abruptly braked, the rear end moving in the direction of where all dogs go when they die, the front end compressing to the pavement as if genuflecting to Sir Isaac Newton. As the PVCs I started throwing were actually tripping over themselves trying to maintain a left ventricular ejection fraction compatible with life, or at least consciousness, out of nowhere, I remembered something about acceleration and force vectors and that every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. Nicky was about to have an external force applied to him: the dog I swore to protect on one side of the equation and a 3500 pound Buick on the other, as illustrated below:

(N)m2(gmV)3 = Ø(N)

Nicky’s mass squared times the velocity of a General Motors product cubed, yields, well, you don’t have to be a genius to follow that one. I remember I could feel Dread, a precursor to The Darkness, in descension. It's always darkest just before it goes pitch black.

When the car finally stopped bouncing on it’s Bilsteins, I was sprinting towards what I was sure was a fatal error. I couldn’t see Nicky. The sense of extreme apprehension I could feel crawling over me like high quality Window Pane bordered on the reverential. And then, what do I see? Squinting in the high beams, Nicky, fresh from a failed interview with God, comes trotting around the front of the car with that look on his face. We’ve all seen it. The “Oh, I meant to do that” look. Ho-ly She-it. I didn’t know whether to embrace him or mace him. I went with the former. Anyway, I’d used the last of my pepper spray the night before. To this day, I swear that dog and that car simultaneously occupied the same space, if only for the briefest of moments. But even a nanosecond gets to keep its dignity. It couldve been 1 billionth of a second and it could have been an eon. It might have been both, I don’t know. But time acts out in some mighty peculiar and mysterious ways when it has to accommodate a miracle.

The Twins

The Warning