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East Chop Lighthouse Courtesy of Gordon D. Benoit, Cape Cod Lighthouse Homepage Table of Contents Chapter One...A Morning in October Chapter Two...Homecomings Chapter Three...Pack Maneuvers Chapter Four...Roughhousing Chapter Five...Baywatch Chapter Six...Over The Bounding Main Chapter Seven...Partings Chapter Eight...October Light
Remember the summer storms? We always knew they were brewing if the wind was blowing up the leaves of the poplars along the shore when we took our morning walks. I know, you knew because dogs just know those things in their own ways. Remember how all day it would feel like a storm was coming in? And the small craft warning flag would be flying at the lighthouse? It's dusk now. The sky and Bay are timber wolf gray. Packs of waves with livid whitecap fangs race and leap down the channel, snapping and biting at Dogfish Bar and trying to tear loose from its mooring our frightened catboat. These waves mean business. We've been caught out in them before and know they want to kill. As I look up from my book out the picture window in the sunroom, I think of the director of the sailing camp down the Bay, who had sailed these waters for forty years; he was out in his Sailfish when waves like these picked up. It was several days before his body was found on the backside of one of the islands. No, better be snug inside when a nor'easter howls in from the sea. On the wall of the sunroom, the wind indicator light glowers orange, flashing north, northeast, north, northeast, east, northeast. Now rain lunges at the picture window, pounces on the roof, growls through the gutters. "Someone take Amy out," my mother calls from the kitchen. "She hasn't been out since this morning." My father is in the den with the game on. I look over at Marjorie, curled up asleep on the loveseat. Amy is luxuriously stretched out on the carpet, dozing and listening to the storm. It's my turn, I know, but it's worth a try any-how. "Your mother wants someone to take the dog out," I say to Marjorie. "It's your turn," she mumbles from somewhere far away, her eyes closed shut. It is, so I don't press the issue. "Okay, Amy, it's us," I say, reluctantly laying down The Widow's Walk and getting out of that particularly comfortable old Victorian rocker, the one that had been in my great grandmother's apartment, the upholstered one with the big springs under the wooden rockers. Just thinking of going out in the storm I can feel the claws of rain scratching at the back of my neck. "We're going to brave this gale and go out there and do our business, right Amy?" Amy doesn't budge. Having learned from the master, she closes her eyes, just like Marjorie, and feigns deep sleep. "Okay, Amy, here we go!" I say, trying to make it sound like an adventure. For a water dog who will splash into the Bay any time, any season, Amy abhors a sprinkle of rain on her head. To even think of going out in a nor'easter clearly is out of the question. She's nestled in for the duration. "What? Are you like some big old house cat, afraid to get wet?" I ask in utter amazement. "A big old Maine coon pussy cat?" A cheap trick, but that catches her attention. Without too much enthusiasm, she raises up just enough to look toward the picture window to see if there really is--and she does have serious doubts about this--a cat dumb enough to be outside in the pouring rain. Let's get this done, whatever it takes, I think to myself, anxious to go out, come in, dry off and get back to my mystery. Maybe it's time for an old-fashioned cat scare. I rush up to the window and look out at the storm. "It is a cat!" I call to Amy with concern. "A big cat!" From drowsy slumber to red alert in an instant, she's up and at the window, looking. Where? Where? Cat scares are getting a little old, but just often enough there actually is a suspicious-looking cat out there, lurking across the lawn stalking the quail. So it is essential for us to check out each alarm. We race from the sunroom through the living room, picking up speed as we pass through the kitchen with Amy's toenails skating over the floor. In the breezeway I grab an umbrella, and we're out on the patio, Amy at attention, looking here and there in the deluge for a sight of the evil, soggy feline intruder. "There. I saw it there!" I say, pointing out to the bluff with my umbrella held against the wind blowing the rain straight in at the house. The sounds of wind whipping through the pines on the bluff and waves tearing down the channel and rain lashing against the house mix in a menacing howl. "Hurry," I urge Amy, "hurry!" Amy senses she might have been tricked but, as not to lose face, trots out to the top of the bluff, gives a perfunctory look around for trouble, and then, finding none and knowing I'm watching intently, at least goes through a pantomime of doing what she's supposed to do (a pantomime I'm convinced on occasion she performs to get those who are obsessively concerned with her bodily functions off her back). Then, her ears blowing about like wind socks, lickety-split, she tears back to the shelter of the house. I lock the door behind us against the storm. In the breezeway she gives a good, deliberate head to tail shake, spraying off the rain. And that is that. She heads back to the sunroom, dark now but for the light from the table lamp by my rocker, and resumes her nap that was so rudely interrupted. "Did you dry her with a towel?" my mother calls from the kitchen a few minutes after I'm settled in the rocker and am back into my Nantucket murder mystery. "What?" "Did you dry the dog with a towel?" "Damn," I mutter. "Make sure her chest is dry," my mother reminds me as I walk out to the back hall to get from the bottom of the closet the old orange bath towel. "The chest is the most important part to get bone dry." Now, since the time when man first invited dog to come live in his house, there has always been a lot of give and take in making this cross-species relationship work. At times, the relationship can be so close that we believe dogs are very much like us, that we, indeed, are related, that we're parents or children, brothers or sisters. And dogs, studies have shown, watch us and know us better than we know them. Maybe dogs find that we become more like them, and maybe we do. They adopt us into their packs as we adopt them into our families. Yet there will always be things about dogs we just cannot comprehend, like what it is that is so ecstatically delightful in sliding into something dead and smelly and squishing it up real tight behind the ears, just as there must be many things about us that dogs cannot fathom, like the endless idle hours we spend seated before the flickering images in a big black box. With few exceptions, what Amy might not fully understand, she gamely accepts. And one of those few exceptions is getting toweled dry. For the supreme leader of a pack to be dried off behind the ears and have her tummy rubbed dry after being outside in the rain is, to her, completely incomprehensible and unreasonable. Clearly it is unacceptable. Carrying the orange bath towel into the sunroom is like pirouetting with a red cape through the streets of Pamplona during the running of the bulls. As soon as Amy sees it coming, she charges it, grabbing hold of a corner, and, hanging on, shakes it like a partridge. She has her end, I have mine, with which I quickly go to work. "Oh, nice and dry, we're going to get you so nice and dry," I singsong chant, toweling under each ear and around her throat. "Ohhhhh, so beautiful, such beautiful, lovely, luscious golden hair, so soft and silky, golden blond, honey blond, lustrous honey blond hair, uummm, so smooth and soft." Nodding slowly in agreement, she momentarily succumbs to this soothing beautyshop lullaby, almost letting her end of the towel drop from her mouth. |
