2005-03-03 - 9:27 a.m.
“Have you decided which one you want?” Emma’s voice, hopeful and bright, preceded her through the kitchen. She looked over my shoulder as the question, more playful than serious, lingered in the silence.
Three puppies remained from the litter of four. The two females resembled their mother, Brie, a nondescript medium-sized mutt covered in fluffy brown hair. The solitary male took after their father—a short-haired black and brown Alsatian mix named Nemo that still hung dutifully about Emma’s place but belonged to another family half a mile down the road.
My thoughts concerned largely two things: burdocks and deterring trespassers. At first I resisted the notion of taking a pup, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense, and overnight I had made my decision. Given my frequent absences, the old farmstead represented an easy temptation. More than once I had discovered strange tire tracks crossing the back yard, and already a scythe that once belonged to my grandfather had gone missing. Maybe having a dog around the place wasn’t such a bad idea, provided it didn’t become a burr magnet.
Lifting the short-haired pup, I said, “This one,” whereupon Emma said I’d picked her daughter Adrienne’s favorite. She took him, wriggling, from my hands, put her nose to his, and whispered, “We’re going to miss you.”
With no more fuss than that, he was mine.
The rutted dirt road, impassible in winter, made for a rough ride even under the best of conditions. Angling sharply from the top of McClure Hill towards the old railway bed halfway down, the road—little more than a wagon trail, really—levels briefly before resuming a precipitous, curving descent to the valley. Accelerating too fast toward this midway plateau, the van hit a bump. The back hopped up and bottomed violently, eliciting a whimper from my bewildered passenger that quickly escalated into a series of piercing, full-throated yelps. At the bottom of the hill I glanced back at the pet carrier, and tried to imagine how it felt to be suddenly extracted from the warm, safe company of siblings and thrust into such unpredictable strangeness. “It’s okay,” I said, but we both knew it wasn’t.
A mile down the river road I almost parked at the closed entrance to Lattice Bridge. Built in 1886, it is the oldest bridge on the Genesee River, and survives in no small measure because its two ends rest upon bedrock. Long, hand-hammered steel straps crisscross its sides, suggesting the trelliswork for which the structure is named. The river flows quietly here, and a peaceful solitude inhabits the place. Briefly I considered stopping, thinking a short walk might reassure my frightened companion, but if he were to run under the guardrails that blocked access to the bridge, there was the danger he might fall through one of the holes opened up in the rotting plank deck. The better course was to keep going, to get home as quickly as possible, uncomfortable as doing so would be for us both.
Nothing has meaning unless we express it. And all expression is approximate. For a quarter of an hour (which corresponds roughly to the more or less dozen miles in our trip) the two of us existed as strangers in close proximity, each painfully aware of the other, yet disconnected—woefully so. Nothing good, no transformation or redemption, can be made from belaboring that point. It happened, and is a mere sad part of a story. Certainly it’s best to just skip some things and forget them.
A man once told of an experience he’d had at the age I was when he related his story: Walking along the river one morning he saw three logs lying alongside one another in still water. When he traveled back the same way that very evening the logs were gone. There had been no rain to wash them away in the interim; the current remained placid and calm. He put the incident out of his mind until one day an old-timer told him, “Son, those probably weren’t logs you saw, but pike.”
I never would have recognized such magic had I not been tipped off to look for it, to see and recognize certain small wonders emanate in the world. One day I was driving to school, going by way of the Lattice Bridge when I saw three small logs of my own submerged in a quiet place in the river. The next day they too were gone and I thought: Those probably weren't logs you saw.
Driving this day, I pass the very same spot twenty years on and think, because the mind is an incessant compiler of disparate things, of something else, too. Just a little farther downriver a fault line demarcates the world where the water is higher by a foot and a half on one side, immediately lower on the other; here the tectonic plates once long ago shuddered and shifted, leaving the river literally broken.
One long-ago summer night I decided to cross along this line, keeping to the high side of the fall. The flat rock bottom, slightly up-tilted at the break, made a lip upon which to cross, creating both the quiet pool behind it and the purling overflow which plunged, bubbling, into the deeper water below.
The smooth river surface reflected the moonlight, and milk-muddy opaqueness covered the intricacies of its depths. I sidestepped along the slippery rock bottom, feeling for each step as the current pushed incessantly against my calves, half expecting to fall any moment. Three quarters of the way across, a waking fish splashed and sped from the trajectory of my searching left foot; reflexively I crouched, and thoroughly soaked the seat of my pants.
But this day’s trip’s actual details from this point on—the taking a left onto the county road, crossing the bridge, entering the village and making a right at the single red light before the four mile drive remaining—have all dissolved into the overriding memory of the pup’s frantic, nonstop yelping the entire rest of the way home.
I drove up behind the house and parked by the back door. The pup, quiet now once out of the pet carrier, still ran and hid beneath the van as soon as his feet touched the ground. At that very same moment the percussive squeal of air brakes releasing signaled the bulldozer’s arrival. The puppy crouched, as if frozen; I decided to chance a quick run down the hill.
Don, whose bulldozer it was, stood to one side, watching the long trailer back up. He called something to the man driving and then approached me, lifting a hand towards the machine behind him, and said, “We’re just going to unload this thing and go.”
I nodded, waved assent, and ran back up the hill, but when I looked under the van the puppy was gone. I glanced towards the barn sitting perched on the knoll behind the house and quickly scanned left, trying to discern movement among all the inanimate junk and leftover weeds still cluttering the back yard. And then I saw him, already halfway across the eastside field heading towards the river valley. It seemed impossible to catch him. He was moving too fast.
I knew by giving chase I would only scare him and drive him further, and possibly faster, away. For a split-second I considered what Adrienne would do and did it, the only thing I could, really, waving my arms in the air while yelling loudly: Hey!
The pup stopped and looked back, suspended between impulses, momentarily undecided whether to continue flight or return. I stopped waving my arms and dropped to my knees; remarkably, the pup did an abrupt about-face and started back.
In every life there are such turning points, moments of decision which influence future events. We decide to keep going or go back, to pursue or restrain the impulse to pursue. We discover that simply being patient and open to possibility will allow good to chance our way. We learn to trust and be trusted.
I was still on my knees when the pup came running—tail wagging, panting—and jumped into my outstretched hands. I scolded lightly, asking, “Where do you think you were going?” He licked my face in reply and I let him, knowing that would be his only answer.
