Walks with Dogs

Tundra Swan

They kill these. The Nevada Department of Wildlife disposes of my world and my fellow animals without any input from me. All hunting makes me sick, but there is something especially disgusting about killing swans. More, much more, on what makes me sick about this department and the BLM — but I’m too upset to go on right now, having just learned that they kill swans.

Dehumanization

Now the camera has moved the two prisoners we saw in  the third image. So we see the back of the victim with the rust-colored garments,  and we get a closeup from behind of the second man. Now I wonder who took the pictures. Clearly whoever it was had freedom to move about the plane. Was this permitted? Were the pictures transmitted in secret? How did  Art Bell get them?

This second prisoner is distinctive because he alone appears plump. We can tell because he wears a sleeveless striped tan and white T-shirt and we can see his fleshy exposed arms and much of his back. He is hooded like all the others, and wears the expensive-looking red-padded earphones. I guess the earphones serve two purposes: first to muffle the airplane noise which is probably intense. But secondly they are for sensory deprivation. The captive has Western-style  trousers and what appear to be unlaced tennis shoes; no socks; metal ankle shackles reflect light. 

Four American soldiers visible from neck down in very background of the photo appear to be conversing because they face one another and not the prisoners. I would assume they are hot, tired, disgusted and on the edge of rage. Do they have a choice? Must they accept this assignment? Did some of them volunteer for it? Have any come forth with testimony now six years later? 

The books or placards I noted in Image three are visible from the front. From this angle they appear to be propped upright as though for the prisoners to read. I cannot make out what they say. Also from this angle I can see how miserably narrow and uncomfortable is the bench the soldiers use. Thought: if the plane goes down, nobody will unshackle these captive victim prisoners. Notice I did not use the Newspeak: ”detainees.”

PRESIDENT OBAMA - END TORTURE ON DAY ONE

Here a single skinny man with skinny ankles  shackled to the floor and hands secured behind his back slumps against the webbing that binds him in the center of the aircraft. His head is averted from two looming huge American soldiers who stand over his left shoulder. The skinny man wears rumpled brown trousers and a sleeveless, sweat-stained tan t-shirt .His face is completely covered with a white apparatus that appears to be a gas mask. His ears are covered with red earphones, as are the ears of  the soldiers. Looking closely you can see the pad under him; this serves as his bathroom. It must be hot, noisy  and unbelievably rank in those big nearly empty planes. 

One soldier bends over the victim. Has he just struck the man? Is he about to? Is he just yelling random accusations? 

To the right of the most menacing guard stands a taller soldier with a bullet-proof vest over a short-sleeved T shirt. He wears a surgeon’s type mask over his nose and mouth, as does another soldier further back in the plane. Who is the winner here? Who the victim?

Circa November, 2002. First shocker

WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED TO KNOW? RESTORATION
OF EVERYDAY HUMANITY MUST BE FIRST PRIORITY
OF NEW OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

I always say they find us, we don’t find them.

Sadiepants Mackenzie is a case in point. There was a thread of logic. Roger was getting old. And he had yet to find his long-lost brother. Just as Snoopy daydreamed about his mother at the Daisy Hill Puppy Farm, Roger with that self-effacing goofy grin of his, sought the brother who was as big and rowdy as he was, who would body slam him while running along the lakeshore, who would jump and spin and challenge. What the poor guy got instead were two worn out little old females.

The first day Roger came home with me, Dolly — 35 pound Basenji, and

Dreams of lost brother

Melba — 45 pound Bassador stood gaping with horror on the steps. He was afraid to pass by them, so he stood at the landing and barked. It never got any better than that. I owed him.

So with Dolly and Melba eventually spreading furry wings and gliding to the spirit realm, I took Roger up to the Wylie Animal Rescue Foundation near a wooded park in Kings Beach. The idea was to foster a dog — see if they got along.

The online Adopt Me picture that had attracted me up to Kings Beach, an hour’s drive from my place, was a blond dog face somewhat like Roger’s own. But in person Prince [I think his name was Prince] was a sad, cowed, skinny, spiritless animal despite being younger than Roger.

We walked them out on leashes and Roger blandly ignored Prince, not interested enough to harass him. If I brought him home, Roger would have him for breakfast.

Next up was a skinny pointer/setter type. Sufficient spirit, but I know those breeds and they’re not for me. “He’ll jump my six-foot fence,” I told Connie, the rescue lady. She expressed denial. A laconic animal control officer in the front room didn’t look up from his paperwork: “He jumped a fence this morning.”

To their credit, WARF has outdoor play areas and volunteer dog walkers and the shelter dogs have it pretty good, good enough to jump a fence here and there.

Time was moving along. Connie seemed out of options. “OK,” she said. “Let’s try Sadie.”

Sadie is such a common dog name that this animal was Sadie Number Four. I waited outside with Roger. Connie came out with what seemed like a pretty small dog on a leash. I had in mind somebody at least as big as Roger, who was 65 pounds but rangy, built like a Shepherd.

Dolly 1989 - 2003

Connie and Sadie approached and the two erupted into a blur of snarling high gear. I noted with disappointment the white splash across Sadie’s black shoulders; her markings were nearly identical to Dolly’s, and I had my differences with Dolly.

While I contemplated my disappointment, Connie was trying to pull her off. She was going for Roger’s neck, just as Dolly used to do. He used to just stand there and roll his eyes while Dolly did what she could to rupture his jugular, but with this one he fought back. I was delighted.

“Looks good,” I said.

“It does?” asked Connie. She already had me pegged for a nut anyway. “Yes. He can’t push her around. She’s not afraid of him.”

No, she was not. Sadie was 56 pounds of assertive border collieness. This little lady had a self-possession I had not seen since Trinka, my Doberman, so many years ago.

We got the two separated and headed for the leash walk. With them separated, I could see that Sadie was bigger than I initially thought; bigger than Dolly, muscular, utterly confident. It doesn’t take me long to fall in love with a dog. I asked Connie if I could hold the leash.

We were on a pleasant sloped trail with typical Tahoe boulders, pines and firs. Sadie leaped, spun, hunting with all her senses, never tangling the leash. It was as though the leash wasn’t there as she sprang from boulder to boulder or along fallen trees.

“She’s agile,” I remarked.

Connie didn’t seem that impressed. Now, four years later, I’ve found so many are not impressed by my Sadie who I’ve come to adore. “She has an attitude,” a trainer told me. Yes she does. Yes she does.

After the walk, we put them in the play yard to see if they would at last make friends. Roger leaped into the kiddie pool because he thought he’d get a laugh from us, splashing and churning, turning on the grin.

Sadie turned her back, went to the shelter door, stood on her hind legs and scratched madly for admittance.

Nevertheless, I decided on her. “It’s because she was the third,” said Connie.

I couldn’t explain it myself. She clearly wasn’t going to be any friend to Roger; she wasn’t his long-lost brother. He needed a male, probably a rowdy young Shepherd. It’s only a foster, I told myself. All I knew was she was about “3 or 4″ years old, had been on death row among several other previous placements, was billed as a Border Collie although there was clearly some other genetic influence as well.

FIRST ADVENTURE

I came up a few days later without Roger to pick her up. Connie was delayed, so I asked the shelter people if I could take Sadie “out to play.”

I came to her cage with the leash and she was galvanized. They uncaged her and she ran to the front door, stood on her hind legs and produced the same frenzied clawing to get out as she had two days ago to get in. I hooked her up and she dragged me outside and up the slope before I could inhale.

The leash and me huffing along behind her didn’t slow her down. We flew over the trail, Sadie doing the logs and boulder bouncing, me trying to remember landmarks. I didn’t know I could move like that, but I didn’t see what option I had, so I clung to the leash. Earlier I had told Connie how I walk my dogs off leash. She warned me shelter dogs aren’t bonded, don’t even know their names, if they get lost, call WARF.

So I knew they’d think I lost Sadie if we stayed out too long. After she ran off her initial steam, I was able to lead her to what I thought was the way back. It wasn’t. We walked through a subdivision, where she behaved herself reasonably well, alongside a golf course, and finally came to a garage.

I called the shelter to pick us up; I was wiped out. Sadie lay in the shade until the animal control truck showed up, driven by the laconic guy. I made some self-effacing remark. “Why do people do that?” he asked me. “Why do they point out their mistakes?” Great question.

“Sadie’s a good dog,” he said. “She has just enough bitch in her.” I agreed profusely.

Hard to say if Connie believed me that Sadie was never off the leash the whole episode, but she didn’t argue. I signed the papers and Sadie was my official guest, complete with a little orange “Adopt Me” cape, a wool blanket and two collars.

I lifted her to put her in my Pathfinder, and she gave me one kiss, on the cheek, as powerful a kiss as I’ve ever had. “I like you,” it said. “You are fully accepted. I am profoundly grateful that you have rescued me.”

Sadie is a dog of few words. She doesn’t need many. Four years later and now she sleeps at the foot of my futon, over the covers, the very place where Roger breathed his last.

Fostering a dog sounds reasonable on paper. You give it a home; the shelter advertises, a few days/weeks/whatever, and somebody else takes over. A few days after Sadie came to my house, I was at lunch with my swim group. “Yeah,” said one. “I fostered a dog. She’s been with me a year and a half.”

I was supposed to take Sadie to a ranch event in Carson City where she well could have been picked up as a ranch dog. But I did not. I took her hiking again, and she’s been with me ever since.

She and Roger were inseparable on the trail. They were hunting partners. They worked burrows together. When other dogs showed up, they had each other’s back. At home they ignored each other; they didn’t even demonstrate rivalry or apprehension. I had to get out the ball or the tuggy toy and to make them play. They would humor me for about ten minutes then go back to their lounging. All either one of them cared about was the trail.

ATTRIBUTES

Wedge profile

I call her Sadiepants to seem like she’s cute, but she’s not. She’s dead serious with no sense of humor. She’s a Type A, a manager with a tight schedule. She has a tough wedge-shaped profile: determined, streamlined, expressionless. This is partially because her dark, dark brown eyes are almost invisible against her black face, but it’s also because she’s intently focussed on her concerns. In the yard she hunts relentlessly, trotting her paths for hours. She finds mice all the time. She comes and gets me when somebody comes to the house. She’s on duty, she’s responsible, she’s busy. Not nervous, just busy.

I added Mackenzie to her name because her dignity calls for it, and because a friend looked at her a few weeks after I formally adopted her. “There’s something else there,” he said. “There’s a touch of Spuds Mackenzie.”

So this is introduction and soon to follow more episodes featuring Sadie.

The  night of October 24, 2008 was chilly and we sat in bleachers, then stood on a windy ball field in the early autumn dark, getting trained for the morning’s event. There might have been 200 of us; I don’t really know. But there are at least 15 field organizers and each invited at least 20 volunteers and those plus all the national organizers and the sound systems people were there. The Obama campaign; America as one organized community.

Since I turned 67 on October 20, I’ve been feeling my age. Things young people never think about like will there be a bathroom and how long will we have to stand and just how goddamn much will my back and my leg and my knee and my shoulder hurt.

I wasn’t even sure I could find the baseball stadium. Where would I park? These are things you don’t think about until you’re over sixty and night blind.

But I was behind a car with an Obama sticker on McCarran so just followed them and all was good. The baseball stadium was brilliantly lit; I could see it from McCarran, it’s just that I never looked  before. There was a Porta Potty right at the entrance. There were people I knew to huddle with in the bleachers. There was a national organizer who had organized, I think, eleven rallies including I think, the Denver acceptance speech at   INVESCO Field — if not that, other rallies and speeches of great import. I was impressed and  glad I made the effort to get there.

The first thing he told us was: “Don’t run.” If we run, everybody else will start running. Then he told us not to talk to the press unless we’re sure we want to see our comments on the front page of the New York Times the next day. Then the quotidian stuff like who sits where, what are the volunteer jobs, how to deal with troublemakers (tell your field organizer). The secret service will notice anybody weird long before you do; not to worry.

It got pretty old standing around on the field once we broke out into teams. We introduced ourselves which was boring and I told everybody how great Dreams from My Father is which didn’t visibly impress anybody and I decided my field organizer hates me and my back hurt like hell but I didn’t want to acknowledge it and finally we could go home and the bleachers closeness and the huddles were over and I felt pretty much alone but still glad I went.

Next morning didn’t start out all that auspicious. I hate waking to an alarm, but had to set one to  be sure I got up at 4:30 and arrived at the field by 6AM. Despite encroaching senility, my brain retains that blessed function my father’s had as well; it works as an alarm clock. I always get up about 10 minutes before the actual alarm goes off. Maybe I hear the alarm mechanism getting ready, or  I dread being jolted awake so desperately that I wake myself up — anyway I was up.

A long discouraging walk from the distant university parking garage during which I feel so very alone and a bit lost in the predawn stillness. The university has expanded dramatically since I was a graduate student in 1983. Good God, that’s 25 years since I got my M.A….anyway University of Nevada Reno has graciously added signposts to the myriad new alleys and byways they have constructed. I’m approaching from the west today and it all looks different.

Being 67, I now have to wonder when my left leg will give out, but I fortified myself with ibuprofen and pain pill and that plus the early crisp dawn gave the whole experience a very pleasant dreamy quality.

Astonishing to see people — in addition to all the volunteers – already lined up at 6 AM in front of the security checkpoint. Everybody’s smiling; everybody’s happy; a spirit binds us.

By sunup I’m at my assignment: usher in the VIP bleachers. Will I fall off the bleachers? But something tells me not to argue when the officious team leader or whatever she is asks me to go to the top of the bleachers. As the morning progresses, I direct squads of union members in bright orange T-shirts and another union in green shirts to the center where they will show up on camera directly behind Obama.

Political campaigns attract so many control freak type A’s and on an ordinary day this can annoy me. But today it’s all a floating pleasant panoply. I just drift with the tide.

From several pleasant conversations emerge two new buddies to share most of the experience: a retired school principal from Gold Run and his friend, a teacher. I would have liked the friend better, but the principal was the chattier of the two and preoccupied me … no big surprise there…but both intelligent and so pleasant. Imagine. Talking to men who aren’t gruntass thugs or downright lunatics in Nevada. How often does that happen? Of course it happened because these men were from California.

So I had the rare experience of enjoying male company even though the principal was married. These guys were smart enough to tease me about Barnard and why was it exclusive and  discriminatory against men. “They’re just that way” I told them and we all had a good laugh.

Because we were standing on the top tier of the bleachers, we could look down behind the bleachers to see a white tent set up and to the east, Evans Avenue down which, in due time, Obama’s motorcade appeared. I would have missed all this without my two guides. By now I had given up all vestiges of being an usher and I was just a fan. The bleachers were full; the stadium floor was almost full, and people kept filing in. We could see long lines snaking in front of the football stadium and down the hill to our field. I later found out the crowd was 11,000.

By now it was sunny and as dazzling as only October can be. The motorcade stopped so that Obama’s limo was lined up with the tent flap. He met there with VIPs, none of whom I recognized, who had been  standing around and now were ushered into the tent by Secret Service.

Perhaps one of them was a woman I later read about in the paper. Her husband had, horribly and freakily, died of a heart attack while canvassing for Obama. Obama had been in Hawaii visiting his mortally ill grandmother, Madelyn Dunham. Nevertheless, he found time to send flowers to the Sparks widow. He called her as well. At first she didn’t believe it was Obama on the line, but she called back and indeed it was he. He arranged a VIP pass for her and she later told reporters she met with him and they hugged. “I blubbered on his shirt,” she said. (RGJ Oct. 25, 2008, by  TAMMY KRIKORIAN tkrikorian@rgj.com.

Obama finally emerged from the tent at an easy, athletic, joyful lope. He kept the pace all the way to the podium.

After the speech, we had that eagle eye view of his tent perhaps 15 feet below. As he emerged from the field, a woman behind me was screaming “We love you, Obama! We love you!” He looked up and we made eye contact. I waved. He waved back. We were all grinning and euphoric.

Obama is now for me that energy, that run to the podium, that easy wave and grin, that sunny day and those happy, soon to be liberated people.