A Dog, a Field, a Remembering

Ada asked me this morning if Littlehead & Kabob & Piper would want to do the Yukon Quest again, & I told her they had run so many miles & seen so much country that they likely would prefer to alternate between dozing underfoot & running home trails in a tiny team with her on the runners. I miss them, with a ferocity that describes the contours of my emptiness. Life is a hollow thing without dogs, a forced march, unsettled & damagingly incomplete. It is difficult to convey how thoroughly engrained dogness was for me for all those years mushing. I simply wasn’t, without the dogs. 

I was thinking of those girls, then, on our morning walk, as we worked our way up the hill. How Kabob always finds my lap, or burrows into my sleeping bag on trail & sits still on my chest in slumber. How Littlehead is always attentive, always on duty. How Piper buries her head forcefully into your cradling arms & pushes with all of the force of her long legs. How they all observed & honored every of my wishes & hopes, committed companions tireless in their efforts. How in lieu of explanation they would have only your steadfast fealty & love, nothing more. 

When we reached the top field on our walk, a seventy-pound female Alaskan husky, white & grey, light in her trot, rounded the fence & shyly approached us. We’d never seen her before, though she lives apparently at the adjacent property. She was beautiful-- a proper weight, bright-eyed, with that thousand-mile bounce in her step that we spent so many years watching in our own dogs. I kneeled & offered my hand & she came tentatively at first & then leaned into my petting awhile before turning around & casting backwards into me with a paw up, precisely the way Solo does in his demands for belly-scratches. It was a gift, meeting my old self up there in that fallow field, feeling my fingers ensconced in that thick coat & knowing that easy grace that happens unscripted between a dog & a human. She escorted us along our walk a pace, then shuffled home, unhurried & calm. What a wonder. 

I think often of the Frank O’Hara line: “Grace to be born & live as variously as possible.” I used to take it as a prompt for diving headlong into the urgencies & exigencies of the present, in a manner you might expect from a teenager going through the grinding changes life offers up with at best a peppering of patience. That fractious conflagration of will & choice, a firecracker fracturing your sightlines at every turn. I think as life stretches on a bit, there is an accompanying understanding of what inhabiting your days can come to mean, an accrued endorsement of slowing. In Courting the Wild Twin, there is a bit about delineating between the depth & draw of enduring love & the flash & spark of something more ecstatic. One cannot leap from ecstasy to ecstasy, it cautions, without wagering whatever is supposed foundational to the self. You must have loyalty to your name, if nothing else. 

Meeting myself, in the fur of that dog, I wondered at the gossamer thread that draws itself between my innumerable lives. What selved my many changes, smoothing the corners against any accidental immolations. How our own continuity of meaning can seem like a line of ghosts around us, a song trailing off into the distance, a language the syllables of which distort into static. But we call our own names nonetheless, & pull the line, & see it waver & snap across the maw of years, decades. We were there, back along the darkness of our wake. We left our names in passing, left them to grow distant maybe, to blur into something familiar but separate, some intimation, some whisper. But when we come to them anew, having walked so far to find them, there is overwhelming solace there. A language that we know & long still to speak, under the cawing raven perched on the oak, under the shadow of its branching, standing there on a roadside & remembering.