AUGUST 1 , 2004

Dog days

One of the great pleasures of living in a rural setting is the opportunity to go wandering in the woods with a dog. For myself and our two-year-old Rhodesian ridgeback mix Birdie, time more or less pulls up a rock and waits for us as we roam through the juniper, cedar, oak and yaupon of the woods behind our pasture, following streambeds and criss-crossing through the hills and gulleys of the eroding landscape. Far from the walls of her pen and the neighborhood regulation of her leash, it is the place of our best and most natural communication. Free to run, she happily forges on ahead in whatever direction looks interesting, but returns frequently to check on my progress and quickly changes course to follow me; and in those brief moments of contact, our eyes meeting in recognition, we see each other most clearly, and we acknowledge each other as free and worthy friends. It is a return to the old ways, and we meet as beneficiaries of the thousands of years dogs and humans have spent getting used to one another.

It is a far cry from the walks she is getting lately. These past few weeks have marked the end of Jenni's pregnancy with our first child, and we are busy, tired, self-absorbed, and slow-moving. We aim for daily walks and usually get them in, but they are slow, quiet, walking walks along the dusty country road across from our driveway, on which Birdie practically prances at the end of her leash, quivering with unspent energy, and watches passing cars as though each carried a greater statesman than the last. Corrections are frequent and stern, and her attitude is one of obedient but strained resignation. She knows these are serious days. At the opening of each walk she greets the mother-to-be while in a sit, at my insistence, and offers a driveway-brushing wag of her tail before gently sniffing Jenni's belly. It is an evaluative, appraising act, to be sure, and possibly one of either deferential or proprietary acknowledgment as well. At least I think so, having spent as much time with her as I have in our two years together. For all I know, though, she could be listening to an endless loop tape of the 1812 Overture. Sometimes it certainly seems that way.

Such was the unbridled enthusiasm she brought to our last long walk.

The family property is made up of two parcels of land, one a long, narrow rectangle running perpendicular to the road, and the other a larger, triangular piece that intersects it at more or less at a corner. Not far from this nexus is the property's pond. It has been our custom to walk out to the pond on leash, because along this route there is the constant temptation for Birdie to take a quick dash over to the neighbor's property on either side, squeezing under a barbed-wire fence and cavorting with one neighbor's longhorn cattle or sniffing at the other's tractor implements and flower beds and peeking in windows. Once we reach the pond, the woods and the wide open pasture easily trump such frivolous pleasures, especially if that is the way I am headed, and I can unclip the leash and let the cannons start blazing. The return path is the same route, but the temptations are greater still since we are heading home and the fun will soon end. So I generally make sure to get the leash back on her once we reach the near side of the pond.

On this occasion, my habitual ways made me a sitting duck in the arms race of animal freedom. As I walked along the edge of the pond to the housebound side, carefully brushing aside the mesquite branches that were slowly growing over the disused cattle trail that ran along its shore, Birdie stopped at the pond's far side behind me. When I turned to look, she was sniffing the ground in front of her suspiciously, or rather, with a suspicious lack of enthusiasm. When she sniffs at the ground with absorption, even if at bare earth with no trace of life in sight, she has certainly discovered a wondrous smell; but when she sniffs gently, glancingly, with her snout never quite relishing the act — when there is a delicacy to it — she is not, in fact, sniffing anything, but is thinking about being bad.

Make no mistake, she is quite capable of being bad without a thought; if properly startled by a lure, she would chase it into a fire. But when she has the chance to mull over her options, and is considering running off for no good reason but to prolong her adventure, she appears, at least to me, to take the time to dwell on what she knows will follow, to contemplate my future dissatisfaction with her, and even to writhe in it a little, as a dog writhes in a delicious odor, to mask herself with it and lend a bold accent to what she is about to do.

I knew, in short, what that sniffing signified. I called out to her to follow me, projecting the most enthusiastic good-times attitude I could muster in spite of my sinking feeling that I had already lost the battle for her will while my back was turned. And then she took off for the farm implement guy's place.

The most maddening thing about chasing a dog is that you cannot show your anger. If you do, the dog will simply drag out its freedom to the last possible moment, because what awaits it after its capture is even less appetizing than before, and the taste of freedom that much sweeter. So I followed her from our pasture to our neighbor's, where I stayed on our side of the fence and called and called and called her, alternating between a gruff, stentorian tone and a devil-may-care Hey!-What-about-coming-over-here? modulation, as though getting my feel for a theatrical part, as she wandered around, mostly out of view. After several minutes, she came trotting around the front of the house, and I was sure she was coming back; she stopped at the barbed-wire fence and looked me up and down, considering my pleas. Then she dodged right and jogged down the driveway towards the road.

Leonard Road is a paved farm-to-market with a speed limit of 55 miles an hour, long curves and nary a cop in sight. In spite of this, Birdie's few encounters with the road have been enormously pleasurable ones; cars, always a source of interest, always screech to a halt rather than running her down, which gives her a nice opportunity to inspect them up close, and once, as a puppy, she found a perfectly good dead turtle out there, a taste I'm sure she savors every time we cross the road to head down Chick Lane on our daily walks.

When she hit Leonard Road she turned right (away from our house), and went jogging down the center line as I carefully climbed over the barbed-wire fence, a skill I could thank her for. Half a mile down she lost herself in the company of a couple of Rottweilers behind a long perimeter fence, which she led up and down the length along the road, back and forth, carefully keeping out of reach of her huffing and puffing handler. This from a first-place winner in her obedience classes. We keep the trophy to this day out of sheer disbelief.

Finally, somehow, she tired enough of the game to stand still long enough for me to reattach the leash to her choke collar. Furious, I held my tongue, offering lavish praise instead that she had obediently sat still for three accidental seconds after I told her to stay for the one hundred and eleventh time. My only recourse in such moments is heavily masked sarcasm, and since she doesn't get irony, it works out well for both of us.

When we returned, it was time for her bath, a highly irregular activity that generally preceded a visit to the vet, as it did on this particular day. Birdie enjoys motoring around under a garden hose on a hot day as much as anyone, but she prefers not to have one aimed squarely at her when she is forced to stand or sit still, so the bath was a bit of a struggle as well. She seemed tired and resigned to it, though, so after scrubbing her with the baby shampoo and washing my dog-hair-covered hands before rinsing her off, I offered the gesture of removing her from her choke collar and attaching the leash to her nylon one, so that her gentle pulling away from us did not discomfort her.

You probably know where this is going. The slippery dog backed out of her collar in a panic when hose hit fur and took off for the other neighbor's, where a dozen head of longhorn cattle with steak-knife-sharp racks wandered around with about 15 dogs. Add another hour's chase to the evening, and by the time we got home it was nearly dark.

The next night we had dinner with John and Lisa, who have a two-year-old daughter. I am generally met with skepticism, and rightly so I'm sure, when I describe to anyone how being a dog-owner has prepared me for being a father. I think the motherly compulsion to mentally carry the comparison through to its logical conclusion typically outweighs all of the caveats, protestations and nuanced observations that follow up the conversation-killing opener. Still, I stubbornly insist there are lessons to be learned from it, and take my drubbings for it. This time, however, I managed to strike a chord with Lisa.

"The most frustrating thing about it," I explained, "is that you can't get mad at them if they finally stop, even if you practically force them to. You have to act all happy that they decided, after an hour of being bad, to be good. You basically have to reward them for being good after they have been so bad, as though the badness never even happened, or you'll never get anywhere. The only times things go really smoothly are the times when I create an environment in which being good is easier than being bad."

She laughed. "That," she said, "is exactly like raising a child."

Garden Notes

Our okra has just begun to produce heavily. The small plants have grown somewhat, could still stand to be mulched and fertilized but are fruiting anyway; the plot of larger plants is picking up the pace. I harvested 5 pounds of okra on Friday morning, leaving no pods smaller than half a pinky finger on the plants. Then I left the drip system running from the hose on low all day (an accident) and came home and the ground was soaked. Saturday afternoon, to my surprise, I went back out and found that 5 more pounds had matured. By today the plot was full of open yellow-and-purple okra flowers, eager for another round. I wonder if this might have something to do with the watering method.

It is a good summer for the plants, rarely hitting 100 and very humid. This is why okra grows so well in the South.

We planted a few tomato plants to try to get some fall tomatoes. Three of them are in 5-gallon buckets so we can move them for (or away from) the sun; another two are partially shaded, planted into an underused flowerbed, under a tree and behind a bush. They are probably not ideal locations but they are within our regular sphere of action, which will ensure that they get watered when needed. So far that has been almost every day.

What will happen with our gourd plants and sweet potatoes remains to be seen. The sweet potatoes have a lot of vines above the ground but there are also a lot of weeds. The gourd plants that have survived do have gourds on them, so we should have a light crop of cannonball gourds at least. Those, our cured gourds from last year, and our okra will be our offering at the farmer's market when we go for the first time in the next week or two. Meanwhile we have blanched and frozen five pounds of okra and will do the same with the ten we have now. This will last us the rest of the year, easily... the rest we really need to sell.