In the land of dogs - #69

Hold them tight and let them go.

The town made it clear from the beginning. The population was not just 180 people, but also 51 dogs. The dogs that sun bathed in the road, the dogs that plowed through the snow, the dogs that chased their own wild history back into the woods. This town belonged to the dogs. And Cooper would soon be one of them.

I didn’t understand dogs as a kid. It was easier for me to connect with cats: suspicious, wary of the strength of others, willing to fight if necessary. Dogs and their goofy grins, their blind loyalty, their faith — it all seemed banal and flat. They were G-rated characters in a devastating film, except for one. 

The neighbor’s dog was old and angry, a black Labrador with a fury inside him that the adults always said was harmless. I was 7 when I tried to see my friend Liz, up the new steps to her old black and white farm house. Buster sat at the top of the steps and growled, as he often did, but with something deeper and deeper, his teeth bigger and bigger. I retreated, slowly, and he followed. I didn’t understand dogs. So when he kept following, I ran. 

Buster took a hold of my wrist in his mouth, and I screamed and screamed until my brother came running with a baseball bat. He was 10, and he beat the dog off me. I wouldn’t go to Liz’s house alone after that. I don’t think my brother and I told anyone, but I remember we agreed: if Buster came onto our property, we’d get that bat and finish it — the kind of pact children with no previous allegiances make when they recognize a common enemy. 

For more than 20 years, dogs would exist on the periphery of my life, only making brief appearances as trustworthy characters, but always to someone else. Until I met Ben. Until I met Cooper. 

Photo by Jordan Clark Haggard.

Cooper is a gateway dog. He is 22 lbs and like most great house pets, doesn’t think he is one. Everyone will tell you their dog is incredible, but Cooper was not always my dog, and I was not always a dog person, so when I tell you he is incredible, it’s because he is. In 2021, in the blooms of spring one month before we were scheduled to pack up our things and our lives, Cooper was taken from our driveway. Cooper’s “I’m missing” Instagram post was shared over a thousand times. People love Cooper. The former CEO of Headspace, upon meeting Cooper, kneeling at his level, looked up at me with astonishment and said, “I look like this dog.” And he did. Cooper enjoyed many a day in the office when others were not allowed.

When the hapless driveway thief took him, I knew it. I knew a person was responsible. Ben was more certain it was a coyote, his personality not being enshrined in hope the way mine is. But I was also there when it happened. I was switching the laundry in the shed on the slope of our Topanga cabin, and one minute Cooper was in the driveway sunbathing and the next minute he wasn’t. A coyote I would’ve heard. Cooper makes noises like you wouldn’t believe, or I suppose you would believe if you’ve seen enough Disney movies, some combination of Gremlins and Stitch. 

I remember sitting in bed, the moon full like a searchlight that first and only night without him, and Ben saying, “what’s the point of moving to Colorado if he’s gone?” What was the point of a big beautiful life without his squat stature in it? Without the smell of his rotten and festering spit on your cheeks? Without the snuffles from under the covers of his deep and trusting sleep? 

When we got the call, the “I have your dog” call of a lifetime, we were watching the clock. I was meant to leave for a flight — a business trip that no longer felt like business worth attending to. There was only my dog, not by my side. But the call came and we threw my bags into the car and drove to the meeting spot. When we pulled in, we saw Cooper see our car, and we saw him start to shake and whine. He leapt into our arms, or leapt as high as he could, and in that moment, it felt like the entire move was for him.

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A post shared by Kelton Wright (@keltonwrites)

Here, in this snowglobe valley, the dogs run free. On the winter canvas, their maps and expeditions are sprinkled across the snow, trails of full out sprints and investigations deep into drifts. Amidst them, evidence of others: ermines, rabbits, the light touch of a small cat, but rarely anything more menacing. Here, the dogs rule. Some with their fierce loyalty, others with their wild buoyancy, so unaware of the cold as to be immune to it. 

They are not without their misery, without their crimes. Stories of this town are always laced with tales of dogs. The dogs that climb the mountains, the dog that eat cats, the dogs that lived here before Cooper, one of whom was known for following backcountry skiers into such dangerous conditions that it fell, trapped in a couloir for four days before other skiers found it and rolled it into the town on the other side of the ridge. They called his home, this very house. “Your dog needs a ride.” He was fine. The dogs here seemingly always are. 

I don’t have pets. I am merely a guardian. When I adopted Finn, a yowling tabby, I lived in a 200 square foot studio in Santa Monica, and as he has made my life better, I have done everything in my power to return the favor. I moved him to the mountains outside LA to the Spider Box, where he first met Cooper. He had a friend and a view. And then I moved him to the Treehouse, where he had a deck with birds and sunspots and a neighbor cat who courted him. And then we moved him here, to a cabin full of mice and perches and a protected patio he could lounge on all day. Then, of course, we brought home Snoots. A real friend. In the early morning hours, you can hear the two of them bounding and rolling upstairs, and I soften deeper into the sheets knowing they are happy, that Finn is happy.

But no one is happier than Cooper. 

Cooper with his short stance and his shorter hair. Cooper with his bat ears and bulging eyes. Cooper who does not know his breed and only knows that he can. He can climb mountains. He can romp through the snow. He can steal a heart at a glance, and he has done so, more here than ever before. This cabin sits on a corner lot, surrounded by open town land. The front yard butts against the intersection of all the dogs, and in the middle of this yard is a bird pond the size of a cafe table, now known to the dogs as the watering hole. 

On a full sun day, they meet to discuss the news.

First, there’s Lily. Oh my heart for Lily with her small head and long snout and luscious gray coat, a velvet blanket draped like the only warmth in a monochromatic home. She is the harbinger of the day, our local rooster, and when she is away at her other human’s home, I miss her morning trumpets. When Cooper hears her mark the dawn, he runs to the window to see her. Outside, she side-steps over to you, too excited to walk in a straight line, curving her body like a croissant. 

“We’re here for Cooper.”

Next is Dash — be careful to bend your knees, because Dash hits you like a bus in the bike lane. It was only this February when you could scoop him up with one arm like a small but manageable load of laundry, dropping a sock or a paw here and there. Now, he is regal, his red coat and retriever sensibilities always looking for adventure. Oh how you’ve grown they would say at the Christmas party. Dash comes to the deck and paws at the window until Cooper comes out to play, the cats following suit, trusting their new friend.

Hello, friend.

But the best days are when everyone shows up. Chego comes sprinting from down the street, like a splinter of oak, Emma slinks in (and away from the walk she’s on with her parents, her frothy black hair never quite fitting with her Bernese siblings), Jazzy has made her way up from the shade with Betty June, her thick white coat knocking back and forth like a train car on old tracks. Blixt looks out from the neighboring deck, Nala looks on from the intersection, Reggie passes a glance from her game of fetch, and the rest gather in our front yard for the Counsel of Dogs with Cooper barking in glee.  

Cooper is no longer the new kid on the block, having been followed quickly by Dash and the newest addition, Ophelia, the gentle and nervous husky too small to know how strong she will one day be. 

This great vista is made greater by their freedom, by their safety and their joy. There was a moment in Anne Helen Petersen’s Townsizing podcast where she asks the people behind Cheap Old Houses, Elizabeth and Ethan Finkelstein, what their favorite thing about living in a small town was, and Ethan says the single roads, the chance “to generally slow down.” Without freeways, the roads themselves force a slower pace. It’s the same here: the roads in town are dirt. The speed limit is 10 mph, reaching up to 15 in the open section between the two parts of town (Old and East — not New and Old, or East and West, but Old and East.) 

The dirt, in some ways, unifies the whole valley. From a field to dirt to a field to the forest, it’s all earth, in your treads, in their paws. You can see the dogs from our windows, bounding through it all. The dirt roads are their race tracks to one another’s homes, to each other. Dirt roads (for the humans) enforce a slowness: to not kick up dust, to not destroy your car, to be cognizant of the road without automated systems alerting you to crossing lines. Dirt roads are the pour over coffee to asphalt’s Kuerig — they take time and the time they take is worth it. 

Here is a memo sent earlier this week to town residents from our town manager:

On Wednesday the Board of County Commissioners authorized funds for paving our road from the main road up to the Post Office — this is scheduled to happen in June, 2023, and it was made clear by the Commissioners that paving from the Post Office up to town was NOT being contemplated, now or in the future. The safety question of that section (AKA Special Parking) kept coming up, and it's expected this improvement will lessen the number of cars going off the road and improve the quality of the road surface through there. More details will be forthcoming in the spring. 

Special parking, if you hadn’t yet inferred, is what we call it when someone loses control of their vehicle and slides off the road, either into a ditch, a tree, or a snowbank, and it’s in the same place year on year. Last winter, we saw repeated cars perilously clinging to the edge of the road, caught by the aspens who I’m sure are tired of catching cars. Maybe my slide will come one day, but it’s hard to see those cars and not immediately assume it was the driver’s fault — for speeding, for not looking, for not simply taking their time to understand the feeling of tires on snow and ice, how to turn their wheel in a slide, how to mitigate risk in challenging conditions. 

I felt this swell of fear, of disappointment and misalignment when I first saw the word “paving”, panicked they meant the whole town, followed by the deep relief of reading “paving… to town NOT being contemplated, now or in the future.” 

In the list of attributes of a potential home, “inconvenient” didn’t make the list, but it should have. Inconvenience forces attention, it forces effort, and it forces people together. I wasn’t looking to live in the past, but in a better future. Of course that’s both grandiose and naive, but like I said, I am enshrined in hope and I cannot and will not escape it. 

When I looked for this home, I was looking for somewhere I wouldn’t feel alone. I was looking for a place where even if you didn’t love each other, you would help each other. You would know each other’s names, and with time alone, know each other’s schedules, cars, pets, and the like. I didn’t know pets would come first. I didn’t know the slow to walk and slow to warm Australian shepherd would be one of the first to acknowledge us. I didn’t know the gentle nuzzle of the old red retriever would be lost so quickly. I didn’t know his successor would carve a path between our houses so quickly that the route would look etched in time. I didn’t know what living here would do for us. I didn’t know what living here would do for Cooper. 

On Wednesday, Cooper had surgery in his mouth. He’s been losing teeth. He is, after all, nearing 12 years old. When we take the cats to the vet, we always take Cooper — to help them feel settled in the car, but also to show Cooper that going to the vet isn’t always about him. He still knew. He shuddered in my arms and he shat on the floor and we felt the passage of so much time, of his reluctance to get up on his back legs, of the slowing in his sprints, of a stress dream in the living world as fear cascaded over his big brown eyes when yet another tooth fell to the ground. 

After we dropped him off, we went skiing. It was early and there was a day to live. On the chairlift, we sat in silence before Ben sliced it open. “I feel bad, being out here having fun when he’s at the vet.” Underneath the spoken words lurked the words he meant: what if this surgery was too much for an old dog? What if his fear was our last time with him? 

At 2pm, the vet called, his voice burdened with all the animals that needed him so badly. Cooper had made it through, but not without complications. His short little snout, his brachycephalic face, would always have complications. On the table, his tongue turned blue, his heart and his breathing not quite right. They watched him for an hour, an hour where we went about our day as usual, an hour where he scared them. But the surgery was a success, and more hours later, he was in our arms, shaking this time with the same relief he felt in that parking lot in Topanga. 

When Cooper licked my face, I couldn’t smell it. The surgery had cleared away the scent of his breath. I couldn’t smell the rot or the fish or the years of settled bacteria lining his gums. I couldn’t smell the sweet, rancid scent I’d worn on my face like perfume. It reminded me of him, like cologne on a sweatshirt, shampoo on a pillowcase. It reminded me that this creature of yay high and nary very big loves me, whole heartedly, spit and all. 

I joke with Ben that my connection with Finn feels like coming across another version of myself on the astral plane, like a precious snag in space and time, but Cooper… Cooper feels like a child. His breed, a mix of Boston Terrier and French Bulldog, comes with this willfulness paired with wild intelligence. Cooper knows everything we say. He knows all our secrets and all our words, but the ones he hears the most are “I love you.” I love you, Cooper. 

Some day, hopefully as many years as there can be from now, Cooper will die. He will rest in legend here, like many others, for his tenacity, his loyalty to his feline brothers, and his ability to become part of a place where no one thought he would fit. 

We believed a home could not be a home to us without him, but he has shown us that it can. So long as there are paws at your door, barks when you arrive, bounding in the snow, and the tracks of lives lived large and free. 

When he is gone, and I look for home, I will always find it where the dogs run free.

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I wrote this listening to the Out of Africa soundtrack. Writing it made me cry. If it made you feel things, consider gifting this newsletter (or just sharing!) with a friend.