For a while, Rusty had a larger vocabulary than I did. Later, I would overtake him, of course, and eventually — and sadly — leave him far behind. Such things are almost always inevitable. But when it counted most, Rusty spoke and I didn’t.
He also bested me in sense of direction, not to mention sense of smell. The latter, coupled with a stubborn curiosity, got him into trouble more than once. Porcupines were his forbidden fruit, and porcupines being porcupines (who could blame them?), they turned poor Rusty’s less than perspicacious leather nose into a pain-ridden pin cushion. Skunks were a problem, too. Carl thought they messed with Rusty’s sense of timing, which is not to say that they made his sense of timing worse. Like most things, it depends on your point of view. In any event, who could possibly think straight when doused in such a stench?
He brought one home one summer day (a skunk, that is). It was on the third of August, to be exact. He carried it to the cool of the space under our porch. It put a quick end to my sister’s birthday party. But since she was my older sister, I didn’t really mind, and later gave Rusty a treat. Good boy, I told him, and gave him a little pat on the head while being careful to breathe through my nose.
In truth, the skunk episode was bitter-sweet for me. The sweet part was watching my sister and her friends run away in disgust, holding their noses and being all young-girl squeamish about the entire episode. The bitter part was that I had to suffer the stink as well. There was just no getting around that. But like I said, I don’t really blame Rusty for that. I couldn’t then and I won’t now blame Rusty for what was after all the coincidence of two highly contingent and merely haphazard incidents: a birthday party and an uninvited skunk. I remained convinced, even many years later, that the malodor the skunk set loose while being mauled and dragged across the freshly cut lawn, then toward to the cool of the dirt under the porch of our house — Rusty’s usual site of solitude, repose, and reflection — was the primary cause of my dog’s momentary lapse in judgment. You certainly couldn’t pin it on the dog.
I’m told I should be grateful for Rusty’s relatively large vocabulary and his keen sense of direction. My mother credited Rusty for my rescue. That could be the case — after all, Rusty was my best friend, and I had no doubt that the dog would do anything for my, and I in turn for Rusty — but my memory is fuzzy on this point, and what I do remember probably results less from my recollection of the actual experience than it does from having heard my mother tell the story again and again over the years, a rather simple story of a lost boy and his dog.
The farm where I grew up, in the rolling hills of The Palouse in eastern Washington State, wasn’t large by local standards. In fact, it was the smallest in the area. Still, it was nearly 2,000 acres of land, of which in any given year half lay fallow and half in crop. The fields had to be worked — plowed, harrowed, weeded, fertilized, harvested, etc. — and my father (and later I) would operate the D6 Caterpillar track-type tractor or the wheel tractor, those usually pulling equipment, and the combine and the trucks, and navigate the machinery over and around the hills and the flats, up and down and back and forth, again and again and again and again, in mostly geometric patterns of increasingly smaller rectangles or circles, as dictated by the lay of the land. And as an act of mindless and boundless loyalty, our dogs loved to tag along, lagging behind or alongside the equipment or the tractor, tongues hanging to the ground, darting ahead or to one side or the other, tongues hanging to the ground like wet towels from a clothesline, flapping in the breeze. They ate way more than their fair share of dust and seemed to love every minute of it, as only dogs can do, in blissful oblivion, as only dogs (and barefoot kids at kitchen sinks) can be. After all, it’s a large and open world, and they roamed and sniffed and marked just about every inch of it. All our dogs loved the endless and seemingly senseless trek: Blackie, Cookie, Tippy, Tiger, King, Zarena … and Rusty, who was the first. Rusty was a pudgy Cocker Spaniel whose frame bore a striking resemblance to a small walrus fitted with short legs.
To grow wheat, you need land and you need weather. (You don’t really need dogs, but it helps.) Everything rides on the weather: good weather means a good year, and bad weather means a bad year. It couldn’t get much simpler. And good weather means the right mix of sun and rain and heat and cold, all coming at the right times. Not too much, not too little. Not too late, not too early. It’s a matter of equilibrium, and in the long run, nature has a way of keeping the books balanced. In the short run, though, it can be a different matter, and sometimes weather can wreak havoc and cause distress among those who find themselves at its mercy.
The rain started, and then it didn’t stop. When that happens, the fertile soil of The Palouse, rich from earlier eruptions of Mt. Saint Helens (I’m talking about the ones way before 1980), soaks up as much as it needs, and then as much as it can, and when it can’t soak up any more it does what dirt does — it turns to mud, a sludgy muck that, if worse comes to worst, eventually yields to the forces of gravity and begins to quiver and shift and finally slide. This is known, quite appropriately I think, as a mudslide. And it was during the heavy rain — maybe the second day, maybe the third day, I don’t remember, maybe my mother did, but I can’t ask her now — anyway, it was during this downpour that I, like the mud yielding to gravity, yielded to a hitherto unrealized sense of irrepressible wanderlust and set out to explore, to test the mighty outdoors, which for me meant the now sloppy fields that surrounded our house.
Despite his repeated affairs with porcupines and skunks, Rusty was no dummy. When it rained like that, he stayed at home under the porch, practicing canine solitude, repose, and reflection. But at my slightest urging, or maybe just because I had gone outside and Rusty heard the screen door slam shut, he was there at the ready, rain or no rain. I, on the other hand, was less ready. With no map in my head, and no ostensible destination other than “out there” (two words I’m sure I felt fairly comfortable with), I left the house with Rusty in tow and took the small path that led by the cellar where we kept the canned goods that my mother prepared every year with survivalist frenzy, and then past the trash cans not far from there, where I veered left and up a slight grade, through some bushes and on toward a copse of trees that we generously called “the orchard” (a few apple trees among them, and maybe cherry), and past the orchard and then halfway back down through the orchard again — in retrospect, it’s obvious that I really had no idea where I was going — and then with a sudden inspiration, perhaps, or maybe simply owing to an inclination of the uneven ground or even the possibility that I just happened to be leaning in that direction, I drifted to the right, which was now my left (and also Rusty’s) and up a steep grade to the top of a nearby hill where our cistern was located, the source of our water (as if anyone needed more water right then!) and, probably because you could see our house from the cistern atop the hill, which would mean that I hadn’t really gotten far at all into the great outdoors, I turned and walked, or rather stumbled and slid, down the other side of the hill and on toward parts unknown, the “out there” that I was looking for and hoped to discover.
For me, at three years old, these were all uncharted territories. But Rusty was an old hand. It wasn’t for naught that he’d marked a good part of the land. So when, finally, I got to a point where I could go no further, when either the mud was too thick or my spirit too weak or my legs just too short (although I did note that they were already somewhat longer than Rusty’s), I sat down in the mud and considered my options, which seemed to be few and in fact were only two: either (1) stand there in the rain and the mud or (2) sit there in the rain and the mud. We must have conferred, Rusty and I. In fact, I’m certain of it. We sat there in the mud and the rain and deliberated, as a dog and a three-year old boy will do. Regrettably, my contribution was modest. I was, after all, quite lost.
Meanwhile (although all of this is in retrospect, you understand, and based almost entirely on what I can remember of recollections of my mother, who no doubt exaggerated as time passed, in the way that often happens with stories like this), she (my mother) had during this time noticed my absence. Thinking the worst (my mother’s first response in every situation and no doubt the catalyst behind her incessant canning), she at least had the sense to dress for the occasion — a slicker and galoshes — before stepping out into the storm that had seemingly stolen her son and then shouting his name into the hills and the wind and the sheets of rain that simply ignored her, all of them — hills, wind, and rain — since they were merely intent on doing what it is that nature does.
It was the worst of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Darkness, it was the winter of despair, she had nothing before her, she was going the wrong way — in short, the time was so much like every other time that had an authority been present it would have confirmed the preferred form of the superlative and declared the moment one of unmitigated disaster and desperation.
Rick! Rick! Rick! The only thing she could hear was her own frantic voice thrown back at her, disoriented decibels bouncing off the hills and whirling in the wind, a sound like a train passing through a tunnel with (my mother must have felt certain) no light at the end.
My mother wasn’t what you’d call athletic, but she nevertheless managed to cover a significant amount of ground. It must have seemed like a nightmare to her, the kind of bad dream where you find yourself having difficulty moving and you flounder about, only to discover that you were sleeping in sheets lined with strips of fly paper, like the kind that used to hang in our porch, yellow and dotted with their catch, and now, no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn’t shake the damn things off.
Of course, what had seemed to me to be a lot of ground was perhaps for longer legs not such a stretch. But let’s not diminish my mother’s determination and sheer grit. Something moved her through those hills on that day. And so — in either a short amount of time or an eternity, I really can’t be sure, because time, like mud, has a way of oozing out between your fingers when you try to grasp it — my mother trudged through the sodden fields, her second skin of paranoia projecting mudslides and apocalyptic worst-case scenarios, drop-offs that materialized out of nowhere and sinister sinkholes left behind by UFOs, and she footslogged her way forward, yelling, slipping, crying, and probably praying (definitely praying, or more likely bargaining, as part of a reconsidered relationship with God), not for rain, as she sometimes did — they were having more than enough of that, thank you — but certainly for the rain to stop, or more likely for me to be waiting just over the next hill, or the next one, or maybe the one after that. (Well, it seems that I had managed to get some distance into the “out there” after all!)
The storm was loud (or so his mother described), and yet we’ll never know for sure if the noise resulted from the wind outside or from the turbulence within my mother’s mind. It does sound reasonable to think that high winds coupled with the rain made it difficult to pick out sounds, especially when the object of my mother’s was search keeping mum. Still, somehow and from somewhere, she detected a faint and familiar voice, a borderline paranormal vibration that was the agitated din of Rusty’s plea for help. Of course it was his bark, but in this context we can surely call it what it was: a plea. If our family could call the meager copse of trees behind our house an orchard, then we can certainly call Rusty’s barks a plea for help. And it was either some kind of canine telepathy, together with the racket of Rusty’s barking, that guided my mom to our location, or perhaps a penguin-like ability to pinpoint offspring based on tones that in this case were not so much emitted as they were implied, that she found her way to where the two of us, Rusty and I, like Vladimir and Estragon, sat waiting, waiting in the mud, the one barking with a self-assurance that comes from knowing that no matter where you think you might be, you are always exactly where you are and therefore not lost, and the other left mostly speechless and distracted by the seemingly endless possibilities of water and dirt.
My mother’s tears had become indistinguishable from the rain. Where she had earlier shed tears of desperation, she now shed tears of joy, as they say (although her face was no less wet), when she interrupted whatever game I was playing and lifted me from the ground. She always said, whenever she told the story, that she held me close and squeezed me in her arms, hard, and I can well imagine that she did. I was crying so hard, she would say. I was just beside myself with worry. And fear. I was so afraid of the mudslides! Anything could have happened. Anything! I shudder to think of it. You could have walked off a steep ledge. You could have been swallowed up whole! And Rusty, he was such a good dog. He just kept barking and barking until I could find you. I just followed his voice until I could find you. Such a good doggie. Thank you, Rusty. Thank you, Rusty. You’re such a good boy. Such a good boy!
Of course, my mother’s good boy was directed toward Rusty and not toward me. And she was right. Righter than rain. Rusty was a good boy.
