By John Stark
OUT OF THE WOODS
The bells were chiming a Shaker oldie-but-goodie: “It’s a gift to be simple. . .” The bells are located atop the stone minaret that’s in the historic, Forest Hills Cemetery, a few blocks from where I live. Every 15 minutes they ring to mark the time. Although I had forgotten to put on my watch, I figured it to be 6:30 p.m.
I had adopted a new dog that morning, and was taking her for her first walk with me. The irony of liberating a dog from a shelter on July 14th wasn’t lost on me. It was Bastille Day, which celebrates the storming of the Bastille by the French revolutionaries in 1789. “It’s a gift to be free. . .”
We were in a wooded, undeveloped area of the cemetery that’s popular with dog walkers. Someday, when enough people die, the woods will be cleared for burial plots.
When I say woods, I’m talking about maples, white birch, sycamores and pine trees. I used to always bring my late Doberman, Monty, here to chase squirrels, or whatever else was out and about, like chipmunks and rabbits. Over the years, I’ve seen turkeys, deer and coyotes in here.
A black, spiked-iron fence encompasses the cemetery’s 375-acres. It’s very Christo-like, that fence, the way it just goes on and on and on. In my neighborhood — the Forest Hills section of Jamaica Plain — it runs alongside a grassy baseball field in the Francis Parkman Playground. Access to the woods is through a section of the fence where two of its bars have been cut away.
My new dog is half Doberman and golden retriever. Her name is Goldie. I didn’t name her, but it does fit her. She has short hair that’s the color of gold, and at 80 pounds, is as solid as precious metal. A woman at the shelter where I got her described her over the phone as looking like “a golden retriever trying to get out of a Doberman’s body.” Or was it the other way around?
I found Goldie on PetFinders.
She was in a shelter in Danbury, Connecticut.
Her owner, a pregnant woman, was getting rid of her because her husband told her that a big dog would hurt a baby.
She had Goldie for six-and-a-half-years, since she was a puppy. According to a shelter volunteer named Donna who checked Goldie in, “The woman was blubbering and wanted me to give her comfort. I wouldn’t give her any. I told her it’s terrible what she’s doing.” Donna’s an investment banker. Maybe she’s only an accountant. Like most animal rescue folk, she’s hard.
In her Internet photograph, Goldie looked stunningly regal, like that Swedish queen Greta Garbo played in the movies. Goldie has long, silky ears and almond-shaped eyes that are lined in black. Her only imperfection is a broken tail that bends in a 45-degree angle. It has a mind of its own, like the Cowardly Lion’s tail.
After I sent the shelter an e-mail asking about Goldie, Donna phoned me: “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she said. “Goldie smiles. When she meets someone, her lips curl up, revealing a full set of teeth. It’s scared off a few potential takers who don’t understand that she’s just overly happy.”
I agreed to drive down for a “meet ‘n’ greet” on Saturday.
No pressure, but Donna told me that Goldie had been in the shelter for two months and was becoming increasingly lethargic and depressed. “Shelters don’t like to take in Dobermans,” she told me. “They’re very sensitive and die of broken hearts.”
When I arrived at the shelter, Goldie was in the business office with an elderly lady. As Goldie ran over to me, she flashed a smile that Julia Roberts couldn’t hold a candle to. “I’ll take her,” I said. I said it so quickly that the woman who was minding her was joyously taken aback. “You will?” she asked. “Really?”
I wish you could have seen Goldie when she got outside and saw my white Avalon sedan. She was whining and spinning in circles from the excitement of knowing she was going somewhere. When I opened the backseat door, she leapt right in.
More than anything, dogs love to go for automobile rides. I think how confusing it must have been for Goldie to get in her owner’s car, then find out it was a one-way trip to Poundsville.
On the three-hour ride to Boston, Goldie wouldn’t lie down. She sat up, staring out the windows. Every time I looked in the rear view mirror, I could see the blunt, rounded peak of her Doberman head. When she got sleepy, her eyes would start to shut, and she’d tuck her face and muzzle against her wide chest.
Even for July, it was an unusually hot day — in the high 90s. Halfway home, on the Mass Pike, my air conditioning went out. I rolled down my window to get air. After a few minutes, I could see that Goldie was standing on the backseat, facing forward. I then felt her soft whiskers as she nuzzled her head on my left shoulder. The rushing hot air pushed her ears back against her face. She stayed like that for much of the way home.
***************
There are a lot of places in my neighborhood that I could have taken Goldie for her first walk with me. The Arnold Arboretum is visible from my back deck. Franklin Park is to the east of me, on the other side of RTE 203. There’s not much to the west, just a Dunkin Donuts. Even though my neighborhood has become increasingly yuppified, it still caters to townie tastes.
After driving all day, I didn’t feel like getting back in the car, especially with no air conditioning. I thought the woods would be a cooling place for us to take a stroll — to start our bonding.
“Want to go for a walk?” I asked Goldie. How comforting those words felt to say again. Goldie had positioned herself Sphinx-like on my living room couch, having sniffed out my entire condo, including the attic. She had now claimed the couch.
Dobermans and couches are inseparable. I learned that with Monty. The living room couch was his fort, where he could look out the bay windows and see everything going on in the neighborhood. I decided not to waste my breath telling Goldie to get down. It was a battle I knew I could never win.
I took the shelter’s thin red nylon collar off her, and put Monty’s worn leather one on her instead. Tomorrow I’d take Goldie to the pet store and buy her a collar of her very own. For now, Monty’s was fine. I grabbed his leash, which I had always kept hanging in my entry hall. I hooked it to the collar.
As we headed down my stairs to the woods, I felt her gentle tug. Everything about being a dog owner felt so familiar, like slipping on an old pair of walking shoes.
Located less than two blocks from my condo, the wooded area is the size and shape of two football fields. On one side of the woods is the baseball field, and on the other side is the cemetery with its manicured lawns and headstones.
Dogs that are on leashes with their owners are welcome in the Forest Hills Cemetery, though “welcome” might not be the right word. Tolerated. Dog owners often let their dogs off leash in this wooded section. The managers of the cemetery are nice about that; though “nice” might not be the right word either. For the most part, though, they leave us alone back here.
I entered the woods with Goldie through the gap in the iron fence, stepping up and over a bottom rung.
As we turned left and started walking along the dirt trail that parallels the fence, the sun was starting to set. It cast a soothing orange light, as if filtered through a cathedral window. A spellbinding stillness prevailed, as happens this time of day in muggy July. Days and nights are pretty much the same length near equinoxes, which makes for very long shadows. The setting sun caused the shadows from the bars of the fence to extend across the trail and into the woods’ tapestry of dappled patterns.
After walking Goldie for about 30 minutes, I decided to let her off her lead. We were on our way back to the fence opening to go home.
I know, I know, what was I thinking?
You don’t think I heard that from my friends? Maybe they didn’t come right out and say it. They didn’t have to.
Except for my friend, Jennifer, who is Richard Pryor’s widow and lives in Los Angeles. She runs Pryor’s Planet, a non-profit canine rescue group.
She let me have it on the phone that night, even talking over her call-waiting beeps.
“You never let a dog you don’t know off leash! You never take a dog out without bringing your cell phone!”
Over 10 years, nothing bad had ever happened to Monty here, and he was always off leash. Nothing bad had ever happened to my friends’ dogs either. I would have known.
The cemetery is entirely fenced in, so even if a dog wanted to leave town, it couldn’t get far.
Besides, Goldie hadn’t slept since I picked her up at noon. She looked exhausted, walking with her head down and panting.
I should have known by now that dogs have an uncanny ability to go instantly from one physical state to another. How many times had Monty risen out of a coma-like sleep upon hearing the word “walk,” or the jangle of car keys?
So I unhooked Goldie from her leash.
For the next five minutes she walked nonchalantly behind me. Until, that is, her radar detected something off to the left.
When I turned around to check on her, she was standing frozen on the path. Her floppy ears were pointing straight up. Her head was held high, and cocked. She was sniffing the air.
The early evening stillness ended as she proceeded to let out a series of deep, four-part barks: “WOO WOO WOO WOO. . . WOO WOO WOO WOO.” They were the barks of a Doberman —Monty’s barks, which caused more than one Jehovah Witness who rang my doorbell to suddenly take up long distance running.
Like a Talladega racecar that couldn’t idle any longer, she took off running. What a beautiful athlete she is, I was thinking: her body is poetry in motion, the kind that rhymes.
Because everything is so green and lush at this time of year, I quickly lost sight of her.
Over and over, I called her name. “Goldie! Goldie!”
I decided to head back to the fence opening and wait for her there. As I was nearing it, I heard the high-pitched, ear-piercing howls and yelps of an injured animal.
I had never heard a sound so intense.
I knew immediately that something terrible had happened to Goldie, and it was my fault. The shadows from the iron fence had turned into sharp, accusatory fingers.
There are sounds you instinctively run away from and sounds you instinctively run towards.
I left the path and charged into the woods, through prickly vines and crunchy leaves.
The closer I got to the sound, the shriller it became.
Just ahead of me I saw Goldie lying on her side, next to a decayed log. She looked like a shot deer. Her upper left leg had been sliced open. Blood was pumping out of an artery, as if from a Super Soaker. She was trembling. Her eyes met mine: “Help me.”
It seemed she had tried to jump over the log, only to land on an upwardly protruding branch.
My heart was whirring like the wings of a dragonfly.
“Oh, God,” I said, “You can’t die. Not on our first day.”
I rushed to her.
More instincts must have kicked in, because without thinking I took off my Adidas shoes and made a tourniquet out of one of my white socks. I knelt down beside her and tied it around her wound.
The sock turned red. Red. Redder.
***************
When I moved to my neighborhood 12 years ago, I didn’t know anyone in the area.
My dog, Monty, took care of that.
He was a purebred Doberman that I rescued as a puppy in the piney woods of Alabama, where he had been dumped. Even though he was only six-months old, he was already his full size.
He had shown up on the property of a woman I worked with, who lives on a tract of farmland outside Birmingham. “My husband’s been squirting him with a hose to get rid of him,” she said to me. “Could you help me take him to the pound?”
Not being a dog person then, I agreed to help out. When I got to my co-worker’s property, Monty came bounding out a thicket of woods. He was leaping up and down like a merry-go-round horse and had a stick in his mouth. He wanted to play.
I instantly became a dog person.
I named him Monty because when I got him in the backseat of my VW, I turned around to look at him. Even though he had the mange from foraging in the woods for a week, he had a noble presence. A freeway sign behind him said Montgomery.
“That’s who you ah,” I said, in my Alabama accent. Even though I’m a Yankee, I had a drawl. Everyone who moves there gets one. “I’m gonna call you Montgom-ry. Montgom-ry from Montgom-ry,” I said. “You’re my dog now.”
I lived in Alabama for four years, where I worked as an editor on a national food magazine. I knew that it was time to leave when my refills for Xanax and laughter ran out. In the spring of 1998, I took a job on a Boston-based health and fitness magazine.
Because my northern digs didn’t come with a backyard, it meant I’d have to walk Monty several times a day.
My neighborhood is very dog friendly, as I quickly found out. A block from my condo is the grassy baseball field that borders the woods. All year long, dog owners take their dogs there to run and play, even when it’s iced over in the winter.
In no time, thanks to Monty, I had a new set of friends, far more than I had in my four years in Alabama. Or even New York City, where I had lived for 10 years before that.
My dog world kept me informed of everything going on in the neighborhood: what condos were coming up for sale and for how much; who was getting married and who was splitting up. If I needed a plumber or electrician, my dog friends had recommendations. When I needed a Web site built, I hired Hugh, who lives down the street from me. He’s a documentary filmmaker who has — or had – a black mongrel named Cochee, which means moccasin in Iroquois.
Within a few months of walking Monty, I even acquired a young lover. He was (and still is) a fiery IT director who had a snarly, Kerry blue terrier. I suppose enough years have gone by that I can finally forgive Monty for that introduction.
Monty was my drill sergeant. No matter how bad the weather, he made me get out of bed early and take him out for a hearty walk. No matter how much wine I had with dinner, I still had to walk him around the block before going to bed.
It’s as if Monty were a celebrity, the way he always attracted attention. Once, while I was walking him, a policeman stopped his car across the street from us. He got out, and waved us over to him. “I just wanted to know what kind of dog you have.” he said. “I’ve never seen one like it.”
With his stilt-like legs, Monty was taller than most Dobermans. A genetic defect had given him a blue-tinted coat. Dobes can be black, brown, red, and sometimes albino. There aren’t very many blue ones. Goldie’s a yellow one, but that’s because she’s mixed with golden retriever.Monty’s ears had never been cut. When he ran, they flapped in the wind.
He was a peacemaker. When dogs would get into scuffles with each other, he’d run over and break up the feud. He’d then go into play position: front paws and forelegs on the ground, butt high in the air. “Can’t we all be friends?” he seemed to be saying. He wasn’t a wimp, though. An Alabama trainer had taught him a command word, and if I said it, he’d go into attack mode.
When he walked, he’d carry his leash in his month, his head held high. I never taught him to do that.
*******************
In June of 2005 I had to put Monty down.
He was 11 at the time. For the last two years of his life, he required round-the-clock care, which I provided. People who don’t own dogs would say to me, “How can you do all that for him?” And I’d just say, “Because he’d do it for me.”
Even though Monty’s illness prevented him from swallowing solid food, it didn’t stop him from chasing rabbits or attacking seaweed at the beach. Dogs don’t let the bad things in their life take away from the good things. If I could only give Monty a 10- minute walk in the morning instead of his usual hour, he didn’t go, “What happened to the other 50 minutes?” It was more like, “Wow! I just got a 10-minute-walk! Thank you. Thank you.”
Monty was such a part of my neighborhood that after he died, neighbors left bouquets of flowers on my front porch. Children got together and drew pictures of him, and wrote poems about him, which they left in my mailbox for me to find.
I had a good laugh at a note that Hunter, the boy next door, left me: “I’m going to miss going to the cemetery with you so that Monty could use the bathroom,” it said. I cherish that note, especially now that Hunter has passed away too. He was 12. He’d only been ill one day with the flu.
Like so many other pet owners, I vowed that I’d never have another dog after Monty died. As much as I loved Monty, I couldn’t go through the pain of losing another dog. Dogs are huge responsibilities. Without one, I could go shopping after work. No rushing home to walk and feed it. I’d be able to travel again. I could go see old friends in Paris, if I had old friends in Paris.
My relief at being unencumbered, however, didn’t last long. Without Monty, my home seemed lifeless. On winter evenings, I’d sit alone on my couch reading or watching TV. I missed his company, having the weight of his head on my lap.
Without Monty, I wasn’t getting outside much, especially as the weather turned cold. There were no early morning trips to an iced-over dog park, where I’d stand around shivering with my friends. I was becoming more and more out of shape and gaining weight. Some nights, after a few glasses of wine with dinner, I’d fall asleep on the couch, and not wake up until morning. I lost contact with most of my dog-walking friends, some of whom moved away without my even hearing about it. I’d go to work, then home, then back to work.
I thought I’d want to travel like I did in my younger years. I couldn’t bring myself to book a trip. I was alone in my house. Why would I want to be far away and alone too?
When I’d take walks, I’d often run into new dog-walkers whose dogs I didn’t know. As their dog would run up to me, the owners would say something like, “It’s OK! She’s friendly.”
“But I love dogs! I’m a dog owner!” I wanted to scream. But I wasn’t a dog owner anymore.
I didn’t belong to a bowling team. I wasn’t a golfer. I didn’t hang out at bars or go square dancing. What family I have is on another coast. I went to a lot of movies, but mostly by myself. What happened to spontaneous get-togethers? To “Come on over and we’ll cook on the deck, and bring the dog”?
Where’d everybody go?
***************
With all the strength I could muster, I put my arms under Goldie’s back and lifted her. I would try to carry her to the entrance in the fence. Every movement caused her to yelp hysterically. At 80 pounds, I couldn’t carry her for long, and had to set her down.
The entrance in the fence was 50 feet away. Whereas earlier I was struck by the silence of the woods, I could now hear voices — loud and boisterous, a cacophony of adrenaline-fueled competitiveness. I could hear the distinct sounds of a ball being slammed hard against concrete. Peering through the weeds and vines that covered the spiked iron fence, I could make out a group of young men playing a spirited game of dodge ball on the basketball court of the playground.
I tried to scream “Help!’, only this time instinct didn’t kick in. Men aren’t supposed to scream. It doesn’t come naturally.
It wasn’t I who got their attention, though. It was Goldie. People could hear her blocks away, as they later told me.
Eight startled young men stopped playing and looked in my direction. They were clean-cut, middle-class teenagers of varying ethnicities. Their diversity is why I love my neighborhood. I know some things about teenage boys, though. They offer to shovel your driveway, then get distracted and leave the job half done. Teenage boys have a lot of things on their minds and volunteering to help people in need isn’t usually one of them.
“My dog’s dying, can you help me?” I pleaded.
Without hesitation, and seemingly without effort, they scaled the eight-foot fence. Even the spikes didn’t stop them from coming over it. In seconds, they had surrounded Goldie and me.
These weren’t teenage boys, I thought. They’re angels. As fast as I had become a dog lover upon seeing Monty, and as fast as I had told the lady at the shelter I’d take Goldie home with me, I had become a believer.
A young man in a Red Sox cap took off his t-shirt and made a fresh tourniquet for Goldie’s leg. Another young man got on his cell phone and called Angel Memorial, our local animal hospital.“Have a gurney waiting,” I could her him say in a soft but firm voice. “But I didn’t bring my car,” I said. “I’ll go home and get mine,” said a young man with short black hair.
Just then, from out of nowhere, a first-aid kit came flying over the fence and landed next to me.
A man who was pushing his little girl on the playground’s swing set came running through the fence opening. “I’m a doctor,” he said. As he took the hydrogen peroxide bottle from the first aid kit, he told the young men to hold Goldie tightly.
As the bubbling liquid was poured into Goldie’s wound, her yelps could have woken up half the cemetery. A lanky young man in wire-rimmed glasses cradled her head in his hands. “It’s OK, it’s OK,” he kept saying to her. I thought for sure she’d try to bite him. She didn’t, though. She trusted everyone.
When the car pulled up, two teammates carried Goldie to the street. As they lifted her into the backseat of a Mazda four-door sedan, I warned the car’s owner: “She’s going to get blood on everything.” Teenage boys love their cars, and this one was shiny silver and spotless. “Doesn’t matter,” he said.
The team member who called the hospital acted as navigator. Sitting in the front seat, he Map Quested the fasted route there on his Blackberry. I sat in the backseat. So did the young man in the wire-rimmed glasses. As before, he held Goldie’s head. He took the cap from his Propel bottle and filled it with water. Cap by cap he put the water in Goldie’s mouth to keep her hydrated.
“Go faster, through the light!” I kept saying to the driver. He ignored my request, keeping his hand steady on the wheel.
As Goldie was rushed into surgery, a receptionist told me to wait in the lobby’s seating area. “When the doctors know something, they’ll come out,” she said, handing me a consent form.
I couldn’t fill it out as I couldn’t read it. I had forgotten to take my glasses on my walk. “We’ll stay with you,” said the lanky young man. He read the form out loud to me. “Sign here,” he said.
Not only had I left home without my cell phone and glasses, I didn’t have my wallet either. “Is there someone we can call who can bring them to you?” asked the navigator. I gave him a neighbor’s number. “Bring a change of clothes, too” I heard him say. Until now, I hadn’t noticed. I looked like that girl, Carrie, who went to the prom.
As a surgeon in green scrubs approached me, the other members of the dodge ball team came rushing through the hospital’s automated sliding doors. “Goldie’s going to make it,” she said. “She’s going to need a few days here, and another surgery to remove twigs from her joints. We thought she might lose her leg, but that’s not the case. In time, she’ll be her old self.”
With that news, the entire dodge ball team cheered and high-fived each other. As I stood up, one by one they shook my hand and patted my back. I tried to get their names, but they left, saying they were late for a pizza date.
**************************
News traveled fast of Goldie’s accident in the woods. Although most dog-owners commented on how freakish it was, I didn’t think it was in retrospect. The woods are a dangerous place for any dog to go running.
Over the next several days, I received lots of phone calls from old friends. “When can we meet Goldie?” everyone asked.
During her convalescence, I’d take her for gentle walks in the woods, on leash! She’d be wearing one of those plastic cones on her head, which she really didn’t object to. “Is that THE dog?” people would want to know when they spotted her, as if they had encountered someone famous.
While coming back from the woods, I ran into an elderly Italian neighbor named Dino, who was walking his teenage dog, Thunder — both knew Monty. “I was with Thunder on the baseball field when we heard Goldie’s screaming,” he told me. “Thunder, he bolted away from me, taking his leash with him. He’s never done that. He ran to the iron fence and looked in. And then he started to howl, making sounds I’d never heard from him. Other dogs started howling too. It’s like they were all telling each other.”
“I’m the one who threw the first-aid kit,” said John, an English teacher I hadn’t seen in years, and who has a black lab name Rory — another old pal of Monty’s. John lives on a side street near the fence. “I knew something terrible was up,” he said. “I grabbed the kit and ran. I saw it was you, but I didn’t want to get in the way. I’m so glad you finally got another dog.”
One morning as I stepped into the fence opening with Goldie, I saw a petite, middle-aged woman jogging past us. When the woman saw Goldie in her cone, she did a double take and stopped. “That has to be Goldie,” she said. Following closely behind the woman was her dog, a King Charles spaniel named Gizmo.
I knew them both from my Monty days.
“I had no idea that it was you who had the hurt dog,” she said. “My son helped save her. He’s the one who wears wire-rims.”
“For him and his friends, it was a challenge,” she told me. “They all just finished high school together. They love video games, figuring out solutions and strategies. Goldie made their day. They got to take charge. Every Saturday once a month they have a dodge ball game. My son didn’t tell me about what he did. I heard that through the other dog walkers.”
I told her how the boys had scaled the ten-foot, spiked iron fence, rather than go through the entrance, which was only 50 yards or so away from them.
“Sounds like my son,” she said.
Two weeks after Goldie’s accident, her wound had healed enough so that she didn’t have to wear a cone. After bringing her back from Angel Memorial for a final check-up, I got a call from Donna, at the Danbury shelter.
“Just checking in to see how our girl’s doing,” she said.
At first, I was going to tell her about Goldie’s near-fatal accident. But then I changed my mind.
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t going to lie to her, either.
“We’re doing fine,” I told her, and we really were.
.
By John Stark
