Here I am again

I’m back in the big little city. This place is so good-bad and cathartically weird for me.

It’s that still warm but snowy part of winter, where it’s not to cold to go on long walks or run around without a coat, but there’s a foot or so of snow on the ground. The roads are slippery, and every time I start to slide into an intersection or another lane and then jerk the van back where I want it I feel this crazy sense of accomplishment and control. It’s good to know that in a millisecond I can stop a several thousand pound chunk of steel from spinning on the ice and send it in any direction I want, but I’m not sure it’s good for me. We get to control so much in the world today, and yet it seems like many people have such little control over their own lives.

Bro and I go for a long walk. The cold makes him wheeze. It makes me cough, too. I don’t understand this either. There are dogs running loose at the start of the trail, a Rottweiler and an Australian Shepherd running with huge leaps through the snow. I hate when people let their dogs run loose and pack up on other dogs. Just when the dogs look up and see me and Bro and I am about to yell to the woman to get her damn dogs, please, she calls them on her own. And they go to her, and walk perfectly on either side of her.

“Hey,” she smiles as we pass. “Beautiful day.”

Compared to her dogs Bro is misbehaved, dashing back and forth on the trail, straining to go towards who knows what, digging for imaginary balls under the snow. Once we’re past the other dogs we run and my blood starts pumping out to my feet and hands and face. I’m not dressed as warmly as I should be, because it has seemed so warm all day, but I’m getting warmer with every breath. Bro loves when we run. He dashes around to the sides of me trying to see what is so exciting and where I’m going so quick and if maybe it’s a ball that I’m so excited about or running towards. Bro never loses hope for the ball.

We break through into a field and slow to a walk. Right at the edge of fields are some of the best tracks. I swear sometimes I get lost in vole tracks for days. Snow tracking with Bro is a disaster though, because wherever I look he digs to see if there’s a ball, so I stay on the trail and just look at the rabbit tracks that lace in and out of the rose bushes.

There’s a group of people and a dog on the other side of the field, and I can’t tell if they have the dog on a leash or not. Suddenly the dog sees me and Bro and takes off running towards us, dragging a kid on ski’s behind. I can hear the parents yelling at her to tell the dog “on by,” and I feel all warm and fuzzy inside because I remember when I was that age and dog mushing was my life. Back then, the true judge of a person’s character was whether they took care of their dogs or themselves first when they got back from a run. A good person always took care of her dogs first.

I step off the trail with Bro, getting snow in my shoes, and tell him to stand quietly with me in the rose bushes and ignore the other dog. There are a lot of places to look for a ball in the rose bushes, so this is not a problem for him. The dog is a puppy, maybe six months old, probably on one of his first solo runs. The girl is young, and she knows what she’s doing. She digs the outside of her ski into the hardpacked snow of the trail to keep it going straight as her dog runs straight off the trail towards me and Bro, then she leans back and plants her butt firmly on the ground.

“Sorry,” she smiles up at me, “there’s no point in me telling him to go by if he’s not going to listen.”

“I’m glad you know that. Shall I go on around you or do you want to grab him first?”

“Oh, yeah.” She reels him in and hangs onto his harness while Bro and I walk around them to the trail.

A minute later I pass the parents. We exchange greetings and I tell them they’ve got a great kid. They say this is her first pup that she’s training herself, and she’s doing a great job. Just gotta work on that “on by.”

I remember passing another team in a race when I was a kid. The other team had gotten tangled up and was fighting, and their handler was holding them for us to pass and trying to break up the fight at the same time. I had a good leader, but I thought there was a pretty good chance my wheel dogs would just jump into the other teams fight and then we’d have two teams all tangled up and fighting. I whistled and yipped and got my dogs going really fast as we started past the other team.

“On by,” I told my lead dog calmly. “Good girl, on by.” She pulled even faster and barely glanced at the other team. Just as my wheel dogs came even with the fighting dogs and turned their heads toward them I yelled at them, “Gomez! Marmalade! ON BY!” They had started towards the other dogs but now they surged ahead and in a second we were past the other team altogether. I felt so synchronous and powerful, and it was all mixed up together.

I want to live the rest of my life in that kind of synchrony, but I hope I never have that kind of power again.