A Small Furry Prayer

A  SMALL  FURRY  PRAYER

DOG RESCUE AND THE MEANING OF LIFE

STEVEN KOTLER

For Joy Nicholson

Preface

It is cold night and dark skies and I am sitting in an old rocking chair on the back porch of a small adobe in the mountains of northern New Mexico watching the moon rise through the slats of a dilapidated barn and trying to make sense of the dying. Inside the house, my wife is asleep, as are most of the dogs. People like to ask how many we have and after exploring other options I've come to understatement as the best approach. “Six hundred and thirty-seven,” is what I usually say, “you know, give or take.” The real number seems closer to eighteen, but this is tentative supposition based on indirect evidence—how much room there is in the bed at night, the timbre of the barking when the neighbors let their horses out to pasture, the amount of fecal matter found in the morning on pee pads set out the evening prior for those too young or too old to wait. Tentative supposition, that is, because once the dying started I lost all desire to count.

I have completely lost track of time as well. My guess is it's April 2008, but it's mostly a guess. Later I will realize this is one of the advantages to sitting shivah, the Jewish rite of mourning, where tradition dictates seven days for the process. Without any similar ritual for animals, grief has no anchor. And no barrier. It can last a week, a month; perhaps it will never end. No relatives fly in from far away to cook meals, no friends drive through the night to attend the service. There's no one to bring me a tumbler of whiskey, none to quietly let me know when I've had too much. Definitely not my wife. When we first met, she used to say that the trouble with us is that when we're alone together, there's no adult in the room. It was funny then—and lately I miss those days.

Scientists who study what is now known as “companion animal bereavement” often point out that the grief following the death of a pet can be far worse than that of a person, even if that person is a close friend or family member. Psychologist Lorri Greene, the author of
Saying Good-bye to the Pet You Love
, co-founder of the San Diego County Pet Bereavement Program, and an internationally recognized expert on the subject, once told me this is why vets have such a high suicide rate. Another is that bereavement is frequently compounded by the facts of euthanasia and the guilt that often follows. Personally, because of the unusual circumstances that surround the dogs in my care, I have not felt that particular regret, though what was true for bluesman Kansas Joe McCoy in 1929 remains so today:
If it keeps on rainin', levee's goin' to break.

By now, perhaps, you have come to understand what you are getting. You are getting a guy who placed a bet he could not cover. Someone who wandered too far from the mothership and won't be back in time to catch the last flight out. I have begun to doubt what philosophers call “first principles,” defined as “those that cannot be deduced from any other.” These are foundational assumptions, a priori truths, axioms in mathematics. It was Aristotle who formulated the
first
first principle, the tautology denoted as A = A. I have always had some difficulty distinguishing optimism from fantasy and chose as my first principle the metaphysical certainty that everything would work out because I was doing the right thing. Of course, my wife, who has significantly more experience in such matters, told me differently. Of course, I didn't listen.

A year ago my wife and I moved to these mountains to run a dog sanctuary. We specialize in dogs with special needs: the very old, the very sick, the really retarded. Many of the animals we take in will need years of work before they are eligible for adoption. Many will never be eligible. We believe that how an animal dies is important, so we've become purveyors of a few great months and a very good death. Not many rescuers do this sort of hospice work, as most find it too trying. My wife is tough enough to take it. My excuse is a predilection toward risk and a history of lucky—which, I assumed, would have some predictive value. Let's just say, in this case, A did not equal A.

One of the lucky things I assumed had predictive value was that my first year and a half in this cause had been remarkably death free. Dogs would arrive in our care in dire shape with dire warnings: three weeks to live, a month at most. But there is a difference between how long a dog is supposed to live and how long that dog does live, and in a great many cases that difference is my wife. Again she tried to tell me otherwise; again I didn't listen. By February 2008 I had developed a false sense of confidence—which was about when the universe decided to make up for lost time.

We now have a small pet cemetery in our backyard. The graves are laid out in a line. If I stand directly in the center of them, my best friend's grave is two to my left, my wife's best friend two to my right. We lost a lot of love that winter. Seven dogs total. Seven dogs dead in seven weeks. Vinnie was among them. He was a schnauzer, sweet and old and prone to the shivers. Once the winter arrived, we began wrapping him in comforters and sweaters and anything else we could think of to keep him warm. After we buried him, I couldn't shake the concern. Two nights ago, my wife found me standing above Vinnie's grave with a blanket in one hand and a shovel in the other. When she asked me what I was doing there, I told her what was most likely the truth: that I didn't really know. Judging by appearances, my plan was to dig up his body and wrap him up tighter.

“You know he's dead, right?” she asked after a while.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “I was worried he was cold.”

There's a small cherry tree shading our graveyard. I remember how hopeful we felt when we planted it. Our world was shiny and new back then. Nothing was irrevocable, everything was possible. I had not yet concluded that the bet I could not cover involved my own happiness, as I had not yet come to understand that the life I was living was, in fact, real. My wife laid the shovel beneath the cherry tree, took my hand, and led me toward the house. “It's late. Why don't you come back to bed.” She was about to tell me that everything would be better in the morning, but I watched her swallow those words. She's a realist. It's been a very long time since anything was better in the morning.

PART  ONE

Walking on water wasn't built in a day.

—Jack Kerouac

1

Not too long ago, I took all the money I had in the world and bought a postage stamp of a farm in Chimayo, New Mexico. It was an impulse buy. I didn't know much about country living, had never entertained secret pastoral fantasies. One moment I was a money-grubbing bastard, the next a guy negotiating for a donkey. Sure, there was the recent conclusion that nothing in common remained between the life I had imagined and the one I was leading—but did farm animals solve this particular problem?

It wasn't much of a problem. Just another existential crisis in the early spring of 2007, and they were in fashion that year. It was the season of nowhere to hide. The economy was lousy, the ice caps melting. There were water wars on the horizon and oil wars under way, and those bees kept dying. Global pandemic came back on the menu. We were freakishly short of food. And this, the experts said, was just the warm-up round. The term scientists have coined for our current planetary die-off is the “Sixth Great Extinction.” I couldn't remember ever not feeling tired. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had butchered the job and begun to call up down and right left, and just about everybody I knew could no longer find their way home.

Like others, I had learned the necessary stagecraft. During my waking hours I was a competent enough act as far as such things were concerned: a journalist by trade; a taker of notes, meetings, and an acceptable level of nonprescription pharmaceuticals; a waterer of house plants; fully capable of handling most cutlery; able to recall Spencer Tracy's advice on thesping—“remember your lines and don't walk into the furniture”—during those times of need. As I turned forty that year, there had been plenty of times of need.

In four decades I'd managed to accumulate some hard facts, but little true wisdom. I can say for certain that the Fifth Great Extinction was the one that killed off the dinosaurs, but didn't think to ask anyone a question about Chimayo before moving there. I was unaware that my new home sits in the heart of the Española Valley and that the
Rio Grande Sun
is the newspaper that serves that valley. I did not know that the
Sun
's weekly police blotter had lately become something of a national amusement. Jay Leno liked the woman who smuggled heroin inside a burrito to her boyfriend in jail. National Public Radio liked the man “in a white Dodge chasing people around with a sword” and the guy wearing “a blue sweater and blue pants talking to the robotic horse in front of the grocery store,” and the one who “challenged his entire family to a fight and was presently hitting his mother.”

It had also escaped notice that Chimayo has one of the highest rates of drug addiction in the country and that a significant portion of the local population was arrested in September 1999 when Operation Tar Pit swept through town. Nor did I hear the August 18, 2005, NPR broadcast that included the commentary of local clean-living activist Dr. Fernando Bayardo, who pointed out that such abuse has been entrenched in this area for over fifty years. “You have a grandmother shooting up with a grandchild. You have family members shooting up together. It's not something the teenage son hides from other family members. How are you going to change those unhealthy lifestyles and habits and develop new norms?”

I had no idea how to develop new norms. All that was certain was that my girlfriend and I had been thrown out of our house in Los Angeles with no other options beyond the just plain dumb. In our case, the just plain dumb was deciding to bet everything on a bunch of dogs and a pie-in-the-sky list of homesteading desires. The dogs we'll get to in a moment. The desires were organized into a wish list of sorts, written the night after we'd learned we were being booted, in a state of not so quiet desperation. A number of the items on that list were critical. My girlfriend had lupus. I had Lyme. Together we were two tenors with multiple sclerosis shy of an autoimmune quartet. We needed long days of brilliant sunshine because we needed to walk. Few zoning restrictions and lots of space were also important because we had a bunch of animals and plans for more. Unfortunately, what we didn't have was all that much money.

The only location in America that fit all our desires was Santa Fe, New Mexico, but Santa Fe was nearly as expensive as Los Angeles. Maybe an outlying community that had escaped the housing boom was the pipe dream. Oprah Winfrey had a ten-million-dollar mansion in the only outlying community we'd heard about, so maybe this was the crack-pipe dream. There were forty items on our wish list. We had the budget for ten. The thing about Chimayo—we got thirty-nine. I should have known there was a pretty good reason for this, but by the time that puzzle was solved, talking to a robotic horse in front of the grocery store made as much sense as anything else I could think up.