Something changed after that evening. In the moments it took Ahab to climb off that ledge and drop back into my apartment, my vision focused and my head cleared, and it was the roll of this wave that I rode right out of my old life in California and into my new life in Chimayo. I traded the finite games of the big city for the infinite games of the country and did so because there seemed to be some kind of cosmic lesson unfolding, a lesson that bound my quest for meaning and my girlfriend's love of animals to larger and stronger forces that are hard to reduce to the narrative construction of simple sentences.
Along similar lines, the donkey I'd negotiated for was named Fuzzy. In the days after the purchase and before our arrival, Fuzzy became the symbolic center of my new decision to find the meaning of life in the world of zoology. I didn't yet know the full specifics of that symbolism, but planned on asking my donkey as soon as we got the chance to talk.
That chance arrived right after we arrived in Chimayo. While Joy looked over her new digs and Elise started unpacking the truck, I dashed down to the pasture to check on Fuzzy. My concern right then was less about answers to my questions and more about donkeys being equines. Equines are social animals. Most social animals are social because they are prey species. Prey species confront danger best through numbers. Think of zebra herds crossing the Serengeti and you have a close approximation of the numbers that make equines most comfortable. To this end, Fuzzy once passed her days in the company of a doting owner and a healthy assortment of barnyard critters. Then I bought her house and that owner went off to greener pastures and that assortment went off to greener pastures and Fuzzy was left alone in a pen for the time it took us to drive across the Southwest.
The first thing I noticed was that Fuzzy was snorting, braying, stomping, and rather unhappy about her few days of enforced solitude. The second thing I noticed was that Fuzzy was a significantly larger donkey than the one I remembered. I remembered a skinny, two-hundred-pound animal. She was close to double that, very little of it flab. Her neck was a long braid of muscle, her hindquarters stronger than her neck. Before leaving California, I'd figured I could wrangle this beast. Before leaving California, I'd had no idea what kind of country moron I would soon prove to be.
I eased the gate open, stepped into the pen, and gave Fuzzy a good scratch between the ears. That scratch seemed to be working, so I was scrubbing my way down her back when Elise walked over to say hello. The pen's gate hung on tall wooden posts loosely wrapped in chicken wire. Elise had gotten two steps inside the gate when the petting zoo closed for the day. Fuzzy lowered her head, snorted once, rocked backward, then shot forward. The full weight of her charge hit me square in the back. She knocked me ass over teakettle and drove that teakettle straight up into the air. On my way down, she rammed me right into the gate. I took chicken wire to the face and a fence post through the chest, and that's about when the honeymoon ended.
In the next moment, Fuzzy gave me another smash to the back, then noticed Elise. She caught her in the shoulder and spun her to the dirt, missing head with hoof by millimeters, before galloping hell's bells for Joyâwho went face-first into a hedge of rosebushes to get out of the way. This was something of a blessing, as it spared her the sight of what happened next. Next, Fuzzy tried to stomp the small dogs to death, and when they proved too elusive to kill, went at the bigger ones. She reared up and crashed down, missing Ahab on her first try and Otis on her second. Before she got a chance at a third we got a rope around her neck and a prayer off to the gods, and one or the other seemed to do the trick.
After we dragged Fuzzy back into her pen, she began to bray and bray and didn't stop. The sound was extraterrestrial, like a foghorn being tortured. We knew she needed company, but company wasn't easy to come by. The dogs clearly weren't fitting the bill. Goats were the obvious choice, except we had a small orchard and wanted to keep those fruit trees. Goats ate bark and killed fruit trees. So company meant another equineâwhich we couldn't afford. We'd come to New Mexico to help animals and quickly realized there was only one way to help Fuzzy.
“We have to find her a new home,” said Joy.
“It's the only way,” seconded Elise.
The dog rescuers were resigned to their decision; the significant other was nowhere close. Sure, it had taken us all of five minutes in the country to get our asses kicked by an ass, but wasn't that the party we'd come for? Giving up on the totem animal just days after meeting the totem animal seemed a bad precedent to set. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream. I had a donkeyâand couldn't even hold on to that. Oh yeah, my meaning-of-life quest was turning out exactly as planned.
In 2002, after my first two years of illness, countless doctors, and no real cures, I stumbled upon a nearly forgotten list of things to do before I died. The list was fifteen years old and fourteen items long. A number of those items had already been checked off, a number were no longer relevant, and the vast majority required a level of health and fitness no longer mine. The only one left with any real potential was “get a dog,” but by real potential I meant sometime in the distant future, not later in the same afternoon.
Back then, the only dog I'd ever had was a golden retriever named Corky. He arrived on my thirteenth birthday and died around my twenty-second and in the years since I'd consistently missed his company, but pet ownership required a more sedentary lifestyle than journalism permitted and, once I got sick, a more active one than my disease allowed. My good friend Joe Donnelly felt differently. He felt that way because a stray had shown up on his front doorstep and refused to leave. As Joe already had a dog of his own, and a landlord decree of one pet per apartment, keeping him wasn't an option. So he did what just about every other person in Los Angeles did when they found a stray that needed a homeâhe called his friend Joy.
“You have to find him a home,” Joy said.
“What aboutâ”
“A nearly destroyed Rottweiler mix? Take him to the shelter and they'll just kill him.”
Finding a nearly destroyed Rottweiler mix a home is a difficult task under normal circumstances, made worse by the fact that this dog had been badly beaten and tended to bite anyone who moved too quickly, including me on first meeting. The reason that meeting took place was because I'd found that list of things to do before I died and realized there was nothing left on it I had any real chance of doing. So I followed that realization out of the house and down to the liquor store and started hyperventilating somewhere between the whiskey and the wine coolers, promptly bought several large bottles of “I don't want to feel anything anymore,” and ran into Joe in the parking lot. He was canvassing the neighborhood for a home for his stray, and canvassed me as well. “Get a dog,” my fifteen-year-old list had said. I was out of other ideasâso I did.
To say I didn't know what I was doing with my new ward would be polite understatement. Joe tried to explain, telling me to go to the store and buy a leash, a collar, a bag of food, a toy for him to chew on, and two bowlsâone for water, another for food.
“You're going too fast,” I said.
He lifted his right hand and spread his first two fingers into a peace sign.
“Two bowls,” he said.
In the end, I made him write it all down. On my way home, during what would technically be my first walk with Ahab, I remember pulling out that list and staring at it, and realizing that the care of a living creature could be reduced to items one through fourteen, with one of those items being “rub belly frequently.”
As time passed, my initial trepidation was replaced by a more ongoing consternation. Let's just say, that man-and-dog bonding thing, ours took a while to happen. Like a great many traumatized animals, and not that different from a great many traumatized humans, Ahab employed diffidence as a survival strategy. Months on end he kept himself apart, spending most of the day sitting on a cushion in the corner, staring straight at a wall. He always kept his back toward me, never made eye contact, barely tolerated my affection. Forget belly rubsâwe were stuck on “brush shoulder without inciting violence.”
This standoff was made worse by his separation anxiety. While Ahab didn't much like my company, he truly hated being left alone. When I was gone, he expressed his displeasure by strewing garbage across my apartment, tearing apart clothes, and chewing up the furniture. At first I was frustrated; then I was stumped. Should I take the advice of most dog trainers and ignore the disease of emotional trauma in favor of curing the symptom of bad behavior? Or should I take the advice of animal rescuers and ignore the behavior in favor of treating the underlying trauma? How much was my furniture really worth to me? How much was a cure really worth to me?
All this caught me a little by surprise. These were ethical questions. I lived in LAâlike who the hell thought about ethical questions in LA? But with Ahab around, I thought about them constantly. How humans and animals should live peacefully together was the core of my concern. Should the goal be for Ahab and me to merge our lives, or should I follow the biblical dominion-over-the-beasts ethos and just try to wedge him into mine? If I chose the path of freedom, whose needs trumped whose? When I had a busy day at work, should Ahab get shorter walks because of it? When I had a free afternoon, did I go to the movies or did Ahab go to the beach? And what about his separation anxiety? What did responsibility really mean?
In the beginning, having no idea what responsibility really meant, I tried to change Ahab's behavior. I would return from the store to find a shredded pillow and lead him over to the mess and firmly say “No!” while trying to remain calm. After he took apart my new couch, I lost touch with calm. I was angry, and when this didn't produce the desired result, even angrier. But I hadn't gotten a dog to be mad at that dog, and scolding Ahab really wasn't getting the job done. Instead, I decided to review the facts.
These were the facts: Every time I came home to disaster, Ahab looked guilty. When I shouted at him, he looked sorry. If I could trust my read of his emotions, then he knew that what he was doing was wrong but still did it anyway. Armchair psychology said this meant one of two things: either he was so terrified of abandonment that he couldn't help himselfâand what I had been interpreting as political protest was actually pure panicâor else the damage was dog language for “I'm terrified of being left alone, you stupid schmuck!” Either way, he was terrified.
Since there was no way to stop leaving him alone, I started comforting him when I got home. I would ignore the mess, apologize for my absence, and smother him with affection. I mean
smother
him. The bigger the disaster, the more love he got. I was going on instinct here, as my plan ran contrary to the advice of most dog trainers. That advice covered the gamut, but a typical example was the 2009 ABC News story “How to Cure Your Dog's Separation Anxiety.” They suggest more disciplineâthus cementing my position as “team leader”âor less affectionâthus breaking him of his “owner addiction.” Across the board, the experts were certain that my strategyâcoming home and treating him, for lack of a better phrase, like a human beingâwould only reward and reinforce his bad behavior. As often happens in dog rescue, the experts were wrong.
Within a week, Ahab stopped destroying the furniture. Within two, he left the garbage alone. At the start of the third, he got up from the corner, walked over to the couch where I was sitting, and put a paw on the cushion. He was trembling slightly, trying to hide it, but trembling. It took him a little while to work up his nerve, but eventually he pulled himself the rest of the way up and belly-crawled over. He stopped a few inches away to gather himself. The quivering ceased, his fur lay back down, and he lifted his head to face me directly. Martin Buber once said, “An animal's eyes have the power to speak a great language,” and this time no different. It really was the first time Ahab had ever held my gaze, I'm not sure what I'd been expectingâmaybe fear, wariness, a hint of hopeâbut what I got was the weight of tradition, a combination of great furry love and truly sober nobility. It felt like Ahab was both offering me his heart and telling me of an ancient trust between our species, a sacred covenant, an honor code I didn't yet know existed. I'm pretty sure he was also telling me not to screw it up.
Then, our ethics lesson over, Ahab put his head in my lap, sighed once, and fell asleep. Not ten seconds later, he was snoring loudly. I started laughing. It had been such a profound performance. The months of buildup, the fear and trembling, the meaningful lookâand for an encore, the melodic sounds of a Panzer tank in the middle of a coughing fit.
Oh, how I came to love those snores: a rumble of contentment, a rolling chortle, a great magic. These were the sounds that woke me on my second morning in Chimayo. As our furniture was still somewhere in transit, Joy and I had slept that night on the porch, in a pile of anything soft we could find. Ahab slept beside us. It had been a lovely May evening when everyone went to bed, but when that Panzer melody roused me from my slumber it was just daybreak and the ground was buried beneath a foot of snow. How had this happened? Just yesterday, my view had been sunshine and skyscrapers. Now there were snow-capped mountains in the distance and snow-covered fields in the foreground and a donkey in the middle. I was disoriented. Also freezing. I grabbed an old coat from the pile, put it on, and blinked about. It was then that I put my hand in the pocket of the coat and found Joe's old note: his advice, items one through fourteen, for the care and feeding of another living creature. I hadn't seen the note in years, but reading it again, I knew the answer to my question. I knew exactly how this had happened. I'd walked through a door marked “rub belly frequently” and never looked back.