Treasury of Joy & Inspiration (8 page)

Money Talk

Money is
a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety.
John Kenneth Galbraith

• • •

It is
said that for money you can have everything, but you cannot. You can buy food, but not appetite; medicine, but not health; knowledge, but not wisdom; glitter, but not beauty; fun, but not joy; acquaintances, but not friends; servants, but not faithfulness; leisure, but not peace. You can have the husk of everything for money, but not the kernel.
Arne Garborg

A Heart for the Run

Gary Paulsen

April 1997

From
Puppies, Dogs, and Blue Northers

C
ookie had
been my lead sled dog for close to 14,000 miles, including an Iditarod, the nearly 1,200-mile race from Anchorage to Nome, Alaska. Several times she saved my life. Somewhere along the way she became more than a dog, more than a friend—almost my alter ego.

Now she was due to give birth in a wild winter storm, and my anxiety was acute. I thought of bringing her from the kennel into our small log house in northern Minnesota, but it would be too warm. Her coat was in full prime—she was at least a third wolf with gray wolf markings—and the heat would be murderous.

I decided to construct an igloolike hut from bales of straw I kept near the kennel. It was just big enough for Cookie—and me, since the only way I could get any relief from my worry was to stay with her. Once inside, I crawled into my sleeping bag and said to Cookie, “Nice. Way better than we're used to.”

She was busy licking herself and didn't respond, although she usually did. We talked often. I frequently explained parts of my life to her, which sometimes helped me better understand myself.

I fell asleep and awakened four hours later to find Cookie giving birth. Four gray pups making small whine-grunt sounds were out and cleaned.

Everything went fine until the eighth and last pup. It was stillborn. Cookie worked at it, licking harder and harder, trying to get it to breathe, her actions becoming frantic.

She growled concern, and it turned to a whine. I reached one hand to cover her eyes, and with the other took the pup and buried it under some straw near the door opening. With other females I had hidden the dead pup to take away later, and it had worked. The mother focused on the live pups and forgot the dead one.

But I should have known better. This was
Cookie—stubborn, immensely strong-willed and powerful, completely dedicated to those she loved. She looked for the pup, and when she couldn't find it, she looked me in the eye.
Where is it?

I reached under the straw, and she took it gently in her mouth, set it down and began working on it again. When she could not get it to respond, she put it with the other nursing pups.

The movement of the pups caused the body of the dead one to move. She must have thought it alive, because she lay back exhausted from the birthing, closed her eyes and went to sleep. I waited a full minute, then carefully removed the dead pup and took it outside to a snowbank 20 yards away. Pushing it into the snow, I covered it, then stole back to our shelter, got into my sleeping bag and slept.

When I awakened, Cookie was still asleep. I was getting ready to leave when something stopped me.

There in the middle of the puppies lay the dead pup, stuck into a nursing position. Without awakening me, Cookie had gotten up and found it.

I was caught between heartbreak and admiration. Again I thought I would take the pup while Cookie slept. But when I reached across to get it, her eyes opened and her lips curled. Again she looked into my eyes.

Almost four days passed before she finally let me take her dead puppy. But even then she growled, not at me, but at the fates that would have her lose a young one.

I had
another demonstration of Cookie's devotion on a nighttime winter run. It was clear, 15 or 20 degrees below zero, with a full moon. I put her at the front of the team with three of the seasoned dogs and six of her now nearly grown pups behind, a total of ten dogs.

I planned to run 100 miles along abandoned railroad tracks that had been converted to a wilderness trail. The tracks and ties had been removed, and the old trestle bridges had been resurfaced with thick plywood.

Twenty-five miles into the run we started across a trestle over a river. In the middle of the trestle, 20 feet above the river, the dogs suddenly stopped. Some maniac had stolen the plywood that provided a base for the snow on the trestle.

I jammed the two steel teeth of my snow brake. But instead of sliding on the plywood to a gradual stop, the teeth caught on an open crosstie and stopped the sled with a jolt.

I slammed into the handlebar with my stomach, flew over the sled and dropped headfirst into a snowbank next to the river. I hit perfectly. If I had landed in the river, I would have drowned or frozen. If I had struck ice, I would have broken my neck.

As I struggled to my feet, I saw Cookie waiting on the trestle above, the team lined behind her, each dog on a tie with open space between them. I couldn't turn them around without getting them tangled. Nor could I drive them over the trestle in the harness; the younger ones could fall between the ties.

“I can't do anything,” I said to Cookie.

She stared back at me.
You got us into this,
her eyes said,
and you'd better get us out.

I climbed up the bank to the trestle and began to release the dogs one at a time. Each crossed the trestle, moving carefully from tie to tie. On the other side they didn't stop. The older dogs had been here before and knew the way home. The pups followed. Soon they vanished in the night.

“Well,” I said to Cookie, “it's you and me.”

I let her loose and in disbelief watched her take off after the team. “Traitor,” I said with great feeling.

I managed to drag the sled off the trestle. Once on solid ground, I trudged along with the sled behind me, feeling as if I were on a treadmill. With some 30 miles to go, it would take three days to get home.

After about 40 minutes I heard a sound. Minto, a large, red dog, came up and sat down facing me.

“Hello,” I said. “Get lonely?” As I was rubbing his ears, another dog, Winston, trotted up.

“What is this?” I said. “Loyalty?”

The truth was, they shouldn't have been there. Race teams are trained for only one thing: to go and never stop. They do not come back. But four more did, then one more, then the last two pups and, finally, Cookie.

I hooked them up and managed to get a “thank you” past the lump in my throat. As I drove them forward, I noticed that some of the dogs had slight bite wounds on the ends of their ears.

Sitting in the kitchen later, I said to my wife, Ruth, “It sounds insane, but it looked like Cookie went after them and sent them back. I've never heard anything like it.”

“I know one thing,” Ruth replied. “You aren't paying her nearly enough.”

Cookie and
I had to retire from racing at around the same time. Arthritis in her ankles sidelined her. Then one day, breaking up a dogfight, I felt a sudden pain in my chest. The doctor said I had heart disease.

I found someone to take the other dogs and moved Cookie into the house. She stayed with me constantly, sitting next to me on the couch to watch TV and growling whenever a cat or dog came on.

Diet, medication and exercise helped me, and I became more active. On the first hard fall morning I went out to the woodpile to split kindling, Cookie by my side. At the pile I stopped, but she kept going.

I knew what she was thinking. Long runs, towing a wheeled sled, had always come with first cold. Cookie had loved them.

I found her at the precise spot in the kennel where she'd stood hundreds of times, waiting for the team to be hooked up.

“No,” I said, coming up next to her. “We don't do that now.”

She whined softly.

I walked toward the woodpile. I did not dare look back, or I would have lost it. As always, her determination to be with me won out even over the call of the trail. When she caught up to me, I reached down to pet her. She leaned against my leg.

Two more
summers and one more winter came and went. Cookie stayed by my side.

Then one morning in late summer I let her out, and she did not come back for breakfast. I found her under a spruce tree, dead, her face to the east, her eyes half-open.

I sat next to her crying. Then I took her back to the place in the kennel where she loved to stand, the place where we harnessed. I buried her there with her collar still on, bearing the little metal tag with the number 32—her number, and mine, in the Iditarod.

I thought of when she was young and there was nothing in front of us but the iceblink on the horizon. I hoped that wherever dogs go, she would find, now and then, a good run.

The Gratitude Club

BY STEVE HARTMAN

July/August 2012

from the
CBS News Archives

 

I've been reporting on extraordinary people for 25 years as a television journalist, but this small Oregon town and the man at its center, Woody Davis, stand alone in my memory.

When I read a newspaper clip about the community's reaction to Woody's declining health, I knew that this would be a special story for my
CBS Evening News
series,
On the Road
(the transcript of which is below). But nothing prepared me for what happened when I traveled to Oregon last December and began knocking on doors. Every single person knew Woody and had countless stories to tell about his selflessness and generosity.

For five decades, he had helped plow cars out of snow, chopped wood, repaired farm equipment and more. He was the consummate good neighbor, and in his time of need, the community was rallying around him. I'd never seen anything like it.

Corbett, Oregon,
December 2011
—On a high ridge above the Columbia River, just down from heaven, you'll find an angel on a front-end loader.

Woody Davis, 69, is kind of a jack-of-all-trades. And although he's never made much money at it, by all accounts, he has earned his wings.

Here is some of what people in town have said of him:

“He's the epitome of something dear.”

“You have to chase him down to pay him sometimes.”

“He's uncommon, he's special, he's a gift that this community has had all these years.”

Which is why folks in this small town east of Portland are now going out of their way to thank Woody for the thousands of good deeds he's done for them over the past 50 years.

Recently, they all got together to cut and stack his firewood for winter. A couple of guys fixed up his old pickup. Someone even built him a beautiful wooden box and invited the whole town to sign it.

“Did you know how much the community cared for him?” I asked Woody's son, Clint.

“Not to the degree I do now,” he said.

Clint said all the work his dad did for people has been repaid tenfold. “Bill Gates could not come to Corbett and buy this. You can't buy the love that people have poured out for Dad.”

Their words and deeds are sincere and lasting. Unfortunately, the box is pine—and the outlook isn't good.

A few months ago, Woody was diagnosed with ALS—Lou Gehrig's disease. Doctors tell him he has about six months. The disease, which attacks the nervous system, is already making it hard for him to lift much of anything or even talk. But his attitude remains unaffected.

“What do you think of what everybody's been doing for you?” I asked.

“I feel blessed that I'm dying slowly.”

I really didn't think I'd heard him right. “Wait, did you just say you feel blessed that you're dying slowly?”

“Because people have a chance to express to me how they feel,” he said.

In most communities, death is whispered, and praise is saved for the eulogy. But Woody Davis and the people of Corbett, Oregon, show us why that may be too late. Turns out even angels like to know they've made a difference.