Cedar

A blog and a dog

Category: July

Dog Days

Dog Days bright and clear
Indicate a happy year;
But when accompanied by rain,
For better times, our hopes are vain.

The Farmer’s Almanac, “The Dog Days of Summer”

Well then. I can tell already that my first blog post in … I don’t know… a few natural disasters… is not going to be, as a local music performer billed himself, tinged by hope. According to The Farmer’s Almanac, The Dog Days of Summer (from early July to mid-August) “coincide with the rising at sunrise of the Dog Star, Sirius, as well as with hot and sultry weather.”

Dog Days have come and gone this summer. In America (as in pretty much all of you who are not us in Alaska), dog days are those hot, lazy days, when Sirius the Dog Star is warning the Egyptians of drought and everyone else of the dangers of Bud Light and sun poisoning. 

Cedar’s dog days… the heart of summer…were apparently good ones. I’ve been gone a lot this summer, and she’s had plenty of love, from Katie, from return house sitter and all-star human, Tenley, from Aaron and family at Shelter Island. But if we’re to believe the Farmer’s Almanac, what’s to come may not be so “sultry.” 

While America hid from fires and skin cancer, we’ve had quite a freak show here, too— a jökulhlaup, a rare thunderstorm, an atmospheric river, and for whatever reasons, a massive blog post drought. 

A jökul-what, you ask? Like “atmospheric river” this term was non-existent to all but specialists until a few years ago. It is not, in fact, an Icelandic heavy metal band. (I don’t think.)  Instead, it refers to a sub-glacial release of water. In Juneau, we have a basin — basically a huge, icy lake—that releases each summer, flooding the Mendenhall Lake, then the river which courses through Juneau suburbia. 

For many in recent years the jökulhaup has been a bit of a party. Pull up the lawn chairs and watch what floats by in the silty glacial river. But this year the lawn chairs went to higher ground. The graphs showing the expected peaks and the receding water levels were erased and modified on an hourly basis (which began to seem like eternities). It wasn’t long before many were up Shit’s Creek without a yard or a foundation. Trees gave up their hundreds of year holds, and houses 50 yards back from the river began to plunge in. 

Friend Betsy posted on social media, “It’s been quite a show. Things that cruised by this evening – massive trees, a refrigerator, pillows, couch cushions, a roof, part of a bathroom, a wall, all kinds of insulation, wiring The river is making a roaring sound as it sweeps by.” A friend posted, “My house just fell into the river. Let me know if you find my stuff.” My neighbor found a box on a beach 10 miles from his place. The police found his Glock pistol floating in the busy harbor may miles downstream. Still missing: a cat and backpack full of cash. 

A day later, a rare thunderstorm and torrential rain. A week later, an atmospheric river rain event. Then another, much smaller, jökulhlaup. No one near the river has returned to normal.

None of this is news from Cedar’s point of view, as far as I can tell. What is news is some doggy love (her Shelter Island summer fling, Libby) and a bit of cousin dog (who nearly lost her own yard) chill time, too. 

They’re kind of all Dog Days around here. Still, maybe it’s worth acknowledging that I’m breaking the drought of the dog blog, with no help needed from the watery world in which she snores comforting sounds to soften vain hopes. 

Bear Witness

Happy Birthday to Cedar. Her gift you ask? She finally got to practice all that training with an off-leash encounter with a large black bear.

Missing from AKC missive: Eaten approximately $1,000 of dog food. And two pair of $150 shoes.

Fortunately, or unfortunately (I’m really bad at judging), it was more her ski training than the recall work that did the trick.

We were walking home on the big tree trail and I had bear spray and a bell, but no leash. (Kids are home and she’s getting lots of outings.) Cedar saw or smelled the bear before I did. She growled and pointed and then I saw the bear, ambling uphill towards the trail, absolutely unfazed by my bell. I called COME to Cedar. She ignored me and began moving toward the bear in full hackles up, head down bark mode. As the bear pivoted and started moving back in the direction from which it had come, I yelled ON BY (our ski command for moving past other skiers), and she complied, trotting down the trail, looking and sniffing over her shoulder with a grumble or two.

Two nights prior, we had a couple of seconds of excitement, too. Tim, Katie, and I were enjoying a king salmon dinner, with surprise guest Delaney. Cedar had gotten a little too interested in the kitchen table, so I clipped her out on the run. As I was at the sink, Delaney, matter-of-factly commented, “You have a bear on your deck.” I turned to see a full grown black bear with both paws on the deck, about 3′ from clipped in Cedar. I opened the door, grabbed Cedar’s lead and hauled her into the kitchen. Seems like it was only then that Cedar realized the gravity of the situation and barked her bear bark. (Later that night, I said the word, “Bear” and she actually got her ears back and head down for a second. Tried it just now, and I think she has efficiently erased that part of her hard drive.)

The title is a dumb pun, I know—the kind of thing I get to do when I’m the editor in chief. But, and…Cedar, the watcher and thinker (and hearer and smeller and OMG, licker) has had a year now of bearing witness to a world full of newness and surprise and only occasionally danger. I’m grateful for the ways she is teaching me to bear witness, too, as we go “on by”, in our separate but overlapping worlds.

Green

I could wax poetic about how green everything is right now. I could contemplate Marianne Moore’s line about Ireland (or our tendencies to romanticize): “the greenest place I’ve never seen.” I could prescribe myself her fern seed “for unlearning obduracy and for reinstating the enchantment.”

Or I could just leave it at this: I think even the bears are turning green right now.

Neighborhood Crimewatch

On my way to work out this morning, I noticed four nearby cars had been rifled. Luckily, our neighborhood has a few security cameras (and apparently a dearth of guard dogs).

Although he was dressed in dark clothing, the suspect has been positively identified.

July, July

I vaguely remember reading Tim O’Brien’s novel with this title a while ago, and recall it blurrily as a bunch of 50-somethings stumbling around trying to reconcile middle age with their dreams of youthful greatness. Good thing this is just a dog blog.

I’ve lost my grip on regular postings, so will post a bunch of photos instead of a bunch of words. (Amen, right?) I’ll squelch my Aldo Leopold wannabe voice by just saying that the dizzying speed of change and growth in late April-May-June seems to have slowed a bit in July. It’s as if we’re up on step, in a moment of equipoise, taking a giant green breath, and just growing berries. And whale calves into whales, and hermaphroditic halibut into freaky females.

And puppies into dogs, I guess.

Good enough.

I was wrong.

There. I said it. It feels kind of good. Tempted as I am to make this post title the title of the blog itself–I was wrong to get Cedar with the understanding we’d be raising her together–I don’t think that’s what this post is about. (I’m so glad I made that mistake at least.) There are many other things–some very big and some very small–that I could apply this cathartic sentence to, but at the moment, I’m going to talk about Cedar training.

If there were readers of this blog, they might remember my debate over siding with the behaviorists (treats and “aversives”) vs. the Monks (love). I came down on the Monks’ side. Well here we are at 11-months-ish, and our girl isn’t all that keen to COME for the sheer bliss of pleasing me. I have had to reprogram her brain (sparingly) with treats. And dammit, it seems to be working.

If there were a reader of this blog named Ray Hudson, he might give a groan remembering my “Seven Steps to Survival” commencement speech in my early years of teaching at Unalaska. (I have a bounty out for any extant copies of the Betamax video in order to destroy the record of forcing a packed gym to listen to SEVEN lessons for how to survive a shipwreck when they really wanted to just applaud their graduates .) Maybe I should have stopped at one: Recognition.

Recognition is that “oh shit,” “Houston-we-have-a-problem” moment. Then you start Inventorying what you have to solve the problem.

In this case: treats. Case closed. Admission made. Catharsis complete. Readers gone.

As for the bigger stuff, I guess just recognizing we’re at Recognition is where I’ll leave it for now.

With enduring apologies to the Class of 1991.

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