It’s not lost on me that while teachers are dealing with the hardest days of their careers, while the pandemic rages on with disproportionate impacts on vulnerable populations, while folks in BC and Western Washington are dealing with epic floods, while some in DC are fighting for the very survival of our democracy, I’m writing about a dog.

Well, if there’s forest therapy, maybe there’s beach therapy, and blog therapy, and…here comes the rationalization…dog therapy? For what it’s worth, between bouts of foolishness like this, I do what I can to help make the lives of teachers just a little better.

Yesterday’s therapy was of the beach variety. What I did not capture on camera was of course the most beautiful moment where Cedar waded into the pastel wavelets and followed them to shore – a little celebration of some brand new aesthetics.

Having recently read about the dangers of too-long walks (there goes the forest therapy)…I had a plan to use a tennis ball to lure Cedar seaward, in hopes of soon unlocking the world of swimming. She was almost there on her own volition…sort of moonwalking after the dappled light, so I figured it was time for the nuclear option.

Here I’ll confess a bit of last-dog trauma. Soon after I introduced the tennis ball to Bella, her brain shrunk to exactly its size and stayed there for pretty much the rest of her life.

Cedar was at first reluctant to go after said nuclear orb, which did sort of please me. But then she made a few retrieves (none quite requiring swimming) and I was almost ready to lob it just beyond moon-walking range.

Then she did the thing: Jumping up in excitement, facing me, going backwards a bit and jumping again as I walked forward. Ball crack.

The nuclear option has gone back underground while we find other ways to play, other enticements to swim.

As the daylight does its slow pour over last night’s snow, I’m thinking about teachers in South Carolina and Massachusetts reckoning with new levels of violence, and others who are reporting young people showing all kinds of asocial responses to trauma. I’m mulling my own significant climate impacts, and what lifestyle changes I will make to do my part. Cedar is chewing on a rawhide, seemingly confident that she has some dog-therapy job security.

level up

1. To bring something to an equal level or position compared to another thing. In this usage, a noun or pronoun can be used between “level” and “up.” A late field goal has leveled up the game between these two powerhouses!

2. To achieve or advance to the next rank. Said of a character within a game, especially video games. You’ll probably need to level up a couple of times before you try to take on the boss in this stage.

Cedar is leveling up and I’m behind in the game. While she spends most of my Zoom meetings curled up on the bath mat next to the recycling bin or on the floor near the heater or on her dog bed in the pen area, last week she decided she needed my full attention and after biting my shoes and hands and knees repeatedly under the table, then tearing my sleeve, when I tried to push her out of the way (while I nodded attentively to my colleagues), she did her best to climb up to table level and join the action.

My puppy proofing is looking quite passé at this moment. I’ve had to move the hamper, previously keeping socks and slippers safe, to the top of my dresser. Shoes near the front door are now above waist height, and…sigh…it looks like counters are potentially fair game in Cedar’s view of new-level adventures. Basically, I have to raise my gaze another couple of feet to a) remove temptations, and b) accept the fact that we’re at a new pain-in-the-butt level.

AKC’s missive for Week 14 is called “Four on the Floor: Stop Your Puppy from Jumping”. They recommend I keep her out of the kitchen. Not going to happen. And that I keep all food off counters. Nope.

I’m going to make a command decision here on a Monday morning. When she goes high, I’m staying low–a low voice and a low tolerance for getting up on the furniture and especially counters.

When I asked Teri, her breeder, to describe her personality among her littermates, Teri described her as a “first sergeant”–not the alpha leader, but not so submissive either. My first sergeant will NOT level up to challenge the Commander in Chief.

Stay tuned.

I’m not a woods guy. My brain and spirit seek open spaces. My formative years near the ocean, on a lake, being a “flatlander” as woodsy Vermonters say, programmed my firmware for the marine world, for open vistas and for horizons.

When I’ve deer hunted, I’m sure I’ve missed many more deer than I’ve seen due to at least half of my CPU — to continue with the unwelcome computer metaphor–preoccupied with finding the way home again.

And I’ve been lost. There was one solo hunting venture when I realized the creek I had been following was flowing the wrong direction. I had a compass, but no map, and my assumption about the North-South lay of the land before I set out was inaccurate enough that the compass made no sense. Easy enough, I’d backtrack until I hit footprints. I found prints, which was at first a huge relief, but then I realized that there were many, many prints, some going in circles like the fresh tracks I was putting down. (Turned out the tracks were from the previous day’s rescue team for another hunter just as woods-direction-impaired as me.) And there were other times. As a kid of eight or nine, I once returned an hour or so late from a neighborhood game of “Chase” –which often veered into the scrubby forests around our house–one shoe missing, torn Toughskin jeans–tears and snot testifying to my fear of spending the rest of my life in the bracken. Another time, a buddy (who does NOT waste his CPU cycles when looking for deer; I swear he imagines them into existence) and I hiked through nasty brush behind his house. When we finally broke into a clearing near treeline, were momentarily defeated by other footprints. It took us a while to realize they were remarkably similar to our own.

I’ve done better in treeless spaces. There was the time on the Egegik River in the fog and darkness. I had taken the Fish and Game skiff down to the cannery on the bay to call my buddy to congratulate him on his wedding. The skiff was full of salmon, which we caught to test run strength, and which we would sell at the cannery. The cannery wasn’t buying and I had to wait in line for the payphone with 10 or 20 gillnetters as I watched the fog coming in across the bay. While I had the trip back up river to our field camp timed with the flooding tide and remaining daylight, fog spooked me into leaving early. I went aground. On a sandbar with fresh brown bear tracks. As the fog swallowed me and the salmon-heavy skiff, and daylight waned, I waited for enough water to float us, and putted ahead blindly to the next grounding. On one of those short trips, I heard the nesting gulls which marked the deepwater channel to get home. The rest of the trip was slow but sure. Run a couple of hundred yards (now in darkness), shut the engine down, listen for the gulls, re-orient, and head home.

Anyway, the forest behind our cul-de-sac has a trail, and it’s frequented by fellow-dog walkers, and other neighbors, young and old. It’s a good place to let Cedar off leash. I’m not sure how we’ll fare with the first bear or porky encounter. My other concern is that I gather pups aren’t supposed to make “long” “hikes” until their growth plates fully fuse. (According to the websites that suggest a 4 month old-pup shouldn’t hike or otherwise exercise for more than twenty minutes, we just overdid it .)

But much as I’m not a woods guy, there’s really no better place to be in Southeast Alaska in November than the old growth forest. I thought about that a few steps in, and the phrase “forest therapy” popped up in my brain. I guess that’s really a thing.

Inspired by the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or “forest bathing,” forest therapy is a guided outdoor healing practice….[f]orest therapy relies on trained guides, who set a deliberately slow pace and invite people to experience the pleasures of nature through all of their senses…

Decades of research show that forest bathing may help reduce stress, improve attention, boost immunity, and lift mood.Trees give off volatile essential oils called phytoncides that have antimicrobial properties and may influence immunity. One Japanese study showed a rise in number and activity of immune cells called natural killer cells, which fight viruses and cancer, among people who spent three days and two nights in a forest versus people who took an urban trip. This benefit lasted for more than a month after the forest trip!

***

Some research suggests exposure to natural tree oils helps lift depression, lowers blood pressure, and may also reduce anxiety. Tree oils also contain 3-carene. Studies in animals suggest this substance may help lessen inflammation, protect against infection, lower anxiety, and even enhance the quality of sleep.

“Can forest therapy enhance health and well-being?”, Harvard Health Publishing

Our big back yard, thousands of acres of forest extending back to the Juneau Ice Field and into Canada and the giant continental craton, ain’t a bad place to take a little “forest bath,” in part because the old growth canopy keeps the actual rain bath to a minimum, in part because it has a trail so I’ll live to type another day, but really because the old growth back there is awesome.

On our “big tree walks,” we skirt the fringes of suburbia. We pass a treehouse and various trinkets testifying to the spirit of the neighbors who choose this fringe. We splosh through mud patches, and over slick corduroy “bridges”. We walk through gates of time (time courtesy of time–some tree rings testifying to centuries; gates thanks to friend Kurt’s chain saw).

And here at home, snoring Cedar, maybe a bit drunk on tree oils, works to close those growth plates so we can go deeper into the big back yard soon.

Cedarpup: girl being made of trees (and kibble).

“Yes indeed. And what is it now what you’ve got to give? What is it
that you’ve learned, what you’re able to do?”

“I can think. I can wait. I can fast.”

“That’s everything?”

“I believe, that’s everything!”

Siddhartha, Herman Hesse

I’m procrastinating getting out on our walk today. We had a prediction of 5″ of snow, but so far, it’s rain, and daylight itself seems to not really want to get on with this day.

Cedar is responding fairly well to the “Wait” command. She’s about 50-50 on doors-where I try to keep her from preceding me out the door, or where I keep her from getting too excited about a rare guest.

I have her wait for her meals, and at the moment, I think her capacity to wait is a bit longer than mine is to make her wait.

I’d say she’s two for three on the Siddhartha scale. She is a bit of a thinker. I just love those moments when she sits and cocks her head at a new encounter–a person, a raven, a dog.

Fasting might be a while.

“There is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting.”

Milan Kundera, Slowness

On our walks, Cedar and I engage in mostly silent conversations, transmitted through the leash. Usually, she wants to slow down and devour scents (and occasionally other nasty bits). I urge her along with leash checks and correct her as she veers off course, with “nah” or “ah” or “uh” followed by “good girl” when she catches up to my slow amble.

In a way, Cedar is lucky, because I am slow. My baseball coach, Mr. Thomas, got a roaring chuckle out of my base running (I believe he mentioned something about a piano on my back). By the end of high school, worried about my reading speed, I took an Evelyn Wood Speed Reading class (with Joan and Patrick Kennedy as it turned out). When I started doing fun runs in college, it took me a while to realize that a million people will always pass me at the beginning of races. I’d usually catch some of them, and cross the finish line before the free beer was gone, but still. And even these days, when I swim laps (most days), I marvel at how much faster almost everyone swims–ladies in their late 70s, random kids, fat guys, and of course, the sveldt young swimmers who go by so fast I can’t even learn from their technique.

My slowness now has a doctor’s excuse. A year ago, I discovered I had “high grade” stenosis in my back and there were many days I couldn’t walk to the mailbox without excruciating pain. Enter Cedar as my rehab partner.

So we go slowly, Cedar and I. And stuff kind of emerges, including today’s half-remembering that Milan Kundera had written a novel called Slowness. I remember it as short and dense, crossing time boundaries, set in France, but I’m so bad at remembering plots (I like to think my slow reading helps me appreciate other aspects of language), that I’ll leave this morning’s accomplishment at remembering the title.

If Kundera proposes that we slow down when we’re remembering things, or slowing down helps us remember things, maybe it’s something about Cedar and my pace that only surfaces parts of things. This morning, I thought of my professor-friend John Elder’s essay “The Footpath of Tradition” in a collection, Imagining the Earth that helped me figure out what I sort of had to say in a thesis I titled “Stepping Stones in Consciousness.” I didn’t quite remember Elder’s words this morning but later resurrected the chapter’s opening sentence: “Just as the wasteland and wilderness are reconciled through the earth’s circuit of soil-building decay, the landscape and the imagination may be united through the process of walking.”

On yesterday’s walk , I remembered that I had tried to organize a set of Aleutian observations by wind direction in a prematurely titled mess I was going to call “The Drift of Things” after lines in Frost’s “Reluctance.” (I was hunkered in a cabin for most of that fall, trying to write my way out of heartbreak. The only thing that really mattered, in the end, was finding enough driftwood on the beach to burn to stay warm. )

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things
To yield with a grace to reason
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

“Reluctance,” Robert Frost

Luckily or unluckily, I have no clue where those notebooks ended up. Maybe a future walk, if we go slowly enough, will surface them.

Meanwhile, Cedar, not so impressed by my imaginative flights, and plenty game to accept the end of Fall, will be ready as soon as I am to do her part to slowly put me back together again.

First snow wasn’t the zoomie-fest I had expected. We woke up — after, YES, a full night’s sleep–to a still morning with an inch or so of snow.

Cedar had been out in a flurry or two, so this wasn’t the world-rearranged that I expected it to be. Instead, the snow seemed to intensify her focus. And despite the slow learner on the high end of the leash, maybe both of our focuses.

As we clipped in and started the neighborhood walk, I had a cheat sheet for some of the usually invisible landscape that blows Cedar’s mind on our little loop. We were out at first light, but we certainly weren’t the first ones out. We stopped just outside the driveway to sniff a set of dog tracks and people tracks. The people were at least size 11, so I figured that was Dave and Maggie from up the hill. At first stop, we could hear Ace, the new Shepherd pup getting rapid fire commands from his owner. A quick tug (“leash check”) and we were off to sniff the wonderland of Griffey, the next-door Labradoodle. As I made out the bottom-of-the-hill shapes of Sam and her Lab mix, Dottie (we stay away from their side of the road because there are bits of dog treats buried in their yard; she and her partner feed ravens dog treats and the ravens hide the bits for their young), I saw what looked bicycle tracks. My world was starting to get rearranged. Which of my neighbors is badass enough to be out riding a thin-tired bike, before light, in the snow?

We sniff-walk-leash-checked on, in time to watch a neighbor’s truck and skiff swish by. About that time, I thought of what a perfect hunting morning it might be. Still, quiet, and just enough snow to reveal some deer stories.

Waking gradually to the stillness of the morning, I marveled at the neighbor industrious enough to shovel (or maybe) sweep this dusting from their driveway and sidewalks. I heard a front door shut, the beep of an electric car backing out of a driveway, the rat-a-tat of an impact driver in a nearby development, the reassuring clatter of studs on an SUV likely taking a driver to work. I smelled cinnamon rolls at one house, and leaking gas from an old Subaru at the next.

And so we did our not-so-great circle, back and forth in the old road in the woods (where Cedar has momentarily lost her alder-leaf camo), past Jeff, the perfectly camouflaged big-white-dog, and grand dog to Alaska’s Writer Laureate, Heather Lende, on up the hill before crossing through my back yard neighbor’s place (who was out shoveling in shorts), crossing the creek, and returning to our back yard. On the way, I put my own world back together slightly by realizing that the “bike” tracks were actually a dog’s, who was out wandering solo apparently, either dragging his feet or his tail between steps.

At home, Cedar was momentarily the 4th grader who didn’t want to come in from recess, ignoring my first “Come” just long enough to go push the hanging broom one or two more times, then barreling for all she’s worth onto the slippery deck.

The cheat sheet of snow revealed how much I don’t know about various tracks, but it also taught me what I continue to learn as I try to answer Katie’s question of what her personality is like. She is focused.

She sleeps now, and I steal this moment before losing the stillness to the day’s list. A raven croaks three times. Another answers twice. Cedar sighs from her dog bed.

Good riddance, Week 12.

Could be my imagination, but I feel like we’ve passed through some kind of anti-obedience forcefield. Cedar is coming more regularly again when she’s called. She’s learning nicely to stay, and to wait. “Lie down” is a bit more elusive, but I’m a believer again. I think we’ll get there.

Cedar’s distractions have been mostly about scents. In our attempts at fetch, she’ll trot excitedly after a tossed item, and sometimes even bring it back. Often, though, she catches a whiff of something delicious and the game — which never really started–is off. I have no facts to back this up, but I’m going to guess Week 12 is a time when dogs’ olfactory superpowers kick in.

Does this inform her shoe “fetish” as one article calls it? Maybe, although she seems to have no preference for which member of the family is offering a laced up chew toy. When I googled why pups are so taken with shoes, the obvious came back–they’re right there, they’re the right size, they contain our smells, but I had to chuckle at one author’s pronouncement, “Shoes are also delicious.” Cedar sends her compliments to the chef. We’ll put that theory to the test when Tim gets home for Winter Break.

Meanwhile, about these crazy noses. I love this bit from Nova:

“Dogs’ sense of smell overpowers our own by orders of magnitude—it’s 10,000 to 100,000 times as acute, scientists say. ‘Let’s suppose they’re just 10,000 times better,’ says James Walker, former director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, who, with several colleagues, came up with that jaw-dropping estimate during a rigorously designed, oft-cited study. ‘If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well.'”

“Dogs’ Dazzling Sense of Smell,” NOva, October 3, 2012

The piece goes on to cite some wild dog feats, including the Seattle-area lab who could smell floating “orca scat” on Puget Sound from up to a mile away. I didn’t even know orca scat was a phrase, nor did I know it floated, and I’ve certainly never smelled it. (I have smelled and nearly tasted cat scat. I picked up a disobedient Cedar the other night, and she shared the paydirt she had been exploring by licking me across the lips.) Anyway, maybe Cedar will be able to smell king salmon scat and all will be forgiven.

It turns out that in addition to their crazy load of olfactory sensors, our pooches have a cool adaptation in their schnozes that lets them exhale out the side so that the incoming stream of nose-data is uninterrupted. Imagine sipping wine without having to stop to breathe. I wouldn’t listen to my nonsense either.

Now we soldier on into Week 13, a little less sleep deprived, and only one shoelace (apparently more delicious than the other) shy of a full set of shoe pairs. Cedar may have exotic taste; she did work over a Mongolian slipper. I confess, my best attempt at divining its essence yielded shoe stores from my youth (yes, I remember getting those PF Flyers from Hanlon’s, Mom) a far cry from goat or marmot or Mongolian beef.

This I know: I’ll take Mongolian slipper over cat nugget.

A few videos for you, Mom.

 “If I develop this little story of a personal experience as a kind of parable, it is because I believe that in one way or another we mirror in ourselves the universe with all its dark vacuity and also its simultaneous urge to create anew, in each generation, the beauty and the terror of our mortal existence.”

Loren Eisley, The Mind as Nature, 1962

There are awakenings. Last night I had at least three different kinds, which did not do well for my sleep budget, nor for the length of this post.

I was awakened by a restless Cedar-pup, with real fear of a repeat of the previous night’s diarrhea fest, and a hurried stumble out the back door. I was re-awakened a dazzling couple of minutes later, at 2:30 am in the frozen muskeg that is my back yard. And I think I’m at least a little awake today to some left-behind aspirations of my youth, as I entered the teaching vocation.

Potty training Cedar is not one of my better teaching performances. After a couple of nights of pukey-skittery misery, last night I finally put her to sleep in the kennel in my room. I heard her stirring somewhere after 2, hustled to find my slippers and sweats — all elevated to be free of teeth– sniffed each room wary of more brown slime, and stumbled out onto the frozen grass. Above us, the aurora twisted and spun black into green into pink and back. With Cedar on the leash I tried to capture a photo or two, but then just made myself stand still and feel really tiny— a speck in fathomless universe, tiny.

I was awake, and duly stunned. But I had a dog to wrangle, and only an hour and change to sleep before the alarm would go off, so I swallowed it whole and inarticulately, dragged the dog in, and got another hour or two of sleep.

Later in the morning, I was too busy to write, but I realized that a moment under the aurora had stirred something in my own Lab-thick skull. I had fresh recall of some blend of haunting moments walking to school in the pre-dawn hours at Unalaska. It was my first teaching job, and to survive, really, I had to work 12 or 14 or 18 hour days. Some of those dark morning walks were dreadful, in mocking winds, sideways slush, an occasional cab-van splashing through muddy potholes. But sometimes, between Aleutian fronts, the planet would still, and the sky would open up to a zillion stars. I had the feeling I was at sea.

Maybe because earlier in the evening I was texting with cousin Steve, who is at sea, on night watch somewhere in the Atlantic, crossing into the horse latitudes, or maybe I somehow saw myself in the dark vacuity of the universe in a way that floated some random debris up from the shipwreck of my memory. But this morning I had a keen return of the kind of feeling that got me into teaching—the idea that finding young people’s spark, maybe even their genius, as we explored beautiful works together was a calling, an adventure, a quest of some kind. (This was long before I’d encounter No Child Left Behind or standards or Robert Marzano or pacing guides or “The Science of Reading”.)

That momentary flash to the star-still walks to work at Unalaska turned me back to Loren Eisley, one of a handful of writers who rescued me from withering as an English major. An archaeologist and a naturalist, a brooder and a poet, Eisley wrote clearly and compellingly about specific stuff in the outdoors, but also about how our brains, our existence, are themselves part of an evolving nature. (Now I need to go back to The Immense Journey.)

Between meetings (one of which included Cedar going Kujo on me…biting me under the table, nearly tearing the arm of my shirt as I tried to summarize our morning’s accomplishments), I found a copy of Eisley’s “The Mind as Nature” online. I was searching for its final lines to try to stitch together the morning’s awakenings. As I skimmed the brooding essay, I came across lines I quoted in my application to a teaching credential program 30 years ago.

“There is no more dangerous occupation on the planet, for what we conceive as our masterpiece may appear out of time to mock us–a horrible caricature of ourselves The teacher must ever walk warily between the necessity of inducing those conformities which in every generation reaffirm our rebellious humanity, yet he must at the same time allow for the free play of the creative spirit. It is not only for the sake of the future that the true educator fights, it is for the justification of himself, his profession, and the state of his own soul. He, too, amid contingencies and weariness, without mental antennae, and with tests that fail him, is a savior of souls. He is giving shapes to time, and the shapes themselves, driven by their own inner violence, wrench free of his control–must, if they are truly sculptured, surge like released genii from the classroom or, tragically, shrink to something less than bottle size. “

Eisley, “The Mind as Nature”

How I miss that mystery and sense of indeterminism in teaching, where it was up to us to walk warily between those edges, rather than needing “to be accountable” and to “deliver” pre-selected content with “fidelity.”

Anyway, I found the concluding lines, and in retrospect they are colonial and patronizing. Why do we need to know her skin color? (Cue a fourth awakening.)

In Bimini, on the old Spanish Main, a black girl once said to me: “Those as hunts treasure must go alone, at night, and when they find it they have to leave a little of their blood behind them.” 

I have never heard a finer, cleaner estimate of the price of wisdom. I wrote it down at once under a sea lamp, like the belated pirate I was, for the girl had given me unknowingly the latitude and longitude of a treasure–a treasure more valuable than all the aptitude tests of this age. 

But I do love Eisley’s sense that we have to get out there under the dark sky–even here in a subdivision built over muskeg–if we’re going to expect to wise up, or to create something before the muskeg takes over again.

Cedar, I’m afraid, is in grave danger of becoming that horrible caricature of one bloodied up, and partially washed up, educator.