As I was likely overthinking some aspect of leash training, a friend gently prodded, “If you were a dog, would you want to be on a leash?” My response was something about depending who was holding the leash, but I do think about this business of domesticity a lot.
A builder friend who visited a while ago, with Diesel, his 105-lb Baby Huey mass of obedient Lab, used the release cue, FREE DOG. He said his crew would often come on site and have to check around to see who had put Diesel on stay, before he was tapped back into motion via the magic phrase.
Maybe half because it plucks those adolescent chords of Freebird, I want these words in Cedar’s vocabulary. We have a ways to go though before we have enough to “release” with a release cue. We’re working somewhat halfheartedly on STAYS and WAITS and SITS, so I’m just using OKAY.
But FREEDOG, is, I guess, the goal of all of this training. (I’ll make it one word in honor of Freebird.) The more I can help to habituate Cedar to the environments I travel in, the more she can accompany me. The only way I know to get there, at the moment is a fair bit of captive dog.
I get to see FREEDOG off leash every day. I love how she bounds and swims and floats and flies— in the woods, mainly. We’ll get back to the beach soon. I tried yesterday to capture some freedog flight, but I was a bit broody on our walk, and I swear, Cedar’s energy level moderated because of it. And there’s also the fact that the woods these days are full of chewy things. (I think we’re in another teething surge.)
My guess, honestly, is that Cedar will use the FREEDOG release to go sit and think as often as she will to fly.
A Time to Talk
When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.
—Robert Frost - 1874-1963
I get it, Bob. Yeah, you oughta quit hoeing to talk to a friend. But maybe come out beyond the wall? Those old New Englanders…
I want to quickly chronicle how much I love Cedar helping to create times to talk, and not just between the two of us.
Today we left the driveway and talked to Kelli, out shoveling snow away from the storm drains for the inevitable slushageddon when temps rise. We loaned her a trickle charger for her Subaru, buried in a couple of feet of snow. Down the hill we saw Buck, who must have hidden the broom he was using on his driveway since it was bare concrete. Buck caught us up on his remote cabin construction while Cedar had a silent scent conversation with his new pup Mini via splotches of yellow snow.
Couple of waves to the grader operator (hoping he might take mercy on an old man with a cute pup as he headed up our way to make the daily massive snow berms across driveways), a short walk in the woods, a quick wave to Eliza, dog Jeff’s mom, and then up the hill to see Nikki and dog Lucy. Lucy had emphatic words for Cedar in the form of some old lady growls, but Nikki soothed the moment with love for Cedar, whom she had never met. Nikki and I talked about her recent deer hunt and swapped a few stories of trying to gauge a deer’s size in the woods. As we chatted we watched a neighbor hotrodding around in a Bobcat deftly moving snow. Turns out it was friend Peter, just back from Death Valley, catching up on his own snow removal and piling up a whole lot of neighborly good karma. Smiling as always, Peter made a few seconds to talk, but had to get the machine back to the rental soon, so hurried away, but not before he offered to come over and move snow for us. Across the street to Tom’s, shoveling, as always in shorts, where we chatted briefly about Cedar as shovel-helper, how retrievers need jobs, and whether I might like to accompany him and and another friend on a future hunt. Cedar waited mostly patiently, watched birds and people, and had her own private scent conversations all the while.
One more neighborly moment to relate, thanks to Cedar. In the last few minutes of light yesterday, she and I set off on the big tree trail. I had a headlamp in my pocket, but as usual, when we got under the canopy, my eyes adjusted and the snow depth lessened. We cruised along until we were surprised by a Labradoodle, plodding along in the half-light on the packed snow trail. When neighbor Michelle came into view, I recognized the Doodle, but not the Husky who was with Michelle. She didn’t know where the collar-less Husky had come from.
Cedar and I forged on, and Michelle and two dogs went back the way we had come. About 15 minutes up the trail, Cedar and I heard someone shouting from the woods downhill and saw a headlamp bobbing in the rough terrain. We shouted back and forth a bit and finally met up on the trail. I called Michelle, who had the Husky safe with another neighbor, and dog-tracker Abby and I began walking back to find her pooch. Since it’s Juneau, we started laying down lines of connection. Abby asked if I were Katie’s dad (one of my two best credentials), so she was in with me no matter what. With Cedar darting in and out of the headlamp, we had a nice conversation, talking about her experience growing up in Alaska, about coaching and running and skiing and careers. It wasn’t until she said her dog’s name, Remy, that I realized I had met them both just last weekend on a ski trail.
Back to Bob Frost and his stone wall. Today while skiing I visited with a friend who casually remarked that her daughter would find her way into the adult world “on her own timeline”. Her relaxed faith launched some mental-emotional thing for me that felt a bit like the giant slabs of snow sloughing off of the big trees right now. I fell in love with Juneau in my youth precisely because people were on a different timeline than I felt back in New England. Collectively, folks didn’t seem to be in a big rush to get to college and declare what they would be in the world at 17 or 18. I remember being blown away, at 19, sitting at a bar with fishermen and women, bankers, loggers, lawyers, and through my young eyes, no one had more status than the other. Except maybe the bartender. And the guitarist with the heavenly voice.
Decades later, as Cedar leads me to saunter around our little nook of suburbia right here against the wild country, I welcome the times to talk she creates, the friendly visits, sans stone walls.
Last week I committed to pushing through some time-hardened reluctance to attend a “real” yoga class. Years ago, I had been in a regular practice with a compassionate teacher who recognized my very special limitations with flexibility. She left town. Prior to the pandemic, I had started a “restorative” routine on Sundays where I was (sometimes by far) the youngest person in the room. While others were trying to restore their lost range, I was trying to locate my never-found flexibility.
The night before my great return, Cedar’s bowels had other plans. We were up at 1, 3, and 5 for diarrhea breaks. I think it was my surprised 3 am momentary delight in how warm the carpet was before I realized what my bare foot was soaking in, when I scrapped the yoga “comeback” and tried to sleep in.
Yesterday’s not-so-great-circle walk started out as sleep-deprived drudgery for me (not so much for Cedar). Light revealed gobs more snow, and the stumble out to the cul-de-sac revealed chest-high berms along the street. Cedar, sensing the lead dog was derelict in his duties, began our walk as if to mock me, executing a professional downward dog. Some blur of time soon after, she climbed a snowbank and struck a busier version of the pose. By the time I scrambled up to see what had her attention, I saw her finishing off a store-bought dog treat.
One of my neighbors calls ravens sky monkeys. I love the term. Another of my neighbors–across the street from Cedar’s treasure–I have learned in my Cedar ambles, feeds ravens dog treats every morning. My guess is that Cedar’s snowbank paydirt was compliments of some ravens who had created their own little dog bone fridge.
Depending on whom you ask around here, ravens are somewhere between the creator of the universe, “God in a clown’s suit” (Richard Nelson), and “dirty rotten shit-eaters” (an Unangan friend). If you ask Cedar, I think she’d say they are well worth watching. A PBS Nature article falls a little short in marking their intelligence, I think, when the author says, “some scientists consider these black-feathered scavengers’ position on the intelligence spectrum to be on par with canids such as wolves, coyotes, and dogs.” They had me until “dogs”. Surely we can aspire higher.
In Make Prayer to the Raven, maybe Nelson’s most famous book, he wrote some beautiful things about coming to understand the Koyukon Athabaskan world view by understanding ravens.
“Where I come from, the raven is just a bird [an It]….But where I am now, the raven is many other things first..a person and a power, God in a clown’s suit, incarnation of once-omnipotent spirt. The raven sees, hears, understands, reveals determines. What is the raven? Bird-watchers and biologists know. Koyukon elders and children who listen know. But those like me, who have heard and accepted them both, are left to watch and wonder.”
richard K. Nelson, Make Prayer to the Raven
I think I’m in the watch and wonder camp, although I’ll defer to my Alaskan suburban whiteguy (just barely) elder, and settle for now with sky monkeys. As I was pondering this post, I did see a pretty amazing predawn raven rally downtown today.
Cedar’s skitters have settled some. The vet, or rather his flunky, S-12, (I was not allowed to talk directly to the vet sun during our visit last week; it was like a ‘consult the oracle’ game with S-12 relaying questions and answers on sticky notes) , says her GI issues are jut “typical puppy stuff” and that I should just just “watch what she eats.” Not a simple task when I let her roam a bit in the midst of record snowfalls. And it’s not just the snow: yesterday as I ran a Zoom meeting and tuned out her nibbling on my feet, I realized the rawhide lace of my slipper may soon be part of a Cedar carpet-warming gesture.
As for yoga, a friend, suspecting I might not be up to my self-imposed challenge, suggested a set of online videos in which you can search by your particular affliction. Ignoring for a second this all-over-the-place post, maybe we are tapping in to some cosmic unity after all. Skip the downward dogs, Cedar. We’re both going to try, “Yoga for Digestive Flow“, purported to be “great for digestion and perfect for when you need a nice yogic kick in the pants. A full body work out for those winter months with encouragement to breathe deep and connect to something bigger.”
If you see us trudging through the snow, stopping to watch the sky monkeys now again, you might think nothing has changed, but look for our “yogic glow”. And if you see me giving Cedar a kick in the pants…
Madame Sears, easily the most boring teacher I’ve ever had, made it a point to tell us that in French, the verb “s’ennuyer” is reflexive, proving that one can only bore oneself.
With my Week 17 e-mailing from AKC, mostly about what to expect from teething — the endless snow is not the only sign of a long winter ahead—was a little gem of an article that pointed out that a pup’s problem behavior may be due to being bored. The article goes on, ad boredom, to list a million ways a dog owner can entertain his pet.
Ad Paris, we do have problems.
Well, Mademoiselle Cedar, it may be time you learn some Français, starting perhaps with “le sarcasme”? (Thanks to Katrina for this training tip.)
“You know it’s interesting. We don’t pay a lot of attention to natural sounds and we’ve forgotten all about the voices of nature. So we live in this world where we’re insulated from this incredible chorus of sounds. It’s all around us at all times. I think that in order to understand our world, we need to start listening to what everything around us is saying. We think the human voice is the only one that has come to matter to us. For indigenous people, I think it’s very different from that—that all of the voices around us, wind and water and ice and animals, they all matter, they’re all part of our single language of living things.”
Richard K. “NELS” Nelson, 2014 Interview
The last two neighborhood walks, mostly because I’m hobbled from skiing too hard this weekend, but in small part because I’m trying to stay alert to Cedar’s personality, I’ve let her set the slow pace and allowed her more time than I think I have to follow her nose, and ears, and curiosity.
This morning was another of those beautiful post-snow still air walks. There must be a weather word for this in some language or culture—mornings when the background blur of noise quiets and individual sounds fill in.
And so…like the lazy writer that I am this morning, I share a few moments of listening with dog Cedar just now. Although I could have captured a moment or two to prove that the human voice is the one that has come to no longer matter to Cedar, these clips give a good sense of her developing personality.
Warning: This video contains no action and explicit renderings of very little going on. It may not be suitable for those even slightly susceptible to having something better to do
As I was recording the last of this, neighbor and friend, Molly, texted as we were paused just below her house.
Although Rodin’s thinker was pondering the gates of hell, and mine birds and sky and snow and very likely food, maybe they share a phrase or two in that “single language of all living things”?
“What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.” -Rodin
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