Dogs Raining (reigning) in My Mind 8

Man drowns trying to save his dog,” read the headline. “A 72-year-old Lake Oswego man died Sunday morning after he was swept out into the ocean while trying to rescue his dog off a Lincoln City-area beach.” The dog survived. Many such tragic episodes have unfolded and continue to unfold across the world. (I collect the articles.) A man (it’s typically a man, usually older) drowns in a river, lake, pond, creek, irrigation ditch, and of course, the ocean, while trying to rescue his dog from drowning. It’s a whole fascinating, but largely overlooked dog story genre made all the more fascinating because in almost every human drowning, the dog survives! I sort of like that and like the effort expended on behalf of the dog. It was not wasted. Those articles imbue something wonderful in the people who read them. I would dive into a surly ocean to save my dog, or a complete stranger’s dog. I know I would not die. I would perhaps not dive into a surly ocean to save a human being, not even a child. I know I would die. Does this make me a terrible human being? Maybe it’s all a big metaphor for our failed humanity that I am constantly trying to correct.

In John Berger’s book, About Looking, he writes:

The pet (dog) completes him, offering responses to aspects of his character which would otherwise be unconfirmed. He can be to his pet what he is not to anybody or anything else. Furthermore, the pet can be conditioned to react as though it too, recognizes this. The pet offers its owner a mirror to a part that is otherwise never reflected.

Bonnie and Clyde held up a mirror to me (actually it was their furry faces) and I saw something that was never reflected in me before and now I am writing this dog book to hold up as a mirror for others, a mirror I’ve carried along a high road, which is something Stendhal said an effective novel must do, even though some will blame the mirror and not reflect on its reflection. That will indeed happen with this book.

Berger also claims Man’s first metaphor was an animal, probably a dog, because dogs were Man’s first companions, and this bond developed long before Man acquired language. Berger also writes: “The animal (dog) has secrets which, unlike the secrets of caves, mountains, seas, are specifically addressed to man.” Oh, very, very true. Moreover, does anyone ever lie to their dog? I never did, only to other human beings. The Coyote figures prominently in many Native American myths and legends, particularly in the Pacific Northwest where I live. These stories, where Coyote serves as trickster and provider to Indians, are certainly more interesting than most of the didactic, wrathful and humorless ones I grew up reading in the Old Testament (Jonah and the whale excepted). I think my favorite one is when Coyote creates a large waterfall on a river well upstream from a village. The waterfall blocks precious salmon from reaching the village and Coyote created it as punishment to the villagers because they wouldn’t let him marry one of their females. Isn’t that far more interesting than the story of a trickster God ordering a man to kill his only son with a knife and then burn the son’s body on an altar to prove loyalty to the trickster God?

Sonny the husky was the Coyote trickster in my life. She also provided. She also provided for others by serving as a foil in my storytelling about human beings and their answering to their higher angels, as James Madison memorably described it in one of his essays in The Federalist Papers. It’s not funny how the Founding Fathers often treated their dogs with more humanity than their slaves. That gross contradiction still festers within our body politic in the form of one third the members of the US Senate. You know where they hail from. If only Reconstruction had been allowed to continue for 50 more years. You wouldn’t recognize this country. There wouldn’t be a need for animal shelters.

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