A DOG TOWN

     January 15 was cold, and it was blowing hard.  I drove down over the hill and into town, nearly paused at the stop sign and turned left. I’d just shifted into second when, glancing at the bank, I saw its door open, and Linda emerge.

     Out here on the islands, even on Vinalhaven, the largest with 1200 people, we all know one another. From this fundamental difference between life for us here and life for others elsewhere evolves other distinctions. For example, since everyone is an acquaintance, as soon as any one of them comes into view the mind hurries instinctively to it’s own video library and pulls up everything it can remember about that person. Invariably that’s more than the subject would prefer, and often more than the viewer would like to know. Nonetheless the videos run, automatically and irresistibly, like breathing.  

     And so, the Linda video cued up. Linda worked at the bank and had for a long time. She knew everything about it. When a manager retired some years earlier Linda was referred to at his retirement dinner as the person solely responsible for allowing that manager to hang on as long as he did. Like so many other island businesses, the actual names of which are often subservient to the given name of the proprietor, the bank was regarded and referred to by many as Linda’s, as in “I got to go down to Linda’s and get some quarters for Bingo”.

     Volumes more about Linda scrolled down a remote section of my consciousness before it became clear that she was standing out there in the icy cold, on the bank steps, without any coat, waving frantically and hailing me by name. My mind hit the pause button and I thought “I must have bounced an awfully big check to compel this sort of attention”. In the few seconds it took me to stop I thought it more likely there was some emergency inside the bank. By the time I got out of the van she was halfway across the street running toward me and I concluded that someone inside the bank was ill, and she had hailed me because I was the first person she saw.    

     “Has anyone talked to you?” she asked. 

     Loath to pass up any opportunity I joked “Well yes, there was that time a few years back,” but her continued distress made it clear to me that something had happened to someone in my family, and she was trying to determine if I was already aware of it. I was not. I thought of my grandmother, in her nineties and living alone in an apartment north of the bank, of my parents in their home across the street and just south of the bank, of my daughter Katie, sixteen and at school 300 miles southeast of the bank, and of my artist wife Elaine at her studio at Sand’s Cove a mile west of the bank.

     “Danny called from the car phone,” Linda went on.

     The Linda video hopped out and the Danny tape hopped in. During the winter he worked in the woods with his brother and father, Addisons Jr. & Sr., all lobstermen during the season. The three of them are the truest of islanders. Generations of Ames’ have occupied the Granite Island neighborhood for so long that even the granite acknowledges their seniority.  At one point the video shows Danny sneaking into a neighbor’s chicken coop to put hard boiled eggs under sitting hens.

     Linda interrupted the viewing. “A tree fell on your dog. We don’t know how he is.” 

     I was reminded that Linnell had taken the dog that morning. The Danny video ejected in favor of hers. Linnell lived at the end of our street with her twelve-year-old son and a cat. She’s a gifted landscape gardener with a degree in math from Smith. Her eighteen-year-old daughter, now away at college, was one of my daughter’s close friends. Linnell was an alto in our six-person singing group and a frequent dinner guest. She and the three Ames boys constituted Ames Brothers Forest Service. Very blonde, nearly translucent, she and they crammed into the cab of Addison’s truck are a stunning, and unlikely spectacle; Mia Farrow abducted by Green Mountain Boys perhaps.  Linnell loved my dog as did the Ames’ and they took him to work with them as often as circumstances permit.

     Linda continued.  “Rob’s on the phone trying to reach Martha.”  Out comes the Linnell video to join the others, barely sampled, piling up on my mind’s floor, and in goes Rob’s.

     Rob is the bank manager. He and Sandy moved here only a few years earler and brought with them an infectious good humor, happily mingled a little with exhaustion of late. They just had their first child; a girl, over ten pounds. The video revealed they’d been trying for a long time which may account for the sustained good humor, and that they were the keepers of the coop wherein were found hens laying hard boiled eggs.

     The Rob & Sandy cassette was ejected, and the Martha clip begins. Martha is a former vet’s assistant and was the first person called in emergencies involving animals. She ran a pet supply and gardening store called Over The Fence and a dog obedience class. She and her husband had a ten-year-old daughter for whom my own happily baby-sat now and then. 

     The dog was Yitzhak, ten years old and a hundred pounds. He was named after Yitzhak Rabin, who was Israel’s Secretary of Defense during the late sixties and, more recently, Prime Minister. I was nearby during the Six Day War and was so impressed with him that the idea took seed that I might bestow Mr. Rabin’s name to something of my own to acknowledge my admiration. I made a semi-conscious vow to name a son Yitzhak, but we had a daughter, so I named my dog instead. Katie is relieved, knowing how close she came. Yitzhak was mistaken by nearly everyone, even vets, as a black lab.  In fact, his mother was a full-blooded Black and Tan Coon Hound and his father was purported to have been a Golden Retriever. You have to look pretty far down his throat to see any evidence of a Golden. I suspect a Lab lived in the neighborhood.  We got him for Katie but after we picked him up in Lincolnville, Elaine drove, and I held him all the way back to Rockland and during the ferry ride out to Vinalhaven. When we got home, I tried to present him to Katie but by then he had wet himself and what not in my lap and in dog parlance there is apparently no greater reciprocal evidence of devotion than to, on the one hand, bestow such deposits and, on the other, to allow them to be deposited. We’d bonded. I was Mom. Not long after that he began riding in the truck and grew accustomed to being let out when we arrived at the dirt road leading to whatever carpentry project I was working on. Several of these roads were at least a mile long. One was two miles. He learned the location of these roads and anticipated disembarking with great eagerness. Having thus run at least a couple of miles and often more nearly every day of his life had left him, now at ten years old, in great shape. A few years ago, he showed evidence of problems with his hind quarters. At someone’s suggestion I began giving him an aspirin and a yeast/garlic tablet each morning. He made a great recovery and though by this time, slow to get to his feet and with a gray muzzle, he still anticipated the arrival of a dirt road and the run that follows. 

     Linda continued, “We couldn’t reach you or Elaine, so we called your father and he’s gone to find one of you.” 

     She told me where the Ames Brothers were working, and I hurried off to Over the Fence. On the way I met my father and, right behind him, Elaine; he having found her. She and I chatted for a moment about the best course of action and decided that I would go to the scene, but she would remain in town. Apparently neither my Dad nor Elaine maintain videos in my library, because neither of them popped up. I think they may be in the book section.  When I arrived at Over the Fence, Martha, having talked to Rob, was already coming out the door and flipping over a well-worn little sign that now announced to incoming customers “Gone on Emergency”.  I picked up a couple of blankets at Martha’s instructions and we headed for Calderwood’s Neck, seven miles distant. On the way we talked about what we might find. We had no information relative to where the tree struck the dog, for example. Trying to ease the apprehension, I observed that with any luck it was his head where there was very little sense. To my surprise Martha agreed that the head would be best since there was such a lot of protection (bone) there.  

     Elaine went home to await word. There was a message from Addison on the answering machine. It was a very sad message, detailing that a tree had fallen on the dog and that it “didn’t look good for old ‘Yitz’”.

     Addison Jr. was the founder of Ames Brothers Forest Service, an occupation he appeared and appears to enjoy as much if not more than lobstering.  He was the Vice President of the Vinalhaven Land Trust and leader of frequent and popular nature walks following the Trust’s many trails, most of which have been cleared and maintained by Addison and other volunteers.

      At 10:15 Martha and I arrived at the scene. Smoke was coming from a rise in the woods a hundred yards or so ahead. We could see Addison walking toward us looking gloomy but not so forlorn that we might readily conclude the dog had expired. 

     “How’s he doing?” we asked simultaneously.

     “Well, he’s still alive.” 

     “Where did the tree hit him?” Martha asked as she headed off toward the fire. 

     “Right on top of the head,” replied Add. I grabbed the blankets and hurried to catch up. 

     Up on the bluff Yitzhak, still prone, cradled in Linnell’s arms and fashionably attired in some of her extra winter clothing, heard the familiar sound of my van arriving and of the door opening. Not long before, this dog had very much appeared to his loving keepers to have been killed by the falling tree. The imprint left by his face having been driven into the ground was still in evidence. If we’d have cast it, we’d have had a perfect likeness to hang in the kitchen. He had a hole in the top of his head the size of a tennis ball and couldn’t get to his feet. Historically, however, it has been the continual and endless prospect of meeting people, new and old alike, putting his nose in their crotch and moving them about like pieces on a game board, that has given his life a singularity of purpose. Up over the crest, he could see now, were coming a couple of new players. He struggled to get up and managed to get his front feet under him. Linnell held him back fearing he might do himself more damage. Martha reached him first. 

     I remember when, years ago, a friend of mine ran out into the street to comfort his dog who was lying in the street after being hit by a truck. The dog, his lifelong companion, bit him badly as soon as he reached for it; nearly broke his heart.

     Martha knelt casually in front of Yitzhak, examined his eyes and then, just as casually, opened his mouth to look at his gums; an indicator, it turns out, of the presence of shock, in this instance evidently absent. We turned our attention to the hole in his head beneath which we could see his skull. It looked like pink granite and, given the blow he received and the recovery he has made since being flown to Rockland and getting sewn up, it may very well have been.       

     During the next few days Yitz got get well cards and presents of snacks and chew toys. 

     Just a dog, some might say, but not out here.