memory. nineteen eighty somethin.

when i was 7 my uncle peter died on new years eve in a snowmobile accident. he had a new puppy named cujo and we got to bring him home. he was a beagle. he had long claws that my friend jeanett still has a scar on her leg from him jumping up and scratching her. im sure i have seen it when I give her massages. this was the 80’s and all the dogs i ever knew lived outside on chains, as did our cujo. a couple years later (im foggy on the timeline) another uncle gave us his dog, sam. a husky mix (with short stubby legs and a stout frame). sam also lived outside on a chain. if they ever got off the chain, they would run away. i like to think that is because husky’s are runners, and not that they didnt like us, or hope to find a warm home where someone would let them live inside. (in all fairness, i was allergic to our first dog susie, and so my parents were looking out for my severe asthma). anywho. they always came home after what i imagine was an epic adventure (or no one else who let the dogs in!). but i remember one time when they ran away and they didn’t come home, gone longer than usual. we were all sad. even though the dogs were jumpy because they just wanted our attention, and hard to pet, because their jumping was aggressive, we did love them (though not the way i came to love my dogs when i became an adult). so my dad suggested we go look for them. all 5 of us including my mom went into the woods and fields and orchards and two tracks surrounding our little five acres. i dont remember how old i was but i know that i had never walked that far or for that long before. we were kinda scared because we didnt know where the heck we were— had never seen some of these parts. not my dad tho— he knew every crick and holler, where that tree with the big ol burl marked when to turn left, where the barbed wire fence lay rusted on the ground, the old shack full of abandoned junk that the dogs mighta found shelter in during the thunderstorm the night before. even in the urgency of lost dogs and whiny girls, he would still pause to ponder and behold the majesty of the skyline from the top of a hill. i always thought my dad was the strongest, bravest, wisest, alaskan bushman that ever lived and that night affirmed my suspicions. even if we didn’t find the dogs, we found we were surrounded and connected by our little house in the valley to wilds we hadn’t previously known existed, and to the endless expanse of wonder contained inside our dad.