Creative Nonfiction Resources
Personal Essay
Loose Dogs
When I was ten, a dog's range was the entire neighborhood, including my backyard with the two weeping willow trees and the cheap red fence and the chestnut tree down the alley where, in early October, nuts fell from the branches in thick, green shells and burst open on the old cement. The neighborhood boundaries ran east-west from 15th to 16th streets and north-south from Alabama Avenue to Kentucky Avenue, then across busy Indiana Avenue, to an old, white factory with peeling red paint on wooden windowsills framing opaque rectangles of glass. Men, most fathers by age 18, went in and out in eight-hour shifts, each wearing a white t-shirt, blue jeans, white socks, and steel-tipped shoes, each carrying a black lunch box. Back then a dog could see all of these things, encounter and smell them, then make it safely home for dinner.
Something changed over the decades. Now, more often than not, dogs are kenneled, chained, left in the house. When I was a kid neighbors knew the neighborhood dogs, at least peripherally. When we walked down the street and saw a dog coming our way, we knew it was the Westra's collie or the Bruzinski's mutt, so we smiled. When adults drove cars, they seemed aware, on the lookout even, for dogs crossing the street. That's not to say dogs never got hit. They did. But it seems like it happened less often because, well, because as a neighborhood we watched out for dogs, even when we were across town in someone else's neighborhood. We were vigilant. We knew they were around, roaming.
It's different now. Now my 13 sled dogs lounge in chain link runs when I'm gone. When I'm home, they play in my backyard, which is where the runs are and which is surrounded by a $4,000, six-foot-high, chain-link, dogs-can't-chew-through-it, I'm-still-paying-off-the-loan-that-financed-it fence. It covers about half of an acre. And I'm thinking of putting up a field fence, too, a fence to fence in the $4,000 fence.
But the dogs will probably still get out. Which is why I know that—unless I build a watchtower and hire a guard to man it—I'll sometimes have loose dogs. Maybe decades ago that wouldn't bother me. Today, I worry about cars, snares, leg-hold traps, and shotguns.
It goes like this: I'm home doing dishes and in the split second it takes me to re-stack my mixing bowls a dog or two or four get loose and I scour the yard and I comb where the fence meets the ground until I locate the tiny spot the dogs unearthed and through which they wormed their 50-pound bodies and I run to my rock pile and I lift a large rock whose weight will later give me a back ache and I plug the escape hole with the rock while fighting back the dogs that are still in the yard barking no screaming to follow their pack mates out beyond the chain link fence and when the hole is plugged I drag the remaining dogs who are still screaming into the house and I grab my car keys and I start driving back roads beginning with the cattle ranch down the road and then the alfalfa field where the deer hang out and then behind my place to the alcoholic farmer's place where he grins toothless and tells me the dogs are headed north where the private timber company land meets with the Colville National Forest which goes clear to Canada where I believe my dogs would make it through customs as the border agents would probably think they were part of some movie about wolves because although my dogs' eyes are blue and wolves have yellow eyes people always ask me if my dogs are wolves.
Sometimes I wish they were. Then, when they ran through my dreams, I wouldn't wake up sweating and run out onto the porch in my flannel pajamas in the middle of winter, calling their names, only to turn around and see all 13 of them staring out at me from inside the house where, until I awoke from my nightmare, they were sleeping.
© Mary Sagal, 2001