The Toil of Trace and Trail

I could write a few boring, er, gripping paragraphs about applying to graduate school and taking the GRE, but I don't think I will.

Instead, in the aftermath of an exceedingly bad coffee prepared by an unpromising trainee, I will write about my absurdly sheltered, weirdly happy childhood.

My childhood was happy, even in the absence of such supposed prerequisites to happiness as friends and TV. For an accurate illustration of my blissful pre-adolescence, look at this photo:

There I am, circa 1992, apparently unaware that I'm wearing bright pink socks with profoundly un-cool, jungle-themed tye-dye shorts.* My classmates shunned me, because I was the kind of kid who brought diagrams of rabbit skulls to class for extended (and unsolicited) show-and-tell sessions, but I didn't fret: I could always count on the neighborhood curs.

The black one to my left was Meeka. The gun-totin', BMX-racin', animal-husbandin' hillbillies across the road owned her since I was four or five, and she remained my official best friend up until adolescence, when I finally realized how crazy "my best friend is a black dog named Meeka" sounded to real people. I'm not sure what kind of mutt she was--probably some kind of lab mix. But she would be at my house waiting for me when I came home from school, and would return to her owners only to sleep and be fed. I talked to her, told her stories, and got in "arguments" with her long after such behavior lost its age-appropriate cuteness and strayed into social weirdness. I also convinced myself that Meeka possessed near-human levels of intelligence, and that she would doubtless save me if I were ever lost or injured.

The mutt on the right is Sheva, the dog my parents let me have in third grade after years of my begging them for one. Believe it or not, she's still alive, albeit a decrepit, betumored centenarian in dog-years. At the time this picture was taken, though, she was barely beyond puppyhood. She and Meeka were jockeying for local dominance, snarling at each other and clashing bloodily from time to time. Their fights both frightened and intrigued me. I observed the dogs for hours every day, noting their body language and patterns of dominance and submission, and recording the details in my journal. As you might conclude, I was a dangerously hip child.

My reading preferences closely reflected my "social" life. Throughout most of elementary school, I was reluctant even to touch a book that didn't have a picture of an animal on its cover. Human interest stories reliably bored me. I read, instead, books like Jurassic Park (a dinosaur on the cover), Black Stallion books (horses on the cover), Clare Bell books (they're rare, sadly, but they had to do with an ancient race of intelligent cats), and especially books about dogs and wolves. I loved Gary Paulsen's stories of sled dogs in Alaska, for instance. And my absolute favorite author was Jack London, whose Call of the Wild and White Fang I must have read at least ten times before I had the smallest inkling of their pseudo-socialist themes.

I glorified these fictional dogs and their brutal lives. I found beauty in descriptions of "gleaming fangs" and "lips writhing and snarling," torn jugulars "spilling life-blood," gnashings and lashings and slashings. In writing my own stories I aped London's style as well as I could. My magnum opus, a sixty-page "novel," contained a series of violent dogfights and culminated with a grisly scene in which a pack of wild dogs kills and eats a panicked doe. Upon which her jugular spills life-blood and the dogs, gnashing their gleaming fangs, slash at her underbelly and partake, snarling, of her soft, warm flesh. What a sweet, gentle little girl I was!

I glorified, too, the "toil of trace and trail," as the oft-overwrought London referred to dogsledding. I romanticized the "primordial urge" that supposedly lay dormant in all dogs; I imagined that underneath, even the neighborhood mongrels who were my companions felt some inborn yearning to be strapped in a harness. I fantasized about Alaska (the Land of the Midnight Sun, in florid-speak) and dreamt of one day commanding a dogsled team in the Iditarod. I would breed huskies, I thought, and find a wolf-dog to be their leader.

This brings me back to the picture above. Meeka, Sheva and Flor (a gentle German shorthaired pointer who is standing behind Meeka) were certainly no wolf-dogs, but I intended to make a dogsled team out of them anyway. I made them stand still, in an upside-down V formation, tied them to ropes, tied their ropes to a central rope, and tied that rope to one of the bricks that my father had left over from building the foundation to our house. Then I cried, "Mush! Mush!" and stomped the ground behind them. They only turned around to watch me bemusedly. I went back to the house and tried to coax them forward with treats, but the dogs just tangled themselves in each other's "traces" until I gave up, a bit disappointed that I'd failed to tap into the beasts' collective memory.

Fifteen years later, I'm blogging at work while drinking beer I snatched from a holiday office-party. O, how things change.

* That outfit is actually not half bad, compared to what I would usually wear in those days. Aquamarine or purple tights with stirrups were frequently worn, along with mismatched socks and maybe a bright green visor. Even worse, I would wear a big, baggy T-shirt with pictures of wolves or cheetahs on it. And god help me, I'd tuck it into the tights--asymmetrically!--such that there were bulges all around my waist. My mother would meanwhile keep my bangs trimmed short--also asymmetrically, as she was not adept at cutting hair. Now imagine being in a class with this freakish child as she's reminding the teacher of the homework she'd forgotten to assign. My classmates hated me.