The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  In 2004, many months after taking part in an ugly search that affected me more than I immediately knew, I was diagnosed with critical incident stress by one mental-health practitioner and with PTSD by another. The terms are essentially related, though they aren’t synonymous. Posttraumatic stress disorder has received a great deal of press and become better known in recent years. But what is critical incident stress? A critical incident is defined as a life experience that seriously upsets the balance of an individual, creating changes in the way that person functions emotionally, cognitively, or behaviorally. Critical incident stress, like PTSD, can occur in victims of crime or warfare, in abuse survivors, and in those who serve in crisis response or in battle. For those working in the heart of disaster, among the most common contributors to critical incident stress are serious injury or jeopardy, line-of-duty death or suicide of a colleague, the death of a child, a failed rescue attempt, mass casualties, and fatalities of people known to the responders. For police, firefighters, EMTs, paramedics, and med-flight personnel, potential trauma is out there almost every day.

  I suppose that, with me, it was difficult to tell where the CIS left off and the PTSD began. The tags put on my condition didn’t matter as much to me as its effects. What I knew was that I sometimes felt too much—depressed, anxious, guilty—and then weeks of relative numb would follow. I sought counseling because search-and-rescue training teaches us to recognize such symptoms, but they showed up so long after the initial event, I couldn’t make much sense of them. I wasn’t sure how long what I was feeling would last or what I should do, or if there was anything to do at all. Because I hadn’t missed any work, I falsely made light of it, telling one counselor it was uncomfortable but survivable, calling it my “portable gloom.” I didn’t confess the one image that repeated itself in dreams and sometimes in my waking thoughts, repeated so profoundly that one morning a surge of grief dropped me to my knees in front of the kitchen sink, and I was surprised to find myself there.

  You think you are prepared, of course, when you head out on a search and get advance warning that it’s going to be ugly. This one would be bad—human catastrophe at its most vicious, across rough and remote terrain. I steeled myself for it and went in to do the job like everyone else, prepared to look squarely at the human death we were likely to find. But despite all that steeling, I wasn’t prepared for everything.

  I wasn’t prepared for the dogs. As we bounded out beside the well-fed, lucky search K9s, we often passed many local dogs that were victims of neglect. Anxious and angry, left out on chains at the edge of some properties, these were hungry dogs with infected pressure sores, the contours of their ribs and hipbones visible beneath patchy coats. There seemed to be many of them. A resident of the area told me that dogs were often used as crime deterrents and that the common belief was that a hungry dog was more savage. Savage dogs were highly prized, so some didn’t get fed a lot. We saw such dogs often, felt them watching us while we worked. Not every dog there was in bad shape, of course, but we saw some terrible cases.

  One dog touched many of us who came into contact with her. At the edge of a yard bordering a parking lot used by search personnel, there was a brindle-and-white pit bull on an eight-foot chain. She was horribly thin, with sunken eyes, and she appeared to have pupped recently, her teats descended and breasts collapsed as though spent. The first morning we parked there to head in for the day’s briefing, we couldn’t help but see the bones of her as she stood beneath her owner’s No Trespassing sign. She strained forward on the end of her chain, growling sometimes but never barking, her nose working the scent of us and, surely, the scent of dog food that many of the canine handlers stored in their cars.

  Her emaciated state was impossible to ignore. Between search deployments over the course of several days, some of us snuck fast-food chicken to her from a place across the street. Several handlers started tossing her a cup of kibble a few times a day. The poor girl seemed to inhale it, her tail whip-whipping as she gulped down the food. Then one morning, a sign was posted:

  NO FEEDING THE GODDAM DOG

  Which seemed to ensure she’d get fed more.

  The canine handlers did a little investigating. They inspected her part of the yard to make sure the feeding wasn’t causing digestion problems; no, I heard a couple of them decide—this dog was being starved for the hell of it.

  Someone should be told, they said.

  Someone should Do Something.

  What something?

  Feed her, certainly.

  Take her. On the second day after the sign appeared, that muttered suggestion slid across the hoods of cars and pooled at our feet, unresolved, a conflict of conscience, law, first duty to the search, and the possible ramifications for the law enforcement agencies overseeing us—as well as the real possibility that even a fed dog could bite.

  Much was said. The local authorities were told. Yes, yes, they knew this dog, but their response was unpromising, and we could feel them turn away. You have jobs to do, we heard in their dismissal. That dog wasn’t the reason we were here. First duty to the search. They were right in that, of course, but the pitbull remained a figure of conscience for many of us. We saw her every day, and we left her every day looking hopefully after us.

  On one chilly afternoon, I was paired to search with a sheriff’s deputy who worked with a beautiful Belgian Malinois. We were to drive to a remote area miles away and meet a bus of community volunteers. They would grid-walk the large search area with us and a couple of other canine handlers and cadaver dogs. My partner and I were first to head out. We had either bad directions that led us to the wrong place or good directions we didn’t follow well, and we made at least two false stops. The Malinois was the only one happy about the long, bumpy drive in light sleet. She huffed over my shoulder, straining forward to see the view.

  Finally, the deputy and I took a last turn into the woods, stopped the truck, got out, and waited for the bus to arrive. We had a hand-drawn map as well as a scribbled description of the area we were to search; it was uninhabited and ambiguously owned, and although we were told to keep our eyes open, search officials didn’t think we’d encounter any problems there. We were stiff with cold and eager to get started. We paced a little, huffing steam into our cupped hands to warm our faces. Enough waiting already. The officer left his dog in the truck, and we crunched our way across the turf frosted with ice pellets, thinking we would get a visual on the search boundaries and see just how big this area was.

  But the terrain didn’t seem to match up to the description we’d received. Our notes could have described a hundred places out here, really. Two-lane country road: check. Worn, unpaved turn to the south: check. We crossed a creek bed, saw woods and unimproved land on the left, barbed-wire fence on the right. That fence petered out to nothing, collapsed with disregard. Landmarks noted on the map were sort of there and sort of not. We followed the dirt road about two hundred yards, walking down a long slope into the quiet wood.

  For all its isolation, this place had seen some traffic. Vehicles had worn the road smooth—a number of vehicles over time, each following the route of countless others. I suppose that should have alerted one of us. Why all the traffic out here in the middle of nowhere? We found the churn of tire tracks in the lowest spots, dug deep, slicing the old mud in wide half circles, as though after a hard rain, several trucks had gotten stuck or come here for a little off-road fun.

  There was no sign of anyone here now. And where were the volunteers? Where was the bus? Where were we, exactly, with regard to this hand-drawn map? The world seemed far too quiet even for a rural area. If there were local birds, we had spooked them into silence. We crunched on for a while, saying nothing.

  The smell of death was upon us before we saw it, a funk rising up out of nowhere and falling so heavily that all the other odors of the woods gave way to it. There was something odd about it, and while I knew immediately this wasn’t going to be who we were searching for, I also knew it was
going to be bad.

  “Oh shit,” said the deputy ahead of me. He had stumbled into cinder blocks and old chain link. “Jesus,” he said when he came upon the dogs.

  A lot of dogs. Thirty or forty of them, maybe. Prisoners all, and dead. Some small dogs were huddled in low, patched-together kennels of wood and chicken wire. Other, bigger dogs lay in slightly larger runs of chain link over pea gravel, beneath an unsteady framework of wood and corrugated tin. The little dogs were housed two and three together. The larger ones seemed to have been kept by themselves.

  Labs, pit bulls, hounds, goldens, terriers, spaniels—and a lot of fuzzy, indeterminate mixed breeds. Some of the dogs had died miserably pressed against the wire; others lay curled in fetal, hopeless positions. A few had been worked by carrion eaters. Anything could have killed the dogs in those kennels—starvation or sickness; exposure, perhaps. A small dirt pit about twenty yards away held the charred remains of three dogs. They lay apart, stretched out as though they were running. They appeared to have been torched.

  I don’t know how long I actually stood there—long enough to take in those desperate faces—but it couldn’t have been much more than a minute. I turned so abruptly that I ran into a tree, witless. The young deputy scrambled away a few feet behind me.

  We got out of there as fast as we could, struggling back the way we’d come. The deputy stopped once and bent over with his hands on his knees, and I thought for a moment he would vomit. I looked away and rubbed my hands to stop their shaking, feeling grief, fury, helplessness—guilt, even. Why guilt? But guilt was there, so strong I can feel it still.

  What had we seen? Was this a fighting facility? A puppy mill’s crude kennel? A cult’s sacrifice operation or a hoarder’s sick idea of rescue? Whatever it was, these dogs had died apart from mercy of any kind.

  When we moved on, I was quiet. The deputy was not. Getting angry seemed to help. I envied him his threats and ugly promises, hacking away at the memory, like it was something to be felled. We slogged out of the mud and ran down the long road we never should have taken in the first place.

  We worked on, in that sector and others; we worked on because that was our job, making terrible finds that were part of the search. And then the search stood down. So small the order—a crackle of static and an “All-call, return to base,” and the news spread across the area like a stain. Search personnel came in from the nearer spaces and the far ones and gathered for the debrief, mute with finality. Afterward, I saw the young deputy across the room. His eyes were rimmed red with fatigue, but he bobbed his head at me and mouthed the word Dogs, then pointed to himself and a local officer.

  Packing up, heading out, I saw the neglected pit bull one last time at the edge of the parking lot. She still rushed forward on her chain, but she had begun wagging her tail when cars rolled up to park. She was wiggly now, hopeful in the way some dogs can impossibly be hopeful after hardship. Don’t wag at us, baby, I thought. Don’t wag. I could imagine the punishment that wag might earn. Someone had crossed out the sign’s NO and ING and then turned the sign around to face the owner’s house. FEED THE GODDAM DOG, it read. It was a rant, a vent, and it wouldn’t change a thing.

  As much as I wanted to save her, I didn’t. I got in the car and I left her. In the rearview mirror, her eager face faded from sight. That image carried as I drove away from that town, through another and another and another. Unable to escape my conscience and my cowardice, I finally pulled the car over and cried. I had never cried after a search and haven’t since, but I needed to shake this one off. I needed to shake off the pit bull, too, and breathe free of the memory of those tortured dogs, but I could still smell their suffering and see my partner trembling with rage. “What the fuck? What the fuck?” the young man had cried, frustrated with our universal impotence at saving anything at all.

  So when I couldn’t escape my own sadness and spoke to counselors in 2004, out of misplaced bravado I said nothing about the dogs. Now I see how bound they were to the fabric of that search and the horrors they represented, but talking about them then seemed like an indulgence. Dogs were not what we’d been searching for. Grief might have marked me soft. I told myself I had written in my journal about it, had walked it off, and, a faithful woman, had asked God for some kind of wisdom that would explain how—and why—He would let those sparrows fall to the ground apart from the Father. I never got an answer, but hey, I’d taken the shot.

  So I went back to work. I went out on other searches. I got on with things. That’s been my way since childhood: When you’re unhappy, get on with it; a 7 percent solution of self-preservation and denial.

  Anxiety disorder began for me as a series of small nuisances months later. I started to have issues with music. An avid listener across genres, I was first unable to listen to orchestral pieces without feeling my spirits plummet. A heart-sink, I called it, and the sensation was as sickening as an elevator’s drop from cut cable. Weird, I thought; a mood, I rationalized, but orchestra music was out. Rap from passing cars felt like a beating. Jazz was too damn glib, and pop music from any age seemed trite. Walking to a meeting in a downtown hotel, I overheard a lounge pianist selling Glenn Miller’s “Pennsylvania 6-5000” and was furious.

  That rootless anger was the next sign that something was wrong, and it attached itself randomly to little things—TV commercials, junk mail, and slow gas pumps. I’m normally a cheerful person, but sometimes then I felt so angry I thought my ears would explode, blown outward from the frustration of something simple—say, a dry-cleaning tag I couldn’t remove. I have always liked to walk, and the urge to get on with things agitated me to walk even more. The madder I got, the more anxious I got, the more I walked, and in 2004, my weight began to drop.

  A sudden crime wave in my neighborhood added to the problem. Burglaries. Robberies. Car theft. Rape. Bad news crackled through the area. Every incident seemed to bring trouble closer to home. A passing neighbor with her own dog liked to gossip about who’d been hit most recently. She had all the details: who’d walked in the front door to find the back door kicked ajar, whose gate was left open, whose pets were gone. She was a dramatic person given to exclamation. “Busted out the back window in broad daylight!” she’d say. “Bam”—making a Tae Bo jab with her fist—“just walked right on in!” My neighbor brought the bad word fast, and she tipped me to an interactive crime map on our city’s home page. A person could keep up with what problems were happening where. “Look at that crime map and see how safe we all aren’t!” she said.

  Normally, I would have classified the woman as a local character. But now I was broody, so I checked out the map. Amazing. Five clicks, and a whole ugly local world opened up. The map had icons for assault, burglary, armed robbery, car theft, and homicide. Want to see all the area murders this year? Just check the appropriate box and click. Interested in stolen vehicles? Then deselect the little red icon of the akimbo man in bell bottoms (murder) and click the little blue car speeding away (auto theft). And if you reviewed all the crime in your neighborhood month by month, you could easily learn that a neighbor five doors away had had a burglary with garage-door access at two in the afternoon on the second Wednesday in June.

  The second Wednesday in June? Where was I at two o’clock that Wednesday? I was sitting right here. Probably looking at the crime map.

  I knew I was visiting the website too often—more often than it was updated—and that I stared at the same crimes every morning. But for me, the crime map had become as addictive as e-mail: What if something showed up on the map that hadn’t been there last time I checked? What if it was on my street? What if it was next door? I didn’t know enough about obsessive-compulsive behavior to recognize the symptomatic gnat cloud of what-ifs that was beginning to drive my impulses. But vaguely wondering if recent search-and-rescue callouts might have done me some kind of damage, I began to keep a journal of my visits to the crime map, hoping to sense what I was afraid of, or if I was afraid at all. Those days I was alternately angry
, worried, and hyperactive. And skinny. Something was obviously bothering me, but what?

  A morning run gave me part of the answer. Huffing through the neighborhood just after dawn one midsummer day, I passed a telephone pole swaddled in lost-pet flyers. I always stopped to look at these—no new habit there—but one particularly caught me. Beneath a picture of two tiny red dachshunds, it read:

  Missing

  Taco and Salsa

  Lost during home burglary June 28th

  We are heartbroken.

  Reward for their return. Keep everything else.

  No questions asked.

  Please.

  Standing there on the corner and sweating from the day’s forecast heat, I felt cold. And I wondered if maybe I knew about this event already, if this family’s break-in had appeared on the crime map with the little black mask for home burglary. I looked at the photo of the dogs, one dark as a kidney bean and the other the color of chili flakes, their heads tilting thoughtfully to the click of the camera. Were these dogs stolen, or did they simply walk out a door the burglars left open? For investigating officers, Taco and Salsa would be considered just part of the aggregate loss. Two pets with no street experience between them and high-traffic areas just a block away. Stolen or strayed, the prospects weren’t good. (I could hear my neighbor in imagination: And you know they’re taking pet dogs as bait for dogfighting rings! And then I realized I was hearing my own fears.)

  We are heartbroken. Keep everything else. Please. I reached up to secure the flyer where the wind had begun to pull it apart.