The Possibility Dogs

by Susannah Charleson

  Back in the car, we wind down long roads from afternoon into evening, many of them roads of memory. I remember searching some of these places. There is a field we grid-walked on the space shuttle recovery. This driveway leads up the rise to that farmhouse, which is still leaning, as if peering down at the street. We pass snow-cone booths and farm stands, derelict churches, a grocery store where almost a dozen searchers went for cough drops after too much time in the sleet.

  We pass rutted red trails leading into deep woods. We pass wildlife. A rabbit briefly races a grass verge beside us. Hunched turkey vultures glance up from some flat thing they have found beside the road. I glance in the rearview mirror to see how Jake continues to take the adventure. Not restless, not carsick, he is sitting up in his seat-belt harness, gazing out the window with a contented pant. He is a dog that loves the moment. Eyebrows raising, ears wheeling, his face is in motion at the curiosities blowing past us. It reads: Interesting, interesting, wow, wow, WOW.

  Day 1:

  (I write in the notebook)

  Public access/task behaviors demonstrated:

  Extended car travel

  Controlled load and unload from a vehicle

  Controlled building entry and exit

  Heel, Sit, Down, Stay

  Under (at a restaurant)

  Brace (down stairs)

  Find Door (at a gas station)

  Leave It (gum wad)

  Leave It (chicken nugget)

  Leave It (random puddle of goo)

  Note: startled by blow-up princess (no bark, held his ground)

  We’re so tired when we get to our hotel room, Jake eats only half of his supper. He leads me to the door for his nighttime constitutional, then takes us back to the right room with sleepy nonchalance. Door (hotel room), Take Us Back (hotel room). I’ll add those notes . . . tomorrow. Jake goes belly-up by the television. To the sound of his snoring, I fall asleep in my clothes.

  Day 2: Which comes first—the eighteen-wheeler or the retriever? I don’t know. Plenty of car-chasing dogs have rushed us today, some on chains and some behind fences, country dogs of every description, loving their sport. And then comes this one late in the afternoon, this tubby black Lab on a porch, who spots my car approaching from one direction and a big truck merging onto our road from another. She wants to chase. She is up and heading for us, springing into her run so hard that I think the chain, when it checks her, will surely snap her neck. My God, she is fast.

  But there is no chain, and there is no fence. The Lab is through the brush and heedless in the road, barking, barking, barking, and whether the driver of the merging truck doesn’t see my car, doesn’t care, or steers wildly to avoid hitting the dog head-on, I don’t know. I lose sight of her as the truck slurs a wide arc across the pavement before us. I hear our simultaneous horns. Hitting the brakes and jerking the steering wheel, I watch the back of the truck slide so close that I can see finger streaks across the dirt of it—and at the same time I brace for collision, I expect the thud of a struck dog and its cry.

  We miss. We miss the truck, which seems impossible, but the truck slings some of its load free from the covering tarp, a spray of stones. One rock strikes my windshield hard enough to crack it as we skid to the edge of a ditch. The car stops, but the crack continues its momentum, spreading upward across the windshield, curving downward before my eyes.

  The truck rumbles on. My last, breathless sight of it is a sign on the back, below the tarp: KEEP DISTANCE 200 FT. NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR WINDSHIELDS.

  Fumbling with my shoulder harness, I twist to look back to Jake. He hasn’t made a sound. He is gamely struggling up from where his seat-belt harness has caught him, one leg twisted, his ears swung back. He looks surprised, but not distressed. I pull to a safer verge of the road and put on the flashers. If Jake’s fine, we’re fine.

  The dog, I think as I get out. There is no sign of the black Lab that rushed us—not on the road and not in the ditches on either side, no blood across the pavement. She is so not there as I look for her that in the moment it almost seems like I imagined that plump, black dog skimming across the ground. It isn’t until I open the door to check on Jake that I feel a dog nose against the back of my knee and hear her whimper of greeting. And here she is, a friendly dog despite her car-chasing. She and Jake stretch nose to nose, their tails swishing some common message. I look them both over. Neither is worse for the experience. The Lab would like to climb into the car. She would really like to climb into the car. She washes my face as I struggle to keep her out of it. She is adoring and brainless and, oh, she is pregnant. And lucky. She follows easily when I lead her by her collar back across the road and toward her house. Her owner meets me with apologies. She says something about bug spray in the house so the dog was outside, something about Daisy never leaves the yard.

  Which is not quite true.

  When I return to the car, my hands are shaking from the rush of adrenaline Jake can surely smell. We won’t drive again just yet. We sit together while I massage his back and neck; he drapes his forepaws across my knees. I can feel a creeping stiffness along my right shoulder—from the tensing for impact? From the hard cut on the wheel? I’m going to be sore tomorrow. Remembering that twisted leg, I wonder if Jake will too. He’s enjoying the attention. He seems comfortable enough right now.

  Across the road, the capering black Lab toddles into the house with her owner.

  Calmly responds to unfamiliar dog.

  I laugh when I remember that service-test item. I tell Jake he nailed that one, and then some.

  Day 3: All the way back to my first meeting with Bob and Haska, service dog handlers have told me that their worst confrontations are often in small-town stores and restaurants—a problem caused mostly, some think, by lack of exposure rather than malice. Whatever the reason, there’s a crapshoot quality to every interaction, and there are handlers who still avoid local businesses altogether, trusting corporate chains to have a better understanding of the ADA. While I don’t doubt their experiences, I live near a cluster of small towns and work with a service dog in training in most of them. So far it’s never happened to me. Maybe we’ve entered a new era. Maybe I’ve just been lucky.

  But out here, well apart from the metropolitan area, it could be different. Or not. Dogs in houses, dogs in yards; we pass a woman pushing a toddler and a poodle in a tandem stroller down a sidewalk. Resting in the shade of an awning, a sleepy pointer mix, blushed red with local dirt, hardly opens an eye when we stop for gas. We are deep in dog country it appears—but so far on this trip, I’ve not seen another service dog of any kind.

  A café promises FAMILY FARM HOMEMADE PEACH PIE. Everyone in the restaurant looks up when Jake and I enter. I am hobbling a little from the long drive and sore outright from the yesterday’s incident with the truck. Jake’s in his stability harness, tagged for Service, and as I sit and gesture him Under, he folds himself beneath a table and lays his head on his paws. No one gives him much attention. The café might seat forty people on a good day. Today it seats three (none in sandals) and a dog. It smells like the L & M Café of my childhood, a comfortable blend of cigarette smoke, sugar, coffee, and grease.

  A teenager in a pink T-shirt takes my order—I’m having that pie and coffee—and Jake and I are settled in comfortably when a woman elbows out from the kitchen, drying her hands. She exchanges comments with the waitress and, following a gesture of the teenager’s head, looks toward us. She is a damp, flushed, pretty woman with pinned-up hair that has fallen a little loose. Her expression is a little guarded, as though she has something difficult to say and isn’t sure how to say it. When she passes, one of the men drinking coffee at the counter wheels sideways on his stool, gazing out the plate-glass window with us in his periphery. Though Jake Piper is credentialed as a service dog in training, and, with provisions, local law allows training dogs in public spaces, I’ve heard enough about the prove-it moment that I feel my guard rising. Here it comes, I think, and I haven’t even touched my
coffee yet.

  But when she gets to us, instead of standing at our table with her hands on her hips, the woman touches a chair and asks if she can sit. She just wanted to say hello, she says, after an awkward silence. Then she leans forward over folded arms and, looking at Jake, whispers that she doesn’t want to embarrass me, she doesn’t want to make a scene, but—she gestures for a bowl of water for Jake—her daughter wants to try for a scholarship that gives volunteerism credits, and she can earn some by raising a service dog puppy. Great idea, seemed to her. But they have no idea where to get one. She asks where I got mine. Do service dog groups have a Facebook page? she wonders. Could I point her someplace on the web?

  I can.

  Three cups of coffee and that generous slice of pie later, the woman and I are still talking, and I’ve stayed far longer than I intended to. Service dogs she knew, psych service dogs she didn’t, but she’s glad to hear about them, she says. She has seen a friend’s postpartum depression so serious that she was hospitalized on suicide watch. It will take her friend a while to come back from that, if she ever really does. Folks that haven’t been there have no idea how disabling depression can be.

  “There are dogs for that,” she says in wonder. “And some of them come from shelters. Who would ever imagine?”

  We head out, the woman accompanying us. “Such a good boy,” she says of Jake, who pads slowly beside me across patched and shadowed pavement. She’s resisted petting him—and he, good boy, has resisted asking—but she’s wrapped a hamburger patty in foil for him for later. I see his eyes squinch and his cheeks wuffle with the promise of it. We depart on that, carrying kindness, taking the scenic route she recommended rather than the road marked by the GPS.

  Peace won by inches. That’s how Merion measured her change at the side of a dog. Something strikes in a terrible place, and the thing you think will own you, the thing you believe you will never get past, is survived. She could have been speaking for most of the psych dog handlers I know—Bob, Kristin, Gene, Alex, Nancy, and how many others; the living respondents to disaster of every kind. In a way, she could have been speaking for me.

  I think of her now as I stand in a gravel parking lot with Jake Piper. It is a familiar place, though there’s a failed gas station I don’t remember to one side and a restaurant with a new porch and paint job on the other. The trees are taller, the thick brush green where I remember only a winter tangle of weeds. It’s a place I never planned to come back to.

  For right reasons and for wrong ones, I left a suffering dog behind here once. Though I can still see her clearly, that half-starved pit bull wagging for kibble is no longer here. That was a decade ago, and she would be very old now, if she was still alive at all. There’s no replacement dog either. There’s no handwritten sign. I wonder about that history—wonder if the law intervened, if the house changed owners, or if those owners somehow had a change of heart. I am no better at forgiving them than I am at forgiving myself, but standing where I did in that moment of grief and divided conscience, I’ve put anger to rest. And guilt. I realize now that any choice I made beside that sweet, long-ago dog would have been, in some way, the wrong one. I did the best that I could. There will be dogs you can save and dogs you cannot, Paula once told me. I look at Jake and recognize how great a part that pit bull played in Jake’s own saving, in the saving of every rescued dog I’ve since brought into the house.

  Jake is happily oblivious to all this. He knows nothing of the place. He is out of the car to shake off stiff muscles and to sniff and to wander, off-duty, unvested. Ambling now to the long end of his free lead, he works his nose low, then pauses a moment and stretches. But he seems to recognize my pensiveness. Every few minutes Jake comes back to me—just a quick check-in, though I haven’t asked for it. I think of Alex’s description of Roscoe—Even when he wasn’t beside me, he was with me—and that spirit is true also of Jake. In vest or out of it, he never carries his duty to a partner like a burden. Now he snorts into a patch of turf and then comes trotting back to nudge my palm and look into my eyes, like Heyup, heyup, howzit?

  It’s fine. The wind has shifted. No longer resonant, this place is just somewhere that I have been.

  “Let’s go home,” I tell Jake. It’s time. The place is getting busy. An SUV pulls in next to us, explodes grade-school cheerleaders. A dark-haired woman dashes into the restaurant and out again, her hands full of take-out boxes. We slip out of the parking lot as a truck with two hounds in the back pulls into it and then pauses nearby on the gravel. The driver is texting. His radio’s blaring Tim McGraw’s “Truck Yeah”—the sad-eyed hounds’ panting is perfectly in sync. They appear to be rocking out.

  Let’s go home. North-northwestward, we’ll be homebound along new roads and back-traveling a few we came in on. It’s been a good trip, I think. A fast trip; I feel it. We accomplished what we set out to do—took a long look at Jake’s maturity, his diligence, and, more than that, his happiness at this work, and took a long look at myself as partner too. And we’ve made some new friends, dog and human. We’ve had some surprises. We’ve said some goodbyes. True of not only this trip but the whole journey, I realize, from that first moment in a Baltimore restaurant when a man said, This is my story, and this is what my dog can do.

  We have full days coming. Less an ending than a rite of passage, this trip has framed what’s ahead for us. Jake and I have tests to take, new service tasks to train. Mizzen and Ollie have therapy visits booked in the coming months. And Puzzle, who will at first sulk when we return home to her, has more searches to make and much more to teach me about the pathways of scent. There are good dogs out there with service hearts, too, ready to be found.

  We have so much to learn.

  I’m restless in the driver’s seat, but Jake Piper’s found the sweet spot in his safety harness, a place where he can tilt back, rest his head, and work his nose in the slipstream at will. He’s worked hard. Sometimes I glance back and see him dozing and nodding like a bobble-head doll. Sometimes I see his mouth open and his eyes wide as he gazes out the window, like this is the best life ever, like he has seen the most amazing things.

  Afterword

  IT WAS NEVER MY intention to start a service dog nonprofit. The curiosity sparked by Bob and Haska and furthered by Puzzle would result, I thought, in a lot of research, some volunteerism with one local service group or another, and plenty of advocacy for assistance dogs on Facebook and Twitter. All of those things came to pass. There are fine organizations providing beautifully trained, responsive psychiatric service dogs to clients who need them, and I never had it in mind to create another.

  But for some partners, the argument for owner-training a service dog remains, and as I pursued that question —How hard is it to find a candidate dog in rescue and train it for psychiatric service?—I came to realize that parts of this experience were harder than they needed to be, that a nonprofit group to support owner-trained service dog teams could be very useful. I imagined a group that could help handlers at any point in the experience—helping would-be partners find appropriate dogs, for example, or connect with professional trainers, or make a confident air journey with their working dogs for the first time, or train additional tasks for new conditions, or acquire pet insurance. Or, at the other end of the timeline, helping handlers cope with the loss of loved canine partners or prepare future lives for their assistance dogs in the event of their own deaths.

  Possibility Dogs®, Inc., came into being as a result of the many requests for help that I received while in the process of finding and training Jake Piper, Mizzen, and Ollie. We are a niche organization that focuses primarily on rescued-service-dog partnerships. We are designed to assist clients, as we are able, at any point on the journey beside their dogs. At the time of this writing, we have co-trained psychiatric service dogs beside their partners; identified dogs in rescue as good candidates for service, emotional support, or therapy; arranged for emotional support dogs and therapy candidates to interact with the publi
c in libraries, schools, and care facilities. We have also helped first-time service dog teams make sense of the travel process by air or train in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Dallas, Seattle, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, D.C., Baton Rouge, Los Angeles, and Burlington, Vermont. We have helped two partners locate their lost service dogs and a soldier find a home for his dog in the event that his own current medical condition cannot be survived. It’s good work, and challenging.

  All this said, I must agree with many of the professionals working with service dog organizations: finding a dog in rescue that is capable of becoming a thorough, reliable assistance dog is difficult. Even service organizations that have breeding programs report that as many as 40 to 60 percent of their carefully bred candidate dogs wash out or are re-careered. Certainly the number of dogs in rescue who evaluate well but are ultimately not up to the challenge of the work is equally high or higher. One dog in thirty is the statistic you often hear. I still call another professional trainer/evaluator in on every evaluation so that one of us can interact with the dog and the other can watch from a distance, with video where possible. There is value in multiple interactions and a trained second pair of eyes.

  And evaluation is just the first hurdle. Some dogs do well in initial training, then reveal some health problem or emotional trigger that is profound enough to make them unsuitable for service. Sometimes such triggers can show up very late in the process. What then for the handler who has an owner-trained dog not up for the job? What then for the dog, brought home for a specific purpose? There are respondents on web forums and blog writers out there deliberating this difficult point of decision. While most service dog programs have a protocol for the dogs that do not ultimately work well, and they have a re-career or re-home path in place, for the owner-trained partnership, the handler needs to consider this possibility before the candidate dog ever comes home. (For a thought-provoking look at this, see the blog After Gadget: Facing Life After the Loss of My Service Dog, http://af tergadget.wordpress.com. Of particular note are posts discussing the potential washout of Barnum, Gadget’s successor: http://aftergadget.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/washing-out-make-or-heartbreak-time/.)