by Peter Martin
This journey was not without its emergencies, and Perth was at the center of all of them. She was “lost” several times during the ten weeks, or at least so we thought at the time. She probably did not. On the first day, we had driven on for an hour after stopping at a gas station in Illinois, only to discover that Perth was not in the back seat as we had thought she was. We turned around and drove back, muttering to ourselves. She was waiting patiently by one of the gas pumps. She hopped into the car nonchalantly, undisturbed, without much outward show of emotion, as if to say, “What kept you?”
Another awkward moment was at the Harry S. Truman Museum in Independence, Missouri. When we got back to the car after visiting the museum, Perth was gone. No amount of searching turned her up. It was drawing near closing time, after two hours of hunting for her, when Cindy also discovered that her watch had fallen off her wrist somewhere. Irritated, she strode into the museum again to look for it. She turned a couple of corners and entered a cool and empty room with an exhibition featuring the Korean War. The first thing she heard as she came in was a clicking noise on the tiled floor. There was Perth sniffing around contentedly, appearing to be interested in the museum exhibits displaying pictures of President Truman, General Douglas MacArthur and battle scenes of the war. There was no telling how long she had been in there, but Cindy was in a foul mood.
“What kind of animal are you?” she stormed. “We should have been halfway across this state by now, but here you are, you deplorable hound, sniffing around this museum while we exhaust ourselves for two hours trying to find you.”
Perth watched her, looking a little guilty, perhaps.
“I can’t believe nobody has seen you in here. You’re a bad dog and I’m beginning to think we should have left you at home in a kennel.”
They walked out of the museum together, past the guards who told Cindy in no uncertain terms the not very surprising news that dogs were not allowed in the museum.
“This is a place for people, lady, not dogs,” said one indignantly.
Instinctively, Cindy defended Perth. “There is no sign saying that,” she shot back combatively.
“There are some things we don’t think we need to have signs for, lady. Do you always take your dog into museums?”
“Always.”
With that, Cindy brushed past him and hastily made for the car with Perth trotting along beside her, leaving the guard fuming behind. In the meantime, I had found the watch in the car. We drove off at last.
For the next week we drove through the beautifully rolling wheat fields of Kansas and over the majestic Rocky Mountains in Colorado with their wild flowers and flowing crystal streams and waterfalls. We saw the orange and rusty splendor of the Grand Canyon, made our way through the spectacular landscape of Mesa Verde and eventually reached the Joshua Tree National Park in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California. We camped there, careful to zip up the net to keep out scorpions and snakes of the venomous kind. The Mojave Desert is relatively small, but it is serious business. A rocky and scrubby wasteland of low mountains and broad valleys, its daytime summer temperatures normally reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Its most famous feature is the aptly named Death Valley, which we decided to give a miss.
We continued westward, down to Tijuana, Mexico, then up the California, Oregon and Washington coasts to British Columbia, and back to Ohio over the Rockies and across the North Central Plains. Perth did not create any major crises, although she was the central protagonist in several anxious moments. She had a fight with a Mexican mongrel in Tijuana that reminded me of a scene from a Graham Greene short story. Scruffy men whiling away the hours in cafés around the square simply watched as Perth raised a little dust in chasing off the presumptuous Mexican cur. A day or two later and in another world, outside Los Angeles, we were asked to leave the famous English Garden at the Huntington Library and Museum in San Marino, California, after Perth gobbled up prize strawberries in the decorative kitchen garden. In San Francisco, in the famous Haight-Ashbury intersection, Mecca for the world’s hippies, Perth sat placidly (perhaps even dumbfounded) watching the constant procession of incredibly strange-looking human beings. Hippies paraded by in all shapes, with hair of every color known to man, and in weird and wonderful clothing that would make even today’s fashion designers run for cover. They stopped to smoke who knows what and we saw a few of them jabbing away at each other in the bright sunshine with frighteningly dirty needles. Perth could not resist sniffing a few of them, much to their irritation, as she had never encountered anything like their aromas in the many miles she had logged during her short life. I tremble to think what might have happened if she had snapped at one or two of them. They might have taken to jabbing her, launching her on quite a different sort of “trip.”
More worrying, in Vancouver, British Columbia, we had to decide what to do with her while we took the ferry for a few hours to Victoria Island. The ferry operators prohibited dogs on the boats, and it seemed too much of a bother to try to smuggle her onboard. It was cruel of us, but we parked the locked car in the peaceful shade of a spreading oak and left her in it with the window down about eight inches. She would be cool, we told ourselves, and could sleep away the time. There was a bowl of water on the floor.
We then hastened onto the ferry and waited as the ropes were untied from the dock.
“I feel rotten,” I said, looking at Cindy. “And guilty. We should have brought her with us. What could we have been thinking of? She’ll die of dehydration.” I imagined the worst. She would raise such a rebellious hue and cry that the police would be called in to investigate. They would remove her to some city dog compound and as the weekend was coming it would be days before we could retrieve her.
Cindy did not answer, but her expression said she felt the same thing. The mountains towered high above the city, the water was the cleanest blue and the island looked green and inviting on the horizon. We stood on the deck by the gangplank as the minutes ticked by, gazing hypnotically down the length of the dock. As a couple of dockers began to throw the ropes onto the ferry, suddenly I saw Perth, or was it a phantom, fly onto the far end of the dock and race toward us at a furious pace. The boat had just begun to ease away as she sprinted for all her worth, a blur as she flew across the weathered boards.
“Good God,” I whispered to Cindy, “it’s Perth.”
It was obvious what was in her mind, but there was no way she could make it. She just kept coming. We were about four feet off the dock when she reached the end of it. Without pausing, she launched herself off the edge and into the air, across the water and onto the boat. The passengers who witnessed her leap through space as if there were no tomorrow burst into applause when she landed and walked over to us, her tail wagging deliriously. Her little heart was beating wildly. Her eyes were flashing. I looked at her in disbelief and admiration. We kept her out of sight and did our successful smuggling routine on the way to the island and back. It was a glorious day among the flowers and graciousness of Victoria, the climax of our journey.
Cindy and I had begun to take this sort of stunt of Perth’s for granted by then, almost as if we had become believers in a type of supernatural wisdom and courage in her. She could never be lost. She was indestructible. We made our way back home with the three of us intact.
5
ALTHOUGH LIFE BACK IN OHIO continued to bore us, we enjoyed our second year there more, cementing friendships with people like Frank whom we would treasure forever after. Still, we knew we had to move on soon. We could not bear the thought of waking up there twenty years later, expecting that the next twenty years might be spent the same way, a universe away from a large body of water and without hills and mountains. So when after Christmas I was offered an excellent job at a university on the southeast coast of Florida, I jumped at it. By midsummer we were there, reluctant to have left our Ohio friends but eager to embrace the more vivid subtropical climate and the majesty of the ocean, even if Florida had no hills.
I s
tood on the beach alone on our first morning in Florida as the dawn spread out across the sky, lighting up the ocean in a succession of glorious tints, from a cold and pale gray to an orange-blue, to a triumphant golden glow suffusing the sky, ocean and palm tree-decked landscape with a reassuring warmth and sense of hope. The sound of the surf made me feel as if I were standing at the edge of the world. Nothing on land behind me seemed real. Gazing out at the ocean, which I had always loved, I felt in a way that I had come home—“Whereon rolled the ocean, thereon was his home,” Byron wrote. I had not lived by the ocean for fifteen years, not since I was ten, living along the sandy, piny coast of Uruguay, a lifetime ago, before my family had ripped me from the landscape of my youth to move to America.
But the beauty and celebration of that dawn seemed to mock the way I really felt. Cindy and I soon discovered that we had not really landed in a paradise of hope and promise. Florida was even flatter than Ohio, and its culture seemed odd to us. It was America, and yet seemed wholly unlike the rest of the country, an American retirement subculture with its own pensioners’ logic. Things have changed now, but many young people then felt they were interlopers, only tolerated as guests who did not really belong, useful appendages to the main business of creating arcadias for the millions in their twilight years. Even at the university, I felt like part of a cadre of service personnel for the millions of retired folk who washed over Florida in waves every year. Much of Florida’s lifestyle, from bingo games and shuffleboard courts to sterile and spick-and-span condominiums, seemed totally irrelevant to us.
We arrived in Florida with a large rental truck crammed with our chattels, not knowing a soul. It was wretchedly hot and even more wretchedly humid. Perth, I am sure, did not have a clue what was going on. It seemed an empty world with no meaning for any of us. We realized with horror that we may have turned our backs on life itself. I could not even imagine the existence of a decent library here with books telling of the riches of world culture, art and civilization. Everything was different: smells, sounds, lawns, bugs, birds, fish, vegetation, architecture and the tempo and temper of life itself in the languid and oppressive atmosphere. We were lucky enough to find a reasonable vacation apartment for as long as we wanted it, about two hundred yards from the ocean, within earshot of the surf. But, except when we escaped to the beach, we were imprisoned in the air-conditioned apartment, driven to it by the intense heat and humidity.
Cindy and I would have been in despair had it not been for each other, Perth and the ocean. That part of the coast, about twenty miles south of Palm Beach, was extremely wealthy, and the small town we had chosen, almost a village, was blessed with a narrow four-mile-long strip of gorgeous sandy beach studded with enormous mansions and gloriously luxuriant gardens. We were at the humbler end of this stretch. The thick, tangled vegetation completely concealed these houses from the beach. All one could see from the sand was a wilderness of cabbage palms, royal palms, Scotch pines, masses of oleander, hibiscus and other shrubs, long grasses and the scrub kind of vegetation that can always be found fringing a beach.
Perth was the first to come to terms with our new home in Delray Beach. While we unpacked, she made straight for the ocean and in minutes had vanished into the thick labyrinthine undergrowth along Ocean Drive. From time to time we heard her barking and howling as she frenetically chased who knows what. A few hours later she returned, exhausted and lacerated with scratches from sharp and pointed cacti but with the gleam of discovery in her excited eyes.
“Seems like Perth likes it here,” I said.
“I can’t imagine what there is for her to explore here, except the beach,” Cindy said lazily, pausing in her making of the beds to notice that Perth was, indeed, very happy. “Let’s go for a swim with her after breakfast tomorrow morning. She can frisk along the surf among the sandpipers. I don’t want to do anything but relax after that horrendous drive.”
It was a beautiful morning, cooler and peaceful. A little breeze caressed the morning air, which was perfectly clear without the normal punishing humidity of that time of year. Vivid colors shone everywhere. The ocean was brilliant, the sun sparkling on it in millions of little gemlike reflections. Surf rolled in gently, hissing pleasantly over the hard-packed sand. Our spirits rose. Instead of breakfasting at home, we decided to treat ourselves in a little yellow-canopied outdoor café just to the north of where the dense strip of mansions and greenery began. The café faced the ocean, and from it we could look in between some towering palms to the shimmering water. Not many people were about. Perth sat quietly next to us as we devoured our bacon and eggs and drank the local nectar, the most delicious freshly squeezed orange juice either of us had ever tasted.
Afterward the three of us drifted down to the water’s edge and walked south along the beach, away from the public area in the direction of the “wilderness” section of beach. We continued for half a mile or so over the fine white sand between the surf and the thick greenness. We had the beach almost entirely to ourselves since people generally did not go that far to swim and lie on the sand, preferring instead to be nearer to each other and the shops of the public beach. It’s a curious thing about human nature, how people like to bunch themselves into crowds instead of striking off on their own.
Perth declined to follow us into the water and ran off in the opposite direction, into the dense undergrowth on the prowl for rabbits, armadillos, raccoons and who knows what else. We swam, walked on the beach, and sunned ourselves over the next four hours. Occasionally in the distance we heard her high-pitched howl over the surf. When it came time to leave, she was nowhere in sight. Nor could we hear her. For half an hour I walked along the edge of the beach, yelling her name into the thick vegetation, but nothing came of it. I am sure the crème de la crème sitting on opulent terraces sipping their exotic juices amid their bougainvillia heard me, and a few of the more intuitive among them may even have made the connection between Perth’s clamor and my cries. Nobody came out either to help or shut me up, so I gave it up. I paced through the sand back to Cindy.
“Why don’t we go home and come back for her later when she’s exhausted and ready to quit?” I said hoarsely. We were not worried. Nor was I irritated. In fact, I rejoiced in Perth’s good fortune to be able to run and explore at will, to gratify her urges, especially in this environment where things were neat and controlled, where there was little space for pioneering. I had already seen and felt enough of Florida to decide that Perth could be my alter ego, my mouthpiece of protest, my rebel on the move. I would encourage her to be wild. If she could no longer range in romantically rural upstate New York, she could at least disturb some of the enervating tameness here. It is an understatement to say she would be worlds apart from the ubiquitous poodles who made regular visits to the “poodle-puff” grooming centers around every corner.
We drove back to the apartment. That evening, after dinner, before we set out to find her, she appeared. Tired, limping a little, but obviously happy, she slumped down on the patio. Food and drink soon restored her.
For three months we stayed in this apartment until we bought a house on the west side of the so-called Inland Waterway, the canalized river about half a mile from the coast that cut its way hundreds of miles to the north. We could not afford to buy on the east side of this posh waterway. Perth did not like the move because our new house was in a predictable, neatly-laid-out residential area about three miles from the ocean, with much complicated traffic and a huge drawbridge over the waterway in between. Our address did not exactly take one’s breath away: Northwest 4th Avenue. We had little choice. There was nothing remotely natural about any of the residential areas. And we had to buy because renting was killing our finances. We were expecting to spend at least three years in Florida.
We had been in residence a week when, on the way back from the university one day, I stopped in at our former apartment to see if there was any mail for us there. Perth, not mail, was waiting for me. She was sitting by the pool but there wer
e signs on her that she had been doing the rounds of mansion land again. But to run across town and over the drawbridge, for which she would certainly have had to sit and wait, and then find the apartment, was no small feat. It was a confusing and dangerous route. There did not seem to be anything she could have relied on for direction. I still do not know how she did it. But there she was. I took her back to the beach for a swim. Exhausted, this time she simply sat and gazed out to the sea or contented herself in playing with the tiny sandpipers in the surf while I bodysurfed in the waves.
As luck would have it, Perth found a kindred spirit in her new neighborhood on 4th Avenue, a beagle named Sam, about her size with similar markings but much rougher in appearance. She had some of Perth’s spirit but little of her beauty. Perth was now four and, if anything, had become more beautiful, her ears even softer and longer, her eyes more intense and knowing, her black back more glistening. I loved to stroke her but not possessively, knowing when to stop before she told me. A favorite habit of mine in a lazy mood, in a chair with her, was to run my fingers along her ribs, counting them one by one. She loved it. She also melted when I rubbed her shoulders, digging gently into the muscle. One thing I never did was fuss with her ears. She disliked it.
Sam was not a Frederick, but like Perth he ran free, if only through the neighborhood. Where they went I do not know, but for a few months he was a good companion. It all came to a tragic end one day. Sam may never have been taught properly how to cross streets. He was careless. From inside the house I heard the car’s screeching brakes when it hit him. Waiting at the side of the road, Perth watched helplessly as Sam walked straight into the car’s path. His howling in pain was horrible. When I got there, Perth was hunched over him trying to lick his wounds. I gingerly gathered Sam up off the pavement onto a sheet, careful not to place my hands near his head. I remembered that when I was a boy in Argentina my brother had tried to grab our dog, who had just been run over by a truck, to pull him off the road. Normally very docile, in his agony our Scottie sank her teeth deep into his hand and refused to let go, leaving a wide gash that needed thirty stitches. There was nothing I could do for Sam except rush him off to the vet. Perth came with me. But Sam was broken in several places and in acute pain. The vet quickly put him to sleep. We drove home slowly and sadly. I asked myself whether I should stop letting Perth run free, but I quickly put the thought out of my mind. She had proven herself hundreds of times over by then. What was the point of worrying? Besides, to be tied up would be for her a hell on earth, a life not worth living.