Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself: A Man and His Dog's Struggle to Find Salvation

by Anderegg, Zachary

  I adopt new strategies. During lunch, I avoid people by hiding in the music room and practicing my cello. The music teacher admires my dedication. I take a different route each day to get between classes to avoid certain kids. Some days, if my last class and my next class are both on the first floor, I’ll go all the way up to the third floor and then walk around and down again to avoid running into Ben, Jerry, Leona, Wade, or any number of people. I’ll go to the music room after school and practice the cello as an excuse to hide until everybody who can hurt me has gone home. I am, consequently, getting pretty good on the cello.

  My home is my sanctuary, but only as a place to hide—not as a place to solve my problems. I wake up from tension and stress every morning at about 5:00, and then lie in bed for two and a half hours, thinking about what can happen, what can go wrong, how to stay safe. Fridays after school, I’ll breathe a sigh of relief, and Saturdays are okay, but Sundays, the terror starts to build again. I’ll go to church alone on Sunday morning—my mother isn’t interested—and sometimes I pray for God to help me, but by Sunday afternoon, I know I’m on my own again. Sunday evenings, I have a routine where I’ll watch three different outdoorsman TV shows, first Babe Winkleman’s Good Fishing, and then a fishing show hosted by a guy named Bill Dance, and a show called The In-Fisherman, which is over at nine, and then I go to bed. Fishing is a passion of mine, and watching fishing shows is a way to take my mind off my fears.

  I make it through, one day at a time, but the weight never leaves me. No optimism returns. These bleak midwinter months, Lake Michigan and the sky both turn gray and stay that way for weeks at a time. The snow turns to a murky slush, everything gets grimy and dead looking, and I start to think I have no hope, no realistic way to end this daily cycle of debilitating fear and anxiety except to kill myself.

  It doesn’t seem like a desperate idea, just a logical, practical one. We don’t have any guns in the house, but it isn’t hard to think of high places I could jump from, or medications I could overdose on. What stops me is only a sense that I don’t have the permission I need to make a decision like that. I lack the autonomy I would require to commit suicide. I don’t worry about what my mom would think if I kill myself, because I don’t care, but I am somewhat concerned about what my dad will think, because I fear him, and I know that Gary, our neighbor/landlord, who’s a great guy and almost a surrogate father, will be hurt if I do anything to myself.

  And as always, my mother, who should be there for me, simply is not. When she’s not at work, she lies on the couch, eating Oreos and drinking Pepsi Free, disengaged from the world around her, and from me. Weekends, she spends an hour a day scrubbing every speck of dirt from the top of the stove or cleaning the sink. Does she somehow believe this is helping? There is a metaphor about the foolishness of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic,” But that’s what she’s doing. She is not just rearranging them. She is naming them, alphabetizing them, sterilizing them. Everything she does is irrelevant, and nothing offers any hope of changing the path I’m on, the path I travel, absolutely alone. The ship of me has hit the iceberg (or maybe the iceberg hit me), and it’s going down, but unlike the Titanic, nobody is hearing my distress signals.

  Driving to the animal hospital, it’s clear to me why I feel safe when I’m alone in nature, exploring places far away from human traffic, and why I took it so hard, so personally, when I found the dog in the canyon: Someone had violated my personal sanctuary. More to the point, I have always empathized with victims and underdogs. In this case, quite literally. There should be a patron saint for underdogs and orphans and Charlie Brown Christmas trees. St. Jude is the patron saint of desperate cases and lost causes, but only the first half of that applies, and what kind of a saint is he, anyway, if he gives up?

  As I got closer to Page and had cell coverage, I called Michelle. The animal hospital would be ready for him.

  “I got your text. Are you alright?” she asked.

  “I’m good. Everything went pretty much as planned,” I told her, glad to hear her voice and glad to share my day with her. “He hasn’t really moved from when I put him in the crate, so I hope things are going to be alright. Did you contact the vet and tell them we’re coming?”

  “I did. They’re expecting you guys shortly.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I really appreciate your help with this. I’m hoping this wasn’t all for nothing.”

  “Call me once you know something.”

  “I will.”

  Michelle understood the frame of mind I was in and that I didn’t want to stay on the phone and chat.

  I walked into the vet’s with the crate under my arm. I hadn’t had a chance to shower or clean up, and I’m sure my appearance left something to be desired, but I wasn’t concerned with first impressions.

  “Can I help you?” the receptionist said, an older woman dressed in scrubs.

  “I’m Zak Anderegg,” I said. She showed no sign that she recognized my name. “I believe my wife called and told you I’d be coming.”

  “When would she have called?” She must have correctly interpreted the look of annoyance on my face. I wasn’t expecting a team of doctors to rush out to meet me in the parking lot with a stretcher . . . or maybe I was. I was definitely not in the mood to deal with people who weren’t up to speed or ready to act.

  “Have a seat and I’ll go check,” the woman said.

  I was wrong to question her competence. A woman came out of the back and told me her name was Krista and that she was the one who took the call. She looked at me, and then at the crate, and she knew what my story was. She was in her thirties and pretty, with light brown hair, and she was, like the receptionist, wearing light blue hospital scrubs.

  “Let’s get him out of there,” she said, gesturing for me to follow her. The examination room was small and windowless, with a stainless steel table that folded out from the wall, a small sink, a chair, a stool, and a cabinet containing medical supplies. I set the crate on the table.

  “Would you take the webbing off, please?” she asked me. I found tremendous relief in the idea of transferring the burden to someone else, and there was something about the way she moved and spoke that inspired confidence. Rather than waste time with knots, I used my pocket knife to slice through the cords and straps. She opened the door to the crate and looked in, and then she called for another technician to help her. They used screwdrivers to remove the top half of the crate.

  “Where in the world did you find him?” she asked.

  “In a deep canyon, about forty-five minutes from here. I have no idea how he got there or how long he was stuck.”

  She looked at me, surprised. Abandoned puppies and kittens found on the side of the road were not uncommon. Finding a puppy deep in a slot canyon was more than a little unusual.

  In the veterinarian’s office, with bright fluorescent lights overhead, I got my first good look at the dog, and my heart sank. His lips and gums had receded from his teeth, due, Krista told me, to dehydration. His teeth had turned a frightening dark brown. Rather than the distended belly you sometimes see when humans are starving, I saw the absence of any belly or gut, just a sucked in cavity, as if all his internal organs had withered away. For the first time, I realized he smelled terrible, a putrid stench I don’t know how to describe. I asked Krista what it meant.

  “He’s probably septicemic,” she said. “And hypoalbuminic. The kidneys and the liver shut down without water. He can’t flush his toxins so they come out the skin, basically.”

  She gestured for the other technician to help her lift the dog out of the crate and onto the examination table. I took a step back, glad to know the dog was in good hands, but slightly anxious that there wasn’t anything more I could do. I was slightly encouraged when Krista inserted an electronic thermometer into the dog’s rectum and the dog lifted his head feebly, as if to say, “Hey—what’s going on back there?” It was more motion than I’d seen in him so far.

  The other techni
cian had shaved a spot on the dog’s left front leg, but she seemed to be having trouble finding a vein.

  “What’s his temperature?” I asked.

  “Ninety-two,” Krista said.

  “What’s normal?”

  “About a hundred and two,” she said, not looking up at me as she put drops in the dog’s eyes. The second technician brought in an I.V. drip and then Krista inserted the needle, using surgical tape to hold it in place. They added medications to the drip. One bottle contained a drug called Baytril (enrofloxacin) and the other contained Ampicillin, which, I later learned, are both used to treat bacterial infections.

  Then Dr. Roundtree entered the room. He was a man of medium height, maybe fifty years old, with dark hair, wearing a white shirt and blue tie beneath his white laboratory coat. He looked at the dog first, then at me, then back at the dog.

  “Wow,” he said. “What a pitiful sight.”

  My heart sank. I knew the vet had probably seen dogs in all kinds of conditions. He’d seen the worst, and the dog I’d brought in fit into that category before he’d even laid a hand on him.

  “Where did you find him?” he asked me. I told him the name of the canyon. “When was this?”

  “Yesterday afternoon,” I said. “I got out of the canyon and got some water and dog food to bring him and went back in.”

  “What sort of dog food?”

  I couldn’t remember the brand, but I described the foul smelling glob of protein and fat I’d managed to set in front of the dog.

  “He eat any?”

  “Some,” I said. “Was that the right thing to do?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “It probably helped rehydrate him a little. Dry food wouldn’t have done that.”

  He poked and prodded the dog, looking at his eyes, his teeth. He looked at the dog’s foot pads and ran a finger across the dog’s nose where a crust had formed.

  “Looks like he might have had distemper at some point,” Dr. Roundtree explained. “That’s why his teeth look the way they do. Destroys the enamel.”

  He listened to the dog’s heart with a stethoscope, and then he looked at his watch for ten seconds as he listened, writing down the dog’s heart rate on a chart Krista had provided.

  “What do you think?” I asked him, trying to sound hopeful.

  “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “I’m worried about his white blood cell count. With malnutrition and dehydration this severe, we often see brain damage. It could be very minor or it could mean he’s not going to pull through. There’s actually a fairly broad spectrum of possibilities.”

  In a way, it felt worse now, because I still needed the dog to survive, but it was out of my hands. The dog’s fate was in the right hands, but it left me feeling helpless.

  Finally, Dr. Roundtree stepped away, and Krista and the other technician transferred the dog to another larger, padded crate before moving him to the recovery room.

  “So how does the billing for this work?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  Michelle and I had started a do-it-yourself garage called the Wrench-It Center, where we supplied the tools and equipment, based on an idea I had as a Marine where the military would let enlisted personnel work on their personal vehicles in the automotive shop, but the Wrench-It Center had turned from a do-it-yourself business into an awkward mix of self-service and full service, and it was foundering.

  “We’ll do what we can for the pup, but we’d like it if someone could assume financial responsibility,” Dr. Roundtree said.

  This was what I was afraid he would say. The idea that we could run up a huge tab, and then the dog wouldn’t make it, was more than a little disheartening. I’d gone into the automotive repair business with my eyes wide open, knowing it was a gamble, but knowing what the odds and the stakes were, too. With the dog, I didn’t know either.

  “I’ll take responsibility,” I said.

  “Fair enough,” the vet said. “He’s stabilized now. Do we have your contact information?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You can leave it with Krista so we can call you if anything changes.”

  He left. I found Krista at the reception desk and gave her both my home phone number and the number for my cell. When she asked me where I was staying in town, I said I didn’t know. I thought it might be a good night to sleep beneath the stars.

  “So what do you think?” I asked her. “I know it’s probably hard to say, but what do you think his chances are?”

  “You’re right,” she told me. “It’s hard to say. When we see severe dehydration, sometimes the internal organs shut down, and even if we can restart them, they might be damaged. There could be brain damage. Seizures or convulsions. Maybe blindness. We’ll keep an eye on him. The best I can say is fifty-fifty. He might make it, or he might have to be euthanized.”

  The word hit me like a punch in the stomach.

  It was another emotional blow I hadn’t anticipated. The feeling was physical, the way you might feel if you were in an elevator that suddenly drops two feet. I was now responsible for a life. This may be the way a new parent feels on the way home from the hospital with a new baby in a baby carrier in the back seat, overwhelmed and unprepared, with no turning back. That was ironic, considering the day before was Father’s Day. New fathers, however, have nine months to get used to the idea, while I was being hit with it all at once. If the universe ran according to some kind of plan, then I had suddenly become part of that plan, and if there wasn’t a plan, and every event was the result of a random roll of the dice, then I had reached in and changed the way the dice had landed. Everything was shifting. Nothing was simple any more.

  I took a right out of the parking lot onto North Seventh Avenue to where it dead ended at Bureau Street, turned left, then took a right on Lake Powell Boulevard, past the Courtyard Marriott, until I hit 89 and open country. I asked myself as I drove, what was I going to do if the dog died?

  Part of me thought, No big deal. Dogs die all the time. It’s not my dog, I did my part, and now it’s out of my hands. But that part was a lesser part of me, a voice I recognized, the one I used when I was trying to convince myself everything was going to be okay. The greater part of me knew I would be devastated, because it would mean evil had won after I’d vowed not to let it.

  But something even bigger was going on.

  I pulled over to the side of the road and got out of my truck when I realized I felt like I was about to cry. I was simultaneously struck with two questions, related but separate. I didn’t understand exactly why I wanted to cry, and I didn’t understand why I couldn’t. The fact that a stray dog was deathly ill and might not make it through the night was a sad thought, but what was it to me? There were far worse things going on in the world that I could have been upset about. I didn’t cry when my father died, so why now? Why this? I told myself I was just exhausted, and that I’d been holding my emotions in all day, and now they simply wanted to come out. I was labile or lachrymose, but it was just a result of fatigue.

  Why I couldn’t cry was slightly easier to understand. I didn’t cry because I didn’t know how to. That might sound odd, because it’s something even newborn babies know to do, but I’d forgotten how . . . or maybe I’d trained myself not to. Growing up, I’d never seen anybody else do it. My mother seldom cried around me. I never saw my father, or my stepmother, shed a tear when I was a child. When I was little, having a wart removed at the doctor’s office, the liquid nitrogen he used to freeze the wart stung like a thousand bees, but I didn’t cry, and afterward, my mother told a coworker that she was surprised. I guess that was a sort of compliment. Boys generally get complimented for being “big” and “brave,” even though crying is a natural emotional release, and no more so for girls than for boys. But for boys, it’s not allowed. I’d never seen any value in crying, any up-side to it, when all it was likely to do was result in a scolding, or worse. Sure, when I was getting held down and beaten and bloodied up—or terrorized a
nd chased through the streets—I may have shed a few tears, but in those moments, I had absolutely no control of the way my body was reacting to the circumstances surrounding it. Those tears were in response to the sheer terror I was feeling; they were not part of a conscious, emotional moment. Crying from sadness or grief is very different from crying hysterically because you’re terrified.

  “I have rules,” I thought, there on the side of the road. “‘No crying’ is one.”

  I couldn’t cry now because I’d told myself, my entire life, not to. And I couldn’t cry because I worried that if I consciously made the decision to start now, I couldn’t be sure I could ever stop. A dam would burst, and I needed to keep that dam in place. Otherwise, I might explode, and then melt into a puddle.

  I didn’t call Michelle right away because I knew she’d be at work. After dinner, I got back in my truck and went to a place I knew off Route 89, a viewpoint behind the Denny’s restaurant with a spectacular view of the canyon, the dam, and Lake Powell to the north. There was a seven-hundred-foot drop to the river below with an easily crossed guardrail. The opposite side of the canyon was maybe three hundred yards away. The river below looked black from where I stood, no rapids that I could see, but I saw eddies and turbulence where the current had built up shoals of rock. Despite the incredible drop, you could actually hear the water flowing down below. The water was low, with only as much water flowing as the Glen Canyon Dam allowed.

  I needed to think, absorb the landscape, and locate myself in it. I saw the cars crossing the bridge turn on their headlights, and the first few stars of early evening appeared in the blue overhead, while the sky in the west blazed with fire, the color that gave the cliffs their name. I witnessed the sky turn dark as the stars came out, the Milky Way a river of light above me. Traffic on 89 across the Glen Canyon Bridge slowed to a trickle. The dam was lit up like some kind of monument.