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

by Anderegg, Zachary

  The first evidence anthropologists have to document the relationship between men and dogs dates back to about thirty thousand years ago, when early man lived in small tribal groups or villages that were, if not permanent habitations, occupied for several seasons, long enough to build up a residue of garbage, including discarded animal bones from which the early canines scavenged and fed. In North America, the wolf sat at the top of the food chain, at least until the early humans made it across the land bridge from Siberia, and then wolves and humans competed for the position. Then someone, somehow, one of us, or maybe both of us, signaled for a truce.

  If you watch how one dog meets another unfamiliar dog, you can typically observe a pattern of behavior where, as the dogs come rushing in to meet, face-to-face, they both stiffen up. This is a tentative moment, one in which they try to assess, “Are you friendly or do I have to be on guard?” When the tails wag to signal a mutual acceptance of the rules of engagement the two dogs slowly circle in to sniff each other’s butts. Some kind of signal must have transpired, thirty thousand years ago, between man and dog, giving each other permission to approach. It may have been a wag of a tail.

  We had reasons to fear each other. We still fear each other, even though wolves have more reason to fear us than we have to fear them. It may have been that the first wolves to approach the human garbage dumps and campfires were puppies, juveniles who hadn’t yet learned to be afraid. Ethnologists describe the differences between how wolves and dogs behave as paedomorphism, meaning a kind of incomplete or partial evolution where the adult of one species imitates the juvenile characteristics of another. Adult dogs will sit, stay, obey commands, wait to be fed, and bond with other species, as will juvenile wolves. Mature wolves won’t do any of those things, which is why they can’t be kept as pets. The juvenile wolves we adopted, thirty thousand years ago, may have retained their juvenile characteristics simply because they had no reason not to—as long as we kept them fed and happy, why fix what wasn’t broken? While working at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, a scientist named Dmitri Belyaev bred wild foxes by choosing the tamest among them (the ones that allowed humans to approach them) and was able to domesticate them in about forty generations, rendering the foxes that resulted as quite “dog-like.” Humans and dogs have been living together for perhaps fifteen thousand generations, working, for thirty millennia, to understand and collaborate with each other.

  I’m not an expert in these things. My hope is just to explain why I felt connected to the puppy. It could have been entirely my imagination, but if it was, I was imagining the same thing the first Cro-Magnon man imagined when the first juvenile wolf stepped from the darkness into the light of the campfire. My sense, leaning down to pet the dog in the crate with the IV drip in him, was that he understood something—not that he understood something about me, but that we both understood the same thing. He’d been abused and abandoned, left to die, and maybe he hadn’t put it all together yet, but if someone could transport him to the bottom of a canyon and leave him there to die, it was reasonable for him to assume that I could also be a threat to him. But he wasn’t threatened by me. He wagged his tail to tell me that, somehow, he knew I was trustworthy. That he was willing to give mankind another chance.

  I wondered if the dog experienced stress, and the release from stress, the same way I did. Once on a previous wilderness excursion, when I’d gotten lost in the mountains near Los Angeles in the snow—without adequate food, water, or clothing—I went into a survival mode, my only focus on finding the road I’d somehow lost. From that focus, I derived a kind of calmness or composure, but once I was safe and back on the road, all the emotions I’d been suppressing caught up to me, and only then did I realize or appreciate how close I’d come to getting myself into serious trouble. Maybe the dog was having a similar delayed reaction, and only now, safe and in good hands, could he let his guard down.

  I wondered, seeing him lying in the crate, what made a lone wolf separate from the pack. Did he not fit in, or did he choose to go out on his own? I assumed it was the former. Maybe they were wolves who for some reason failed to recognize the signals, didn’t wag their tails soon enough or often enough, or didn’t notice when more dominant wolves did? Then I wondered what would happen if two lone wolves met. Would they fight, or would they empathize with each other and realize they had something in common? Would they realize they’d be better off if they teamed up?

  Would they wag their tails or bare their teeth?

  “He’s exhausted,” Krista said, looking over my shoulder.

  On my way out, I looked into a room off to the side and saw Dr. Roundtree, who was in the middle of some sort of surgical procedure on a cat. The cat, black with white paws and cowl, was lying on its back with a tube down its throat, and some of his internal organs had been lifted from his chest cavity to make room for the veterinarian to do whatever it was he was doing. It may sound odd to think a former US Marine sergeant might feel squeamish around blood and gore, but I had to suppress a brief gag reflex. I should have been tougher, in theory, but, in truth, I’ve always been queasy around blood. In third grade, I attached a fake bloody eyeball from a costume shop to my forehead for Halloween, but when I looked in the mirror, the sight of the eye and the fake blood actually caused me to see stars and almost faint. I was reminded that the animal hospital was a portal, a place where sick animals came; some or most went home better, but some didn’t make it. It happened every day. It happened no matter how skilled the surgeon or how lucky the patient.

  I left the animal hospital thinking about the cat and feeling like I was covered in a thick coating of gloom that I desperately wanted to rinse off. I needed to get my mind off it all. If I was back home in Salt Lake City, I probably would have gone to a gym to work it off, but of course, I was surrounded by opportunities for exercise. I made a quick stop at the first grocery store I saw to load up on water and snacks, and then I headed out of town for a slot canyon a little over five miles from Page I’d seen on a map, far enough to get away from people but close enough to get back quickly if I felt the need.

  Thankfully, no two slot canyons are the same. I hoped I wasn’t going to find another puppy in this one, because I wasn’t sure I could handle it. At the truck, I pared down my gear and took only enough rope for a rappel or two. The first fifty yards or so was a flat wash, deep sand that had my calves and thighs burning in fifteen or twenty paces. As the canyon sloped down, the sand gave way to petrified sand dunes called “slick rock,” because the iron shoes on the horses of the pioneers who discovered the region slipped against the surface, which is actually more like rough sandpaper. Mountain bikers, however, love riding on slick rock because of the grip they get with their fat, rubber tires. The bottoms of my hiking boots found similar purchase.

  I walked sure-footed and easily along a winding half-pipe of stone that grew narrower the longer I traveled. My eye followed the striations in the water-worn rock as the walls rose vertically to either side of me, as though I were walking in the trough of a frozen ocean wave. The canyon curved and undulated, winding its way through the sediment in dips and twists, and after a while I felt like I were lost in some sort of interactive sculptural art form, flowing into it along the contours.

  After perhaps two or three hundred yards, the declivity carved sharply down another fifty yards before terminating at a sixty-foot drop into a much larger canyon. In a rainstorm, I would have been standing at the top of a large waterfall, though if there was water raging down the canyon, I wouldn’t stand there for long. Slot canyons are all, one way or another, tributary canyons feeding into Lake Powell or the Grand Canyon, so many arms and branches and forks that I’m not sure they all have names. From a hot air balloon or a helicopter, or using a program like Google Earth, you’d see a latticework of ravines and washes and veins all draining into the Colorado River and eventually the Gulf of California. From the air, you’d be able to see how all these cracks in the earth converge an
d lead to a single point, like a mathematical equation or a logical syllogism solvable with deductive reasoning. From the ground inside one of these tributaries, or more accurately from below the ground, you are a mouse in a maze, and all you can see are the impenetrable walls around you and a path that opens and closes to you.

  I left the first canyon, Canyon A, to explore the rim of the second, Canyon B, looking for a place where I might drop in. After about fifteen easy minutes on slick rock, I arrived at a slope where Canyon B met Canyon C and edged down an incline until the angle was too steep to walk. There I drilled a hole, set a bolt, donned my harness, and set my rope. Once in Canyon C, I removed my harness and gear and left it there, thinking I was not in the mood for hardcore exploring, and that if I hit a drop-off, I’d just turn back. I headed downstream, ignoring any number of side canyons, and explored for about three hours, seeing things I’d seen on other trips elsewhere, logjams and holding pools and miniature stone arches, and things that shouldn’t be there, like a weather worn deflated soccer ball, as well as things I’d never seen before, including one canyon absolutely clogged with a dense mat of tumbleweeds. You see tumbleweeds blowing across the landscape in cowboy movies and think of them as archetypal images of the American West without realizing many of them, maybe most of them, are not native to this continent and arrived from Asia or Russia as unwanted hitchhikers in seed shipments. The mechanism of seed distribution has always been, to my mind, one of nature’s more ingenious adaptations, where, in a dry climate, the top part of a plant dies and breaks off, then rolls across the arid topography in the wind, distributing seeds and spores as it tumbles before eventually, like a steel ball in a pachinko game, coming to rest in a low spot where there is likely to be water. When the water cracks open the seed, the plant comes alive again. The botanical term for this classification of plants using this method of propagation is diaspore.

  The hiker’s term for finding a canyon clogged with tumbleweeds is “more trouble than it’s worth; time to turn around.” When I did, I found something even more interesting—a place where a small spring was flowing out of a wall. This was, I thought, a slot canyon being born, the spring a birth canal where rainwater, percolating down through the sandstone, fought its inexorable way to sea level. In another ten thousand, hundred thousand, or ten million years, it would have nothing but daylight above it.

  Where the rock opened up, there was an alluvial fan of saturated clay, maybe ten feet across. I stuck my finger in it, and I felt suction when I pulled my finger out. The clay, with its suspension of microscopic particulates, was more like paint than mud. When I stuck my foot in it, the suction nearly pulled my boot off. The consistency or viscosity was something like the cornstarch colloids kids sometimes make in elementary school science classes. I wondered if I’d discovered a patch of the legendary quicksand you’d sometimes see depicted in westerns and Tarzan movies. I picked up a rock, about the size of a football, and chucked it into the middle of the alluvial fan. The surface seemed to hold the rock at first, as a crown-shaped shockwave ringed the point of impact in slow motion, almost like the time-lapse videos of water droplets splashing into a pool below. I wondered how deep this pool of quicksand was, but there was no way to find out short of jumping directly into it. I’d seen those westerns and Tarzan movies and knew there was no future in it.

  I sat for a few moments, downing a Clif Bar and a bottle of water and listening, in the stark quietude, to miniature landslides all around me, sand slides where, somewhere high above me, a field mouse or a passing centipede kicked loose a single grain of sand, and that single grain fell into two grains, which knocked into four like billiard balls increasing in number exponentially until gravity ultimately built a slope of scree at the bottom of the canyon. I thought of a video I saw once called “Powers of Ten,” which starts with a couple of Chicagoans having a picnic on the shores of Lake Michigan, then zooms out to infinity, then zooms back in to infinity as the telescope turns into a microscope.

  I decided it was time to head back.

  I reversed my direction and walked until I arrived at the clot of tumbleweeds. I felt a sinking sensation, because it meant I’d missed the turn I needed to take. The problem with exploring slot canyons is that you don’t have a bird’s eye view, and you’re the mouse in the maze surrounded by walls, and unless you do something to mark the way you came, you can have trouble finding your way out. Unless you kept turning around to memorize the path back, there are basically two separate canyons: the one you saw going in and the one you see going out, and they’re not the same. The usual way for a hiker to mark his trail is to build cairns, small piles of stones stacked vertically with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on the top. You can even arrange your cairns sequentially where your first turn has one rock atop the base, your second turn has two, your third has three, and so on, so that when you reverse directions you can count down and know how much farther you need to go. Some of the simplest mistakes are made in haste.

  I was, in short, lost, because I hadn’t built any cairns and I knew I wasn’t in Canyon A, or Canyon B, but I wasn’t quite sure if I was in C, D, E, or F. Trying to follow my own footprints wasn’t going to help because I hadn’t left any on the slick rock and I couldn’t tell my footprints apart from all the other indentations in the sand I’d crossed through. Plus, there wasn’t any mud, which might have given me the information I needed. If I couldn’t find my pack and the rope I’d left in place, I wasn’t going anywhere. More to my chagrin, I’d taken the day and made the decision to venture off so casually (or perhaps because I was distracted by my worry about the dog) that I hadn’t called Michelle to tell her where I was going or to give her a drop dead time. I was alone.

  I reversed direction again and walked slowly, studying the rock walls for anything that looked familiar, even though after a while, everything looks the same and your vision starts to swim and you can zone out. Each twist and turn reveals another twist and turn, and you can’t remember if you need to turn left or right.

  I started once again feeling like I’d walked too far. I was hoping to see something that looked familiar, but everything looked familiar, and nothing did. How would I know if what I was seeing was familiar from the first time through or from this instant, as I passed it a second time? I grew more than a little concerned.

  I decided to slow down and think carefully and not panic. Even if I hadn’t given Michelle a drop dead time, sooner or later she’d realize it was unlike me to not check in with her. She’d call someone. That someone would call someone else, and somebody would report finding my truck and deduce where to search from where I left it, and everything was going to be okay. That was generally how things had gone in my life once Michelle entered it. As much as I enjoyed being a lone wolf, she was what made everything okay.

  We first “met” via a letter. My dad and her mom knew each other and, as proud parents often do, they thought it would be wonderful to get us together. One day I received a letter from her—nothing special, just a brief introduction and pleasantries. She didn’t know me and was probably just humoring her mother. She had also recently ended a relationship and wasn’t exactly eager to jump right into a new one, especially with a “worldly guy.” I say that because she was, at the time, a practicing Jehovah’s Witness, though I didn’t know that then.

  I decided to write her back, inquisitively asking about her boat care business, where she lived (Florida), what it was like living on a boat, that sort of thing—just small talk. But the small talk kept growing. After we exchanged a couple of letters, I let her know I was going to Florida in January to visit my grandparents in St. Petersburg. I asked if there was any chance of us getting together. She liked the idea, but couldn’t make any promises.

  As it turned out, we weren’t able to meet in person, but we did spend almost four hours on the phone one night. The ease of communication was remarkable, as was the sense that we understood each other and shared many views and beliefs. There was obviously
something between us.

  My first impression of Michelle was that she struck me as being very driven and hardworking. She owned her own boat care business, which I respected, given that I wanted to own my own construction businesses. I also noticed a couple of subtle things about her. For one, she never cursed. In the Marines, I had a sergeant who once dropped the F-bomb forty-six times in a seven-minute class he was teaching. (We actually counted.) The fact that I hadn’t heard a single cuss word in nearly four hours of talking to Michelle was strikingly apparent.

  She also had a sweetness, and an innocence, that I had never witnessed in anyone else. It was so disarming.

  After my trip to Florida, we routinely exchanged letters or called each other, usually talking two to three times a week. Our conversations steadily lengthened, until one night we had a marathon eight-hour conversation, sweaty ears and all. It became apparent that not only did we enjoy each other’s company, but we needed each other, needed someone with whom we could share our thoughts.

  Somewhere around our third or fourth call, she shared something deeply personal with me. Some folks in her church were really making her life hard. They were very judgmental and controlling and she was suffering pretty nasty stomachaches and headaches because of their treatment. I’m no poet, but I decided to write her something short to help her feel better. There was a line in it that said something like, “Because someone far away loves you . . .” It felt like a pretty bold move, but it was what I was starting to feel. It felt appropriate, at that stage in our relationship, to use those words. Not only did she catch that line, but she brought it up to me later. She said it gave her “butterflies.”