Learning to Fly

by Steph Davis

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  As summer approached, my internal clock started to sound. The heat was coming to the desert, ready to set in like an oppressive force, sapping all energy and motivation. In the summer, it was impossible to be in direct sun. The days seemed endless, bearable only for a few hours at dawn. The arrival of June had always meant it was time to migrate, to escape from the desert heat until September. Fletch had always been fine with friends if I’d left on a summer expedition or went into the mountains. Now there was no question of leaving her. She had a hard time walking and needed to wear a diaper when she was sleeping or in the car, thanks to the spinal arthritis. She needed me and seemed happiest when I was within her sight. She didn’t like to be alone at all now. She seemed to understand that she was vulnerable and that she needed help. Coming from such an independent little creature, this new dependence was incredibly touching, but also a heavy burden. Things had become hard physically too, with lots of lifting, carrying, and cleaning. Forty pounds wasn’t heavy, but picking Fletch up all day long was starting to take its toll on my lower back. Although taking care of her was tiring and emotionally draining, there was nothing else I’d rather be doing. I wanted to be with her all the time, making sure she was comfortable, making sure she was safe. I wondered if this was how Mario had felt when I was hurt, when he’d looked after me so devotedly, and realized it must be how he felt all the time because he was always looking after me in thoughtful ways.

  Fletcher’s crag wagon at Rifle

  For Fletch, going to Rifle seemed even better than staying in Moab. At Rifle, I could spend every second of the day with her. She’d have no steps or ramps to negotiate. I put a dog bed in the bottom of my garden wagon and some safety straps, so I could pull her up and down the dirt road between climbing sectors and then carry her to the bottom of the cliff I wanted to climb, where she sat comfortably on a blanket. In the evenings, we sat together by my truck eating dinner and watching the dark fall. I put a clean Depend pad in Fletch’s cloth doggy diaper—a system I’d come up with as dribbling had turned to soaking—before we got in the back of the truck to sleep, cuddling her against my chest. At home she refused to get on my bed, but in my truck we always slept together.

  Even more to my surprise, I realized that I didn’t want to get too far from Moab for the summer because Mario was there flying the jump plane. I found myself missing him after just a couple of days away at Rifle, which seemed almost ridiculous to me. In the past, I’d thought nothing of setting off on my own for months if my ex-husband wanted to climb somewhere I didn’t, happier on my own. Now I drove back to Moab every two days when it was time to take a rest day from climbing. I missed Mario. Like Fletch, I seemed to have become dependent on him, feeling better when he was nearby. Though I seemed to be inexplicably exhausted all the time, Mario was endlessly energetic, seemingly incapable of not being productive. When Fletch was home, he worked on modifying a baby jogger into a dog wheelchair with a small harness system, hoping to make it easier for her to walk. She’d started to drag her back feet and was getting a chronic scrape on the top of her left foot. I kept it bandaged and put a dog bootie on it, but it got worse. I was starting to become a regular at Dr. Sorensen’s.

  Fletch downed every meal with her characteristic gusto. She didn’t have the wide, face-stretching grin she’d always worn, but she still smiled. But what if I was just prolonging her life, making her suffer? It was so hard to be sure what was right. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never had a dog before. I’d believed I would have Fletch with me for the rest of my life. Somehow the idea of her growing old or dying had never entered my mind at first, and when it did, it just seemed ludicrous. I didn’t want her to suffer, but I couldn’t imagine being without her. I wondered if I should put her to sleep. I’d never thought about it before.

  “You’ll know when it’s time,” friends told me.

  But how? How would I know?

  “You’ll just know,” they said, a maddening response. She didn’t seem to be suffering unbearably, but it was so hard to tell with Fletch. She’d never complained about anything. She’d always been more stoic than any other creature I’d ever seen, almost as a point of dignity. Just before Scott relinquished her to me, she’d been hit by a car and dragged herself home to him, bleeding from huge gashes in her back legs. He and the vet had picked her up, and she never made a sound. Only days later did they realize she’d also broken ribs, in the same spot people had been lifting her. Maybe she was hurting too much now, but it was impossible to tell. Only her limp revealed any clues to me. She wouldn’t limp if it didn’t hurt. It was easier to throw myself into the daily details of taking care of Fletch. That was easy to understand. I knew how to take care of her. At night, I lay in the back of my truck with Fletch curled up against my stomach, breathing rhythmically, and wondered what to do. She depended on me for everything.

  In the past, big decisions had always seemed clear, so easy to know. I’d instinctively trusted my heart and implicitly trusted those around me. I’d lost that habit of pure trust, especially in my decisions. My choices had led me into every place I’d been, and I no longer assumed that I would always choose right. This deep doubt spilled into my feelings about professional relationships. At this point I had to either put all my energy back into being a professional climber or switch gears completely and find a new path and new employment. Climbing was woven into my being and I didn’t want to leave it. I started working with a new clothing sponsor, with the encouragement of two good friends who worked at the company. At first I had a hard time not thinking about the past. I wanted to trust, to be as carefree as a new puppy, but I felt more like a shelter dog who wags uncertainly and starts forward, then dodges back at the sight of a raised hand. It was scary stepping into a new relationship after having felt used and discarded in the not-so-distant past. The company was changing quickly, was in deep transition, and as months passed, I saw integrity and professionalism being not just voiced but practiced at every crossroad. I was objective enough to see the difference between where I’d been and where I was now. This was a good place, a place where people did the best they could and stuck by their word, made decisions that balanced professionalism with humanity. I didn’t have to be ruled by the past.

  Mario was also teaching me to trust simply through sheer trustworthiness. In the last year, I’d come to depend on him to a degree I’d never before depended on anyone. He was unfailingly gentle and true, and no matter what happened, he was there with me.

  I remembered my decision to take Fletcher, almost thirteen years ago, when Scott, her original human, had decided to take an electrician’s job at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. For him, it was the chance of a lifetime, and one of the perks was a stopover in New Zealand after the contract was finished. He planned to stay in New Zealand for a year or maybe more, since he never had any trouble finding work anywhere he went. It wasn’t fair, he thought, to ask someone to watch his dog for years and then come home and take her back. The right thing to do was to give her to someone. Scott could afford to be choosy since he was inundated with petitions to take Fletch, who made an indelible impression on everyone who met her, even people who’d never liked dogs before. But since I was already sharing her with him, he told me that I had the first choice. I was living in an Oldsmobile, I left the country for at least four months a year, and I spent a good portion of my time in national parks, where dogs are outlawed as much as weapons. I didn’t see how I would make it work. I thought of all the ways in which it seemed like a hopeless plan. Then I thought about not seeing Fletch anymore. Being without her was unthinkable. It turned out to be the best decision of my life.

  At first, this self-possessed, strong little creature was my role model. I watched her and learned how to move through the world gracefully, naturally, and with dignity. Over time she became my soul mate, who showed me the meaning of pure love. Simply through example, Fletch taught me how to live the life I wanted to live, how to be the person I aspired to be. She
became part of me, not just my soul mate, but my soul itself. It’s hard to explain how much I loved her.

  I would have given anything to have Fletcher with me forever, healthy, vibrant, and not in pain. I wanted to do the right thing, but I still didn’t know what it was.

  In Rifle, I loaded and unloaded Fletcher’s wagon from my truck and pulled her from one place to the next. I changed the bandage on her foot every morning and night, cut up vegetables to mix into her dog food, washed her cloth diapers in the stream and hung them over bushes in the sun, and anxiously leaped up to follow her when she got up to wobble around. Climbing was simply what I did to fill the time in between. And I was supposed to climb; it was my job, after all. So I climbed.

  We had a routine of two days at Rifle and two days in Moab, with a lot of driving, a lot of lifting Fletcher in and out of places, and a lot of washing. The sore on her foot was growing, despite my changing the bandage twice a day and three attempts by Dr. Sorensen to staple the skin shut. I’d tried to put a cone on her neck to keep her from chewing the bandage open, but it seemed so uncomfortable when standing and walking were already difficult endeavors. Every time I took my eyes off her for a minute, she chewed into the bandage and pulled the staples out, making the wound worse. She was determined to get the staples out and to lick the ointment off.

  “You need to keep her from chewing on it. I can’t close it up at this point. You’re just going to have to keep it clean. Change the bandages and bring her back every week,” Dr. Sorensen told me. Her circulation wasn’t good in the back legs, and we had no choice but to hope it would somehow heal. I bought rolls of purple and pink stretch gauze at the desk, and powdered antibiotic.

  The morning had started off badly. We’d camped by the creek, and I was sitting in the sun eating cereal with soy milk and raspberries. Fletch was lying in the grass nearby, her breakfast finished and her foot rebandaged and wrapped in purple gauze. I finished the cereal and looked over. She was gone, which didn’t make sense because she couldn’t walk far or fast. I rushed over and saw her lying in the creek. A steep hillside led to the water, and she couldn’t have walked down it. Somehow she had tumbled or slid down the hillside and was now caught in the shallow water, half sitting, half standing. I had no idea if she’d been there for thirty seconds or five minutes and, dismayed, I ran down to carry her out. She was chilled and shivering, her thick double coat of fur soaked. Why on earth had she gone down to the creek? She didn’t even like water. She had plenty to drink in a bowl right next to her, and it was the first week of September, no longer blazing hot. I toweled her off, replaced her soaked foot bandage, and sat her beside me in the sun, feeling deeply unsettled. I’d relaxed my guard for just a minute, and the next thing I knew, Fletch was in the creek. She could have drowned. Or frozen to death. I sat right beside her while she dried.

  Last morning at Rifle

  I tried to move ahead with the day, carrying Fletch to the warm-up wall and tucking her into fleece blankets at the cliff. She seemed worn-out, abnormally so, and started shivering again. I put her in the car, where it might be warmer and more comfortable in her dog-bed seat, but she anxiously tried to stand up as I shut the door to leave her. I was starting to feel completely unsettled. We needed to go home.

  I drove down the winding roads, past the green fields and the wide reservoir. Fletch lay in her round bed on the passenger seat, her head resting on my thigh. I stroked the soft fur between her eyes, following it back to her pointy ears, over the beautiful patterns of white, rich brown, and black on her forehead. She felt different. She felt limp. A quiet feeling of alarm rose inside me. We got out onto the flat stretch of I-70 and the feeling intensified, threatening to become panic. I stroked her head and shoulders. Tears trickled down my face. I’d never seen her like this before. She was worn out. We both were. Clearly she’d done as much as she could, but she was done.

  I drove in a blur. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I couldn’t imagine anything without Fletch. The thought of it was a bleak mine of emptiness that scared me to look at. My breath got ragged, the start of deep, shuddery sobs. I smashed back the panic to keep it from Fletch. She didn’t move, every muscle in her body lax, her ribs gently rising under my hand. My eyes and nose flowed as I held quiet, rubbing at them with the back of my wet sleeve, breathing through my mouth. It didn’t seem real. I drove without seeing anything, without caring, feeling a choking weight inside my chest and Fletch’s smooth fur between my fingers. Every thought that entered my head triggered a fresh flow of tears. I tried to empty them from my mind, to make it blank, get some control. I had no idea if we’d crossed the Colorado-Utah border. I wanted to stay here with Fletch beside me forever, just keep driving in this limbo zone where nothing had to be finished. When we got home, it would be over. How could this be the last time? How could this be possible? The miles smeared by inevitably, like time, like tears.

  I pulled into the driveway and went around to Fletcher’s seat. I gathered her up. Her forty pounds felt heavy, heavier than usual. She was so limp. I carried her in to her dog bed in the living room, the one with arms around it like a sofa. Strips of old carpet ran from that bed to her other bed in the bedroom, and to her food dishes and the dog door. Mario and I had tiled the floors a few months before, driven to the project now that the carpet kept getting soaked from Fletch’s diapers, not taking into account that tile would be harder to negotiate with arthritic joints. So we had covered the new tile with walkways cut from all the smelly carpet we’d pulled up. Fletch lay still, her head resting on her paws. She looked so tired. It was time—there was no way to mistake it now. She didn’t seem to be in pain or misery. But it was time. I’d wait for Mario to get home. In the morning, Dr. Sorensen would come. He’d told me he would come to the house if we needed to put her to sleep.

  Last evening at home Lisa Hathaway

  I curled myself around the bed, petting Fletch, whispering to her. Lisa came over to say good-bye. Lisa had lost dogs before, but for me this was a new, earth-changing experience. I teared continuously, listening to Lisa’s reassuring voice, telling me that Fletch had had a perfect life, that she would be okay. I’d had so many friends die over the years, climbing, jumping, getting sick, having accidents. I’d almost become immune to that loss. Or I thought I had. Lisa and Fletch were my two most constant companions in my adult life, the ones I’d grown up with. Now Fletch was leaving me. It was so hard to grasp.

  Lisa was gone and Mario was there. I’d put small bowls of food and water nearby, but Fletch didn’t lift her head. She lay still, resting on her paws, not moving, breathing gently. She’d never refused food before. I cut some small pieces of cheese, one of her favorite treats. She perked up slightly and ate a small piece. Mario and I looked at each other, almost ridiculously pleased. She ate another, then another, looking more interested.

  “Let’s take her out to the grass,” Mario said. “She loves lying in the grass.”

  Carefully, he carried her out, and we sat with her on the green lawn. Fletch lay still, with her head lifted up from her paws, and then suddenly she vomited. I looked at Mario, stricken. She threw up some more, just the small pieces of cheese we’d given her and clear fluid, and her head dropped down. She rolled partly to her side, her chest rising and falling quickly. “Oh, no, oh, no,” I said, heaving sobs, stroking Fletch’s head. “I’m sorry, girl, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Fletch lay on her side in the grass, taking fast, shallow breaths. Tears poured down my cheeks, heavy, gasping sobs welling up behind small moans. I couldn’t pull myself together. I curled around Fletcher’s back and shoulders, trying to comfort her, to calm her. She panted, sounding exhausted and helpless, then suddenly tried to push herself up with her front legs. Her shoulders and head raised just a few inches and then dropped back down. It became a horrible rhythm, seemingly beyond her control. Panting, trying to push up, dropping down. Panting, trying to push up, dropping down. It was past five, and Dr. Sorensen’s office was shut until mor
ning, and I had no way to help her. I was racked with guilt. She shouldn’t have to do this. I should have decided, should have called him before this started to happen. I stroked her and held her, and she panted, pushed up, and dropped down. It went on for hours, until dark fell. I just wanted it to stop. I wanted her to rest. She kept on, laboring, seeming to move without conscious thought.

  We carried her inside the house, to her bed at the foot of my bed. She’d always refused to sleep in the bed with me. I put blankets and pillows on the tile floor, and Mario and I lay beside the dog bed with Fletch. We didn’t talk. Tears flowed from my nose and eyes as I spooned with my little dog, feeling her mechanical breaths against my chest, the push of her legs as she ineffectually tried to push up. Mario lay on the other side of her, quietly. He’d taken such good care of her. He’d never known her in all her glory, when she was the strongest, bravest little res dog, when she dominated dogs three times her size without even breaking a snarl, when she charged coyotes in the desert, when she got lost in a thunderstorm and turned up herding sheep at a rodeo, when she ran beside me for hours, her grin stretched so wide it split her face in half. I was so tired. I listened to Fletch, panting and pressing in the dark. I never imagined this place where Fletch was laboring, gasping, dying. I was so tired.

  I woke up suddenly. Fletch was coughing. I curled my fingers through her fur, the thick ruff at her neck. She was quiet. I looked at the clock, the numbers glowing red: 1:02. I lay in the dark, my eyes open. She was gone. I whimpered, the sound creeping out from my chest, cutting off my breath, making me pull deep, shuddering gasps of air through my mouth to refill my lungs. I shook Mario. He held me as I cried until I was just too tired, then we got off the floor and into bed. Fletch was in her bed, where she always was. I fell asleep, my back against Mario’s chest.

  The light woke me. I lay in bed, watching the orange glow on the cliffs outside the window. Fletch was in her bed, at the foot of mine, the way she always was. I stayed still, feeling it. This was the last morning she’d be there. I’d have to get up. We’d have to take her away, bury her. She would be gone. I didn’t move. We couldn’t bury her in the yard. What if someday I didn’t live here? I couldn’t leave her here if I was gone.