by Jon Katz
In our year together in Jackson, I also wrote Running to the Mountain, a record of my movement toward a spiritual life with animals (Julius is on the cover of that book). My connection with Julius and Stanley deepened through weeks alone, walks through the deep woods, and evenings by a roaring fire. I saw that the connection I had with these two dogs was genuine, trustworthy, and transferable.
Julius and Stanley grasped my life on the mountaintop as completely and intuitively as they had grasped it in New Jersey. They figured out how to be calm when the coyotes howled, how to navigate blizzards and snow, how to walk miles in the deep woods without markers or trails.
These might have been difficult things for city dogs to adjust to, but they were not farm dogs. I had stumbled—accidentally, really—into a way of talking to Julius and Stanley. Looking back, I see that my ideas and techniques for communicating with dogs were quite primitive. Over the next two decades, they would be tested in ways continuous and far-reaching, mostly with dogs and cats, but also with other animals, especially those that have been somewhat domesticated and live near and around people.
I could not credit Julius at the time with the importance of his role in my life, but it has been profound. Many years later, I took Julius’s ashes and scattered them behind the cabin where he and I spent that wonderful year together. Finding my voice as a writer, my rich and meaningful life with animals—none of it would have happened without him. None of it.
3
Orson and the Rings of Fire
Orson, a troubled border collie show dog from Texas who arrived in 1999, was one of the first animals who shaped my philosophy.
Orson was a shooting star. He sailed right into the heart of my muddled life and set it afire. Orson was the catalyst dog—the dog of love, memory, awakening, controversy, and pain. He was my best dog and my worst dog.
At the time he arrived, I was working on a book about technology and writing for Wired magazine and Rolling Stone. I was a media critic, and all sorts of new media were erupting. I knew the rise of the Internet was important, but I just wasn’t that interested in it. It lacked the romance and grit I wanted to explore in my writing. I was drawn to stories, not trends. I found the media world cold, corporate, and confusing.
I was also restless in other ways—living in a New Jersey suburb, up to my neck in Boomer kiddie culture. I was in my late forties at the time, living with my first wife, swimming in the Baby Boomer stream. I spent hours carpooling, driving my daughter, Emma, to guitar and piano lessons and playdates. The talk in town was about teachers and schools—which was the best, how to get in—and soccer and lacrosse. The grass in the parks was torn up for lacrosse turf, plastic and durable. The parks now smelled like airplane glue; the dogs didn’t even want to pee there.
I had slipped into the very life, in the very place, I had always meant to avoid. The Boomer life, SUVs, perfect kids, the very best colleges looming always over the horizon. To our eternal shame, we started working on those admission letters early on, stacking our lives and the life of our child with lessons and credentials. You had to plan early, that was the mantra. I pined for escape, driving upstate whenever I could, starting to work on my books, holed up in my freezing attic to write. I wanted something else, but I was not sure what.
My marriage to a very good human being, my first wife, was failing. We had begun to fall out of love with one another, our lives moving in different directions. We were, as the cliché suggests, drifting apart.
My yellow Lab Julius had died. Stanley, my other Lab, was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. The vet said he would not be far behind his friend.
I began rooting around online, emailing breeders, making inquiries, and checking out dogs. It was as much a matter of passing the time as it was anything else. I wasn’t really sure what I wanted or when.
One morning, I awoke to an email from a Texas breeder, Deanne. She had a border collie, she said, that might benefit from a new home. The dog had problems, she conceded up front; he had been raised as an obedience show dog, but that had not worked out. She had read one of my books and had the sense I might be good for Orson, that we might match up. Good breeders do that; they are essentially matchmakers.
Deanne was honest. She told me right away that Orson had issues.
She was not lying.
When I met him, it was instantly clear that Orson was in no way an obedience trial dog. Obedience trials are contests in which the most obedient dog wins a ribbon. The dog that sits on command, lies down when asked, stops and stays until released, waits until told to move, and obeys voice, hand, and even whistle commands has a shot at a blue ribbon. Orson, Deanne told me, had broke loose during one trial, tore around the ring, and drove off some of the other dogs. He disrupted several trials, wreaking havoc, and was booted out of almost every competition he participated in.
I wondered what Orson’s owner might have been thinking. Deanne said that Orson’s owner continued to care for him but had stopped taking him to trials. The dog was now confined to a kennel and did not have much of a life. Deanne wanted more for him. She had read Running to the Mountain and was touched by how much I loved Julius and Stanley. Might I be interested in Orson? Her question sparked several months of agonizing and uncertainty.
I knew enough about border collies to know that at that point in my life I shouldn’t have had one. They needed to work, and I had no jobs to offer a border collie in suburban New Jersey. Nor did I know much about training dogs or working with them. This was still at the beginning of my life with dogs. It was the 1990s, and while I had had good luck with training Julius and Stanley, animals were not yet the focal point of my life. I was inexperienced with complex dogs and had never set foot on a farm or been near a donkey or sheep.
Border collies are almost all complex dogs, but this one sounded like he had more problems than most border collies, known for their intensity, restlessness, and arousal. Julius and Stanley were gentle, easygoing Labs, easy to train, and happy to lie around for the long periods of peace and quiet a writer needs. Border collies are not like that.
Still, the story of Orson nagged at me. He was stuck in a kennel in Texas with no life. A New Jersey suburb with a human who worked at home all day and had a fenced-in yard might be better. And then, there was this: I was becoming very drawn to the world of dogs—to training them, working with them, living with them. Something about them stirred something inside me. I wanted to know more, experience more, write more about them.
A challenging dog, Orson could perhaps teach me more about dogs, force me to learn more than I had needed to know to live with Julius and Stanley. Also, as a lost boy myself, I simply identified with his story. I knew what it felt like to be unsuccessful and alone and abandoned. I had spent a lot of years of my life feeling that way, all the way back to Lucky. Here, perhaps, was a chance to finally write a different ending to that story. It was as important to me in my forties as it was when I was eight.
Pining after a beautiful dog in trouble was an old story for me, and here was a beautiful sleek black and white border collie with radiant brown eyes and tons of personality (Deanne sent me photos of him online) looking for a home. I was a person in search of a purpose.
Deanne and I talked on the phone for hours, emailed one another a hundred times. I fussed back and forth in my head. Was this a good idea? A good way to get a dog? The right way to get a border collie?
Ultimately, I said yes. I can’t honestly and fully say why. I have a long history of impulsive and unpredictable moves, many of which have worked out for me. But this was not the way to get a border collie. I knew that then; I know it now. But I did it anyway.
A few weeks later, after elaborate negotiations and preparations, Orson was shipped from Texas to Newark International Airport. I was excited about Orson’s arrival. I read a dozen books about border collies—most of which terrified me—and got several crates, repaired patches in the backyard fence, and stocked up on dog food and throw toys and balls for e
xercise.
I got to the airport early, found a parking spot close to the terminal, and stood eagerly under the arrivals sign. I had an enormous sense of excitement and expectation.
I imagine that the old-timers who work at the airport are still talking about Orson’s arrival at Terminal C. I am. Baggage handlers dragged his crate off a truck and hauled it into the busy terminal. I rushed over, leaned down in front, and slid open the front gate. His arrival was well before 9/11, and I am grateful for that, because things might have turned out very differently for us if he had come a decade later.
The next thing I saw after I opened his crate was the terminal ceiling. Orson shot out of the crate as if fired from a cannon, knocked me on my butt, and ran into the crowd. I knew he was beautiful, I saw that much, and I knew he was strong and fast. When I got to my knees I saw him vaulting over one moving carousel after another, to the shouts and screams of dozens of surprised travelers.
You have to consider the scene from the point of view of an excitable border collie, plucked from his home, driven to an airport, stuffed in a crate for a five-hour flight, tossed onto a moving cart, dragged into a huge building with thousands of people milling around—and suddenly his crate door opens.
He is out of there, like a missile fired from a silo, into the mayhem of a busy airport terminal at a peak travel time: there are flashing lights, honking carousels, moving luggage, enough things to make a border collie frightened, crazy, and excited. Plus, I think Orson was all of those things to begin with.
I was suddenly in the middle of a genuine nightmare, a combination Marx Brothers fiasco and horror movie. Orson rushed from one end of the terminal to the other, with me and several Port Authority police officers in hot pursuit.
Some people screamed at the sight of this wolflike creature diving over the baggage conveyors, darting past strollers and between people, looking frantically for some open space. I was shocked and frightened, praying he would not find any.
Some kids cried, some travelers dropped their luggage, a few dog people tried to grab at him as he flashed past. His speed and agility were astonishing. He was moving faster than anybody could keep up with. He had the Port Authority officers running in circles, huffing and puffing.
If Orson made it through the doors, it was likely that we would never see him again. Newark Airport parking lots are vast, filled with cars and trams, and surrounded by access ramps, superhighways, and shipping terminals.
There were several border collie owners in the terminal that day. The dog Samaritans, as I called them, came running. They instinctively knew what was happening and wanted to help. We all knew Orson must not find his way outside, something he seemed smart enough to do. We found each other and agreed through hand signals and shouts to head for the exits, since Orson would eventually make his way for the light and open air. All of us were shouting for people to get out of the way, holding our arms out to head him off, yelling to one another with reports of Orson sightings in one corner of the terminal or another. It was a good strategy, since four or five of us were waiting when he exploded toward the electronic terminal doors.
At this point, I got my first good look at Orson and saw that his tongue was hanging down to the floor. He was wild-eyed, exhausted, clearly in a frenzied panic.
There were enough of us at this point to form a semicircle, and for the first time, he slowed. He seemed exhausted. I lay down on the ground, held out a liver treat as a peace offering—he had to be hungry—and asked everyone to be still. The police officers kept the crowds back and it got quiet. For the first time, Orson focused on me, looked me in the eye—I knew this was important.
He sniffed the treat and did not take it, but he did look at me long enough for me to get his attention. He was focusing on me. I spoke to him softly and calmly, throwing one treat, then another on the ground.
Orson took one of them, and then stared at me some more. This was good, a human for him to connect with. I did my very first visualization without intending it—I imagined him crawling over to me, getting close enough for me to put a collar on him. And that is what happened. A few minutes later, Orson was on a leash and we were both sitting on the ground beside my car in the parking lot.
We were in the midst of a huge and crowded lot. Buses rumbled right by us, enormous jet planes roared overhead, the blare of loudspeakers and announcements was deafening, an electric train hissed over our heads. Yet, in a sense, we were alone. I put a bowl of water out and Orson gulped it down thirstily. I put some kibble in another bowl and he wolfed some of it down. Food, the first step in bonding. I was suddenly more than just a large man with a leash. I was life itself. I could see the change in his eyes.
I kept speaking his name, petting him on the head and shoulders. I continued talking to him, getting him used to my voice. Orson was wild-eyed, disoriented, and exhausted, but his panic had eased and his fearsome curiosity had begun to emerge. He watched the planes in the sky, the trains, listened to the buses, the sound of car horns. He was like a kid who suddenly finds himself in the middle of a three-ring circus.
Orson rode home in the front passenger seat. I put the window down a bit so he could stick his nose out. He was not frantic anymore. He seemed to be relishing his role as passenger. He was fascinated by the traffic, the lights, and the buildings whizzing by. He was interested in his new world.
Orson was an explosive animal, the biological opposite of Julius and Stanley. My suburban town of Montclair was the last place an untrained border collie like him should have been brought—as was pointed out to me for years by outraged border collie owners and lovers. I guess I knew that from the first. But I was willing to learn and do what I had to do to make it work.
I knew I had to restructure my life, and right away. We needed quiet and space. I started getting up at 5 a.m. to walk him. I scoured the town for quiet parks, with geese for him to chase, some space for him to run. He did not seem to know how to walk quietly, or on a leash, or alongside a human being. He shot out after cars, diesel trucks, and other dogs. He wrapped the leash around my legs and ran in circles.
My wife wanted nothing to do with Orson. She had no interest in walking him or being near him. This was to be significant in the coming months, as caring for Orson took more and more of my time, and this separated my wife and me even further. In a curious way, this new dog highlighted the distance growing between us, the separate paths we had begun to walk.
Would I have seen it without him? Would she? I can’t say. But I see now that instead of finding something that would pull us together, I had chosen something that was sure to push us apart, although I did not realize it at the time.
Orson quickly became a significant part of my life. I found some creative places to exercise him in the early morning hours, when he and I haunted the streets and parks of the town.
The police in their cruisers came to know us. They would wave to us as they drove by, me grappling with Orson’s leash. Orson loved the backyard, but not for long. Within a couple of days, he had dug a tunnel under the fence, and a neighbor called to tell me he was in her backyard, treeing the squirrels there.
Soon after, Orson pried open the nailed slats in the fence and squeezed out. I found him in the schoolyard down the street, chasing after soccer balls.
Then he simply jumped over the fence, and he took off trying to herd a big yellow sheep that looked to me like a school bus. I was exhilarated by Orson, but also frustrated and angered by him.
Orson’s troubles in the suburbs mounted quickly. He would scramble out of doors, windows, screens, pull out of leashes, slip out of collars. He chased after small dogs and herded them, driving them considerable distances as outraged and panicked owners raced behind. He tried to herd strollers over the objections of enraged nannies and hysterical moms and dads.
One afternoon, he dug under our fence, traveled a mile or so, and dug under someone else’s fence, terrorizing the two toy poodles in the backyard, herding them into a corner by the side gat
e. The residents started to call the police when they heard the barking and shrieking, but then remembered they had heard about a crazy dog and his loon owner living several blocks away. Blessedly, they called me, not the police. “What have you done?” I asked balefully as Orson gazed out the car window on the way home.
I did not know what to do with him. Like so many dog lovers, I was drawn more to the rescue than the dog, at least at first.
One day Orson opened the front screen door and took off down the street. A neighbor came rushing over to tell me he was trying to herd a school bus picking up kids at the elementary school down the block.
When I rushed down the street to the school, I saw the principal holding Orson off with a stick as he tried to herd the bus filled with children; the driver had closed the doors. The parents screaming around the bus were not amused. I heard sirens in the distance. In my Boomer town, nobody had much of a sense of humor about dogs or children.
I grabbed Orson by the collar, picked him up, ran through side streets, and hid in a friend’s garage. Later, they smuggled me and Orson out and drove us to my house in their minivan. We stayed off the streets for days.
I did some unconventional things, like taking Orson down to the Garden State Parkway at 4 a.m. and letting him run after big trucks, which he loved. (He was separated from the trucks by a big long fence on our side.) Some mornings, I drove him to freezing and empty public beaches. I think I came to love Orson on a windswept beach in northern New Jersey.
One blustery and very cold winter afternoon, I took Orson to a national park where I could look out across to Staten Island and the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. It was a beautiful spot, a beach, deserted and eerily empty.
Orson was a study in grace and enthusiasm as he tore along the shore, covered in salt and spray, barking joyously, confused by each wave’s sudden disappearance, excited to see another one forming. For the most part, he stayed along the shoreline, but sometimes he got carried away and jumped into the water to try to herd a wave, to turn it. Stunned by the cold water, he’d retreat, then charge again.