Another kind of rescue
One snowy Sunday night in December 1992, I was working in the Jackson Hole Guide newsroom when my colleague Joy Ufford came through the door to announce that her dog was having puppies. Several of us trooped two blocks and watched in mingled awe and alarm as the second half of the litter arrived in a towel-strewn refrigerator box in Joy’s kitchen.
One of the puppies who popped out, black with a white bib, ended up with me a few weeks later. Called Egg — a tribute of sorts to my cabin mate Craig Welch, now an award-winning environmental writer for National Geographic — the dog survived the sort of endless near-misses to which pets in the care of young bachelors are sometimes subjected. The most dire: He gobbled a Sam Adams bottle cap and managed to avoid surgery only by coughing it up, slightly rusted, a few weeks later.
Egg moved with me to Vermont and then to Albany, and passed away just shy of his 14th birthday. Our next dog, Teddy, made it almost that long before going fast in September. Despite being named for the legendary Boston slugger Ted Williams, she was a New Yorker to the bone: found by firefighters in the Bronx, and delivered to us by a rescue agency that billed itself as Brooklyn’s best vegan-lesbian option for pet owners.
And so it was that our household entered the darkest season of the year dogless. I didn’t like it — and liked it even less when I fled the newsroom and returned to my attic as the region’s infection rates began to spike. I would come down the stairs and try not to cast a glance at the unmussed guest bed that was Teddy’s favorite lounging area in her dotage.
If you’re a pet owner, you’ll probably agree that while the prime pleasure it affords is companionship, near the top of the list is the structure required to keep another living thing safe and sound. How many memoirs of melancholy tell us of the healing powers of pets? A lot of bad books, to be sure, as well as a handful of classics like J.R. Ackerley’s “My Dog Tulip,” an account of the British writer’s 16-year relationship with a singular German shepherd who became his “ideal friend.”
It is the least sentimental kind of love story, especially in the detail afforded to Tulip’s biological processes. Dogs, Ackerley wrote, are too often “stupidly loved, stupidly hated, acquired without thought, reared and ruled without understanding.” His slim book — adapted as an animated film in 2009 — is an attempt to get as far as one can go toward that understanding, and an acknowledgment of its limits.
However dogs (and other companion animals) are reared and ruled, at this particular moment in humankind many of them are going like hotcakes. Since the spring, many shelters around the country have reported that adoptions are outstripping intakes as Americans trapped in their homes realize it might be nice to share the time with another living thing. Others worry that the growth in home fostering tends to make the trends look more encouraging, and there is great anxiety that economic pressures and a much-feared wave of evictions could force an unprecedented number of families to part with a beloved dog or cat.
After a respectable period of mourning for Teddy, my household turned to Petfinder.com, which serves as a clearinghouse for shelters and rescue organizations.
Based on my experience, trolling through Petfinder every day or two was the opposite of what the kids call “doomscrolling,” the obsessive consumption of rotten news.
Instead, the site offers a searchable database of enthusiasm and hope, as choruses of staff and volunteers extol the pets on offer while doing their best to inform interested parties that a certain dog might not be good around cats or small children.
As I would check in almost every day, the pleasurable sensation was similar to the one that washes over me upon entering a well-curated bookstore, where the contents of the shelves might provide hours of amusement or a right-angled turn in the way you live your life. (One wonders what Ackerley would have made of the site.)
We ultimately made contact with Mountain Rotties Rescue of New York, which operates across upstate, after settling on Max, a 9-month-old border collie-bassett hound mix who stared from his Petfinder photo like Humphrey Bogart mooning for Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.” His profile said Max was newly arrived in the Capital Region from a shelter in eastern Kentucky.
It is a miserable gray day, and a text alert on my phone brings the news that the Capital Region has lost its 400th resident to COVID-19, which is raging across the nation. It is the work of this newspaper to share that news, and the rest of the awfulness and loss that 2020 has brought to the world.
But in a lousy season, I will take a measure of comfort from the dog who, tired from a morning run through Albany, is snoring on the sofa a few feet from where I write this.