LOVED & LOST
Finn’s tale speaks to the human heart’s indomitable tendencies — even in pandemic
Someday, when scholars attempt to convey the historical undulations of the year 2020, they will write about pestilence, mass death, catastrophic job losses, state violence, oceans of protesters flooding city streets in the name of racial justice and a presidential election, held during a pandemic, with no less than America’s soul in the balance.
They will not write about Finn the dog, though maybe they should.
The canine’s tale speaks to the tendencies of the human heart: our eagerness to rally around a common purpose, and our hope of recovering something loved and lost.
Finn’s story starts in the woods of Washington, D.C. But really it starts almost three years earlier when, as an 8-week-old Bernese Mountain Dog puppy, Finn landed at a shelter.
The shelter called Debi Blaney. She’d been fostering dogs for a few months since her own Bernese Mountain Dog died young, at age 5, from cancer. After 24 hours with Finn she knew the fluffy puppy with velvety ears and a black dot on his white nuzzle wasn’t going anywhere.
Finn was skittish and shy around strangers, yet deeply attached to those he trusted. Finn’s hunger for affection was insatiable; whenever two humans hugged, he would nudge between them.
So it went until three months ago, when the coronavirus nudged all of the humans apart. Reliable things disappeared. People were losing family, losing their jobs, losing their bearings. And then, one day, Finn was gone, too.
On May 3, a Sunday, Blaney clipped a leash to Finn’s collar, and they headed out the door.
When the pandemic hit, Blaney, an educational programming manager for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was ordered to work from home. They would make escapes to Glover-Archbold Park, by their new home, and to the home of Blaney’s boyfriend, Paul Basola, who lives in a neighboring apartment building.
That’s where Blaney and Finn were headed Sunday evening. Blaney decided they’d go the long way, through the woods, for a dose of nature and exercise. Once they were on the trail, she unclipped his leash. Finn’s low tolerance for separation was something of a benign mystery. The upside was that she trusted him off-leash.
But a few minutes into their walk, she looked around and didn’t see him.
She called his name . ... Nothing.
She telephoned Basola. Keeping the requisite six feet of social distance, the pair asked everyone they encountered if they’d seen a loose dog. No one had, but several people offered to help look. One of them was David Magee, a teacher who was out walking.
“It was a pretty brief interaction, but she was definitely worried,” Magee says.
After two hours of searching, the skies darkened. The winds began to gust and torrential rain beat down against the city. Blaney knew it was useless to keep calling out for her companion.
Did her dog know how to survive, out there on his own? Blaney wasn’t sure.
Magee got home that night and texted Blaney for an update. He wanted to help. So the next morning he wrote an email to his second-grade students.
“If you are going outside today — I could use your help,” Magee wrote.
He forwarded them a picture of Finn, along with a map of the area. “It occurred to me,” he says,”that with 22 students, that’s 44 eyeballs that could be looking for this dog, too.”
Later that morning he took a break to walk in the woods where Finn went missing. He didn’t see the dog, but he did see one of his second graders, searching for Finn alongside a younger brother.
“That was really special to me,” Magee says. “Just to catch a little kid in the act of trying to be a hero. And to be able to tell him that he is — for just being out there.”
Blaney had been doing her own recruiting, posting notices of Finn’s disappearance on social media and local Listservs and encouraging anyone who wanted to help search to meet that afternoon at a nearby dog park. Around 20 people came. Magee showed up and saw several of his students there, too — masks on, ready to help.
In a pandemic, being a good neighbor meant staying home, staying apart. The case of Finn seemed to have stirred some pent-up Good Samaritanism. It was an opportunity to come together around a mission that, unlike the coronavirus, was easy to understand.
Perhaps none of them felt this more strongly than Toni Ghazi. The 40-year-old Realtor had been about to go to bed when he saw Blaney’s posting about Finn on NextDoor.
“His photo captured my attention — just his eyes,” he says. “I was obsessed with finding this dog.”
Something about Ghazi: He’s a very spiritual man. In the coming days, Ghazi would seek guidance in the search for Finn from his shaman. He would place a picture of Finn under the Buddha on his altar at home, where he lives with his husband and their five rescue dogs.
Ghazi got in touch with Blaney, and printed 100 copies of the flyer she’d made. He ran around buying staple guns, packing tape, laminate sleeves and extra masks for the search party.
The searchers who showed up to the dog park fanned out in all directions, but found nothing.
But their resolve was contagious. The next day, Tuesday, twice as many people showed up. The managers of Finn’s old doggy day care brought their entire staff. More of Magee’s students came with their families. More neighbors, dog-park regulars, internet strangers.
And still, nothing.
On Wednesday and Thursday it rained. Cold, driving rain with the threat of a frost. Blaney went out anyway. Her volunteer task force no longer assembled at the dog park, but she was not alone. Her phone buzzed constantly with texts from numbers she didn’t recognize, “People saying ‘I’m going out with my dogs now.’ ‘I’m going out with my kids.’ ... Where do you want me to look today?’ ”
The hunt for Finn was no longer merely an amateur affair: The doggy day care managers set her up with a search-and-rescue dog, who went on the hunt for Finn. Blaney also hired a professional dog finder, who put up a motion-activated camera and trap cage near the spot he vanished. Telephone poles were saturated with Finn flyers.
Still, days three and four came and went — no confirmed sightings.
Blaney had barely eaten or slept all week. By Friday night, after putting Finn’s untouched food bowls away in a closet, she collapsed. Sobbing, she worried aloud to Basola that Finn had been kidnapped. Or worse: become stuck in a deep hole, alone, slowly wasting away.
On Saturday, May 9, a vibration ran through Blaney’s phone. It was an incoming text message from an unknown number: “Is this your dog?”
The picture, showing a black-and-white dog lying in the dirt, was unfocused and taken from far away. Was this a sighting? Unclear, but maybe.
Blaney got the man’s address; he was two miles away. She and Basola sped over. The man, Steven Williams, explained that his neighbor, Kevin Hodges, had taken the photo after spotting the dog in his backyard. Blaney and Basola headed to Hodges’s house. Hodges said the dog had left, but not before he’d snapped a closer picture. Blaney studied the second photo.
An orange name tag, a black spot on the dog’s nuzzle. It was him. “I broke out in tears,” she says. “It was 100 percent Finn.”
Blaney texted Toni Ghazi and rest of the task force. Everyone redoubled their efforts. This time she got multiple texts reporting Finn sightings, but still no one caught him as the sixth day ended.
The next day, Sunday, was Mother’s Day. Ghazi was already out searching for Finn when he received an early-morning message from his shaman: that she could see Finn, by a creek. She said he would be found that day.
That afternoon, a librarian named Laura Neal was taking a walk around the neighborhood when she saw Finn’s flyer. After walking for two miles she saw a big dog lying in a fenced-in yard. Neal approached the chain-link fence and locked eyes with the dog. It looked tired and kind of sad, with twigs and burrs in its fur.
“Are you the dog?”she asked aloud.
And then Neal, 59, took off running. She snagged the flyer and called Blaney.
When Blaney arrived at the house she found Neal, who pointed her toward the dog. Blaney slowly walked toward Finn and sat down on the opposite side of the fence. “Hi, Finn-Finn,” she said sweetly and squeezed his favorite ball.
Finn came immediately. Blaney clipped a leash on his collar, hopped the fence and buried her head in his fur. She cried tears of relief.
Neal watched the reunion from her car: “It’s definitely the happiest thing that’s happened to me since COVID.”