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The Long Road to RhodryJanuary 17, 2011 Until this moment I haven't been sure if this is part of To Be Rather Than to Seem or not. It's an important part of my life, but was it part of "a writer's education"? Well, duh: Pixel in The Mud of the Place is closely based on Rhodry, and whose picture is that on the back cover? When I was growing up, my family usually had two dogs and two cats. The cats were always closely related and exactly the same age. The dogs never were. Jill was our first dog. We got her when I was seven, and I gave her her name. This set the pattern for subsequent pets: I didn't name them all, but I did have veto power over names I didn't like. Jill was part Labrador retriever and part hound of some kind. She was medium-sized and solid black, till middle age turned her muzzle white. Dogs ran loose in those days. Jill was a champion car chaser. While honing her skills, she got hit two or three times in her first couple of years, but she survived the hits and became an expert. She'd zoom toward a front tire, angling her approach just right then chasing the offending car till it was out of her territory. Like most Labs and Lab crosses, Jill was an avid water dog. She swam, she went canoeing, she crewed on the Sunfish we sailed on Tisbury Great Pond. She was seven when my family spent our first summer on Martha's Vineyard. Once I was tacking around the point of a sandbar and Jill didn't attend to my "Ready about, hard alee!" The Sunfish boom whacked her in the butt and she went overboard head-first. Up she popped, forepaws above water, with a startled look on her face. When Tisbury Great Pond was opened to the ocean, the current between the two ran strong when the tide was coming in or out. We'd dive in on one side of the cut, swim like hell for the other side, and inevitably come ashore yards downstream from where we'd gone in. Jill would splash in and swim straight across. Two is optimum capacity for a Sunfish; three is manageable if the third is small, you aren't going far, and the wind is brisk. When there was no room for Jill, she didn't stay behind. Sometimes, especially if there was another dog in residence, she'd swim across Thumb Cove, then run along the pond shore to the barrier beach and catch up with us near the opening. Other times she'd take the water route. The prevailing summer winds on Tisbury Great Pond are southwesterly, and the route from the family camp on Deep Bottom Cove to the beach was due southwest, so a sailor had to make long tacks across the widest part of the pond, getting closer to her destination with each one. Jill would swim a few yards beyond the boat, tacking when it tacked. From cove to beach is about a mile as the crow flies. If the crow is tacking back and forth, it's more like four or five. The distance didn't faze Jill in the least. I was still in elementary school when we added a puppy to the family. We named him Traveller, after Robert E. Lee's horse. He was sandy colored with white on his belly, chest, and legs. He was hit by a car and killed when only a few months old. I don't think I ever knew where or how it happened. I do remember my father and I going to collect his body, which was lying on a blanket in the third, usually empty bay of Grandma's garage. He looked as if he were sleeping. Soon afterward we got another puppy. He was a collie-retriever mix -- we always said the retriever was Labrador, but his black fur was long and wavy like a golden's. Of course he became Traveller II. Like his namesake he had white on his belly, and a white pattern on his chest that looked like a dagger with an abbreviated blade. Just before his first birthday he was hit by a car on Newton Street, near the sledding hill at Pine Brook Country Club. Newton Street was the winding road that carried traffic from Route 128 and the Massachusetts Turnpike toward Weston Center. When the sledding was good, cars would be parked along the edge of the road where it curved along the top of the hill. Busy road narrowed by parked cars and snow, kids pulling sleds, toboggans, and Flying Saucers -- it's not hard to imagine how young Traveller got hit. One of his back legs was badly broken, with serious damage to nerves and ligaments. Because he was a big dog, our vet decided not to amputate the leg. Instead, he inserted a pin in Traveller's hip and set the leg bones as best he could. Traveller spent most of that winter in a cast. He wore a sock over his paw, and we taped a plastic sandwich bag over the sock to keep it dry whenever he went out. When the cast came off, his injured limb was like a furry peg leg. When he walked or stood still, he'd use it for balance, but when he ran he'd tuck it up under his tummy and run on three legs. And run -- and swim -- he did, until he died of old age at twelve or so. After Jill died, in 1968, we got Fritz, who was mostly German shepherd. I left for college when Fritz wasn't much more than a year old. We got along fine, but we weren't close. During the fifteen months or so after my grandmother died, I lived in her house and looked after Max, her Labrador retriever. Max and I went for long walks in the woods. He stayed at home when I went to work and greeted me when I got back. In the summer we went to the Vineyard together. I'd leave the car in Falmouth; we'd take the ferry to Vineyard Haven then hitchhike to the end of the Deep Bottom road and walk the two miles in to the family camp. On Martha's Vineyard in those days you could hitchhike with a large dog and still get rides. Once I set my sights on Washington, I couldn't afford to think too hard about Max. Getting out of Weston was too crucial. Nothing but nothing, not even Max, could get in the way. I found a room in a boardinghouse near Dupont Circle; I asked the landlord if he allowed dogs, and when he said no I was relieved. I couldn't imagine a dog being happy in the city -- especially not a big dog. Another home was found for Max. In D.C. I didn't have a car, or want one. I got around by bicycle and public transportation. I worked all day, and evenings and weekends were taken up volunteering at the women's center and participating in other community activities. There was so much more to do in D.C. than there had been in Weston. There was no room for a dog in my life. My life did make room for dogs, however, as long as they belonged to someone else. Franklin, a black and brown border collie type, belonged to my first serious girlfriend. I'm pretty sure he was part of the attraction. Tosca, a mop-headed white terrier, belonged to a musician housemate. I liked having a dog to hang out or go walking with. Owning a dog, though, like owning a car, was out of the question. To shoulder the responsibility of car ownership, I thought you had to be a mechanic; otherwise what would you do when the car broke down? How could you take good care of a dog without veterinary training? Martha's Vineyard was dog heaven. Nearly everyone, it seemed, had at least one dog. Dogs went to work, dogs rode around in pickups, dogs hung out at play rehearsals. When I got to know Mary Payne, founder of Island Theatre Workshop, she had recently quit smoking and become a born-again walker. She and I walked together frequently, exploring the Lambert's Cove area where she lived, accompanied by Jenny, her Schipperke, and Featherbell, a Lhasa Apso, who belonged to Mary's partner, Nancy. Nancy had a real job, as a legal secretary in Edgartown, and so was gone from nine to five. Jenny I never warmed to, and Schipperkes look more like hedgehogs than dogs as far as I'm concerned, but Featherbell and I became best buddies. Before Fuzzy Bell, as I called her, I thought that if you could pick it up and carry it, it wasn't really a dog. I could carry Fuzzy in the crook of one arm, but she was a real dog. I couldn't carry Jackson: I could barely pick him up. Jackson, half Lab, half Doberman, belonged to my friend Cris; he looked like a large, floppy-eared hound. My first several years on Martha's Vineyard I had winter rentals and moved in with Cris in the summer, so I got to know Jackson pretty well. Cris went back to school to train as an early childhood intervention specialist. I moved into her house and looked after Jackson when she was away. Island Theatre Workshop produced a simplified version of the famous Christmas Revels; I was a member of the company, and Jackson made his theater debut as the lord of the manor's faithful hunting dog. He was probably the best behaved member of the cast. The school system of San Bernardino County offered Cris a job, so she moved to California, taking Jackson with her. They came back summers, though, so we kept in touch. By then I had learned that properly maintained cars don't break down so often that only the mechanically adept should own one. All you needed was a good mechanic. It seemed the same was true of dogs. By then Martha's Vineyard did have several capable veterinarians. Jill, Max, and Jackson were either all or part Labrador, and on Martha's Vineyard it seems that every other dog you meet is a Lab, yellow or black. So I assumed that when I got around to getting a dog of my own, it would be a Lab or Lab cross. Fate intervened, and instead I got mixed up with malamutes. I became auntie to Tigger and Petrushka, littermates with different owners. Their father, Bear, was a malamute; their mother, Nanu, was a Samoyed–border collie mix. "Pooshka" was white, taking after the Samoyed grandparent. Tigger was black. Bear and Nanu's first litter was planned. The second wasn't. The universe was giving me a second chance. I got in line for a puppy. Nanu gave birth to eight healthy offspring on December 17, 1994; I was among the attendants. Being unemployed at the time, I made almost daily visits -- point-and-shoot camera in hand -- until the puppies went off to their new homes. I helped assign their litter names, nearly all from Star Wars. (The exceptions were two of the three girls; after Leia, Star Wars didn't offer many options in the girl's name department.) I cuddled and played with all of them, asking each one at irregular intervals, "Are you my puppy?" One afternoon, when the puppies were nearly three weeks old and I was hanging out in the puppy box, little Han Solo came toddle-trotting toward me with such determination that my heart opened and there was no more question about which one was my puppy. But what to call him? At the time I was immersed in Katharine Kerr's wonderful Deverry novels, so I had several names from the series in mind. Early one evening nearly all the puppies were asleep in the puppy box. Not mine, however: he was sitting in the middle, surveying the snoozers with mischief in his eyes. He pounced. In an instant peaceful slumber turned to pandemonium and I knew I had a Rhodry on my hands. His namesake, Rhodry Maelwaedd, is handsome, smart, noble to a fault -- and given to berserker fits on certain occasions. Whether I named him true or he's just lived up to his name, Rhodry Malamutt was without question a Rhodry. Rhodry was friendly, outgoing, and drop-dead gorgeous; he had friends all over the island, and it was a rare trip to town that we didn't encounter at least one old friend and make a new one. Rhodry had his own distinctive Malamutt take on things, which I did my best to channel in the bloggery. Not long after his thirteenth birthday, at the dawn of 2008, Rhodry started favoring his left hind leg. We treated it as an injury, with rest and pain-killing anti-inflammatories, but it didn't respond. In late January, he stopped eating. We went back to the vet, whose X-rays identified the problem: a tumor at the base of the spine, probably prostate cancer. With my vet's concurrence, I chose to alleviate the symptoms -- the bum leg, some trouble eliminating -- as long as possible. His appetite came back, and Rhodry and I had another good month before a pathologic leg fracture strongly suggested that the cancer had metastasized to the bones of his leg. Rhodry passed peacefully around 10:15 the morning of February 26. We buried him at Malabar Farm, which was Rhodry's home away from home during the years that Allie lived there. Pixel, Shannon's sidekick in The Mud of the Place, is closely based on Rhodry; Pixel is Rhodry 25 pounds smaller and female. Betsy Corsiglia took that beautiful picture of Rhodry and me the day after I learned Rhodry had inoperable cancer.
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