The Dog With the Old Soul (8 page)

Ed Goldman

The crying starts as soon as the car starts.
“It’ll be all right,” I say as softly as I can, while still fighting to be heard. “Daddy loves you,” I add, figuring there may be some doubt on her part.

I’m already soaked with perspiration by the time I reach the end of the block, the crying now reaching such a feverish, intense pitch that I debate pulling over and reprimanding her. But how can I? She won’t understand and won’t care that this is proving more traumatic for me than it ever will be for her. So I take a deep breath, crank up Mozart’s Turkish March on the classical station and keep telling myself,
The hospital is only a mile and a half away.
…

Every three days I take my wife’s seventeen-year-old cat, Sabrina, to the Sacramento Animal Hospital for intravenous fluid treatments. They slow down her metabolism, and that keeps her from burning too many calories too fast. Early in
her treatments, she weighed four pounds and eleven ounces. Now she’s up to six pounds and two to four ounces, depending on how much of her dinner and then our dinner she eats the night before.

I inherited Sabrina when my wife, Candy, and I began our life together four years ago. The little cat is beautiful and calls to mind a black-and-white Puss in Boots. She also has lungs that would prompt even an opera conductor to say, “Easy.” When I drive her to the treatments, she howls from the moment I strap her carrier into the backseat until the moment when I get her home, unstrap the carrier and let her strut back up the stairs to the house, as though she went to the vet only because she felt like it.

Sometimes between the hours of 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., she yowls, which is worse than howling, from the first floor of our three-story home. It’s a home with a contemporary, open floor plan. This means the only sound barriers are the earplugs I keep on a shelf behind my pillow.

I’d never had a cat before, only a couple of dogs. My first dog was a rescue dog, in the truest sense of the word. One evening my first wife (bear with me, as there are a total of three) and I were riding back from dinner with another couple in Long Beach, California. As we came to a stoplight, I noticed there was a very panicked mutt on the island separating the opposing lanes of traffic. She was panting heavily, and that was her only activity since she was, literally, paralyzed with fear. Since my wife and I were passengers, I asked my friend not to go when the light changed (we made many friends that evening). I jumped
out of the car, hunched down on the island, about twenty feet from the little dog, and put my arms out. “Come on,” I said as softly as I could above the din of traffic, the shouted assertions about my parentage (our
many
friends), the cursing and the honking from the cars behind us.

Miraculously, the dog dashed into my embrace. I all but tossed her into the backseat with my wife and jumped in the car with an athletic grace that surprised everyone in the car, including the dog and me. My friend gunned the car through the intersection just before the light turned red.

Back in our one-bedroom apartment, a block from the ocean, we let the little dog smell her way around before she settled in for the night on the bathroom floor. This turned out to be a measure of her intelligence, because sometime later she experienced an attack of diarrhea, which she thoughtfully dealt with by quickly climbing into the bathtub.

As the days went by, we advertised in the local newspaper that we’d found her (she had no ID tag and this was many years before the invention of the puppy microchip). We hesitantly named the dog Portia—my wife loved Shakespeare—in the hope that we would keep her.

No one answered the ad after a tense ten days. By then, we had taken Portia to the vet (she was fine), had caught her up on her shots (as best as the vet could determine) and had plied our landlady with champagne, chocolates and a hefty damage deposit for allowing us to violate the apartment building’s no-pets-or-surfers edict (the latter was implicit; the former clearly spelled out in our lease).

As the years went by, we fell in love with Portia, moved to Sacramento and promptly fell out of love with each other. I adored the dog but knew it would shatter my soon-to-be ex-wife even more than the divorce would if she also had to surrender our dog to me. So when she asked if she could keep Portia, I said, “Of course.” Part of me wanted to push for visitation, but I realized that as much as I would miss my dog, in the long term she’d be far better off with my ex-wife.

My second dog was a rescue dog, too, from the SPCA. I was married to Jane, my second wife, whom I would live with for twenty-nine years, until her death. We got the dog when our daughter, Jessica, was three and a half years old. Jane had always been afraid to have a dog because she suffered from allergies that could easily escalate into asthma. But since our daughter loved animals so much and clearly had a gift for communicating with them—she surreptitiously petted the kangaroos at the San Francisco Zoo, which was strictly
verboten
—Jane asked her allergist what sort of dog she could have that would cause her the least discomfort. “Get whatever you like and we’ll adjust your shots,” he said.

This came as a shock to her. All her life she’d been told—by uninformed family doctors and a mother who would say, “Who needs the trouble?”—that a dog,
any
dog, unless it was completely shaved and drenched in aloe, would cause her grief. “I’d have had dogs all my life,” she said.

Camellia, a German shepherd–Queensland herder admixture, was just eight weeks old when we adopted her. She and our daughter quickly became quibbling siblings, to the extent
that when we were enrolling Jessica in a private school and she was asked if she had sisters or brothers, she responded, “I have one sister an’ she’s a doggy.”

Camellia lived with us until she was fourteen (and my daughter was seventeen) and contracted cancer. By this time, my wife was also five years into her nine-year battle with breast cancer. Camellia’s losing battle became far too emblematic of the direction our lives would take in the next couple of years: my wife’s condition would turn terminal, our daughter would leave home for college, and I would have to learn, or to pretend, that everything in life had a purpose.

I could never stand cats. Part of my animus derived from the fact that I’d always been allergic to them. Another part sprang from the fact that cats just didn’t seem needy, dependent, grateful and sloppy enough to make them loving pets. Cats just never seem to need anyone’s help. Fact is, I like to be depended on, I like to protect and I like to help. I have the same problem with children once they’re old enough to ask you to leave their rooms.

And while I lived with Sabrina and tolerated her, I never really saw myself as a cat owner—not in the way I’d been a dog owner to Portia and Camellia. Until one day, not long ago, a feral neighborhood cat strolled into our backyard and began to hassle Sabrina. She quickly burst into an aria that had me running downstairs from my office into the backyard and removing the intruder, which I threw for a thirty-yard incomplete pass (unless you consider a camellia bush a receiver).

Wow. Where did that come from?
I wondered, standing on the grass, waiting for my heartbeat to calm down. My rage and violent reaction surprised me. Since when was I patrolling the garden to protect a cat? I knew enough about cats by then not to await a thank-you note from Sabrina or even a casual brush against my leg as she stalked stiffly back into the house.
Weird,
I thought, shaking my head and brushing the stray cat hairs off my hands.
Just weird.

A few nights later Jessica came to dinner and asked for my help with a project with a looming due date. The request was barely out of her mouth before I nodded in agreement. “Sure, of course. Let’s get started. I’m ready right now.”

And that was when I realized why I’d come to Sabrina’s rescue. One of my kids had been in trouble. I’d done what any loving father—or cat owner—would do.

Pam Giarrizzo

Laguna San Ignacio
is not a destination people generally think about when planning a vacation to Mexico; indeed, most people have probably never even heard of it. It lies on the Pacific Ocean side of Baja California Sur, but visitors don’t go there to swim or scuba dive or lie on the beach. Flying into the desert near the lagoon in an airplane so tiny they can’t even stand up straight in it, they may start to question why they decided to go there at all. But they are there because they have heard about the
laguna de ballenas amistosas
(lagoon of friendly whales) and they want to see if the stories are really true.

Two years ago I was one of those people, although I wasn’t actually the person who was supposed to be there. My husband, Phil, was, since he had been part of a successful campaign a few years earlier to prevent Mitsubishi Corporation from building a salt plant at the lagoon, which serves as the nursing grounds
of the California gray whale. He had been asked by others who had been a part of the campaign to go with them and see the whales for himself. After all the arrangements had been made, pressing business matters arose that kept Phil from taking the trip, and he asked if I would like to go in his stead.

I had gone whale watching before, crowded with strangers along the rail of a large tour boat off the coast of Monterey, fighting seasickness and straining for a glimpse of a whale a quarter of a mile in the distance. I had no desire to take a trip like that again. But I knew that this was not going to be that kind of whale watching. My husband had been told stories about camping out on the beach in Mexico, close enough to hear the whales breathe in the stillness of the night. That sounded like a once-in-a-lifetime whale-watching excursion, and I was grateful for the opportunity.

I packed my gear and flew to San Diego, the jumping-off point for the trip. The chartered bus ride with my fellow whale watchers from San Diego to a small private airport across the border in Tijuana was uneventful. When I saw the small planes we were about to board, I suddenly understood why I had to list my weight on the trip application and was instructed to bring no more than thirty pounds of luggage. It looked like only a dozen or so passengers would fit inside each plane. I found myself worrying about whether or not I had been entirely truthful when I listed my weight, and whether I might have packed a few more things than I really needed.

With a certain amount of trepidation, I climbed the steps to the plane’s entrance, hunched forward and squeezed through
the narrow passage that served as an aisle, dropping into the first open seat I saw. The lavatory was separated from the cabin by only a flimsy curtain. After takeoff, the person sitting in the last seat in the plane began serving the in-flight meal by reaching into the cooler supplied by the tour operator and passing snacks and soft drinks forward until everyone, including the pilot and copilot, had something to eat. I was beginning to wonder what I had gotten myself into.

Fortunately, the plane touched down without incident on a dusty airstrip in the desert, where we were met by vans and driven several miles to the water’s edge. We grabbed our luggage and boarded pangas, small fishing boats about twenty-two feet in length, which delivered us about forty-five minutes later to the Rocky Point campground at Laguna San Ignacio. We unloaded the boats bucket-brigade style, found our assigned cabin tents and received a brief orientation about the camp.

After a quick lunch we headed down to the water and climbed back into the pangas for our first ride out to see the whales. In addition to the pangateers who piloted the boats, there was a naturalist aboard each boat to point out the birds—black-and-white surf scoters, with their striking orange bills; parasitic jaegers, conducting midair attacks to steal fish from the mouths of hapless gulls; and other denizens of the lagoon, such as sea turtles, moving effortlessly through the water. Whales could be seen in the distance, breaching most of their bodies’ length out of the water’s calm surface or spy hopping just enough to see who was in the vicinity. Bottlenose dolphins appeared from nowhere, bow riding in the
surf stirred up by the pangas, much to the delight of all the passengers aboard.

Suddenly, the pangateer cut the throttle, slowing the boat to a quiet glide along the shimmering water. He and the naturalist were especially alert then. The whales that had seemed so distant a moment ago were now a mere fifty feet away. We all held our breath; this was what we’d been waiting for. Slowly, an enormous barnacle-covered gray whale mother made her way toward the panga, which was about half her length. She was followed by her shiny black calf, which, even though it was only a few months old, was already as long as the boat. The whales were only a few feet away, and we were at their mercy, hoping that the stories we’d been told about the friendly whales of Laguna San Ignacio were true, and that they wouldn’t upend our panga and spill us into the frigid waters of the lagoon.

“Lean over the side and splash a little water toward them with your fingertips if you want them to come closer,” the naturalist advised. There was no question that we wanted the whales to come closer. This was the moment we had dreamed of. The mother whale appeared to show her infant what to do next. She eased closer and closer to the boat, until her head rose up out of the water mere inches from the side of the panga. As she met our gaze, we reached out eagerly and began to stroke her scarred gray head, whispering soothing words to let her know that we, too, were friendly. The encounter continued for a minute or so, before she dived down and resurfaced several feet away on the other side of the boat.

Her calf, who was learning this behavior from his mother, inched closer to the boat, much to our delight, as we couldn’t wait to stroke his smooth black head. His body had not yet been invaded by the barnacles and sea lice that had attached themselves to his mother’s skin, nor had he suffered the injuries from run-ins with ships or other creatures that had left his mother with deep scars. We continued to pat every part of him that we could reach until his mother finally swam away and he followed after her. We had all heard about people who had managed to actually kiss a whale or rub the baleen plates in its mouth, which are used to filter its food, but for us on our first day in the lagoon, it was enough just to be able to touch the whales. It is not an overstatement to say that this demonstration of trust from creatures who have suffered so much over the centuries at the hands of whalers and other humans was a life-changing experience for me and all the other passengers aboard the tiny fishing boat.

The gray whales of Laguna San Ignacio were not always friendly. They could not afford to be. After the captains of European whaling ships discovered what a fertile hunting area these nursing grounds were, the waters of the lagoon ran red with the blood of slaughtered whales. Then the mother gray whales would attack the whaling ships ferociously in a futile attempt to save themselves and their calves. The whalers called them “hardheaded devil fish” and learned to fear them, even as they harpooned them by the hundreds, hunting them almost to extinction. Not until 1949 did the International Whaling Commission end this bloody practice, once again allowing
mother gray whales to give birth to their calves in the peaceful sanctuary of the lagoon and to prepare them for the long migration north to the Bering Sea and beyond.

For decades after the hunting ended, gray whales and local fishermen maintained an uneasy truce, staying as far away from each other as possible. The story of how that all changed is legendary in Laguna San Ignacio. One day in 1972 two local fishermen were out in their panga when they saw a female gray whale heading for them. They tried to get away, but the whale kept coming closer, going so far as to swim under the boat at one point and actually lift it out of the water. After she lowered the boat, she continued to swim near it, making eye contact with the fishermen until one of them finally reached out his hand and touched her. This was the beginning of a new era in the relationship between humans and whales in Laguna San Ignacio. News of the friendly whales began to spread, and people began to arrive from locations near and far to enjoy this mystical experience for themselves. Now tourism has joined fishing as an important source of income for the people who live near the lagoon, and they have become very protective of their whales.

Over dinner in the evenings we learned about the gray whales and the lagoon from the naturalists who had been hired for the season. I had the impression that everyone who made the journey to Laguna San Ignacio must be deeply touched by the experience. It seemed to me that no one who had stroked the head of a baby gray whale would ever see a Save the Whales bumper sticker in the same light again. It would no longer be just a slogan; it would become a sacred trust.

But after a few trips out onto the lagoon, I began to worry that I might be part of the problem. “Should we be encouraging them like this?” I asked Kate, the naturalist who accompanied the panga I was in one afternoon. “Should we make the whales believe that people are their friends, when on so many levels we are not? Will my loving caresses somehow take away the baby whale’s ability to recognize danger if she comes across a whaling ship during her northward migration?” Kate agreed that normally this would be cause for concern, but she assured me that the gray whales exhibited this behavior only in Laguna San Ignacio, where, thankfully, they are protected by laws and local sentiment.

I allowed her words to soothe my newly troubled conscience, but I continued to wrestle with the question of whether we are wrong to allow the whales to become so comfortable with us. After all, one of the cardinal rules of wildlife rehabilitation is to refrain from trying to turn a wild animal into a pet, which means that contact with humans is kept at a minimum. The whales have no need for rehabilitation, as they are already in the wild, but it seems as though the same principle would apply.

Part of my dilemma is that I don’t know what’s in it for the whales. They approached us, after all. We didn’t approach them. The fishermen in 1972 were trying to get away from the whale, but she persisted in forcing their acquaintance. When my fellow whale watchers and I went out into the lagoon, the pangateer didn’t chase after the whales. He waited for them to come to us. The whales aren’t looking for food, since food is not the primary
reason they stay so long in Laguna San Ignacio, and no food is given to them by anyone in the pangas. There are those who believe that the whales seek interaction with humans in order to form a close bond and thereby ensure that we won’t threaten to harm them or their calves again. But I know of no research that would support this anthropomorphic theory.

Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe I should just trust the whales. If they perceive that there is value in making overtures to humans, who am I to say there is not? Still, I worry.

In our two trips a day out into the lagoon, I don’t think we ever went without a visit from a whale, although the tour operators always caution that there is no guarantee of whale encounters. We all became quite adept at coaxing the whales to the side of the panga so we could pat them, but I had an unfulfilled desire to kiss a whale before my trip ended. That seemed a little more difficult, though. Reaching my arm far enough over the side of the small boat to touch a whale with my hand was one thing, but leaning my whole upper body far enough out to kiss the whale was another matter entirely.

On the last day of my trip, I watched for my chance. I would have loved to kiss a mother whale, if for no other reason than to thank her for trusting us with her calf, but it seemed to me that the mothers always hung back just a bit, making us work a little harder to reach out and touch them. The calves, with their exuberance of youth, were more likely to come closer. With a heightened sense of awareness, I watched as a gray whale calf swam toward the panga. I began to ease up off of my seat and reach out into the water. I splashed a little water in the whale’s
direction, leaning a little farther out of the boat the closer he came.

Suddenly he was rubbing up against the side of the panga, and everyone was stroking his satiny skin. It was now or never, I thought, and I leaned as far out as I safely could and kissed the side of his head. And then, with salt water still clinging to my lips, I gave him another kiss for good measure. Afterward, I alternated between a feeling of almost giddy excitement and an overwhelming desire to burst into tears. It was an intensely emotional experience, one that I would never have thought possible just weeks earlier.

I had to be in Monterey on business several months ago and I had a little time to kill before my meeting started. I took a walk along Fisherman’s Wharf and saw people waiting to go out on a whale-watching cruise. It seemed to me to be awfully late in the season for that, so I stopped and took a look at the trip board set up by one of the cruise operators to find out what they expected to see. It announced recent sightings: Killer whales! Blue whales! Gray whales! And I found myself wondering if any of
my
gray whales were off the coast of Monterey now. Would anyone on that whale-watching cruise, fighting nausea and being jostled by other passengers, see my whales? Would they see the mother whale to whom I felt such gratitude for trusting me with her calf? Would they see the baby whale that I kissed? Probably not, and even if they did see those gray whales, they couldn’t possibly feel the same bond to them that I now feel.

Perhaps reasonable minds can differ as to whether it’s a good thing or not for people to have such close encounters with whales as I did in Laguna San Ignacio, but one thing is certain: having kissed a baby gray whale, I will always feel that the responsibility for his fate and the fate of his species is in my hands.