Thunder Dog (4 page)

“Michael, we’re looking forward to having you come and get a guide dog,” he said.
What
? I didn’t even know my parents had applied. Maybe they didn’t want me to be disappointed if I had been turned down. I was just fourteen, and the rule was that you had to be sixteen to get a guide dog. For some reason, Guide Dogs bent the rules for me.

In late June, my parents sent Ellery off to Boy Scout camp and then my dad, mom, and I drove up to San Rafael, where they dropped me off at Guide Dogs for the Blind. Back then it was surrounded by rolling green hills and undeveloped land out in the middle of nowhere. As we drove down the gravel road leading into the campus, I was practically wiggling with excitement. I had hardly ever been out of Southern California, and it all seemed like a big adventure. I wasn’t too worried about getting homesick; after all, I had survived a couple of previous stints at summer camp. And I was far too excited about getting a guide dog to be nervous.

My parents dropped me off on Sunday, and I spent the day exploring the eleven-acre campus. At the front of the campus was an administration building. Off to one side was a small dorm with eight double rooms. On the other side was a house for the executive director. There was also a dining room, a common room with a small television and an out-of-tune zither, and a swimming pool. At the back were the dog kennels.

Class started the very next day and I was the youngest person by far. The average age for a guide dog user is fifty-one. Being around so many adults made me slightly nervous, and I had to learn how to behave. One morning we hit town for a training session and ended up at the Downtown Lounge in San Rafael for lunch. I got up and went to the restroom and left the door open, like we did at home. I can’t believe I did that, but I guess because I couldn’t see anything, I didn’t think about other people looking in and seeing me. Or maybe I was just an idiotic adolescent. In any case, I was quickly made aware that my bathroom etiquette needed an upgrade.

One thing I loved about the Guide Dogs campus was that every room had a record player in it for talking books, recorded on twelve-inch vinyl records. Whenever I wasn’t in class or practicing, I spent my time reading books that way.

In class I learned that Guide Dogs for the Blind started with the idea of using shelter dogs as guides for blind service personnel after World War II. Blondie, a German shepherd rescued from the Pasadena Humane Society, became the guide dog for Sgt. Leonard Foulk, the first serviceman to graduate from the school in 1941.

The first skill I learned in training involved basic footwork. Guide Dogs teaches through “Juno” training, with the trainer holding the harness to simulate working with an imaginary dog named Juno. Footwork involved learning to coordinate keeping my left foot by the dog’s right front paw. This may sound simple, but it isn’t if you can’t see the dog’s foot or your own foot. I also learned the verbal commands and hand signals, how to properly use the harness and leash, and how to both correct and praise a guide dog. As a class, we also participated in lectures where we learned techniques for basic dog training and obedience, along with how to keep our dogs healthy and happy.

Three days later, I got my dog. There was an excited buzz in the air on Wednesday, also known as Dog Day. The trainers had been carefully evaluating each of us for personality (quiet or energetic? patient or hotheaded?), gait (fast or slow? small or large stride?), and physical capacity (strong or weak? young or aged?). Trainers had also studied our home environments (busy, big city or small, rural town?) and our lifestyles (frequent traveler or homebody?). Last, they had taken a close look at our day-to-day surroundings (high-rise building, crowded classrooms and hallways, or peaceful home office?). After careful consideration of every facet of both the human’s and the dog’s lives, Guide Dogs matched each of us up with the dog that seemed the best fit. The wise trainers knew I needed a calm, collected dog with the patience to put up with a teenager.

On Dog Day, we sat through a morning lecture about the dogs, ate a quick lunch in the dining room, then went to our rooms to wait. I was so nervous I couldn’t sit still enough to listen to a talking book in order to pass the time. I sat and fidgeted, getting up to pace back and forth when I could no longer stand it. My roommate felt the same way. Finally, I was called into instructor Bruce Benzler’s office.

“Mike, sit quietly,” he said. “Your dog is Squire. Squire is a dark red golden retriever, about sixty-four pounds. I want you to be patient. Don’t say anything. I’m going to let the dog in, and we’ll see how he reacts to you.”

Mr. Benzler got up and walked to the door. He opened it, and Squire walked in the room. He came straight over and started sniffing me all over. I was excited and my hands itched to pet him, but I obeyed and sat still. Squire inspected me for about thirty seconds then sat down next to me and waited. “It looks like you found a friend,” said Mr. Benzler. I gave Squire a hug. My heart was pounding.

“You can take Squire back to your room now,” said Mr. Benzler. “Use his leash, and ask him to heel. Then take some time to get to know each other.”

Squire and I headed back to my room. I felt like I was walking on air with Squire by my side. When the door closed behind us, I sat down and talked to Squire for the next couple of hours. I’d known plenty of dogs, but I’d never met a dog before that was so mature and well trained. I felt an immediate bond with Squire. He liked me and seemed interested in me. We just seemed to fit.

Squire and I developed a partnership, and I learned how to read Squire’s body language through the handle of the harness; I could almost tell what he was going to do before he did it. I think he learned to read me too. He was much more than just a pet. Squire was my best friend, and we became a team as he guided me safely through the halls of Palmdale High School for the next four years. He was a quick study. When faced with a gaggle of girls in a crowded campus hallway, Squire learned to stick his cold, wet nose under a miniskirt or two. When the girls would shriek and jump out of the way, my brother, Ellery, swore that Squire actually grinned. I suspect I almost received a few slaps and I am sure I was the subject of many angry looks, thanks to Squire.

Squire and our dachshund, Pee Wee, got along famously and wore tracks in the carpet chasing each other up and down the hallways of our house. The two dogs developed a game where Pee Wee raced down the hallway, with Squire in hot pursuit. When they got to the living room, Pee Wee bunched up his long, narrow body like a spring and jumped up on the couch. Squire would run up and grab him off the couch, flip his little sausage body over on the ground, and gnaw on his stomach, play-growling all the while.

I know Pee Wee must have missed Squire when he went with me to college. After a few years with me at UC Irvine, Squire grew old and tired. He was eleven years old and couldn’t keep up with me anymore. The very worst thing about guide dogs is they don’t last very long. The average guide dog only makes it as a working dog until the age of nine or ten because guiding is both physically and emotionally stressful for the dog. I loved Squire, and I think the relationship with your first guide dog is something like the first time you fall in love. Squire occupied a special corner in my heart. Forever. But it was time for him to retire, and he went to live with my parents back in Palmdale with his little buddy PeeWee. Squire lived to be fourteen years old, a good, respectable age for a golden.

After Squire retired, I headed back to San Rafael for a second time, and Guide Dogs paired me with another golden retriever named Holland. He was a good, steady guide dog. He took me through my graduate years and my first several years of employment. I tried to take advantage of his chick-magnet qualities, but most of the time women were interested only in the dog, not me.

After Holland, I got another golden, named Klondike; he guided me through much of my working life. Klondike had a bit of an overactive digestive system and sometimes filled the office conference room with a—how shall I put this?—pungent aroma. It didn’t bother me; I figured it helped keep my sales force awake and alert.

Linnie was next, a light-blonde Labrador retriever. She was a wonderful dog. Whenever anyone touched her, she would stop, drop, and roll over to get her stomach scratched. We ran across actor Peter Falk once in an airport frequent-flier lounge, and he spent ten minutes on his knees on the carpet, scratching her stomach. “Linnie, I can’t sit here all night,” he groused in his gravelly voice, smiling big. Linnie had a sixth sense about people. In a crowd, she always went right to the person who needed some attention. She would have made a great therapy dog. Her guiding career ended abruptly when she contracted Lyme disease from a backyard tick bite. She retired in 1999 after only three years of guiding, and Karen and I kept her as a pet. Linnie became a beloved part of our family.

After Linnie, I went without a guide dog for six months, using a cane to get around New Jersey and New York City, including the World Trade Center. New York sidewalks are jam-packed, and I spent way too much money replacing broken white canes at forty dollars a pop because people didn’t watch where they were going.

Then, in November 1999, Roselle entered our lives. I found myself back in San Rafael at Guide Dogs for the Blind in that same office, waiting to be matched with a new guide dog. Although this was my fifth time, I was just as nervous and excited as that first time, thirty-five years earlier. The only way I can describe the feeling of waiting for your guide dog is that it is almost exactly like standing at the front of the church in your tuxedo, waiting for the organ to play the “Wedding March” and your bride-to-be to start down the aisle. Your life will never be the same, and you will no longer be alone.

When the training supervisor let Roselle into the office to meet me, she was a bit of a busybody. She sniffed me all over then left and snuffled her way around the room. “Well, call her and see if she’ll come to you,” suggested the supervisor. Roselle slowly made her way back. Then she stopped and sat down next to me and didn’t move again. I took her back to the room and chatted with her for a while. I petted her and played with her and we got to know each other. I quickly noticed she had two sides to her personality. She could be very calm and quiet when she was working. But when the harness came off, she became a little mischievous. She liked to steal my socks, carry them off in her mouth, and hide them, but she never chewed them up. I also noticed she snored. Like a grizzly bear.

Roselle’s puppy raisers were Ted and Kay Stern, a retired couple in Santa Barbara, California, who first got her as a fuzzy, yellow, four-month-old puppy with an impish twinkle in her eye. The Sterns gave Roselle her first ten months of basic in-home obedience training and acquainted her with as many different environments as possible, including a visit to New York City at Christmastime. The hectic pace of urban life didn’t seem to faze Roselle as the Sterns visited packed restaurants, clattering subways, and crowded sidewalks.

At home, Kay remembered Roselle as spunky and playful. “She used to steal my slippers from the closet and run all around the house to try to play keep-away,” Kay said. “She loved to play hide-and-seek with us, and I loved her crooked doggy smile. She sometimes tested limits and tried to pretend she didn’t remember her lessons. She was a smart pup.” They also reported her snoring, especially in church.

When we got back to New York, Roselle and Linnie became fast friends. Whenever I worked down in the basement of our house in New Jersey and I needed to take a break, I’d grab a braided Booda rope bone and play tug-of-war with the dogs. They pulled me all around the basement in my rolling office chair, banging me into walls and posts. It was something like a human pinball game and I was the ball.

Within two days of her arrival at the house, Roselle went off to work with me at the World Trade Center. Initially, we spent a lot of time exploring the building’s hallways, its lobbies, and the underground shopping center. I worked hard to make sure she would not expect to always go the same way to get to a particular location within the building. I always felt it important that Roselle not be able to anticipate my commands—something that can easily happen within a confined space such as the WTC. Roselle and I made a good match; we were always up for an adventure.

But my 9/11 adventure would have very high stakes.

As Roselle and I walk together down the first few concrete stairs of Stairwell B, I begin to smell a peculiar odor. It reminds me of the smell of kerosene lanterns at Boy Scout camp. At first it’s slightly pungent, though. Just a tickle.
I wonder what that smell is?
Roselle must smell it too, but she gives no sign.

More stairs, with our small group heading down. The temperature in the stairway is comfortable, not too hot or too cold. The electricity is working and the air is breathable.
But that smell .
. .

Then it hits me. As a salesman, I’ve flown all over the world and been through countless airports.
I know that smell. I’ve smelled it on the runway. I could swear it’s jet fuel
.