Dane on the Run!

     Saskia was one of those timid Danes. She wasn’t one of the ones that shivers and cowers all the time, like Scooby Doo, but she was downright pitiful in new situations and so when, many years ago, we had an opportunity to visit family intercontinentally (it being usually beyond our means), we were serious about finding her the right place to stay. We knew she would be miserable in a run-type boarding facility, surrounded by strangers and strange dogs with limited human contact, but we were also inexperienced about where one could board a dog on a budget, as she was our first dog in this country (except Tank who we had for a week).

     It eludes me now why our vet’s information didn’t help – too expensive? I really don’t remember – but I ended up going on the searchpath from work, where, as a receptionist tied to the desk, I had frequent downtime. Most of the places I found within a reasonable public-transportation radius were too expensive or were full. I began to despair, but then I saw an ad for one that looked incredible. The website extolled the wide-open pastures the dogs had access to, the sensitive-dog experience of the owner, the weather-proofed runs with heaters and the personal attention. Each dog would be given a couple of hours of exercise throughout the day, including one-on-one person/dog play. There were photos of open grassy fields, comfy dog beds, happy retrievers gamboling about the sward. It seemed like the best we were likely to find and I enthusiastically rang them up. They had the space, it turned out, and I shudder to think what might have happened had I not gone to look before booking. I mean, who doesn’t do that? But what if we’d needed to book in a hurry, like in a serious family emergency situation or something? Anyway. Doesn’t bear thinking about. I went to look.

     The place was a solid walk through the particular kind of between-farms terrain we have here. Everywhere has its own just-out-back-of-suburbia between-farms terrain. Back in San Diego, it would have been gently heaving baked foothills, dirt roads and pull-outs littered with trash and ruts, various types of scrub growing from between the baked-clay chunks of earth, all broken up by canyons, small stands of scrubby willow in swampy old river bottoms, trashy lived-in trailers, and piles of junked cars and farm equipment. Alligator lizards, fence swifts, scarabs, tarantulas, white-tailed deer, and ground squirrels dodged red-tailed hawks, coyotes, rattlesnakes, weasels, herons, feral dogs, and ravens all around, and the air smelled like tangy dust and horses and sage. In Santa Cruz, it was brief flattened-out valley floors, dirt roads and pull-outs littered with trash and muddy sinkholes, everything overgrown with manzanita and wood sorrel and oat grass sprouting out of the rich soil, scattered by sheer granite mountainsides and creeks and surrounded by redwoods, interspersed with small stands of scrubby willow, trashy lived-in trailers, and piles of junked cars and farm equipment. Ringneck snakes, slender salamanders, white-tailed deer, scarabs, grey squirrels, and crickets skirted foxes, red-tailed hawks, weasels, and feral cats everywhere, and the air smelled like redwood trees and licorice and fennel and stink bugs. Here where I live now, it’s flat cultivated land gone a bit wild, dirt roads and pull-outs littered with trash and deeply-etched tire tracks, all of it overgrown with nettles and clover and dock thriving in the boggy ground, segmented by stands of scrubby willow and sudden, brutally straight canals, trashy lived-in trailers, and piles of junked cars and farm equipment. Roe deer, rabbits, Eurasian jays, shrews, scarabs, tits, and toads live in fear of weasels, buzzards, herons, foxes and osprey, and the air smells like daffodils and green growth and rot. Twenty or thirty minutes through this landscape and I was there.

     “There” was a typical run-down ranch front gate like any anywhere in the world: fence-posts sagging in ruts eroded over decades barely supported wilting barbed wire, a main house-type building squatting low and brown just on the other side of a dirt patch from which a few rusted vehicles were growing. The required sad chicken run, wire tacked to a few trees and a broken fence, to the left, rabbit hutch to the right, alone against a shed wall. A wary-looking, unsocialized yellow dog skulking around the corner of a barn. Nobody, as per protocol, in sight.

     I went in there, and by the time I found the owner, I’d walked around the whole place and seen the big bare-dirt outdoor area in which all of the boarded dogs were digging, sleeping, fighting, pacing, and fretting around the two big tubs of filthy water, a ripped-open bag of dog food in the corner by some splintery discarded lumber. I’d seen the tired horses with cracked hooves and the thorny hay like the stuff I was forced to feed out at that one job, I’d seen the listless ducks crouched in the corner of a muddy pit and the scrawny pregnant cats. Thus it was that when I rounded the last corner and spotted the woman I recognized from the photos on the website, I called out cheerfully, “Hi! There you are! We had an appointment 20 minutes ago! I’ve decided not to board my dog here! Bye!” and retreated immediately.

the situation to my colleague, who was training me to replace her at the time, and she waxed very enthusiastic about the woman with whom she boarded her dog whenever she went away. I called up right away, and as instructed mentioned my co-worker – the woman on the other end immediately and delightedly shrieked “TSIPPE!”, this being the name of my workmate’s dog, and we were in! She was great on the phone and she was great when I went out there. It was only 25 minutes on the bus, and despite her terror of unfamiliar daily life our Saskia loved the bus. I went out alone and then I went out with the dog.

     It was perfect! This woman lived in a row house with a square concrete back yard for emergencies, but took the dogs across the street to the loose-dog-friendly, fenced grassy bit for regular needs. She shared the home with her two utterly laid-back dogs, her dog-loving husband, and her sure-this-is-cool-whatever teenager. The ground floor was a sea of dog beds. She would, depending on compatibility, take in up to three dogs at once. Saskia loved her immediately, and tolerated the other dogs and the cat well, so we took it to the next step. I valued it highly that she insisted on a trial overnight stay before committing, and two days later I dropped Saskia off in the morning. We had made a pretty specific, and not very special-needs, list about our dog. How much she should be fed, that if there was a chaotic or loud situation she should be shut away from it, that kind of thing… and, kind if crucially, that she had a tendency to panic if she got scared so she should only be off-lead in the fenced area. All of this had been extensively discussed beforehand.

     At around noon I got the call. Things had been going super well. Saskia had befriended a couple of the other dogs and loosened up some, she’d been coming to all three humans for comfort, she was listening well to commends. So the woman had decided that she should go along for the Trip to the Park. This was very much not part of the plan. Saskia got used to new small environments and friendly entities quickly, we’d explained. However, Saskia freaked out (without us) in new wide-open spaces or chaotic or clinical settings. In no way was it a good idea for that woman to take that dog to that park.

     Indeed, the moment they left the car, which ride Saskia found traumatizing, our sweet girl just disappeared. Apparently she hadn’t been leashed in the car with the other dogs and no precautions had been taken about this; when the door opened, she was gone. The dog-sitter had been beating the bushes and calling for twenty minutes; she was now leaving our dog! I pleaded but no, she was not just going to drop the other dogs off and go back to search for ours, she was done. Incensed and terrified, I seethed my way through the second-most traumatic bus ride of my life and lunged out of the bus before it came to a full stop. OK, that part’s an exaggeration; they don’t open the door until they’re stopped. But I would have. She did drive back over to meet me there, I’ll say that, and recount the story again, and then explained that she would not be willing to watch our dog while we were away because she hadn’t come back to her when she called her and she didn’t want the responsibility.

     Whatever.

     This is where this story actually starts.

     Once I’d been dropped off in the parking lot at the edge of the park, I was lucky enough to be at the top of a slope so I surveyed the terrain: it was a big park, with a small lake in it that widened and narrowed as it meandered through open grassy fields, copses of trees, sports installations, snackbars.

     I stood on a picnic table and called my dog. I walked all around the park and called my dog. I asked every single person I saw whether they had seen a frightened Great Dane and they all said no, but they would spread the word. A couple of hours of this later, when I had circled back around to the parking lot again, I made the decision to leave the park. I was absolutely panicked; my dog was out there somewhere, scared, maybe hurt. The park terminated at this corner with farmland and the freeway. A road ran alongside the farmland; the freeway zoomed above me, a steep earthen dike covered in sheep rising to it from the road, itself terminating as the freeway lifted away from it to become overpass. I was terrified she might have gone onto the freeway, but I couldn’t do that and it wouldn’t help anything if I did.

     I opted for the road. There were farmhouses, widely spaced. Ten minutes or so brought me to the first one, and someone came to the door but hadn’t seen anything. I pressed on another 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, to the next one, where a man was loading hay onto a trailer. I asked if he’d seen a really big dog, probably running scared, and he told me someone else had told him he’d seen one “chasing the sheep” up on that dike a couple hours ago. Now, Saskia wouldn’t do that, but if she’d been frightened she also wouldn’t have balked at them and they would have scattered, so it would indeed look like a dog chasing sheep. My heart sank; I hoped no sheep had been badly affected by the experience and that should I encounter their humans (spoiler alert: never did, and all the sheep seemed fine when I got out there) they would be understanding.

When I reached the dike, which seemed nigh-on vertical from this close, I traversed a walking path along its lower slopes, ignoring the grazing sheep to look out at the area from this vantage point. No Saskia. It was then, though, I encountered the Universal Countryside Fellow, about 65 – 400 years old or thereabouts, resplendent in tweed walking cape and rubber boots, pipe a-puff, a shaggy Jack Russel running around the base of his magnificent, well-used  walking stick. He listened with great attention to my brief tale and explained to me that he had been to see a fellow in another farm just over that way – he indicated it sharply with the tip of his pipe-stem – and they had seen a yellow Really Big Dog leave the farmlands, running hard, and go over… to… there.

     Where? Only the airport. More specifically, the airfield, the taxiways and approach ends of the runways out where they abut the swampy land between them and the freeway and farms. Did she, I asked with great trepidation, access the airfield? Why yes, he said. Yes, she did. Last they saw she was running off on the asphalt of a taxiway itself, headed toward the lights of the airport proper in the distance. Now my heart started really pounding. A huge dog on the runways? Oh my god. We’d be talking runway closures, massive animal control personnel deployment, entire flight schedules affected, possibly for days. What if she stopped an important diplomatic flight? A medical flight? What if she ruined re-unions, weddings, funerals, vacations, first days at work? What if she got hurt? Not to mention the fines.

     I didn’t know what to do. I obviously couldn’t also go onto the airfield… What I did was go to to the unofficial walking path along edge of the sloggy land around the landing strips, scanning and scanning for any sign of my dog and not seeing any, until I came to the next path leading back under the freeway, and I returned to the park as my emotional and mental re-grouping point. I was now completely stymied. I decided I’d have to call my husband and set him to work on the landline getting in touch with whoever one called about this kind of thing while I did another round of the park, calling in my now very hoarse voice for my poor, scared dog. I walked across the parking lot, lined with tangles of vividly-blooming azalea, just as a police car cruised through slowly on a routine patrol. I flagged them down wildly and they listened to me, but said regretfully that they had not seen her. One said he would call it in and get everyone in the area keeping an eye out, the other started taking my statement – and that’s when Saskia walked out of the nearest azalea stand straight into my arms.

     And now we’ve reached the end of this tale – but for the curious I’ll cap it off by telling you that in the end we boarded her with the animal protection and rescue services, who turned out to have excellent but run-typical boarding facilities, and she did hate it utterly, but she was treated well and came back to us safe and was very glad to see her own bed when we got back home again.