by Pam Houston
To say Fenton was intelligent; to say he had a wider range of emotions than anyone I dated in my twenties and thirties is really to only scratch the surface of what a magnificent creature he was. He was the ranch manager, hypervigilant but not neurotic, keeping his eye on everything—animals, people—making sure no one was out of sorts or out of place. Because of his watchfulness, he had perfected the art of anticipating what would happen next better than any person could have. He knew all of my tastes and my tendencies, and he was always ready to be of service in any undertaking—moving the sheep from one pasture to another, walking the fence line to look for breaks, riding into town to drop off the recycling, cheering me up on a sleepless night by resting his heavy head across one of my ankles, reminding me to get up from the computer after too many hours of writing and go take a walk outside.
This last year, though, the arthritis that first made itself known when he was about eight years old was getting severe. He’d been on Rimadyl—the canine version of Advil—for years. We had had good results from acupuncture, massage and glucosamine chondroitin. Doc Howard had shelved his country vet skepticism to give a laser gun a try and had been surprisingly impressed with the results, using it on many patients for pain relief, as well as on his wife and himself. Once a week I loaded Fenton in the 4Runner and we drove to Doc’s, donned our Keith Richards goggles (Fenton got some too) and Doc’s granddaughter gave Fenton six shots of laser light in his back end. Lately, even the laser gun treatments were reaching the point of diminishing returns.
I’d been away for a few days, in Boston, when I got the call from Kelly, my ranchsitter, that Fenton was down and didn’t seem to want to get up anymore. A wolfhound isn’t meant not to be able to stand and walk around, however comfortable we might be willing to make him.
Months before, I had written on my calendar the words “This weekend keep free in case Fenton . . . ,” and there was the old boy, as obliging as ever, doing everything, even dying, right on time. I flew to Denver immediately, and invited some of Fenton’s closest friends to the ranch for the weekend, knowing that in order to come, they would have to brave the predicted Mother’s Day blizzard during the five-hour drive from the Front Range to the ranch.
In Boulder I bought dry-aged organic beefsteaks for everyone I thought might make it, plus a mountain of other groceries. I figured if we were going to be sad—and we were going to be sad—at least we were going to have good food to eat. When I selected the steaks, the butcher, whose name is Jerry (and whose dog’s name, I would learn later, is Gristle) took a lot of time and great pleasure describing the dry-aging process, and when I asked for six T-bones, one for each of the potential guests and another for the old boy himself, Jerry said, “You must be having quite a party.” And since he had been so kind and thorough in his explanation, I said, “Well, what I am actually doing is having a kind of living wake for one of the best dogs who has ever lived, and I want to buy the very best for him, and for his friends who are making the drive up to my ranch in Creede to be with him.” Jerry lifted one of the massive T-bones off the top of the pile sitting on the scale.
“You shoulda said so to begin with,” he said. “In that case Fenton’s is on me.”
My friend Tami Anderson had a wonderful dog named Taylor who she was as deeply connected to, I believe, as I was to Fenton. I have loved all my dogs, of course, but there is the rare dog—I have had two so far in my life—that asked me to transcend my human limitations and be, at least occasionally, a little more evolved, like them. Fenton was such a dog, and so was Taylor. Taylor and Fenton were puppies together, and they loved each other truly all their lives. When Taylor was coming close to the end, she and Tami would often lie on the bed together and look into one another’s eyes. One day, Tami told me, almost in a whisper, they were in such a position, and Tami said, “Maybe next time, I’ll be the dog.”
But Tami couldn’t be there for Fenton’s weekend, and neither could Greg, so it turned out to be me and Kelly, and Linda, who had cared for Fenton so often over the last five years of his life he belonged to her nearly as much as he belonged to me. She had flown in from Reno and met me at the Denver airport and we had driven together. The storm had kept everyone else away.
The weekend was everything all at once. It rained and snowed and blew and eventually howled, and I slept out on the dog porch with Fenton anyway, nose to nose with him for his last three nights. The storm seemed to have been ordered especially for the old boy, who loved the cold and snow most of all, who hated the woodstove and preferred it when I kept the house in the 55–60 degree range, who all his life would literally raise a disapproving eyebrow at me the moment he suspected I was going out to chop kindling.
Linda and I gave him sponge baths and rubbed his face and ears until he didn’t want us to rub his face and ears anymore, and then we sat quietly beside him. I will admit to even loving cleaning him up, changing his dog beds, washing and drying him, fine-tuning my attention to meet his every need.
When I could stand to tear myself away from him, I cooked—giant pots of soup and pesto and grilled vegetables and salad. I had no appetite but the kitchen was warm and smelled good whenever I walked into it. Fenton ate Jerry’s giant dry-aged T-bone in three sittings over two days and enjoyed the bone as much as I’ve ever seen him enjoy anything in his life, even though he’d mostly lost interest in other food by then. There were times I was sure we were doing exactly the right thing by Fenton, times I thought that if my last weekend could be like his, it would be better than pretty much anybody’s last weekend I had heard about in the history of the world. Other times, I was in a flat panic. How could I be trusted to make this decision? What on earth gave me the authority or the wisdom to decide when his quality of life had crossed over some determinate line? And all that aside, how would I live in a world without him, without his tender presence beside me, without his increasingly stiff rear end galumphing down the driveway to meet me, without his quiet vigilance as I sat in a chair and did my work?
Fenton was my seventh Irish wolfhound and my tenth dog overall. I was not new to being the decision maker, but no amount of times down this difficult road made it any easier. At one point I got myself so freaked out I thought maybe we would get in the car together—just him and me—and drive and drive and see if we could outrun death.
On Monday morning I saw he was getting the very beginning of tiny sores from sitting still for so long, and I knew Tuesday morning would have to be his last. My friend Kae Penner Howell called from Denver and said she had tried to make it on Sunday, but they had closed Highway 285 because of black ice and so far it had not reopened. She asked me if I was okay, and I told her I was. I have always called Kae the moral center of my large and wonderful group of women friends, in part because she was raised by preachers, in part because she has so much backbone, but mostly because she has a remarkable way of orienting toward true north.
Kae and I have the same exact Prius—year and model—and when she pulled in the driveway ten hours later Fenton got more excited than I had seen him all weekend, even though I was sitting right there beside him. Like there might be two of me, and I might come home all over again and start caring for him as I already was. This was another unexpected gift of the weekend. How many hundreds of times had I seen Fenton at the bottom of the driveway, his tail going in giant crazy circles? But because I was always the one in the Prius I had never before witnessed that moment of recognition, the moment he became sure that car was my car. Who in your life has ever been that ecstatic over your arrival? Someone, I hope. Some living being.
But of course, it wasn’t a second me who got out of the Prius. It was Kae, and when he recognized her, he danced and danced, on his front legs only, because he loves her too, and he knew she had come to see him. As a culture, whenever we want to treat someone or something inhumanely, we declare they don’t have emotions, but anyone who thinks dogs don’t have emotions should have been on the porch that night in the snow.
Ka
e had driven ten hours in whiteout conditions, doubling the length of the drive. When I asked her if it was awful, she shrugged. “You never ever ask for help, so after we talked, I figured I needed to get here.”
“I don’t think I asked for help this time.”
“Maybe not,” she said, “but you were close.”
We bedded down on the dog porch in sleeping bags under the swirling snow. She said, “You are doing the right thing, Pam. He’s not going to get better.”
I said, “It feels like a betrayal no matter what I do.”
And she said, “I don’t think ‘betrayal’ is a word that belongs on this porch.”
I teach sometimes with the Colorado writer Laura Hendrie, and she gives a craft lecture on something she calls the Jaws-of-Life character, the person who sweeps in and pulls your protagonist from the burning car just when it seems all hope is lost. Kae Penner Howell was my Jaws-of-Life character that weekend. She came just when all my intrinsic strength and broad-minded philosophy about the cycle of life was about to fail me. She drove ten hours in a Prius on black ice to sleep on a hard wooden porch in a poorly rated sleeping bag with Fenton and me on his last night on earth.
I didn’t want to go to sleep because the hours were short now and I didn’t want to miss a minute. After we had been quiet a while, a coyote barked and another howled back from a greater distance. Before long and for the last time, Fenton joined their song.
A few hours later, when it was barely getting light, I lay nose to nose with him and petted his perfect ears and said, aloud, “You did such a good job, Fenton. You did such a good job taking care of me.” He looked right at me, right into me. He wanted me to know he knew what I was saying. “And I think you already know this,” I said, “but you don’t have to be afraid.” I didn’t know where those words came from—if it were me getting the shot in the morning, I sure as hell would be afraid—but I knew when I said them they were the most important ones. In the gathering light he looked in my eyes not with fear exactly, but urgency. He said, Now it’s my turn to trust you and I said, You can.
An owl hooted, some geese honked, and Kae stirred in her sleeping bag. One of the lambs started baaing—Queenie probably, the one with the higher voice. I heard Roany nicker softly, heard him walk around on the crunching snow. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of a woodpecker. All the sounds the ranch makes every morning.
Doc Howard came at ten, through the snow, to give Fenton the shot. Doc is getting older and had told me he would be sending his granddaughter in his place, and I didn’t protest, though I know he heard the disappointment and fear in my silence, so I was unsurprised and very grateful to see his small gray head behind the wheel. When I saw he did not have the sedative most vets give initially, before they give the drug that stops the heart, he again heard my unasked question. Doc said, “What’s in this syringe is the world’s biggest sedative. I don’t like to mess around with lots of reactive drugs.” Fenton was calm—almost smiling—for the very few minutes it took to put him to sleep forever. I believe he knew what was happening. I believe he was ready to put his head down on my lap one last time.
Everybody cried, even sweet Jay, Doc’s brand-new vet tech who had only met Fenton a couple of times. When I found my voice again, I told Doc the story about Jerry and the steaks, and he said, “Pam, it turns out there are a lot of really good people in the world.”
After we loaded Fenton’s body into Doc’s truck to be taken to the morgue for cremation, Kae and Linda and I took a pasture walk in his honor. A couple of inches of snow covered the ground, and the bluebirds who had returned recently hoping for better weather were almost too beautiful against the freshly whitened pasture to bear. The sun came out, and we fed all the equines apples and carrots from our hands.
Eight hours later I found myself back in the Denver airport, which was full of opportunities to do the things I hadn’t found the time or the wherewithal to do all weekend: drink water, go to the bathroom, eat food. My plane was delayed two hours, and the corn chowder at Elway’s bar tasted miraculous. I was riding on something I recognized as “having lived through the thing you thought you might not live through” adrenaline. I marveled at all the people around me who weren’t grieving, who had had normal days in board meetings or at home with their kids. I wasn’t sleepy exactly. It was more like the insides of my eyes had been scoured with a Brillo pad.
Fenton the human sent me a text saying Fenton the canine loved and was loved all his life, and there is no condition in all our living and dying that could be more satisfying. Months later he would write Fenton a eulogy quoting both Thomas Merton (What we have to be is what we are) and Whitman (Life is the little that is left over from the dying), and saying, “Fenton the canine, was a teacher . . . he taught through the simple fact of being who he is, who he was. . . . In the losses lie the lessons. . . . [I]f we would only embrace death as another aspect of life—if we would let the animals teach us how to live and how to die—we might just treat each other and our animals better than we do.”
As I waited for my plane I found myself thinking back, as I had many times that weekend, to Jerry the butcher pulling that steak off the top of the pile. He might have thought what he did was a small thing—though the price of those dry-aged steaks makes it at least a medium thing, even by the most objective measure—but the relative magnitude of his kindness to me, at that moment, was frankly immeasurable—and I had held on to it all weekend, and would continue to for the weeks of grief to come.
Back in 2000, to help pay for the ranch, I took a teaching job at UC Davis, requiring me to be there for two ten-week quarters each year. I chose spring and fall, because summers are glorious in the high country and miserable in Davis, and because farm animals die most often in winter. Twice yearly I’d trade my down, fleece and XtraTufs for corduroy and linen. Twice yearly, I became a teacher who rode her bright yellow bike to school, who formulated sentences containing phrases like “contemporary fabulism” and “Paul Celan-esque,” who had regular meetings with the dean and the provost and who usually brushed her hair for them. I read my colleagues’ books on Noir Cinema in a Postcolonial Age and Situatedness and spent a fair amount of time apologizing for my SUV and the percentage of my clothes that bear sports logos.
In Creede, there is no movie theater and no drugstore and no one who would ever use a phrase like “Paul Celan-esque.” In Creede I talk to my neighbors about shrinking water tables and bingo at the Elks on Saturday night. When I go to the Monte Vista Co-Op to buy sealant to shoot into the water trough, and mineral licks, and big tubes of Ivermectin horse wormer and Carhartt overalls, I notice how different it is from the Davis Co-Op, where I buy organic turmeric and homeopathic allergy medicine, and where people take their groceries home in environmentally friendly macramé nets. To the people in Creede I am intelligent, suspiciously sophisticated and elitist to the point of being absurd. To the people at UC Davis I am quaint, a little slow on the uptake and far too earnest to even believe.
In Creede, people believe in hard work, the restorative power of nature and, in many cases, God. In the English department at UC Davis, my colleagues believe in irony, analysis and verbal agility. God has been replaced by literary theory, of course, which has rolled all the way over, in the seventeen years I have taught there, from deconstruction to Marxism with brief side trips into feminism and the postcolonial. In Creede there is no need for literary theory of any kind because there is such an overabundance of things that are actual. Cold, for instance, sometimes minus 50 degrees of it, and wind and drought, and wildfires that can chew up ten thousand acres in a day.
When I began teaching at UC Davis, it was still the home of the poet Gary Snyder. It was then, and still is, one of the finest environmental literature departments around. But times change, and over the years the talk has changed from riprap and plate tectonics to cyberspace as environment, Prius commercials as representations of nature, the suburban lawn as (and here I quote) “a poetic figure for a space,
or spacing, around or under figurality—The lawn therefore a figure for what is excluded in the idea of figure itself—the very substance and / as dimension in which figurality can emerge in itself.”1
My colleagues are brilliant, and so is their research, which proves to us, mostly, our own absurdity—tending our lawns, saving the earth with our Prii—the hollow chuckle often aimed at ourselves. The earth is already lost, they reason, and all that is left is to study the simulacrums, the Man vs. Wild video games and Survivor. I understand that this is the new environmentalism, and I respect it as such.
Last winter, a colleague taught a class in something called “distant reading.” Because I have spent my life trying to teach students close reading, when the grad students first told me about it, I thought it was a joke. But distant reading, according to The New York Times, is “understanding literature not by studying particular texts but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.”
“It’s not actually done by people,” my student Becca told me. “You take a body of literature, say, all the books set in Paris from 1490 to 1940, plug them into a computer, and the computer can tell you how many mentions of the Pont Neuf there were.” It was, I understood, an attempt to repurpose literature. As if all beings are best understood only in terms of their aggregate, as if by making things less particular, one made them more powerful or clear.
Last semester, when I asked my class, as I do each quarter, how many of them had ever spent a night sleeping in the wilderness the answer was zero, and I realized for the first time in my teaching life I might be standing in front of a room full of students for whom the words “elk” or “granite” or “bristlecone pine” conjured exactly nothing.
