by John Grogan
“Go ahead, let him loose,” Killer’s owner said. “A dog ain’t meant to spend his life on the end of a rope.”
“Oh, what the hell,” I said, and unsnapped the leash. Marley dashed for the water, kicking sand all over us as he blasted off. He crashed into the surf just as a breaker rolled in, tossing him under the water. A second later his head reappeared, and the instant he regained his footing he threw a cross-body block at Killer the Pig-Slaying Pit Bull, knocking both of them off their feet. Together they rolled beneath a wave, and I held my breath, wondering if Marley had just crossed the line that would throw Killer into a homicidal, Lab-butchering fury. But when they popped back up again, their tails were wagging, their mouths grinning. Killer jumped on Marley’s back and Marley on Killer’s, their jaws clamping playfully around each other’s throats. They chased each other up the waterline and back again, sending plumes of spray flying on either side of them. They pranced, they danced, they wrestled, they dove. I don’t think I had ever before, or have ever since, witnessed such unadulterated joy.
The other dog owners took our cue, and pretty soon all the dogs, about a dozen in total, were running free. The dogs all got along splendidly; the owners all followed the rules. It was Dog Beach as it was meant to be. This was the real Florida, unblemished and unchecked, the Florida of a forgotten, simpler time and place, immune to the march of progress.
There was only one small problem. As the morning progressed, Marley kept lapping up salt water. I followed behind him with the bowl of fresh water, but he was too distracted to drink. Several times I led him right up to the bowl and stuck his nose into it, but he spurned the fresh water as if it were vinegar, wanting only to return to his new best friend, Killer, and the other dogs.
Out in the shallows, he paused from his play to lap up even more salt water. “Stop that, you dummy!” I yelled at him. “You’re going to make yourself…” Before I could finish my thought, it happened. A strange glaze settled over his eyes and a horrible churning sound began to erupt from his gut. He arched his back high and opened and shut his mouth several times, as if trying to clear something from his craw. His shoulders heaved; his abdomen contorted. I hurried to finish my sentence: “…sick.”
The instant the word left my lips, Marley fulfilled the prophecy, committing the ultimate Dog Beach heresy. GAAAAAAAAACK!
I raced to pull him out of the water, but it was too late. Everything was coming up. GAAAAAAAAACK! I could see last night’s dog chow floating on the water’s surface, looking surprisingly like it had before it went in. Bobbing among the nuggets were undigested corn kernels he had swiped off the kids’ plates, a milk-jug cap, and the severed head of a tiny plastic soldier. The entire evacuation took no more than three seconds, and the instant his stomach was emptied he looked up brightly, apparently fully recovered with no lingering aftereffects, as if to say, Now that I’ve got that taken care of, who wants to bodysurf? I glanced nervously around, but no one had seemed to notice. The other dog owners were occupied with their own dogs farther down the beach, a mother not far away was focused on helping her toddler make a sandcastle, and the few sunbathers scattered about were lying flat on their backs, eyes closed. Thank God! I thought, as I waded into Marley’s puke zone, roiling the water with my feet as nonchalantly as I could to disperse the evidence. How embarrassing would that have been? At any rate, I told myself, despite the technical violation of the No. 1 Dog Beach Rule, we had caused no real harm. After all, it was just undigested food; the fish would be thankful for the meal, wouldn’t they? I even picked out the milk-jug cap and soldier’s head and put them in my pocket so as not to litter.
“Listen, you,” I said sternly, grabbing Marley around the snout and forcing him to look me in the eye. “Stop drinking salt water. What kind of a dog doesn’t know enough to not drink salt water?” I considered yanking him off the beach and cutting our adventure short, but he seemed fine now. There couldn’t possibly be anything left in his stomach. The damage was done, and we had gotten away with it undetected. I released him and he streaked down the beach to rejoin Killer.
What I had failed to consider was that, while Marley’s stomach may have been completely emptied, his bowels were not. The sun was reflecting blindingly off the water, and I squinted to see Marley frolicking among the other dogs. As I watched, he abruptly disengaged from the play and began turning in tight circles in the shallow water. I knew the circling maneuver well. It was what he did every morning in the backyard as he prepared to defecate. It was a ritual for him, as though not just any spot would do for the gift he was about to bestow on the world. Sometimes the circling could go on for a minute or more as he sought just the perfect patch of earth. And now he was circling in the shallows of Dog Beach, on that brave frontier where no dog had dared to poop before. He was entering his squatting position. And this time, he had an audience. Killer’s dad and several other dog owners were standing within a few yards of him. The mother and her daughter had turned from their sandcastle to gaze out to sea. A couple approached, walking hand in hand along the water’s edge. “No,” I whispered. “Please, God, no.”
“Hey!” someone yelled out. “Get your dog!”
“Stop him!” someone else shouted.
As alarmed voices cried out, the sunbathers propped themselves up to see what all the commotion was about.
I burst into a full sprint, racing to get to him before it was too late. If I could just reach him and yank him out of his squat before his bowels began to move, I might be able to interrupt the whole awful humiliation, at least long enough to get him safely up on the dune. As I raced toward him, I had what can only be described as an out-of-body experience. Even as I ran, I was looking down from above, the scene unfolding one frozen frame at a time. Each step seemed to last an eternity. Each foot hit the sand with a dull thud. My arms swung through the air; my face contorted in a sort of agonized grimace. As I ran, I absorbed the slow-mo frames around me: a young woman sunbather, holding her top in place over her breasts with one hand, her other hand plastered over her mouth; the mother scooping up her child and retreating from the water’s edge; the dog owners, their faces twisted with disgust, pointing; Killer’s dad, his leathery neck bulging, yelling. Marley was done circling now and in full squat position, looking up to the heavens as if saying a little prayer. And I heard my own voice rising above the din and uncoiling in an oddly guttural, distorted, drawn-out scream: “Noooooooooooooooo!”
I was almost there, just feet from him. “Marley, no!” I screamed. “No, Marley, no! No! No! No!” It was no use. Just as I reached him, he exploded in a burst of watery diarrhea. Everyone was jumping back now, recoiling, fleeing to higher ground. Owners were grabbing their dogs. Sunbathers scooped up their towels. Then it was over. Marley trotted out of the water onto the beach, shook off with gusto, and turned to look at me, panting happily. I pulled a plastic bag out of my pocket and held it helplessly in the air. I could see immediately it would do no good. The waves crashed in, spreading Marley’s mess across the water and up onto the beach.
“Dude,” Killer’s dad said in a voice that made me appreciate how the wild hogs must feel at the instant of Killer’s final, fatal lunge. “That was not cool.”
No, it wasn’t cool at all. Marley and I had violated the sacred rule of Dog Beach. We had fouled the water, not once but twice, and ruined the morning for everyone. It was time to beat a quick retreat.
“Sorry,” I mumbled to Killer’s owner as I snapped the leash on Marley. “He swallowed a bunch of seawater.”
Back at the car, I threw a towel over Marley and vigorously rubbed him down. The more I rubbed, the more he shook, and soon I was covered in sand and spray and fur. I wanted to be mad at him. I wanted to strangle him. But it was too late now. Besides, who wouldn’t get sick drinking a half gallon of salt water? As with so many of his misdeeds, this one was not malicious or premeditated. It wasn’t as though he had disobeyed a command or set out to intentionally humiliate me. He simply had to go and he we
nt. True, at the wrong place and the wrong time and in front of all the wrong people. I knew he was a victim of his own diminished mental capacity. He was the only beast on the whole beach dumb enough to guzzle seawater. The dog was defective. How could I hold that against him?
“You don’t have to look so pleased with yourself,” I said as I loaded him into the backseat. But pleased he was. He could not have looked happier had I bought him his own Caribbean island. What he did not know was that this would be his last time setting a paw in any body of salt water. His days—or rather, hours—as a beach bum were behind him. “Well, Salty Dog,” I said on the drive home, “you’ve done it this time. If dogs are banned from Dog Beach, we’ll know why.” It would take several more years, but in the end that’s exactly what happened.
CHAPTER 21
A Northbound Plane
S hortly after Colleen turned two, I inadvertently set off a fateful series of events that would lead us to leave Florida. And I did it with the click of a mouse. I had wrapped up my column early for the day and found myself with a half hour to kill as I waited for my editor. On a whim I decided to check out the website of a magazine I had been subscribing to since not long after we bought our West Palm Beach house. The magazine was Organic Gardening, which was launched in 1942 by the eccentric J. I. Rodale and went on to become the bible of the back-to-the-earth movement that blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s.
Rodale had been a New York City businessman specializing in electrical switches when his health began to fail. Instead of turning to modern medicine to solve his problems, he moved from the city to a small farm outside the tiny borough of Emmaus, Pennsylvania, and began playing in the dirt. He had a deep distrust of technology and believed the modern farming and gardening methods sweeping the country, nearly all of them relying on chemical pesticides and fertilizers, were not the saviors of American agriculture they purported to be. Rodale’s theory was that the chemicals were gradually poisoning the earth and all of its inhabitants. He began experimenting with farming techniques that mimicked nature. On his farm, he built huge compost piles of decaying plant matter, which, once the material had turned to rich black humus, he used as fertilizer and a natural soil builder. He covered the dirt in his garden rows with a thick carpet of straw to suppress weeds and retain moisture. He planted cover crops of clover and alfalfa and then plowed them under to return nutrients to the soil. Instead of spraying for insects, he unleashed thousands of ladybugs and other beneficial insects that devoured the destructive ones. He was a bit of a kook, but his theories proved themselves. His garden flourished and so did his health, and he trumpeted his successes in the pages of his magazine.
By the time I started reading Organic Gardening, J. I. Rodale was long dead and so was his son, Robert, who had built his father’s business, Rodale Press, into a multimillion-dollar publishing company. The magazine was not very well written or edited; reading it, you got the impression it was put out by a group of dedicated but amateurish devotees of J.I.’s philosophy, serious gardeners with no professional training as journalists; later I would learn this was exactly the case. Regardless, the organic philosophy increasingly made sense to me, especially after Jenny’s miscarriage and our suspicion that it might have had something to do with the pesticides we had used. By the time Colleen was born, our yard was a little organic oasis in a suburban sea of chemical weed-and-feed applications and pesticides. Passersby often stopped to admire our thriving front garden, which I tended with increasing passion, and they almost always asked the same question: “What do you put on it to make it look so good?” When I answered, “I don’t,” they looked at me uncomfortably, as though they had just stumbled upon something unspeakably subversive going on in well-ordered, homogeneous, conformist Boca Raton.
That afternoon in my office, I clicked through the screens at organicgardening.com and eventually found my way to a button that said “Career Opportunities.” I clicked on it, why I’m still not sure. I loved my job as a columnist; loved the daily interaction I had with readers; loved the freedom to pick my own topics and be as serious or as flip-pant as I wanted to be. I loved the newsroom and the quirky, brainy, neurotic, idealistic people it attracted. I loved being in the middle of the biggest story of the day. I had no desire to leave newspapers for a sleepy publishing company in the middle of nowhere. Still, I began scrolling through the Rodale job postings, more idly curious than anything, but midway down the list I stopped cold. Organic Gardening, the company’s flagship magazine, was seeking a new managing editor. My heart skipped a beat. I had often daydreamed about the huge difference a decent journalist could make at the magazine, and now here was my chance. It was crazy; it was ridiculous. A career editing stories about cauliflower and compost? Why would I want to do that?
That night I told Jenny about the opening, fully expecting her to tell me I was insane for even considering it. Instead she surprised me by encouraging me to send a résumé. The idea of leaving the heat and humidity and congestion and crime of South Florida for a simpler life in the country appealed to her. She missed four seasons and hills. She missed falling leaves and spring daffodils. She missed icicles and apple cider. She wanted our kids and, as ridiculous as it sounds, our dog to experience the wonders of a winter blizzard. “Marley’s never even chased a snowball,” she said, stroking his fur with her bare foot.
“Now, there’s a good reason for changing careers,” I said.
“You should do it just to satisfy your curiosity,” she said. “See what happens. If they offer it to you, you can always turn them down.”
I had to admit I shared her dream about moving north again. As much as I enjoyed our dozen years in South Florida, I was a northern native who had never learned to stop missing three things: rolling hills, changing seasons, and open land. Even as I grew to love Florida with its mild winters, spicy food, and comically irascible mix of people, I did not stop dreaming of someday escaping to my own private paradise—not a postage-stamp-sized lot in the heart of hyperprecious Boca Raton but a real piece of land where I could dig in the dirt, chop my own firewood, and tromp through the forest, my dog at my side.
I applied, fully convincing myself it was just a lark. Two weeks later the phone rang and it was J.I. Rodale’s granddaughter, Maria Rodale. I had sent my letter to “Dear Human Resources” and was so surprised to be hearing from the owner of the company that I asked her to repeat her last name. Maria had taken a personal interest in the magazine her grandfather had founded, and she was intent on returning it to its former glory. She was convinced she needed a professional journalist, not another earnest organic gardener, to do that, and she wanted to take on more challenging and important stories about the environment, genetic engineering, factory farming, and the burgeoning organic movement.
I arrived for the job interview fully intending to play hard to get, but I was hooked the moment I drove out of the airport and onto the first curving, two-lane country road. At every turn was another postcard: a stone farmhouse here, a covered bridge there. Icy brooks gurgled down hillsides, and furrowed farmland stretched to the horizon like God’s own golden robes. It didn’t help that it was spring and every last tree in the Lehigh Valley was in full, glorious bloom. At a lonely country stop sign, I stepped out of my rental car and stood in the middle of the pavement. For as far as I could see in any direction, there was nothing but woods and meadows. Not a car, not a person, not a building. At the first pay phone I could find, I called Jenny. “You’re not going to believe this place,” I said.
Two months later the movers had the entire contents of our Boca house loaded into a gigantic truck. An auto carrier arrived to haul off our car and minivan. We turned the house keys over to the new owners and spent our last night in Florida sleeping on the floor of a neighbor’s home, Marley sprawled out in the middle of us. “Indoor camping!” Patrick shrieked.
The next morning I arose early and took Marley for what would be his last walk on Florida soil. He sniffed and tugged and pranced as we circl
ed the block, stopping to lift his leg on every shrub and mailbox we came to, happily oblivious to the abrupt change I was about to foist on him. I had bought a sturdy plastic travel crate to carry him on the airplane, and following Dr. Jay’s advice, I clamped open Marley’s jaws after our walk and slipped a double dose of tranquilizers down his throat. By the time our neighbor dropped us off at Palm Beach International Airport, Marley was red-eyed and exceptionally mellow. We could have strapped him to a rocket and he wouldn’t have minded.
In the terminal, the Grogan clan cut a fine form: two wildly excited little boys racing around in circles, a hungry baby in a stroller, two stressed-out parents, and one very stoned dog. Rounding out the lineup was the rest of our menagerie: two frogs, three goldfish, a hermit crab, a snail named Sluggy, and a box of live crickets for feeding the frogs. As we waited in line at check-in, I assembled the plastic pet carrier. It was the biggest one I could find, but when we reached the counter, a woman in uniform looked at Marley, looked at the crate, looked back at Marley, and said, “We can’t allow that dog aboard in that container. He’s too big for it.”
“The pet store said this was the ‘large dog’ size,” I pleaded.
“FAA regulations require that the dog can freely stand up inside and turn fully around,” she explained, adding skeptically, “Go ahead, give it a try.”
