Rescuing Riley, Saving Myself: A Man and His Dog's Struggle to Find Salvation

by Anderegg, Zachary

  In grade school, there’d been a kid named Scott and another kid named Joey. In seventh grade, there was Ben and a different guy also named Scott, and then Leona and Jerry. I always wondered what they said about me when I wasn’t present, because the bullying seemed so coordinated or organized, as though there was a group consensus. Any day, any one of them could drop a comment. It felt like a wolf pack, where one harasses the prey while the others rest and prepare for when it’s their turn.

  It’s an insidious sense of constant betrayal, where you don’t know who your real friends are, or when your enemies are going to do something. I once ran into Scott in the boys’ room at school in fifth grade, and to my surprise, we chatted pleasantly, as though nothing had ever happened between us. I had the sense he thought, “You’re not cool, but I’ll talk to you as long as we’re alone—in front of people, I’m going to have to pick on you again, to show everybody we’re not friends.” He was athletic and he had a reputation for being tough, so a lot of people followed him with the sense that it was probably smarter to be his friend than his enemy. Joey was an Italian kid who was sort of charismatic and made everybody laugh, all piss and vinegar, and he was Scott’s friend. Running into either of them, separately, wasn’t nearly as dangerous as meeting them together, when they aided and abetted each other, as though competing to see who could be meaner to me. Meeting them alone, I almost had the feeling they were embarrassed by the way they behaved toward me, as close as I would get to an admission that they knew what they were doing was wrong.

  In ninth grade, when I was a Boy Scout, I was nominated for the Order of the Arrow. It’s a nice thing to earn, because the boys who get it have been chosen by their scout leaders and recognized as representing the ideals scouting supposedly stands for: honesty and hard work and fellowship and service. When I learned of the possibility of receiving the award, I said I didn’t want it, because to receive it, you have to participate in a ceremony where you have to stand up in front of the entire summer camp of around 250 boys, and that idea terrified me. What if someone said something, called me a name, or made a fart noise while I stood alone in front of everybody?

  Lying in the back of my pickup truck outside of Page, Arizona, I thought about the dog in the hospital. The word “dogged” means never giving up. There had to be something more than a cardiovascular system capable of sustaining three hundred beats per minute to explain doggedness, some sort of innate stubbornness, or maybe indefatigable optimism, that kept them running. Nature had to select for the gene that let them believe, against all odds, that the chase was going to pay off, a persistence of hope.

  I’m in tenth grade, and everything shifts in a single instance when I see a thirty-second commercial for the Navy SEALs. It’s much like a light turns on or a door opens in my mind. It’s another way out of my misery that won’t be easy, but won’t require killing myself. It’s a way to reinvent myself and channel my energies and abilities, and more than anything else, a way to get the hell out of Cudahy as soon as I’m old enough to enlist. It’s hope. I want to be a Navy SEAL, and I know that if I’m going to be a Navy SEAL, I’m going to have to change my body by lifting weights.

  I am actually pretty decent at sports and I am on the volleyball and tennis teams, so I am already reasonably fit, but I know there’s a very high drop-out rate for guys training to be SEALs. Having a clear goal—this goal—to work toward appeals to my logical engineering brain. I’m an okay swimmer, but if I’m to become a SEAL, I need to join the swim team to really take things to the next level. I join my sophomore year. It’s the hardest thing, physically, and in some ways emotionally, that I’ve ever done. I’m the worst swimmer on the team, at first, enduring agonizingly long practices and on several occasions nearly drowning as I learn how to swim freestyle competitively. I am nearly “one of the guys” on the team, but after practice ends for the night, or between seasons, they largely ignore me because of the stigma attached to who I am.

  There’s a gap between the swim season and the tennis season, so I have the time after school to use the school’s weight room. The problem is that the weight room is where all the “cool” jocks hang out, and thus it’s a minefield for someone in my position at the bottom of the social totem pole, an endeavor fraught with peril. Fortunately, I know a guy named Pete who, while not as unpopular as me, is by no means part of the “in” crowd. I’ve known him since kindergarten, and nobody messes with him because he holds a black belt in tae kwon do. I’m in the weight room one day, avoiding the free weights section where all the hardcore lifters congregate, working with one of the pull-down machines. I set the weight low and begin operating the machine, all my emotional shields raised, expecting to catch some sort of trouble. While trying to look straight ahead and not make eye contact with anybody, I hear a voice say, “You’re doing that all wrong.”

  I brace myself, but fortunately, it’s Pete. He asks me if I need a workout partner, and it’s fairly obvious that I do. He asks me if I want him to make me a workout schedule with a plan—day one, day two. This is exactly what I need. The progress I make is almost immediate, maybe because I’m starting from zero. By the second week, I’m lifting more than I did the first. After a month, I’m lifting more than many of the guys in the weight room and, specifically, more than some of the jerks who’ve teased me. When I tell my tennis coach I’m going to quit the tennis team to spend more time lifting weights, he can’t believe it. He says I have the potential to be one of the best players on the team by my senior year. I don’t care, because my goal is to be a Navy SEAL, not a tennis player. I can see and feel my body responding to the regimen. Eventually I’m benching more than two hundred pounds, which is considerably more than the “cool” kids are lifting.

  I start feeling competitive, knowing I’m stronger than them. The bench press is more or less the “showcase” in any locker room. I’ll see one of the “cool” guys lifting, and when he’s done, I’ll move to the bench he was on and add weight to whatever he was lifting, before rolling the bar off the rack and lifting it. There is no argument they can make—the “loser” is lifting more than they were, so apparently the loser isn’t a loser any more. There is, I’m learning firsthand, some sort of deeply embedded code of masculinity where the perception of strength commands respect, like some species of bird where the male with the longest beak or the largest bib markings holds dominance over other males with shorter beaks or smaller bibs. I realize I don’t have to fight anybody—I just have to look like I could fight anybody.

  My attitude changes along with my body. I’m learning things about myself. It’s more than just what others are seeing in me. I am surprising myself, seeing what my body can do, and what my spirit is capable of. I’m concentrating like I’ve never concentrated before, developing a kind of personal intensity. I am actually feeling confident for the first time in my life. As a consequence, the bullying stops almost immediately. Somehow, I’ve been able to convert inner strength and pain into outer strength and gain. It’s not that the bullies have developed a new respect for me—it’s that I’ve developed a new respect for myself. bird where the male with the longest beak or the largest bib markings hol

  It happens bit by bit, slowly, day by day.

  After I started training for the Navy SEALs, I started bicycling long distances, as much as thirty miles a day, both to get in shape and to get out of the house and away from the dysfunction there. On my bicycle, I wasn’t just improving my aerobic conditioning—I was also alone and safe, and I could relax in the way your brain shifts into neutral when your body is working hard. It meant a lot to me, not just because it told me I’d done well, but because it told everybody else I had.

  Later, after receiving the news that my less-than-perfect eyesight would keep me from attaining my goal of being a Navy SEAL, I became a Marine. In boot camp, I was briefly promoted to “Guide,” not an actual rank but a position of leadership among equals. However, a few days later I was demoted when, on a forced march, a soldier fro
m the platoon ahead of us lagged behind, and my drill instructor ordered me to push the poor kid out of the way and I refused. We’d been taught, after all, that our mission was to save and protect our fellow Marines. When I was offered the position of Guide again a few days later, I turned him down, much to his amazement, but I’d lost all respect for him, which made the recognition and promotion meaningless.

  In a way, working out in the gym with weights merged perfectly with joining the Marines, which presented me with a life that was absolutely regimented and predictable and perfect for maintaining a training routine. I was soon in such good physical condition that I acquired the nickname “Android” (from my last name) from my peers, a name I embraced and identified with. The week I left the Marines, I tested myself. I completed a three-mile run in a time of 17:29. I could bench press 350 pounds. I could press a pair of 100-pound dumbbells over my head five times, and I could bench press a pair of 120-pound dumbbells ten times, all at a bodyweight of 211 pounds. The satisfaction I got was not a matter of vanity or the desire to acquire bragging rights, though when you’re living with a bunch of gung-ho Marines, it’s rather natural to compete with each other in all kinds of ways, including weightlifting. What mattered more to me, much more, was measuring how far I’d come from the first time I’d set foot in the weight room at school when Pete had offered to help me. Or rather, how far I’d come from well before I ever set foot in a gym, when I saw myself as the proverbial ninety-five-pound weakling getting sand kicked in his face at the beach.

  It was in Marine Corps boot camp that I first learned to rappel, which began inauspiciously when I stood at the top of a sixty-foot wall while the instructor screamed at me (again with the screaming) to go over the side. So I did, but I forgot to lock my knees and slammed hard into the wall. I had remembered, however, not to release my braking hand and avoided a free fall and certain death. You don’t get points in the Marines for trying. The instructor yelled, “See what happens when you don’t lock your legs?”

  I haven’t made that mistake since then, which tells me that sometimes screaming helps.

  We later trained off a seventy-five-foot tower at a base in Singapore. When the instructor, a Lieutenant Farnum, saw my enthusiasm, he asked me if I wanted to learn to rappel upside down. I wasn’t sure if it would ever come in handy, but it sounded like fun. The feat is accomplished by lowering yourself ten feet or so from the top and then rotating your body clockwise until your feet are above your head and your right arm is pointing straight towards the ground. To this day, I enjoy rappelling upside down because it is simply exhilarating. Looking straight down, maybe a hundred feet or more, and controlling your fear is something that energizes me.

  If I learned nothing else as a Marine, I learned how to conquer my fears. When we learned during the same deployment that some CH-46 helicopter pilots needed to practice inserting and extracting combat troops using a long line with D-rings attached to it, I volunteered, and half an hour later, I was hanging from a rope from the bottom of a helicopter that was flying several hundred feet above the Indian Ocean at a forward airspeed of maybe sixty-five knots. Given the circumstances, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to practice my air-guitar.

  Being a Marine means learning to suppress your feelings. In one sense, it might seem I’d have been a natural at it. Part of making a man, or perhaps more accurately a boy, into an effective soldier requires that he learns to conquer a number of things in himself, including his fears and his self-imposed limitations. For example, part of my training led me to CWSS training, which stands for Combat Water Safety Swimmer. It’s designed to teach you how to save your fellow Marines during shore landings where you have to negotiate large waves and rip tides, all while wearing heavy gear. When I was on the swim team in high school, I was competitive at the state level and could turn in winning times at distances anywhere between fifty and five hundred yards. Rescue swimming, however, was an entirely different endeavor, because it meant taking tough Marines, guys who generally think they’re badasses with something to prove, and pushing them past their breaking points.

  On the last day of training, we had to execute mock rescues, with the instructors posing as victims. When it was my turn, I jumped in after my “victim,” but immediately found it challenging to swim with just my legs, using my arms to secure the “victim.” Then, just as I dove down and locked my arms around him, he used his hands to push against the water and drive us down, something you’d think a genuine drowning victim wouldn’t do. When I finally managed to surface with him, I let out an explosive breath and gasped to take as much new air in as possible, and then we were below the surface again. We surfaced three times, until I thought I was going hypoxic. When I finally managed to swim with him toward the edge of the pool, I lost control of him and he started to sink, while three instructors on the edge of the pool screamed at me, telling me my victim was going to either drown or suffer from brain damage. The idea was to reproduce the stress of an actual combat situation, and it played all kinds of tricks on my brain.

  I managed to pass the test, but also nearly passed out. You know it’s valuable, because if the time comes and you’re the one who ends up being the victim, you want to know the men around you won’t panic, but it exacts a heavy cost on your mental well-being because suppressing all those feeling only means they come back to bite you twice as hard at some later opportunity. I could say, honestly, that for better or worse, the Marines provided me with an environment to mature into a man in a way nothing else I know of could do, and I am extremely grateful for the experience.

  Lying in the back of my truck, gazing up at the sky above the Colorado Plateau, I realized it’s both the size of the dog in the fight and the size of the fight in the dog, but the size of the fight in the dog comes first. That spark, that persistence gene, that little tenaciously optimistic bit, is what drives the dog to get stronger, to keep running and build muscles as it runs. The spark had almost died inside me, but at the last minute, almost in the nick of time, I found a way to tap into it. There was an ember inside me, buried deep beneath the accumulated ashes, and I was able to bring it back to life and then feed the fire until it blazed.

  I hoped the puppy I found could do it, too. If he survived, he was, by nature and by definition, more dogged than I would ever be.

  6

  The next morning at the Page Animal Hospital, Dr. Roundtree was busy, and a girl I didn’t recognize was sitting behind the desk, but Krista was there. She smiled when she saw me.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked.

  “Better than he was yesterday,” she said, “but we’re not out of the woods. You wanna see?”

  She led me down the hall to a room full of cages. I knew which cage was his because only one had an IV drip stand outside of it. I’d expected some kind of isolated ICU, the way emergency patients might be treated in a hospital. I felt like I should have donned latex gloves or a hospital gown first. Krista told me he’d gone through an entire drip bag overnight and was on his second. He had wet himself, too, which was promising, but there were still other concerns, such as possible permanent cognitive impairment and organ damage, most likely the kidneys.

  “He also had a weak bowel movement this morning, the consistency of tar,” she told me.

  I understood that renal failure was usually fatal. I had a dog at home, an Australian blue heeler named Kohi, and I knew a bit about dog health in general. I knew that grapes and raisins were poisonous to dogs, for example. Scientists aren’t exactly sure why this is; they simply know that grapes or raisins can cause renal tubule necrosis, destroying the small conduits the kidneys use to filter and break down toxins and produce urine. When the kidney can’t make urine to flush the toxins, there’s no hope, unless, I supposed, you could put a dog on a kidney machine, which I was sure people with a lot of money did, but I wasn’t people with a lot of money.

  “Go ahead and open the door if you want,” she told me.

  I knelt down in front of the cage
and opened the door. He still smelled, and he looked horrible, lying on his side, covered in mud with the catheter taped to his paw. I supposed, on a healthier dog, they might have put one of those big plastic cones around his neck to keep him from chewing on the catheter, but with this dog, no such precaution was necessary. This dog lacked the strength to move as he stared off into space, seemingly immobile. However, when I knelt down, he wagged his tail. Just the tip of it—just once, rising an inch off the mat before falling back.

  To me, the tiny tail wag was a brave thumbs up, the kind you see when they carry a previously unconscious football player off the field on a stretcher. Before he goes into the locker room, he gives the crowd a sign to tell them he’s going to be alright, and the crowd cheers. The crowd inside me cheered, too. I wanted to believe not only that he was giving me a positive signal, but also that he recognized me somehow. It might have been simply an acknowledgment that someone, anyone, was there next to him, maybe even an involuntary reflex. As far as I could tell, the dog had been virtually unconscious the day before, but I knew that dogs have incredible noses and can identify smells thousands of times better than people can. By the time I’d worked up a sweat climbing out of the canyon, I must have been fairly identifiable.

  “Has he moved at all?” I asked.

  “Nope,” a technician told me. “We’ve been moving him every couple of hours to keep him from getting sore. He’s on his second bag of fluids though, so that’s good.”

  I was wary of anthropomorphizing the animal. People think that when a dog licks your face, he’s giving you a kiss, bestowing affection—what he’s doing, according to the experts, is exhibiting a common pup behavior where juvenile canines lick the mother’s lips to encourage her to regurgitate food for them to subsequently eat. We make inferences and project our own emotions onto dogs, coloring our interpretations of how they behave and why. I think it’s important to try to understand a dog on a dog’s terms. Yet, it struck me as remarkable how closely those terms parallel our own, where we—man and dog—have somehow learned to communicate with each other in a way no two species ever have. I don’t know if we learned their language, more than they learned ours, but the point remains that both sides tried.