News Hounds: An Accidental Newspaper Life On Martha's Vineyard

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CHAPTER ONE

Mr. Big

The long trajectories of human lives, some of them blazing, some meandering, are rarely foretold. Diesel proves the point. His trajectory and mine intersected without warning about 11 years ago. It was more of a collision, and of course I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t recognize the gift it was, just as I had failed, so long ago, to see my grandfather’s gift for what it was. So, I did not welcome Diesel, and I did not object quickly enough to influence the decision to add him to the family strength.

It was during an early summer holiday at a nearby island. Off walking with youngest son Christian one sunny morning, my wife Molly met a cousin-in-law, Mary Sarah, whose husband, a pilot, had died a few weeks earlier flying an early morning load of newspapers to Nantucket in dungeon fog. In a gesture of wholehearted but misbegotten goodwill intended to lighten this sad widow’s load, a friend had given her a leggy puppy English mastiff, six months old. Mr. Big, as he was called then, joined four or five other dogs in Mary Sarah’s household, pushing the dog quota over the limit. When she and Molly saw one another and Molly saw the gangly 124-pound pup tromping delightedly through the tall grass, she shouted A mastiff, I’ve always wanted a mastiff.

Mary Sarah experienced a moment’s inspiration. Do you want this one. She was overwhelmed by the undisciplined and enthusiastic six-month-old. He wouldn’t get into her tiny car, wouldn’t get into her boat, wouldn’t come or stay or sit or lie down, although whatever he did do he did joyfully. Perhaps, she suggested, Molly might like to take on Mr. Big. Molly and Christian discussed the matter for perhaps half a second, decided there was no need to bother me with the question, and Mr. Big was ours for the next decade or so.

His tenure began by hurtling through the tall grass in the long, wide field stretching west from our house, ignoring my calls, Hey. Hey, come back. That field is a mecca for ticks and a hunting ground for coyotes whose murderous wailing we hear at night. When Mr. Big eventually came home he refused to climb the narrow 17th Century staircase to our bedrooms. Of two minds over the issue, he yowled to let us know that he fervently wanted to, but just couldn’t. When it was time to leave for home, we packed up the outboard motor boat, which till then had seemed large enough for all of us and all our stuff. It would have accommodated Mr. Big too, if he’d agreed to join us, but he wouldn’t. Boarding Mr. Big took a lot of time, and pushing, pulling, and lifting. On the hubbly 30 minute trip across Vineyard Sound, Mr. Big’s tummy became upset and he vomited all over the deck. When we arrived and transferred all the humans, their bags, and Mr. Big to our VW Eurovan, Mr. Big, who had come without luggage, had nevertheless a huge load with him, which he deposited in the van. I was distinctly gloomy.

Diesel, as we called him – his bigness was obvious, the label he had been tagged with unnecessary – was not human, of course. He grew into his enormous self, about 185 pounds, hairy, drooly, a mess on every level. He was shy, embarrassed at his mass, I suspect. As time wore on, he developed an obsessive interest in infirmities of all sorts. He wished he had become a surgeon, probably an orthopod, because they are often large, athletic, avuncular, comforting animals. It was his self-image. When his partners, first Ping, then Fluffer, the lovely female pug who was second in our pug-stream, or Teddy, the pug who survived Diesel and is our leader now, were under the weather, Diesel’s probing black nose was instantly at the scene of the treatment. Push him aside here and he butted in there. Stick the thermometer in, Diesel was making close investigations. Shake a pill bottle and he was reading the label, judging the dosage – an overgrown, unhygienic busybody. And, he had an opinion about everything. The temp was high? He’d say, submerge Ping in cold water in the bath. Diesel was not malicious, but his scientific bent ran to experimentation. The three pugs were convenient subjects for his studies.

Diesel expected to be involved in family life, whether he was invited and regardless of whether there was room for his imposing self. He expected to be involved unbidden in the lives of other families also. Romping on Lucy Vincent Beach on a warm spring weekend afternoon, Diesel visited strangers who had spread blankets and opened beach chairs, and begun to picnic. Excited by the wind and the roaring surf, he liked to get to know each of these folks. He was sure they would be happy to see him, and astonishingly, most were, although his size, the sea water draining from his vast body, along with the drool inspired by all the salt water he’d lapped, drove many of his victims to abandon their blankets and their picnic baskets as the reality of him overwhelmed them. We did not encourage this behavior, and we did not pretend not to know whose dog he was, though we were tempted. Abjectly, we apologized as we wrestled him away from amongst the shaken sunbathers. Only once did we hear an unforgiving, We’re really not dog people.

Remembering Christmas mornings before Diesel, when the children were young they set the rhythm, they were up early, panting next to our bed, rushing down the stairs, shrieking like those wolves of yore coming down on the fold. It was helpful to have more than one child, both little and committed to Christmas. That way, we could stay under covers for a bit longer while the children worked noisily to decrypt the arrangement of presents, until their patience gave out.

When the children were grown and living far away, Diesel had a version of the Christmas morning wake-up routine that he practiced on me. We no longer let Diesel sleep in our bedroom. He was too big, too much in every respect, and in his dreams, which apparently involved running ferociously after poachers, he whacked the bed and made it tremble. Banished to the adjoining room, his morning practice was to shuffle into our bedroom panting excitedly, his huge black face inches away from mine. I didn’t fault him for it, but his breath was like the exhalation from an ancient tomb, opened after centuries. I wondered if he knew that no one could sleep through the fetid hurricane of his breath. He would have been stricken with regret if he had known. But never mind such niceties, on mornings like this, he was on a mission.

Years ago, the child panting in my face was fresh, eager, unblemished. Years later, opening my eyes and wincing at Diesel’s exhaust fumes, what I saw were the visible marks of a deterioration that Diesel and I shared. Diesel had several expressions — chagrin when he had been scolded for flopping his dripping jowls on the dining table in pursuit of his share of our dinner; profound sadness when I approached him with a towel to dry his foot long, streaming drool; or ears pricked, riveted attention when he heard a cat meow (he was obsessed with cats and badly wanted one of his own to advance his medical studies); or penetration, to encourage a compliant response from me when he wanted breakfast and to go out. By the way, I’ve read that dogs have evolved the penetrating stare, holding the gaze of their masters or mistresses, speaking the language of love, beast to human, or supplication, or disapproval. They know what they are doing, they’ve understood over eons that it works, and we’ve evolved to to join the conversation. It was the stare, framed now with eroded teeth and a whitening muzzle, that he turned on me as I squeezed the covers around my nose to ward off the smell.

To the extent that I could think clearly in the corrosive environment he created, I was reminded of how fond of him I had become. He was not the lanky pup he was when we met, his whiskers had whitened, and grey fur expanded north between his wide set eyes to the top of his anvil of a head. We had gotten old together. He had a bad right hind (the left one was not so hot either), I had got a sore left knee. He had to take Carprofen to make himself comfortable. For me, it was Aleve. Incidentally, the Carprofen worked magically. Often, after medication, in a sign of remembered youth, he grabbed a dish towel and followed me around the house begging for a tussle, digging his huge claws into the floor for purchase and delighting at the sound of the shredded cloth. Aleve has not ignited that same spark in me. Diesel liked to frisk around with other dogs he met, but as time ran on, he didn’t frisk the way he used to, and the younger dogs ran circles around him, until he said to me, To hell with that, old man, let’s resume our stately progress and walk on.

Diesel did not take the stairs two at a time the way the children did. He was uninterested in Christmas presents, unless they were bones or cookies. He loved Christmas dinner, because he knew that if you gather people at the table in greater numbers than just Molly and me, there would be abundant scraps. It also happens that guests sometimes turned out to be sappy about dogs, a quality he quickly detected, and when he identified the victim he used his best questing expression so that they would pat him and slip him treats at the table. What he wanted to avoid, having in mind the consequences, was mistaking a merely polite diner for a dog fancier. Such an imposter might react to his advances by leaping from her chair, horrified at the drool he deposited on her smart black slacks. He also shrewdly understood that if he screened the guests carefully he would escape the worst sort of punishment. Moll and I thought that we should have offered guests Tyvek overalls when they arrived, to defend themselves against his amiability.

Unsurprisingly, as time has passed and the troop has changed, Christmas morning is not what it was. When the kids were kids, after the morning flurry had exhausted us, it often happened that as I stood admiring the tree, with all those familiar ornaments that we made long ago out of scallop shells and pinecones, and that we repair and reuse year after year, a child’s hand would infiltrate my own. Later, it was Diesel’s soft, graying muzzle that nudged my hand, asking for nothing but a scratch and a pat, and maybe forgiveness for the way he had awakened me.

Martha’s Vineyard in winter is often a few degrees warmer than the mainland nearby, but the difference is not great, and the screeching wind is scouring enough to leave no grounds for smug satisfaction. Diesel was indifferent to gross discomfort. He was not weather dependent. Wind, snow, rain, gales, mud – especially the mud that was Molly’s perennial garden where he dabbled – all meant nothing. He was always comfortable, rolling in the snow, swimming around the ice in the harbor water, wallowing in the road mud when spring comes.

The Vineyard’s poor, wet spring heightened tensions between dogs and humans in our house. Usually April is downright swampy, May not much better, and June gets no prize either. Easterly wind, drizzle, forty days and nights of rain in a couple of hours, a few promising mornings giving way to overcast and thundery afternoons – one hoped for something more. Often the gloominess has me in a mood. But, Let it rain, let it rain, was his motto. This is the day the Lord hath made; I’ll go with it. In fact, I’ll go with it was his reaction to almost everything, except a request that he jump in the back of the car. He despised driving trips.

Diesel became a very sweet dog, but he was untidy, and he was out of communication with some of the distant reaches of himself, so he let those parts do as they chose. For instance, early on after he moved in and had spent a few weeks getting acquainted with our furniture and deciding which would be his exclusively, he turned to playing that indoor game he loved, in which he tore a dish towel or napkin to shreds while you tried to pry it from his canyon-like mouth. Once during the contest, he was surprised to find his after end sitting on an ottoman in front of the sofa where I claimed asylum. It was nothing he planned, but he said, Okay, if that’s what the after parts want to do, I’ll go with it. The ottoman became his daily resting place, at least for those trailing parts of his long body and especially when he wanted a serious word with me.

We kept towels near each entrance to the house. When Diesel, drenched and reeking, appeared at a door and raked his enormous paw across the delicate mullions to signal his desire to come in, we rushed to swaddle him as he marched through our arms toward the pantry, where the dog treats are housed. Getting him to stand for the toweling was futile. Moll and I rove with him through the furniture as we rubbed and toweled him, then toweled ourselves off after-wards, which takes longer, is more effective, and can be fun.

Often, after shaking and then internalizing a dog bone, Diesel wanted out. To prevent the paw thing on the inside of the door, we acquiesced. Of course, sometimes he said out, but didn’t really want to go out. I guess he just wanted to look out and sniff the air in search of something fetid to investigate. In such cases, as the wind-driven rain lashed the hall rug, we waited till the spirit moved him. In or out, it was a debate for Diesel sometimes.

For nearly two and a half months each spring, Diesel was damp. Because everything about him was big, his warm, moist aura inflated to become our indoor aura. I’m reminded of a line that was common in coming attractions at the movies years ago. It went like this, It’s a love story as big as the West itself. That was Diesel and his aura precisely. Would that our house were big as the West, because Diesel’s aura was wasted under our roof. It could absolutely dominate the atmosphere over a north-south swath of red states west of the Mississippi and east of the Rockies. And I imagine Diesel high on a mesa – rather than one of our long sofas that he appropriated – gazing north over the Great Plains, his black wet nose filled