Donald McCaig - Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies

MR. AND MRS. DOG

Our Travels, Trials,
Adventures, and Epiphanies

Donald McCaig

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

CHARLOTTESVILLE & LONDON

University of Virginia Press
2013 by Donald McCaig
All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

First published 2013
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
is available from the Library of Congress.

FOR

Rachael Ashley-Layton

&

June

If a fool would persist in his folly

he would become wise.

WILLIAM BLAKE

Humans are a lonely species.

Dogs were our first friends.

VICKI HEARNE

MR. AND MRS. DOG

Billy Bobs West Texas high school hired a new English teacher; a Yankee who liked to talk about epiphanies. She used the word in every other sentence. Puzzled, Billy Bob went to the dictionary.

Next morning, when the teacher discovered another epiphany, Billy Bob raised his hand. Maam, he said, There aint no epiphanies in West Texas. Hell, its two hundred miles to the nearest coincidence.

I am a visionary. Not the visionary CEO grinning from the cover of your seatback magazine, much less a Joseph Smith or Isaiah. I am a run-of-the-mill visionary: plain vanilla. When I was younger, I didnt discriminate between visions produced by decades of spiritual discipline and visions got by swallowing a pill. I became a pharmacological tourist in the iridescent world where William Blake communed with angels.

Visions are not created equal. Some altered the way I saw the world, others how I feared it. Some of the best were funny. I recall one fine fall afternoon in Detroits inner city when Id ground, boiled, encapsulated, and ingested (at the time legal) mail-order peyote and was dissolving into Brahmss German Requiem when fire erupted in the mortuary school across the street. The cinematic confusion fire trucks, flames, and bustling undertaker trainees each in white shirt and somber black suit was, since Im not William Blake, indescribable.

Visions are not created equal. A jiggling highway center line is banal. A center line melding with the shoulder line is a headache. It was January and I was heading to West Texas for the Sheepdog Winter Olympics, sixteen hundred miles from home, right now outside Texarkana. In those old cotton fields back home damned if I could get the tune out of my head just about a mile from Texarkana. I needed a rest stop, but if Texas had any, they were deep in the heart of... Quit it! Just quit!

Id dozed at midnight shivering under my jacket at a Tennessee rest stop. I woke to a white world: my and the dogs breath had frosted the inside of the windshield. I scraped icy slivers onto the dash.

Four-thirty a.m. That damned center line wouldnt stop flopping around and how to stay awake until daybreak? Where was that truck stop? Remember when truck stop coffee tasted like dog piss? Luke and June were zoned out in the wagons wayback. Theyd keep until the sun came up.

Ive an old friend whos abused every substance known to the DEA and some they havent heard about. His interest is both practical and theoretical; hes worked needle exchanges and taken intoxication seminars at Berkeley.

One spring he and his wife accompanied me to a sheepdog trial north of San Francisco. It was young Junes first trial and we were DQ ed in less than thirty seconds.

That evening over dinner, when I tried to explain what it was like when it went well the pure focus and swiftness of handling a sheepdog my friend snickered. Bullshit, he said. You just like to get stoned.

He may have had a point. The dogs and I were traveling twenty-six hours in a twenty-year-old station wagon to get ready for a trial on the other side of the Atlantic. I had this vision, you see. Next October at Llandielo, Carmarthenshire, Wales, I would step onto that lush green British field with Luke or June and thered be white sheep in the distance. Itd be cool; might be a breeze blowing. My dog and I would glance at one another. That glance was as particular and as far as my vision could carry me: to the intimate silence just before everything gets real.

Me and the dogs hit Dallas during the morning rush and the old wagons temp gauge shot up but dropped after I killed the AC . The Texas speed limit shot up to seventy-five outside of Midland.

Midland, Texas, is ugly. Poor folks homes are smaller and shabbier than in Appalachia. Dirt roads lead to oil wells protected by razor wire and wind turbines clutter the ridge tops, thousands of wind turbines. I wouldnt want to be a bird in Midland, Texas.

I stopped to phone my hostess, Sarah Boudreau: did she want me to pick up groceries? Just outside of Sheffield, Texas, Id pass Hayre Headquarters Ranch, turn left at the Las Norias sign, pass through the bump gate, and Id be there.

Bump gate?

South of Midland the topography didnt soften: rimrocks, chalky soil from which plants made a stand with mean-ass thorns and spikes. Natural desolation isnt as ugly as manmade.

Eighty-mile-per-hour limit on US 10. West Texas crude was fetching $160 a barrel and most traffic was drilling and oil service trucks. Road shoulders were mowed thirty feet back so drivers had a sporting chance to miss the deer who lacking better forage grazed on them.

Sheffield, Texas, had one gas station and one abandoned auto court. A couple hundred Sheffieldians did what for a living I couldnt guess. Sheffield did have a school. Maybe everybody worked at the school. Maybe producing and schooling children provided Sheffields economic base. Stop it! I was very tired.

In midafternoon I got to Las Norias (the wells gas, not water wells), where I learned a bump gate is a pipe gate you smack with your front bumper so it swings open and you zip through before the gate swings back to dent your car. At the farmhouse, I shut down and the car ticked and bubbled. The dogs were glad to get out of the car. Me too.

Las Norias, one of three Hayre ranches, runs for miles along both sides of the road and five or six miles deep.

For decades, they raised sheep. One bad drought year, after the Texas grass was finished, the Hayres shipped forty thousand sheep to South Dakota for graze. We had six semis, Bud Boudreau told me, that went back for another load as soon as the sheep were off-loaded. When the governments wool incentive payment ended, Hayres sheep were sold. Today the Hayres own I didnt ask how many cattle and fifteen thousand goats and, oh yes, all those oil and gas wells. Bud helps with gathers and shearing but mostly he trains the ranchs stockdogs.

Las Noriass ranch house was built in the 1930s with two-foot-thick concrete walls and heavy steel shutters over each window. I wondered what kind of weather might demand such protection. When I described the ranch house to a Big Bend National Park ranger, he suggested, Bandits?

Im still not sure he was kidding.

For thirty years Bud Boudreau made a good living as a racetrack farrier, but he quit when he could no longer stomach how the horses were treated. Bud got into sheepdogs about the same time I did, and moved to South Dakota where he reared, trained, and sold dogs. Later he lived on a big Argentine estancia, training dogs and teaching gauchos how to use them. Now, he and Sarah summer on their South Dakota spread which becomes Hayre Ranchs summer headquarters and winter at Las Norias.