NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/625084
56 NEBRASKAland • JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2016 From There to Here By Patrick Mainelli A dog's life across Nebraska. I n the colder reaches of January my dog and I play this game. After the sun's gone down, the dinner's dishes scrubbed and stacked, the baby returned quiet and dreaming to her crib, we take a walk. The dog, Suzzy, pulls me by leash across the quarter mile of snow-blown pavement that leads to the empty plain of the old Fontenelle Golf Course in North Omaha. When we get there I undo her leash and she turns to me, looking up in the oily mix of moon and street light, waiting. "Okay," I tell her. Then she's gone, springing above the snow, plunging half submerged a moment later. The game is simply that I follow where she goes, through the empty fairway, over the gnarled and weeded fence, onto the frozen lake, into the island of trees. As a piece of urban land – surrounded by gas stations, liquor stores, pharmacies – the failed golf course is necessarily defined by its absence. It has become, by virtue of its purposelessness, a wild thing. Suzzy the dog was once Elsie the dog. Until we came along she lived on several hundred acres of Sandhill ranchland in Hooker County. She was the last of her litter to be adopted off the ranch, excused from a life of earnest work and the constant company of other dogs. Though she has largely grown accustomed to her new place in the world, there remains, it seems, something laying idle inside her. With no cattle to move, no passing deer to pursue, she can now be found, most hours of most days, in the living room, her nose pressed flat against the window, steaming and unsteaming, steaming and unsteaming her view to the outside. After jumping the wire fence and onto the frozen lake, Suzzy runs from one teacup pool of melted water to the next, eagerly lapping up the chill. I should stop this, I've tried actually, but there she is. Though I call it a lake, the water we walk across might more precisely be known by its other name. Though its quiet and bone stillness seem real enough, the City refers to these kinds of variously-scattered, deliberately-engineered urban ponds as stormwater detention basins – any resemblance to the natural phenomenon known as lakes is merely coincidental. As she stops to drink, I stop too. In the sky, the stars – arranged here in the same pattern visible anywhere else in this quarter of the world. Though they compete with the surfeit energies of so many other droning lights, I can still make out the major players: Sirius, Bellatrix, Regulus, Polaris. Beside the bleeding hum of the horizon's prolific glow their vibrancy feels, at best, an afterthought. Like the wasted space of an unwanted golf course, their purpose is unclear. When she's done with the water Suzzy scales the bank of the small island in the middle of the ice. Here she knows her favorite trees to inspect, her favorite shores to take watch from. On the ground are already layers and layers of prints pressed into the snow. If I look closely I will see what I already know – every paw is hers; every boot, mine. O On the five hour drive from the Sandhills to the city she mostly trembled in a ball on the floor. When we stopped in North Platte for lunch she tongued soft-serve in a drive-thru, peed on the white lines of a Wal-Mart parking lot and seemed to feel a little better. In the following days, we gave her shots to stay healthy and a collar to stay found, and though those first weeks were hard, she quickly made use of that most profound animal ability – she adapted. There are times, though, when I wonder which life she has preferred. Was it worth it to trade nights in the barn, piled among your many brothers and sisters, for a cotton pad on the living room floor? Could those organic, grain-free, dehydrated pellets we put in her bowl ever compare to the scavenged viscera of a pronghorn bleeding out beneath the tree? Did she ever think of it? Could she? Regardless, when we leave the ice and the island and the immutable stars behind she is as anxious to go home as she is to go anywhere. Watching her sprint full-bodied into the cold and total white of the evening, I think there could be nothing else, anywhere else, more alive in the world. And if I whistle and she returns, retracing the postholes her legs have driven into the snow, she will look up at me, ice in her beard, with eyes so bright and hungry I cannot help but follow. ■ PHOTO BY PATRICK MAINELLI