Fido

 I got Fido at the local pound, or animal rescue service, by mistake or accident. I went to get a terrier and found one but in the next cage was a almost long haired puppy cowering in the shadows of a corner. The terrier knew he had me and was jumping up and down with expectations flowing from his half mouthed tongue, so I got the puppy. 

Fido was beautifully thankful and I felt like a true parent maybe because of his fix on me as his leader and teacher. Our relationship was never owner/master and dog. From the first moment out of that cage it was some kind of mutual respect and love.

He was a German Shepard-Collie mixture of breeds and behaved like a sheep dog every chance he had. He had knobs on his knees that quickly grew out through running in the Panhandle part of the Golden Gate Park. I am a San Franciscan and lived in the Haight Ashbury during the Hippie invasion before we were, by law, ordered to have dogs on leashes. So, after crossing two trafficked streets, one with traffic lights we were free to roam the over four miles of park to the beach.

I worked at the museum in the park and could leave Fido outside during my eight-hour schedule and know he would be there for lunch and when my work ended. Once he brought a friend to see me but when he and the wolf came out of the bushes they scared the crowds who were exiting at closing.

With a call of adventure I decided to go up to Alaska to join a fishing fleet and make some real money so I packed up my Volkswagen van and made a comfortable bed for Fido and off we went on our way to the wilds of Canada. I said I am a San Franciscan, right? 

When I was around eleven snow fell in the City around 2 or 3 in the morning. The quiet woke me and I looked out my window to see people coming out of their houses and picking up snow to make snowballs, about one-inch thick, to throw at each other. I ran out in my pyjamas and joined what became a street party of whizzing tiny snowballs and echoing laughter. I didn’t remember it being cold, just fun.

I was now driving an eighteen hundred mile route in December from San Francisco to Juneau, Alaska. My eleven year old adventure was my only time ever being in the snow. It looked great on television and in the movies and nobody seemed to get cold on those screens. But, I carried a couple of pairs of gloves, a thick jacket, two sets of long johns and bought some snow boots and snow chains.

We hit real snow in British Columbia and I had my first lesson in snow living when I couldn’t start the van because of my oil freezing and solidifying. The mechanic I found assumed I was just stupid and told me to wait until noon and try to start it again, and then to bring the van to him and he would change the oil and give me the heavy duty correct oil. I did it and he did it. And off we drove with renewed confidence that I had done the right thing in paying for a professional to solve my problem.

There were great wild west towns with saloons along my route that I really enjoyed, always noticing how the snow alongside the highway was getting higher and higher with the pace slowing at times in both the shovelling trucks and black ice. I didn’t know what black ice was until I tried to brake and slid into a piled snow mound, well, I learned what black ice was more than once.

A few days into the snow and due to driving very slowly I could not see houses any more. They were there. I could see smoke flowing up into crystal blue skies but I could not see roofs or any trace of actual houses.

Fido loved the snow at first. Bounding and bounding. Burying his nose and mouth in it and biting at the flaky water of it. He was continually curious about snow and then it happened. We got out at a rest stop and I took a pee. He liked the designs I could make in the snow but after the first time did not like the taste. This one time he went bounding off into what was probably a field if there was no snow. It was a long flat area and I got back into the van and let him just have his time out there. When he came back he didn’t want to get back in the van but I wasn’t going back out. It was cold. I could see he was a bit angry but I made some hot chocolate on my little camping stove and enjoyed the warmth from that little fire in the confines of the van.

As I sipped my hot chocolate I looked but couldn’t see Fido. I moved over to the other side of the van and saw his nose going up and down. It scared me thinking that some animal had injured him. I got out on my side of the van to hear his whimpers and ran, slid around to see him laying on his side. I looked around and didn’t see a bear or anything, and tried to scoop him up but he was stuck. I gently pulled his long hair back to see if it was a bear trap or something holding him. His eyes gave that I-know-you-can-solve-all-earthly-problems look that always encouraged me when I noticed his white fur under his leg was yellow. It slowly sank in that Fido had taken a pee and sat in it freezing him to the ground and freezing his leg to his body. I started laughing and looking around for somebody to share the laughing with but we were alone.

After solving that problem with some hot chocolate on the leg I freed him from the ground and settled him in his bed. He actually looked angry. At me.

Another day on we were snowbound in a hotel with just another thirty miles to the Alaska border when I called ahead to reserve a hotel room and found that the temperature there was verging on seventy below freezing. That was the end of my quest to make some real money fishing out of Alaska.

The drive back was an impatient one but generally uneventful. I had two sets of bikers’ gloves over wool mittens and three pairs of socks in my snow boots. The heat in that year volkswagen van came off the engine in the rear of the body and it ever so often made its way up to the front where I drove using the wheel as we all do. About half way back to the States, in a hotel room shower I noticed that my fingers were off colour, sort of reddish. Getting out of bed I noticed my toes were getting a dark colour, sort of brown.

When I got to the no snow area of British Columbia and stepped out of the van I almost fell over and had to hold on to the car door until I felt balanced enough to stand. Fido was in heaven running and digging up real grass, biting it and rolling in it. I was happy to take off a set of the gloves and remember having to take the jacket off with some memory of sweat letting me know I was saved and back in civilisation. The next day when I got out of the van it was the same thing. I had to stand holding the door until my balance returned.

At a hotel at the California border I saw for the first time that my fingertips were purplish blue and that my toes were almost the same colour. I also noticed that the hot shower did not feel hot to either the fingertips nor the toes. The hotel manager told me it was frost bite and I should see a doctor. Back in San Francisco my doctor told me hot baths, saunas, hot tubs, hot towels, aspirin would help. 

I decided to go to Belise. But, that is another story.