Gone to the Dogs

by Haden Webster Ware

Swiss hotels are a bit creepy if you ask me. The thick stuffy drapery, chandeliers, and sofas with useless buttons in their backs remind me of my Aunt Hyla’s house; which, although its owner was one of the kindest ladies this side of the Poconos, was like entering a time machine and being teleported back to the original set of Psycho.

Upon entering one of these hotels you are immediately bombarded with tasteless displays of extroverted opulence as if their aim was to say, “thank you for depositing your money within our borders, as you can see we’re putting it to use.” If a kid drove by on a big-wheel mumbling “redrum” I swear I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

Anyway, my story startsin a hotel room in Switzerland…After a dinner meeting with some Swiss associates I got back to my hotel around midnight. I was scheduled to take a flight to Antigua the following day so I passed on my usual nightcap and fell straight into Aunt Hyla’s bed and was out entering one of these hotels you are immediately bombarded with tasteless displays of extroverted opulence as if their aim was to say, “thank you for depositing your money within our borders, as youcold before my head hit the chintz pillow. At around 2:00 my cell phone rang. One of the scariest things you’ll experience in life is a loved one calling you at 2:00 in the morning in hysterics. It’s also one of the most frustrating as you would need a Rosetta Stone to figure out what the hell was actually wrong. On the other end of this particular call was my wife, Julia, calling from Ireland and between fits of crying and hyperventilation I was able to decipher the following hints… Miro gone….Car stuck…ankle broken….Cita eating peas.

Now, Miro and Cita are our dogs. Miro has been known to wander off so this wasn’t entirely unusual, and Cita is a lab who will eat herself to death if you let her so the peas, while a bit odd, were explainable. I couldn’t quite figure out what happened to the car though and wasn’t sure whose ankle was broken. In any case it was clear that we were dealing with multiple crises, but I was happy that everyone was, at least for the time being, alive and ok. After the hysterics subsided the full story began to emerge….

5 minutes outside Cork you’ve got mud huts, pig farms, and they’re still frightened of Longshanks, so you can imagine what it’s like 30 minutes outside.

We were in the middle of nowhere.When we moved into this house we were worried about the dogs wandering off and getting lost in the countless acres of surrounding farmland. As a precaution we bought a system called The Invisible Fence which would prevent the dogs from crossing over the boundaries of our property. You basically lay some wire around your house and then put these special collars on your dog. If the dog gets too close to the wire then he gets a small shock. It was endorsed by the ASPCA so it must be ok right? Wrong!

Cita flew 3 feet in the air the first time she was shocked by this torturous device. We felt so bad, but they never went over that wire, never ventured out into the street or took off into the fields so we kept the system in place. As they said to Francis Farmer, “better to have a little shock than get hit by a car!” After accidentally shocking my own hand one day and finding that I couldn’t make a fist for 5 minutes afterwards, we decided that strapping these things to our dogs’ necks wasn’t what the Ware’s were all about, and we abandoned the Invisible Fence. The dogs would explore but they never seemed to go far (perhaps emotionally scarred from the brief shock therapy we put them through) and they always came back when we called them.

Well on this particular night, Miro and Cita ventured off and only Cita returned. This is what started it all. The dogs had crossed the river next to our house and wandered upstream which was their preferred path. After calling

for Miro with no success, Julia decided to retrace their steps to see if she could find him.It was pitch dark out, but there was a small path along the river that she could follow for about 100 yards upstream, which she did. Upon reaching the end of the path, she continued to call for Miro without any success and was about to head back when she heard what sounded like a soft whimper coming out of the darkness. After getting Cita, who was enjoying the midnight stroll, to sit still, she sat silently until she heard it again and was now sure that it was Miro crying from the woods. The darkness was impenetrable and there was no way she was going to be able to hike through the woods and over this terrain to find him without some kind of light. We had no flashlight at the house, but my baby is clever! She walked back to the house, got in her Nissan X-Trail, drove into the field directly across from the river, pointed the car at the spot where she thought she’d heard Miro crying, and turned her high beams on. So far so good.

Now she had the forest fully illuminated and headed back to go in search of our beloved dog. Half way back to the house though, things took a turn for the worst. The ground in the field was wet and uneven and difficult to walk on in broad daylight, not to mention in the middle of the night. She took a bad step, caught her foot in a muddy hole, and twisted her ankle.So, at this point we’ve got the car in the field with its lights on, Miro in the woods crying, Julia lying in the field unable to get up, and Cita having a grand old time playing in the mud. Julia somehow managed to pull herself through the muddy field back to the house. By this time her ankle had swollen significantly, and it was all she could do to pull a bag of frozen peas from the freezer, drag herself to the couch, and apply the

medicinal veggies to her injury. In so doing she inadvertently broke a hole in the bag causing a trail of peas to be left in her wounded wake. Lying there on the couch watching Cita eat frozen peas off the floor….it was now time to cry. This is when I received my phone call. After talking through the main issues at hand there remained three questions left outstanding. Was the ankle broken?, where was Miro?, and what was wrong with him? The fact that the car was in the middle of a field with its lights on took a distant 4th. With no friends anywhere near the house and no neighbors we knew who weren’t off fortifying their homes against Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army, we decided to call the Cork police department to help out.

OFFICER: “Garda station hello”

ME: “Hello, I’m off-island and my wife is having some issues over in Glenville, and I was wondering if you could send a car over to make sure she’s ok.”

OFFICER: “What kind of issues?”

ME: “She’s got our car stuck in a field, our dog is lost, and she fell and hurt herself.”

OFFICER: “Is she critical?”

ME: “No, I don’t think so, but she’s all alone and our dog might be critical.”

OFFICER: “What kind of dog is it?”

ME: “A Rottweiler”

OFFICER: “Jaysus, you take me for a fecking eejit!!??”

ME: “Say again?..... Hello?”

So much for Cork’s finest. Out of options, Julia cried herself to sleep on the couch spooning Cita who in no way deserved the affection but nonetheless remained irresistible. I canceled my flight to Antigua and got on the next flight from Geneva back to Cork. And that was that. Arriving at the house the following morning, feeling gallant and necessary, I discovered that much of my chivalrous work was already done. Julia had called two friends of ours and they had driven up from the “city” at around 7:00 that morning to help. They found Miro cold and uncomfortable stuck in a badger trap, which is a wire noose that’s attached to a spike in the ground that animals get stuck around their necks and can’t get loose. Miro had pulled it so tight around his neck that they had no choice but to pull the whole trap out of the ground and take Miro and the trap to the vet to get it cut off.

An uncomfortable night for the old boy but he came out all right.

Julia was then taken to the hospital where the x-rays came back negative. She had a severely sprained ankle but no broken bones and was prescribed bed rest and frozen peas. Less than eight hours after the hysterical phone call it seemed as if everything was now more or less in place and taken care of. The only thing left for me to do was to get the car out of the field. I had built up so much chivalrous energy on the flight back to save the day that I was determined to put everything I had into solving this one last problem. After an evening of high beaming the woods the badgers didn’t get a wink of sleep and our battery was completely dead.

There was a pretty simple solution to this: jump-start the car. I had jumper cables and my Saab was ready to provide the added boost needed.

I had bought this Saab with the highest of expectations. My whole childhood my family drove nothing but Saabs, and over the years the performance and safety records for these cars took on mythical proportions. These Swedish works of perfection could do no wrong! So asking this engineering masterpiece to drive through a muddy field to jump-start Julia’s X-trail was like asking Superman to get my cat out of a tree. It’s amazing how the distortions and misconceptions of childhood continue to come back to haunt us as adults. In any case, half way across the field, Superman got stuck in the mud. The only consolation to this debacle was that it got a smile out of Julia. She had warned me about the limitations of my Saab but I figured, what do Germans know about cars. So after a hellish night, still reeling in pain, my mishap was able to at least give her some personal pleasure at my expense. It was a short lived satisfaction though, as funny as it may be to see both our cars stuck in a field, the fact remained that both our cars were stuck in a field. There was nothing we could do but call in Irish support.

“Jaykers, you two look like you lost the plot like. Got on the piss last night did ya and tore the arse out of ye cars?”

Yeah, something like that.