Homecoming

At left, Ieuan vom hohlen Huegel, AD, BH, IPO 1, 'a'

He's home!

Ella (V Elatha vom hohlen Huegel, SchH 2, Kkl 1 'a') has been my almost-exclusive hiking partner for the past year and a half, and during that time has become nearly as necessary to me as oxygen. But prior to that time my usual partner was Ieuan. So why was he not there by my side, as was Ella, during the walkabout last year and indeed every other trail mile I've been logging? Ieuan was with trainers, working on his titles. That is, until six weeks ago when I picked him up as Jess (my daughter) and I were on our way to the Monongahela wilderness area of West Virginia for a long weekend of backpacking.

Ieuan had just gone High in Trial and High Scoring Tracking Dog while earning his IPO 1 under Nikki Banfield, and it was time for him to come home. Perfect timing for him to take some well-deserved R&R, so for once Ella stayed home to make room in the car to pick up Ieuan as we drove south to the mountains.

The necessity of titling my dogs, in combination with the fact that being a breeder means there is always a steady stream of young dogs growing up and moving into adulthood, has dictated that for the past fifteen years or so I've raised my pups to a certain age, brought them to a base level of training, and shipped them off to Germany to achieve the titles that the German system requires for a breeding program. I was fortunate enough to work with friends and trainers in Germany who ensured that the dogs have come home just as happy as when they left, and it was a system I'd hoped to follow throughout my breeding career. Unfortunately, post-divorce financial realities have instilled hurdles that I haven't yet found a way to overcome, but one step towards reducing the cost of titling has been to work with trainers in this country (eliminating the shipping expenses). Tim & Carol Karchnak of Muddy River K-9 have been marvelous to work with and their methods ensure that the dogs work because they love it, not because they're forced to.

So, Ieuan achieved his titles, had a lovely vacation, and is home and has been logging many a mile as my hiking buddy alongside Ella. They make quite an impressive team, red coats flashing bright against the bronze and brown landscapes of late-fall woodlands. I relish the wildness that lights their eyes as develop pack hunting strategies, feeding off each others' instinctive reactions to musky deer scent of the autumn rut. I'm never more blissful than when spending days in their company, their unadulterated joy calling forth my own Paleolithic inheritance as our trail-hardened muscles carry us tirelessly, mile after mile. Indeed, it sometimes seems that the further we go, the stronger and fiercer I feel. I wonder if they feel that, too.

Where once I felt my responsibility as dog owner was to control and modify my dogs' natural behaviors, I now see myself as more of a supervisor, a witness, providing opportunities for them to discover their own capacities while maintaining some degree of boundaries for their own protection. There really is nothing I can teach them, other than to try to establish a mutually-understood language that allows us to function as a team. They are complete and more than sufficient unto themselves, yet they chose to partner with me, and that fact gives me more than enough to ponder on our rambles. The choosing to share a life with an Other, the struggle to understand and to be understood, to communicate and to share...isn't that what all relationships are about?

As the years have gone by, my idea of a "long walk" has evolved numerically and then geometrically (four miles became six became ten became thirty), dissolving boundaries both physical and mental. As these once solid-seeming barriers were surmounted, the very idea of limitations has nearly evaporated.

Though I've always been athletic and outdoorsy, without these canine companions I know I would never have ventured into the wilderness as extensively as I have, nor grappled with the barriers that hemmed me in. Granted, I'd warrant that most of those barriers were self-constructed. Nonetheless, the experiences I've shared with these dogs never fail to remind me of the limitless possibilities of a life lived unleashed.

And isn't that a Homecoming of the best sort?

Transition

What's with this obsession with hiking? Well, what's with anyone's obsession with anything? What gets us "hooked" and what keeps us coming back for more? Why did I arise at ungodly hours to load (alone) crates and dogs and equipment and often offspring into the van to drive (through blizzards or driving rain, darkness or road construction) to distant venues to run around a dog show ring, more often than not returning with nothing more than a satin ribbon for all that effort and expense? What drives others to hop on motorcycles and risk life and limb to travel cross-country for rallies? To sit in slips of plastic and play rodeo in raging rivers? Or for that matter, to sit atop actual bulls in actual rodeos?

What are we all after, with our obsessive quests? Are our modern lives so damn easy we have to artificially create the stresses that once were a daily occurrence for our ancestors? No doubt our bodies crave the endorphin rush, our brains lighting up with the "hit" of neuro-chemicals. I can readily attest to the addictive quality of my own pursuits, more noticeably so now with my hiking morphing into trail running...but I suspect there's more going on.

Some of it's escapism. Things are tough, life is messy, it's a relief to just delve into a hobby or activity than to address the worries or grapple with the uncertainties. Are we, perhaps, hoping to encounter something real, as if we can keep doing whatever we happen to have gotten hooked on and Presto!, by accident one day it'll hit us -- we've stumbled onto something deeper, encountered something of substantial Meaning, something akin to actual living?

Perhaps consciously we would never cop to that. Yet, underneath, is some aspect of ourselves pushing us into pursuits that could do precisely that? It occurs to me that it does not matter what one does, from digging ditches to painting murals to building particle accelerators... the opportunity for achieving your best and highest self exists in every moment, every activity, every breath we take. So, we push and persist while our subconscious screams at us to sit up and notice, whatever it is we're doing, just really be there, participate fully, not on auto pilot but actually in the now. To do it as if it's our only moment to do so, as indeed, each moment is.

Viewed this way, the point, the goal, is not the satin ribbons, the next speed record, conquering the class five river, or managing a 25 mile hike in a day's walking. It's every aspect of each of those things. Each step of the trail becomes a means of honoring the life that I'm granted. The cool mud soothes my feet, the jagged rocks energize my thighs, the tree canopy enfolds and protects. Each view is a wonderment, each breath a cornucopia of delight. I want for nothing.

On the Trail

Over the past few months I can't claim to have been blogging frequently enough to qualify even as intermittently. I'm hopeful that my current circumstances may contribute to more regularity, given that I've set a few (very few) goals for myself for the next six weeks, and one of those is a daily commitment to writing. Then again, since the other goals involve hiking and backpacking, my access to things in the wired-world are minimal at best...which obviously makes blog entries tricky.

Thunderstorms drove me to a hotel so I'm surrounded by the trappings of civilization for the first time in a week, which is how I happen to have the luxury of internet access...and a bed, and running water, and soap and electricity.... That's in contrast to a one-man tent occupied by myself and a German Shepherd, surrounded only by the sounds of crickets and owls.

Let me back up. For the past week I've been hiking in the Monongahela wilderness in West Virginia. This is just a starting point, but I plan to be on the road for six to eight weeks...I'm calling it a sabbatical, or a pilgrimage; it doesn't really qualify as vacation, but hopefully it'll be restorative, or transformative. The idea is to log as many miles as I can in other national forests and various backroads and byways and small towns, and to write...and write, and write. Maybe with a little luck a book will take shape.

The car is so full of gear that there's only room for one dog, so after much angst I chose Ella as my traveling buddy. She's eight years old and hasn't had the physical conditioning she should have for a trip like this, but I picked her specifically because she's my peer or perhaps a tad older, chronologically speaking (that's in dog years)and I wanted to demonstrate to myself how gracefully a dog of my years can handle herself under the stresses of the road and trail. Not to mention she's my most reliable personal protection dog, and when a woman travels alone it's always reassuring to know your partner will provide not just companionship but protection if it's called for.

So far we've averaged a ten mile hike a day on foot (quite a bit more by car), but I want to increase that steadily. We did a fifteen-miler one day and Ella was a tad cranky by the end, lifting her lip at an overly-friendly Lab mix we met on the trail and clicking her teeth at an English setter whose only offense was a gentle sweep of her feathery tail (the setter in question had originated from DeCoverly, just up the road from Hollow Hills!).

In spite of the fully-loaded car, it appears that I left home without the cable that allows me to upload photos from my camera to my laptop, so you'll have to use your imagination to "see" the photos that I meant to accompany this post--they show Ella in eye-popping mountain scenery...more precisely you can imagine pictures of Ella's tail-end as she leads me up yet another trail, onward to scenes and experiences that I hope will renew us both.

Perhaps we're past our prime, but by the time we're through we'll be stronger than ever.