Copyright (c) 2000 by Michael Finley

Poodlevania

The happiest times I have spent with Beau have been while walking him. Every morning in our house, Beau and I get up and we drive Daniele and Jon to their respective schools. Then the two of us go down to one of our Mississippi River locations, within a mile of the airport.

On the Saint Paul side are Hidden Falls and Crosby Farm. On the Minneapolis side are Fort Snelling State Park and an area known to historians as Camp Coldwater, but known to my family as Poodlevania, the one place in the Twin Cities where dogs roam free.

These areas are all wild and relatively unpoliced. They include sandy beaches, cottonwood swamps, backwater pools of the mighty Mississippi, ruins from Minnesota's earliest settlers, cattailed marshes, and tall stands of pin oak, red pine and spruce. The woods are plentiful with deer and raccoons, and the waterways course with ducks, herons, and snapping turtles.

When the coast is clear, I let Beau off his leash, and he dances alongside me while we walk two to four miles along well-worn dirt paths.

The horrendous blizzards of our first winter brought equally horrendous spring floods. The roads into many of our river-walking areas were shut down, as the river rose up above its banks and dumped millions of tons of riverbottom sand along the alluvial plains south of the Twin Cities. The transformation from sleepy green riverbank to barren soggy dunes could not have been more striking. Footbridges, docks, picnic shelters and sheds were lifted up and swept away. The scars of the flood are still evident -- plastic bags caught in tree branches at twenty feet above flood stage are still there today, tattered and translucent, ghostly markers of yesterday's high water.

The upshot of all this destruction was that the parks were officially closed for about three months. These three months of devastation, coinciding with Beau's fourth through sixth months of life, were exceptionally fun ones for the two of us, because we would go where no one else dared, and no one, including police, would follow.

There on the dunes and muddy plains of the river flats, Beau seemed to blossom into the kind of bodhisattva dog I pined for -- happy, handsome and brave. He encountered every kind of creature, from white-tailed deer in high snow to big, dangerous snapping turtles at egg-laying time. We saw snow fall, and heard ice crack, and seedlings sprout. We heard the chaotic yakking of the crows in subzero weather in the bare treetops.

Every day I seemed to walk further with him. Some days we walked for two hours or more. I had an aching knee, but having my puppy dance with me by the river made the twinges bearable.

Sometimes we would just sit in the soft sand and watch the river go by, and we feel our breath inside us. Beau gets all panty when he is happy and his mouth opens in a saurian grin and he winks at me. Such times I thought, this dog understands everything. That matters, anyway.

 

When I walk Beau, I often take a tiny wire notebook to jot down ideas in. We are like two toddlers doing parallel play. Beau will roam from tree to tree sniffing the beauty and fixating on places where a woodchuck may have paused in the last 48 hours. And I will daydream about projects I am working on. If a thought comes to me, I whip out my 69-cent Mead memo-book and scribble the thought down.

I don’t think Beau minds my daydreaming, but I’m certain he resents the memo-book. Sometimes I look up from the silver coil and he is looking at me with a look of dissatisfaction that seems to say “Yo, Shakespeare, ixnay with the ookbay.”

Sometimes Beau has severe energy rushes, in which he suddenly starts dashing back and forth in frantic ellipses. He tears like a cheetah through the underbrush, tongue hanging out the side of his head. It is truly an uncontrollable mood he is the grip of, and if I could translate it into words it would be something like "Wheee!" Only in giant triple-italics, double-underlined, and red.