Pam Houston

A Little More About Me

An Excerpt, Part 2 of 2

Legend has it that in the old days packs of wild pigs used to roam the streets of Park City, and that's how the leniency toward wandering dogs began. Whether it's true or not, it's a great story, one that makes us think that the occasional group of bad dogs we see headed down Main Street, as if on assignment, are part of our history, something we all should be proud of, something we should leave well enough alone.

But Park City is quickly becoming a town full of civilized people, and civilized people, I'm told, don't let their dogs run loose. The animal control officers say that loose dogs will be impounded, and repeat offenders will be put down. Park City Friends of the Animals says that anyone who can't keep their dogs at home shouldn't own a dog. And there is a certain logic to that. But those of us who own dogs who are smarter than we are, dogs who consider themselves part of this town's local color, dogs who manage to come and go under their own free will with help, it seems, only from other dogs, dogs who are often in trouble with the dogcatcher, dogs who in some cases have a price on their heads — those of us who own the dogs of Park City whom, try as we might, we cannot keep at home — we might argue that our dogs help make the town what it is.

My dog's name is Jackson. He's long and lean and blond and big-nosed. He rides around town in the back of his red pickup, which he occasionally lets me drive, and he has the dubious distinction of having the loudest bark of any dog in Park City (possibly in the intermountain west). He is as cool as a bad dog can be. He's a little embarrassed about me, because I'm not really very cool at all, but I try to make it up to him by letting him go to all the best parties. He has way more friends in this town than I do, human and canine, and a few more enemies. He's been arrested twice, once for begging hamburgers at the Corner Store, and subsequently trying to follow his benefactors into the gondola, and once in Salt Lake City for threatening to bite a young Mormon boy, who Jackson swears to me was trying to steal the truck (the little boy was eight). Jackson has come out of the back of the pickup three times, all at speeds over sixty miles an hour; two of those times he suffered nothing more than a road rash, and the third time was in Heber City, and I swear he did it just to see if he could beat me home. (And he did.) Jackson likes to hang out with Roger's mastiff Bo and P.J.'s husky Raichle; he tolerates Hailey, my other dog, who is decidedly uncool; but his favorite dumpstering buddy will always be Rasta.

I like to think of Rasta as the patriarch of all the dogs on Main Street. Rasta was introduced to me as the baddest dog in Park City, and though he's never so much as nipped at an irritating human, he has a reputation for being able to kick any dog's butt. He's also earned respect among the local canines for the most creative dumpstering techniques of any dog. Two visitors once reported to his mom, Christie, that they saw him line a dog called Arlo up in front of Cisero's dumpster, and then use Arlo's back as a springboard to get inside. Rasta claims he's learned everything he knows from Helmet, Sonny's late rugby dog, the only dog that Rasta ever let push him around. But Rasta's life hasn't been all glory and garbage. He's done some hard time in the slammer; he saw his very best dog-friend Bakkhus gunned down outside Kamas for allegedly chasing deer, on a day he got shot at himself but managed to run between the bullets. Rasta lives the quiet life in Kamas now, but he and Christie come to Park City every day. You can see him in front of her office on lower Main Street, too old and wise, now, to get into much trouble, but still proud and friendly, as much a part of Main Street as the sidewalk on which he sits.

When I tried to find Fred, the chocolate Lab that has hung out in front of the Alamo for as long as I can remember, the response among his human friends was universal. "Oh, shit," they said. "Is he in trouble again?"

But when I finally caught up with Fred, at his new hangout in the back room of the snowboard shop where his owner, Mikk, works, he tried to play down his criminal record. Instead, he wanted to talk about his six-year residency that he feels gives him status as a local. "A lot of dogs come and go," Fred said, stretching his long chocolate body between a workbench on the left and a row of new snowboards on the right, "but I was born here." Fred prides himself on being a totally self-sufficient dog. He says he used to go dumpstering when he was young, and it was what all the dogs were doing, but now he finds it's quicker and easier to stand in front of the Claim Jumper, put his sad dog face on, and bark occasionally until someone comes out and gives him a rib bone. Mikk tells me that once a bunch of guys at the Alamo put a sign around Fred's neck that said will work for food. "It was good grub that night," Fred admits, "but I do fine without the sign."

Tyler is one of the few dogs in Park City who actually works for a living. Since 1985 Tyler has been the official Park City Ski Patrol Search and Rescue Dog, and if you spend any time in Jupiter Bowl, you've seen him riding the chair lift, sometimes with Kenny Elliott, his handler, sometimes all by himself. Maybe you've seen him on the snowmobile with Kenny, paws up on the handlebars, big doggie grin on his face, but a snowmobile is pup's play to a dog who has been, many times, in a helicopter, and who has even been air-evacuated out of the gondola. Tyler works on the mountain one hundred days a year, mostly practicing for the live rescues he and Kenny both hope will never come. "Tyler does all the work," Kenny says. "I learned most of what I know about snow rescues by watching his signs and clues." Tyler has never been picked up by the dogcatcher, a message to all the other Park City dogs about clean living and hard work. Like many of the Park City powder hounds, Tyler spends his summers windsurfing, with Kenny, in the Columbia River gorge.

The only physical difference between Tyler and his son Astro is that Tyler's left ear flops and Astro's right ear flops. The metaphysical differences between the dogs are many. Whether the flopping ears indicate something about the working capacities of the dogs' left and right brains would be an interesting question for dog psychologists, but for each day Tyler has spent hard at work on the mountain, Astro has spent another day begging burgers and running from the law. Astro doesn't look like a delinquent: he's big and sweet and he likes, about as much as anything, to simply chase rocks. What he also likes to chase, unfortunately for him and John, his owner, is the bull wheel on the bottom of the Pay Day chairlift, and he barks at it until he drives the lifties so crazy they have to call the pound. Astro's been picked up so many times now that the last time he got busted they took him and John away in cuffs with a thousand-dollar bail on John, a seven-hundred-dollar bond on Astro, and a promise to have the dog put to sleep if he ever got picked up again. "Astro's been clean now for a year," John says proudly, while Astro barks happily at a rock between his feet. "Kenny says I've ruined him, that I should have sent him to some Swiss school of avalanche and doggie etiquette, but he's the best construction dog in the world, and that's the way I like him."

A relatively new addition to the Park City dog scene is Bo, an English mastiff who is quickly becoming the most photographed tourist attraction in Park City. Only three years old and weighing in at over 150 pounds, Bo has charmed his way into the heart of every visitor who lays eyes on him; he winds up in their photo albums, their video libraries, and even a few of their condos and cars. "Bo finds himself in some strange places," Roger tells me from behind the bar at the Alamo, "but I always get a call. People love him until they find out how much they'd have to feed him, then they let him out and he finds his way home." Roger is too Park CityÐcool to admit that Bo's celebrity status pleases him, but when he tells me Bo has been on David Letterman, a grin crosses his face that speaks nothing but fatherly pride. "Some celebrity was visiting Park City and took his photo, and he held it up on the show," Roger says, the grin getting even bigger as he hands the waitress a couple of beers. "I don't want it going to his head, though," he says. As anyone can see, Bo's head is already big enough.

There's no way to write about all the famous and infamous dogs of Park City. Already I see that I'm leaving out Lee's little mutt Arrow, rescued by Lee from former owners who used to feed him hallucinogenic mushrooms and then tie him up. I'm leaving out Stephanie and Dana's dog Pan, named for his ability to disappear, and Marty, who lived for years on the roof of the Alamo. I'm leaving out Max, the young dalmatian, and the doggie surprise party Mitchie had for him when he turned three. Then there's Jersey Dave's dog Arlo; Yuki, the biggest dog in town, on Upper Norfolk; Chaos and Bigsey on Prospect; and Cody, whom the Austrians seem to have adopted, on lower King Road.

To say that the dogs of Park City are intelligent, to say that they can communicate with each other, is to grossly understate the obvious. To say they have the most organized social structure since Lenin and Marx is a little more to the point. If there is any doubt about whether or not these dogs can systematically work together, ask Stephanie and Dana how Bo and his husky sidekicks come and get Pan off his chain without any human assistance; watch Rasta organize a dumpster raid as smoothly and efficiently as a union boss. If you don't believe these dogs are as capable as any human being of independent and original thought, watch Bo sweet-talk a visitor out of what she thought was tomorrow's lunch, watch Fred stand up casually and stretch and move toward the door every night at five minutes to ten, just as dishwashers all over town carry that night's leftovers to the dumpsters that wait in Swede Alley.

We humans moved to Park City, many of us, because it offered us the chance to be our truest selves, to lead an independent lifestyle, to not be tied (or chained) to the conventions of a confining city life. Should we expect our dogs to want anything less? More and more, these days, I let my dogs show me how to be happy, how to make choices, how to live my life, and I'm not the only one. You've seen the way dog stars are splashed across the hot new books and movies; you know dog therapy is being used as a doctor-prescribed treatment in hospitals. How many children do you think Pan has greeted on Main Street? How many guests have had the pleasure of giving Jackson a pet and a slice of pizza at the Pizza Co.? How many smiles has Astro brought vacationing tourists as he chases the bull wheel round and round? Speaking for myself, I know there's very little wrong with me that the sight of Bo loping up Main Street can't cure, and when I see a couple of dogs making tracks down Main Street with something I can only guess at on their minds, it makes me feel good that I live in a town where occasionally dogs can get free and occasionally their owners can let them.

I was in the post office, checking my mail, when a young man came in with a black Lab puppy, no bigger than the top of one of his Sorels. The puppy was adorable, floppy-eared, with feet way too big for the rest of him, and he ran circles around his owner's feet, bumping softly into an occasional bystander. One woman, actually a little doglike herself, dressed in black pants, black turtleneck, black jacket, black hair hanging over her face, hissed, "They don't belong in here." The young man was apologetic; he picked his puppy up and took him outside. I left the post office incredibly depressed, because while I couldn't in good faith argue that yes, dogs do belong in the post office, I also couldn't allow myself to face the fact that this is what we are becoming, a town where a ski bum with a puppy is a criminal and the post office is a place we go to make each other feel bad.

One day, years ago, when I was complaining about how hard it was to find a place to live that allowed dogs, a friend of mine said, with considerable wisdom, that having dogs forces us to keep living in places that are right for us. And I think of all the things I might have given up had my dogs not shown me what was important in my life: fresh air, a garden, an eleven-thousand-foot mountain in my backyard. And whether or not the pig story is true, I think we should accept the fact that a doggie culture seems to be a part of every ski town in America: Winter Park, Steamboat, Sun Valley — the dogs are one of the ways we show the visitors we are free.

I was in Telluride in February, and I had the pleasure of meeting Zudnick, Tyler's more famous counterpart at that resort, who unlike Tyler has a history with the dogcatcher a mile wide. Zudnick had his one last chance and lost it, and was on doggie death row, no appeal pending. But the townspeople of Telluride loved Zudnick, and so did all the children at the county hospital, where he worked as a volunteer. The children wrote letters and the town drew up a petition, and Zudnick was saved from the gas chamber to ride the chairlifts again.

I met a man in Manhattan last winter who had lived in Park City during the mid-seventies. "You wouldn't have believed it," he told me. "Park City was full of dogs then. There were leash laws, of course, but somehow the dogs got around them. The dogcatcher was always busy, and still you couldn't walk down Main Street at any time of day without seeing a dog or two." The man didn't understand, right away, why I broke out laughing. He didn't understand how happy I was to know that in this town that is changing at such a dizzying rate a few things remain the same. He didn't understand how his words gave me hope that in five or ten or twenty years Park City will still be a place where we can find bad dogs, free and happy, with big things on their minds, walking past us on the street.