Six at 11

Sometimes, when I am in the middle of a frustrating or embarrassing situation, I look on the bright side, thinking “Hey, at least I have something to blog about.” At eleven o’clock last night, as I was paddling around my lake (in my pajamas, in a thunder storm), I thought this very thing.

There are some background essentials you must know to fully appreciate the story. I spent close to a third  of the day in my car yesterday.  Grab a map if you aren’t familiar with Washington state and I’ll paint you a quick picture. I drove from my house in Port Orchard, dropped Maddee off at camp in Gig Harbor, went to University Place to do a puppet workshop, drove from UP (as the cool kids call it) to Bothell, sat in a three hour meeting, then hopped on I-405 at 5:20-prime traffic time-and arrived home around 7:30. With me so far?  Great. To boot, I fueled my body with McDonalds, ice cream and cookies. Nice, right?  By the time 9:30 rolled around (kids’ summer bedtime), I was exhausted and cranky. I just wanted to make a beeline for the bed.

I neglected to mention that Max was in tow all day. He was such a good sport coming with me to all my commitments with no complaints. He hadn’t slept well in a couple of nights and after being stuck in the car all day he, too, was exhausted and cranky. Of course, the core difference between a tired and cranky adult and a tired and cranky child is this: the adult wants to go to sleep, the child already at the point of no return, insists he isn’t tired. A smart, well-rested parent, wouldn’t engage in a battle.  You already know my state of mind.

So things weren’t going as smoothly as I’d like in the old Allen abode. After about thirty minutes of trying every trick in the book and then some, Max was asleep. In fact, it seemed every living creature in my household was settled in and sleeping. I was about to climb into bed myself, when I heard my dog, Six, barking and it sounded like she was outside. This was extremely unusual as Six prides herself on her beauty sleep, getting about 18 hours a day. She is always the first to retire, so why she wasn’t already nuzzled in at the foot of my bed, was beyond me.  It had started thundering in the distance and looked like it could rain at any moment so I went outside to see if she might be out there.   I could hear her, but couldn’t see her. I turned on the porch light, still couldn’t see her. I went out front thinking perhaps she somehow got out of the yard, still no sign of her. I decided to go to bed, she has a doggy door and I figured she’d let herself in as soon as it started to rain anyway. All I had to do was ignore her bark.  Right?

Right, I am not good at ignoring whines, complaints or barks. When I tell my brain we are going to ignore something it defies me and decides to hyper focus on it, until what I am ignoring gets so imbedded in my mind and under my skin that I…well, in this case, I get out of bed, and head back into the yard. I heard her again and it sounded like a distress bark. This changed my state of mind from annoyed to concerned. I looked and looked but couldn’t find her. I went back in and got a flashlight, put some shoes on and threw a sweatshirt over my pjs. I looked and saw the back gate was open! Ugh!!

  I would alternate from the front yard to the back, calling her name. Once in a while she’d answer my call with that distress bark. Poor Six! Where could she be? Cornered by coyotes? Taken against her will by some cult? A-ha, I found her. She was stuck in the salmonberry bushes next to our yard. We have a fence and then there is a thicket of trees and salmonberry bushes that eventually give way to our neighbors’ yard. This thicket butts up to the lake, as does our yard and our neighbors. It should be told that Six loves our neighbors and they love Six. Sometimes she swims over to their house, sometimes she sneaks out of the yard to go see them. She often is let in and makes herself at home by their fireplace.  It is my suspicion that she headed over and when no one let her in at 10:20 pm (the audacity!) she decided to make her way home via the thicket. She was probably stuck in some thorns and branches. I had a flashlight, but it was hard to tell for sure if she was caught in something.

The lake in this particular area is fairly shallow, probably just to my knees, but I really wasn’t in the mood to wade in and get her. I had no knowledge of how to get into the thicket from the other side and really no desire to do so anyway.  So, yep, I decided to set sail in our paddleboat and see if I could get over to the bushes and get her untangled. This might be a good time to mention that somehow the paddleboat was  wedged on top of one of our kayaks in the water. Now if it were daylight I would have noticed this situation right away, but my only light came from my flashlight and an occasional burst of lightning. I hopped in to the paddleboat, untied it and started paddling…going absolutely nowhere, of course.

Finally, I realized that only the stern of the paddleboat was in the water. The rest of it was on top of the kayak. I got back out of the boat, pulled the kayak out from underneath, practicing some words I hadn’t said in a while, and climbed back in. The paddleboat was making an unusual swishing sound and not moving very well. The strange thing about paddleboats is that sometimes water actually gets inside the hull , making it challenging to move. I suppose there’s a minor risk of sinking when this happens, which makes this story all the better, doesn’t it? And let’s add to the suspense by my admission that even though I can’t swim I was not wearing my life jacket.  The whole time that I was trying to get from point A to point B (it should have taken two minutes tops)  I heard the following:, a distressed dog bark, a rumble of thunder, a disconcerting swishing sound coming from somewhere in the bowels of the  boat, a distressed dog bark, a rumble of thunder, a disconcerting swishing sound , etc. And so it goes. All the while I couldn’t  help thinking about my cozy bed.   

When I finally got over to the thicket, I realized I didn’t have much of a plan. I had a vague idea to climb out, hold onto the paddleboat with one hand and try to get Six out of whatever trouble she was in with the other hand. Not ideal, but it’s the best I could come up with.  You would think Six would be elated to see me, but instead she turned her head and put her snout in the air, as if she expected to be picked up in a yacht or something.  From the paddleboat, I called her name and she did it again. I couldn’t understand it. She sometimes does this when she is in trouble, too, like if she doesn’t look at us, maybe we won’t see her. But why would she be in trouble, you ask?

 Well, let me tell you, at this point in my narrative, I have a good view of her and I can see that she is absolutely, not tangled or stuck in any way!! So, I came upon the ugly realization that her distress barks originated from the fact that she didn’t want to go back through the thorny thicket and she didn’t want to go for a swim either!  This is where Mike would say something like “You should have just left her then and she would have had to swim home eventually.” Well, I don't think so, dear reader! There was NO WAY I was going anywhere without that dog. Thunder, lake water, potentially sinking paddleboat and thorny bushes be damned, I was getting the dog. I called her name again and she slunk onto the bow of the paddleboat, climbed onto my lap (being sure to get my cute pjs nice and muddy) and we were back on the water. I got us moored up, climbed out of the paddleboat, missing the dry beach area by just inches, soaking my feet and my not-waterproof -Toms. I then had to give my beloved canine a bath before I could finally, finally, finally, climb into bed and get some sleep.

When, at last, I made it to my bed, Mike lifted his head and I could see his face was marked with deep sleep lines and he had a little bit of drool in the corner of his mouth. I was so jealous! That should be me with sleep carved into my face, drool running down my lips!! I guess if that were the case, there’d be nothing to blog about, would there? And isn’t that what it’s really all about?