XI
things that go boom
OUR FIRST JULY Fourth with Trixie, we lived in Harbor Ridge, where we enjoyed a panoramic view of Newport Beach all the way to the sea, northwest to Long Beach, and north to the San Bernardino Mountains. On a clear Independence Day evening, we could see four or five major fireworks displays, some nearby and others at a distance.
Generally speaking, dogs aren’t cool with fireworks. The pretty patterns of color and light don’t impress them, but the boom-bang-crackle-crash makes them nuts. Most memoirs about dogs have a chapter detailing how Fido, left alone on a July Fourth evening or during a big thunderstorm, did more damage to the house than would have a runaway logging truck.
In this matter, as in so many others, Trixie behaved differently from our expectations. When the fireworks started, we watched them from an upper-floor balcony, and our golden girl stood with us, intrigued. She even put her head between two of the balusters to have a better view of the spectacle. Her tail wagged when the sky filled with girandoles, palm trees, magnesium peonies, and other types of fireworks that at most hissed or crackled but did not boom. During the louder flash-bangs, her tail stopped wagging and she stiffened slightly, but she didn’t tremble or whimper.
Over time, she lost enthusiasm for skyrockets and Roman candles, but never became terrified of them. She trembled when the loud ones went off, but cuddling was sufficient to soothe her.
In southern California, we seldom experience pyrotechnic storms. Whether light or heavy, rain comes with subtropical languor. Thunder and lightning occur on average no more than once a year, though two or three years can pass without such a spectacle.
When she was younger, Trixie grew mildly irritated by thunder, but as she aged, she developed a fear of violent storms. I think it was less the noise than the combination of noise and night, because when once we had a daytime downpour with a lot of sky drumming, she was unnerved but not fearful, and she even stood at a big window to study the day, as if to determine the source of the sound.
One evening, however, we were hammered by the worst thunderstorm I’ve ever known. Even in the mountains of Pennsylvania, where rain seldom comes without cannons in the heavens, I never heard such cacophony. The deluge started before ten o’clock in the evening with a detonation that sounded as if the cosmos might be collapsing.
Gerda and I had gone to bed but were not yet asleep, and we sat up, startled, mistaking the thunder for another kind of explosion, until the sudden roar of rain followed it. Trixie shot off her bed and paced the room, agitated.
We switched on a lamp. A soft light sometimes soothed our girl.
Peals of thunder continued, low rolling rumbles suggestive of ominous war machines conquering territory in the distance, punctuated by tremendous cracks and crashes so vehement that the foundations of the world seemed to be under assault and giving way.
Trixie did not whine or growl. She did not shiver with fear. But she paced restlessly around the bedroom. Every time an exceptionally hard clap of thunder chased blast waves that vibrated in the window glass and trembled the walls, she went still and waited expectantly for some terrible consequence of the sound—then continued to pace.
We tried to get her to jump on the bed with us, but she wanted to keep moving, alert for some threat of which the thunder warned. When after a while the loud detonations stopped and there were only long low grumbles like some huge beast softly growling in its sleep, she returned to her bed but remained alert and nervous.
Either a series of storm cells harried the night or the same storm kept circling back to us. Each time it seemed that the rumbling sky would settle into silence, the booming began again, as bad or worse than the previous round of detonations.
Finally, after midnight, Trixie decided that being closer to her family was better than ceaselessly roaming, and she jumped onto the bed with us. We encouraged her to cuddle, but she sat at the foot of the mattress, facing the windows, which were covered by roll-down wood shutters.
The storm seemed about to crescendo, but the escalating tumult roared for hours. As the night dragged on, Trixie turned her back to the windows and hour by hour, always panting with anxiety, she inched up the bed, between Gerda and me. Flat on our backs, we reached up to scratch her chest, to touch her face, to stroke her sides, and once in a while she would lower her head to lick one of our hands or to rub her cold nose against our fingers in gratitude for our presence. We could not induce her to lie down, perhaps because she thought that she would be vulnerable if not standing or at least sitting. Just after four o’clock, she traveled as far as she could, her chest against the headboard, her nose against the wall.
If the thunder had not kept Gerda and me awake, Trixie’s fear and panting would have made sleep impossible. We had work that needed to be done when morning came, appointments to be kept; we were going to be shambling through our meetings as if we were the walking dead.
At four thirty, the sky quieted at last. Exhausted, Trixie did not lie down so much as collapse on the bed, her head on Gerda’s pillow, her fluffy butt in my face. Instantly, she began to snore.
We had to get up at six o’clock, and we did not have a dog’s ability to switch off like a lamp. We knew that we would lie awake until the alarm clock rang.
Throughout the long night, Gerda and I had said little to each other, trying to remain sleep-ready in case the thunder stopped and the panting dog grew quiet. Now, with Trixie snoring between our heads, Gerda said, “I’m going to be a wreck all day…but I wouldn’t trade this experience for the world.”
I knew exactly what she meant. We had never previously needed to gentle our girl through such a long seizure of anxiety. Being there for her and knowing that she took courage from us, we fulfilled the promise that dog lovers make to their dogs—I will always love you and bring you safely through troubled times—and little in life is as satisfying as keeping promises.