Saturday, July 19, 2003

In which we ponder the nature of human existence

 
I thought that my next entry in this blog would be about the couple of trials last weekend at Bev Lambert’s and Carol Campion’s in Connecticut: I would say something witty about all the poison ivy in Bev’s field (which was formidable), the freneticism of having three runs in a single day with Phyl (I entered Ranch and Open at Bev’s, and Ranch at Carol’s), and the enjoyment of winning my first Ranch class with my best score yet (we got a 79 on the last day, without a clean pen--it was our fourth time attempting that course, and practice sometimes makes perfect). But I’m not going to write about any of that. I’m going to write about Paul Dragunas, who died at the Bloomfield Sheepdog Trial on Friday, July 18, 2003.

I didn’t enter Bloomfield, although I’d been there last year: it’s hot in July, and I felt that Phyl and I needed a little time off after so many trials in a row. But I heard what happened from enough people that I feel as if I experienced it as well: after completing a pretty solid run on very difficult sheep, Paul and his dog Cookie were working the exhaust pen. The set of sheep that Paul was exhausting escaped and ran onto a paved parking lot that backed up into a school. Paul and Cookie chased after the sheep, attempting to get them back where they belonged. At some point during the chase, Paul collapsed. It was eventually determined that he had suffered a massive and fatal heart attack, probably dying instantaneously. He was only 44, leaving behind a wife, two young children, two working border collies, a flock of sheep, and a pony.

Paul was not precisely a friend of mine, but I had lately come to think of him as a potential friend. (I call very few people “friends,” and for me to believe that someone might have friend potential is a rare and exalted thing.) He was also someone I privately thought of as my doppelganger at trials. Paul and I started trialing at almost exactly the same time: my first trial was at Sherry Smith’s in April 2002, and Paul’s was a week or two later at Sharon Nunan’s. I always made a point of watching his runs, and he made a point of watching mine, never failing to tell me when he thought Phyl and I had done well. He had trained his bitch Cookie from puppyhood; I had imported Phyl as a trained dog. He started running Cookie in Novice-Novice and Nursery while I was muddling along with Phyl in Ranch. By the Bloomfield trial a year ago, Paul had qualified Cookie for the Nursery Finals in Tennessee. He decided to skip Pro-Novice entirely and start entering her in both Ranch and Nursery, in order to be better prepared for the Finals. It was bold move, and one that not many points-and-placements-obsessed novice handlers would have had the guts to attempt.

I admit that I sometimes felt twinges of jealousy when I watched Paul and Cookie run in Ranch: he sometimes beat us, and being beaten by someone with no more experience than I, someone without the advantage of a professionally-trained dog like Phyl, was sometimes difficult. But jealous or not, I found it hard to work up any sort of ill-will toward Paul, because he was such a nice person. (“Nice” isn’t a word that does much writerly work, but nothing describes Paul better: he was nice, thoughtful, earnest, kind, and fundamentally decent.) Cookie was a dog that was purchased as a family pet (although she comes from good breeding), and Paul became interested in training her as a sheepdog only as an afterthought. Paul adored Cookie; he told me once that he had never felt so close to any other animal. Cookie worked hard for Paul, taking in stride all the mistakes and unfair demands that any novice handler gives to a first dog. I was there when the two of them had a lovely run at the Tennessee Nursery Finals, a run that put them in the top fifty of the 111 dogs who were entered. Paul was ecstatic that day, and he should have been: not many novice handlers come close to achieving with their first dogs what he did with Cookie. The two of them started running in Open this season, and they were getting better and better. They hadn’t gotten an Open placement yet, but I am confident that by next season they would have done that, too. One of the many tragedies of Paul’s death--a minor one to normal people, a major one to the trial-obsessed--is the fact that Cookie and Paul never will get the Open placement that they had been working toward so diligently.

Sudden deaths are the enemy of the procrastinator. I had often thought of inviting Paul down to our place to work dogs, but I had never gotten around to doing it. It had occurred to me that we might want to have some evening fun trials this summer and ask Paul to judge--he had become very interested in learning about judging and was developing a very clever score sheet designed to show the handler exactly where points were deducted--but I never got beyond the thinking-about-it stage. Like all of us, I tend to assume that I have all the time in the world to decide whether or not I want to kick a relationship up to the next level, to decide when someone should stop being an acquaintance and become a friend. But time is the one thing that none of us really do have, whether we know it or not. A lot of thoughts present themselves when an acquaintance dies, from the maudlin (his two-year-old son will never remember his father, he’ll never be able to watch his seven-year-old daughter compete in another horse show) to the pragmatic (I wonder whether his wife will sell the sheep?) to the ghastly and wildly inappropriate gallows humor (an image of a redesigned Bloomfield logo with a border collie positioned near a skull and crossbones actually flickered through my mind as I lay awake last night unable to sleep). But most of the thoughts are ones of regret: regret at not having reached out more, at having chosen to stay in a comfortable circle rather than make a new connection with someone. Some of my favorite television shows (Six Feet Under, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Showtime’s brand-new Dead Like Me) are dark comedies that focus on the lighter side of death. The problem is, try as we might to laugh in its face, death is fundamentally not funny: death is loss and sorrow and missed opportunities. It’s also about moving on, like it or not. I remember reading Robert Frost’s “Out, Out--” in high school, the poem that ends with the people who “since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.” When I was sixteen, I thought “Out, Out--” showed that human beings are at best pragmatic and at worst selfish. Now that I’ve lived long enough to have caught a whiff of death every now and then, I see that poem more as a reflection of one of the essential tragedies of the human condition: whether we would choose to or not, we have to turn to our affairs. Those who are closest to the deceased might fight it the longest, but in the end they too have to give in to the day-to-day thrum of the mundane. And the instant we do that--and that instant is inevitable--death really occurs.

I want to end this overly long, very peculiar blog entry with the image of Paul, trying as hard as he could to get his sheep back into the exhaust pen, to solve the problem, to make it right. That’s how I’ll remember him, because it was very typical of the way he was: nobody tried harder, or cared more. Deep inside, I know that I never would have worked as hard as he did to get the sheep gathered up: I’d have slowed down and hoped that someone else, someone who knew more about how to go about it, would step in and pick up the slack. But Paul didn’t do that: he took responsibility for his sheep. It’s why he was a real shepherd, and why I’m just someone who plays on the trial field with my dog, and it’s why someday he would have been a very good Open handler. I’m sorry that he’s not going to have that chance, but I’m going to do my best to honor his memory by working as hard as I can to learn this craft of dog trialing.

posted by Heather Nadelman

Friday, July 11, 2003

Just under the wire

 
I'm just about to leave my house for a weekend of trialing in Connecticut (Bev Lambert and Carol Campion are having simultaneous farm trials--they live twenty minutes apart--so we can sample a taste of life in the UK), and I realized that I never updated my blog to report on last weekend's trial. That'll never do . . . especially since it was a pretty good experience. The trial was at Allan Lynch's field in Turbotville, Pennsylvania; I entered Phyl in Ranch on Friday and in Open on Saturday and Sunday. Our Ranch run was our poorest, largely because (for whatever reason) I couldn't focus on what we were doing: Phyl was halfway finished with her outrun before I stopped thinking about a conversation I had been having right before going onto the field. As a result, my handling was quite bad, and we ended up with a mediocre score and no placement. On the plus side, she did her outrun handily, and on this same field a year before she'd gotten completely lost and had to retire. After our run, I retreated from the heat to a Red Roof Inn with all four of my dogs, blasting the air conditioner. We spent the balance of the day watching a Fourth of July Twilight Zone marathon on the Sci Fi channel. (Phyl isn't much of a Zone fan--she's a very literal-minded dog--but Leap, my other border collie, is a fanatic. Leap especially enjoys the time travel episodes, even though I have argued with her about the offensiveness of the 1950s-esque moralism and foolish nostalgia of the Zone's philosophy of time travel. But Leap thinks that art should transcend politics. What can you do with a dog like that?)

On Saturday, I saw (to my horror) that the outrun was to a very different part of the field than it had been in Ranch, and it was much longer to boot. Essentially, this meant that I had to send Phyl away-to-me, because if I sent her come-bye (as I'd have preferred, since it's her better side) she'd come upon both the setout pen and the spot where the sheep had been the day before (and weren't now). So I sent her, fear and trembling in my heart. And she did it! She ran out beautifully and with confidence--she was a little tight at the top, but nothing out of the ordinary. The outrun was about 400 yards, so it was even on the long side for us! Our downfall of that run was our fetch: the pressure was strong to Phyl's right, and (although she flanked readily when I told her to) she never grabbed hold and kept on the pressure. Many other dogs were having that problem, and I know that Phyl finds pressure on that side hard to deal with. But we'd been working on it at home, and I was disappointed (her fetch in Ranch had been much the same, adding to my consternation). The rest of the run went pretty well--we made our drive panels, just missed our crossdrive panels but with a pretty good line, got our pen, and even got a tiny little one-point shed. We ended up with a respectable 62, which (other than the fetch) satisfied me.

On Sunday, I was determined that whatever else happened I would do that fetch correctly! My plan was to handle her as aggressively as possible at the top, flanking her over to the away side immediately and telling her "there" and "walk up" ("there" usually has the good effect of making her turn in and hold the pressure, but I'd never tried it at 400 yards before). And it worked! Or anyway, it seemed to work (it's always hard for me to tell if we were better or if our sheep were just more cooperative): she got control of the sheep early in the fetch, and after that everything felt easy. We had a little detour on the first leg of the drive but we got the sheep collected and made the first panel; the crossdrive was a little jerky but we also made that panel. (Note to anyone who cares: that marked the first time in Open competition that Phyl and I made all three panels.) Our pen was very clean (as were most people's by this point--the sheep had become very, uh, cooperative about penning!) Our attempts at shedding this time were fairly pathetic: we circled much too much, and I never had Phyl in the right position to take advantage of whatever holes I managed to make. (Sometimes I feel as if that shedding ring is the last circle of hell, and that Phyl and I are down there with sheep named Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. And since Phyl's pretty speedy at getting through the rest of the course, our sentence in hell is usually LONG. If Dante had been a sheepdog handler, The Inferno would have been a very different kettle of poetry!) At any rate, we ended up with a 77--our best score!--outrun: 18; lift: 8; fetch: 18; drive: 23; pen: 10; shed: 0. We were closer to placing than we'd ever been before, and (even more important) I felt better about our run than I ever had before. That probably means that this weekend is going to be the disaster of the century, but at least it was heartening at the time.

Ok, I'm off to the wilds of New England. Think good thoughts for me, and I'll report what happened when I return on Sunday.

posted by Heather Nadelman