8 Sep

Early in the morning, as I am outside enjoying a cup of coffee and surveying the world around us, Corky comes to the camper door and lets me know he is ready for our morning walk. Something we have done together a few thousand times.

I began to reminice.

Corky, our wonder dog, has been our constant camping companion since we rescued him from a shelter in 2006. To say we “rescued” him isn’t fair to his previous owner. He was in fairly good health and had been well cared for. From what I was told, his owner had to move to a location that did not allow pets and he was given up for adoption.

The decision to get a dog was somewhat scary – both Joyce and I came up with the decision independently – that was the scary part; we were both on the same wave length, a conjunction of Mars and Venus. At the time I was traveling frequently away from home and a dog would make us both feel more secure in my absence. Both of us have had dogs before, but we are in complete agreement that Corky is special – the best dog either of us have ever owned. Perhaps part of this is that we are older with more life experience and our kids were grown and on their own. 

Finding Corky

Once we decided to get a dog, the next step was where and how. It was almost a given for us to rescue a dog from an animal shelter. This turned out to be quite a daunting task. We soon found that the vast majority of dogs (maybe 90%) are large breeds and mostly pit bulls. It is sad that people get a dog without thinking the whole thing out and when they find out their decision was a bad one the dog ends up in a shelter.

We also discovered that smaller breeds were in high demand. Two of the shelters near us quarantine  dog for a few days before it can be adopted, and while the dogs are held people can sign a waiting list. All the dogs we might be interested in already were on waiting lists. We decided that a medium size dog was our preference. A Shih Tzu or similar was too small and perhaps a slightly larger Lhasa Apso might be a good fit for us. And so the search began. Most shelters have websites with all the dogs available for adoption and Joyce began monitoring several of them.

One day I was at home in my office working and Joyce called. She had found a three year old Lhasa Apso in a shelter in Riverside, 60 miles from our house. She wanted me to stop what I was doing and immediately drive to the shelter to check on him. Arriving at the shelter, I found him in a cage with several other dogs, and he was cowering in a corner obviously scared. He was wet and his hair clung to his body making him look just pitiful. The website said his name was Jim. But he wouldn’t answer to Jim. He wouldn’t respond to anyone. To be honest, I felt so bad for him; I was willing to take him just to get him out of the shelter. The folks at the shelter insisted I take him outside to a special area and spend some time with him just to make sure it was the right choice for both of us.

Once outside, I sat down and he jumped onto my lap shivering with fear or perhaps it was anxiety over being deserted by his previous owner. As we found out later over the years, Corky isn’t a lap dog. He hates sitting on our laps, with one exception – if we take him to the vet he will jump in my lap shaking because he knows what is going to happen. Anyway, I liked him. I called Joyce to report back and we decided to adopt him.

The process was somewhat time consuming, and I had to fill out quite a bit of paperwork and pay a very reasonable fee of $36. And so on August 16, 2006 Corky became a member of the Gatel household. He was still damp and dirty and the shelter gave me a used bedsheet to wrap him in so the SUV wouldn’t get dirty. Placing him on the front passenger seat, I got in the driver’s seat and headed home. Corky wouldn’t stay put, he kept trying to get onto my lap. We finally reached an agreement: he could rest his head on my lap so I could safely navigate the 60 miles back home.

Corky Comes Home

By the time we arrived to the Gatel Casa, Joyce was home from work after stopping to pick up some dog shampoo and dry dog food. He hates baths, but allowed us to bathe him. His hair was long and required a blow dryer. He looked beautiful.

What’s in a Name?

Parents, when they have a kid, agonize over names. They often buy books with sample names. For many parents, picking a name is more traumatic than childbirth. Neither of us can remember how or why we came up with Corky. Jim wasn’t going to work for us and soon after that grooming session we christened him Corky. Also, after this session it was obvious to us he wasn’t a Lhasa Apso. After several hours of research via Google it was confirmed that he was Tibetan Terrier. I downloaded a picture of a champion Tibetan Terrier that was the spitting image of Corky.

The really good news for us is the fact we was housebroken. No climbing on furniture and no behavioral issues.

Challenges

The very first challenge was he wouldn’t eat. Not a single cupful of his food and we weren’t about to give him table scraps. We just assumed it was stress. The second challenge was he wasn’t in very good shape. He couldn’t make it around the block without sitting down several times to rest.

Appetite

We decided to go camping the upcoming weekend and, of course, to take Corky with us. He still wasn’t eating and we soon found out why. Friday afternoon we arrived at our campsite on the Colorado River. I was outside and Joyce was preparing dinner. She called out,

“I figured out why Corky won’t eat.”

“Why?”

“Because he is used to canned dog food. I opened a can of green beans and he is going crazy with just the sound of the can opener. We need to go into town and get some canned food for him.”

And we did. He “swallowed” his dinner. It didn’t take us long to wean him off the canned food.

Physical Conditioning

Each day we slowly increased the length of the morning and evening walks. Soon he was able to walk several miles without getting tired. He relished the walks if we compromised… he wanted to stop occasionally to smell things. It worked out well and he has been very healthy ever since. Of course dogs, like people, get sick once in a while. But we take him to the vet on schedule and also when he gets ill. Hell, he has gotten better medical and dental care than me over the 12 years he’s been with us.

Life with Corky

Although I never take him backpacking, he has hiked in the High Sierra with us, swam in mountain streams and rivers, supervised most of our trout fishing expeditions, walked on remote ocean beaches, climbed desert rock formations, rafted on the Colorado River, piloted our raft on alpine lakes, and enjoyed many a campfire with us. Over the past 12 years he has camped over 1,000 nights with us. He has done what many people just don’t make the time to do. Corky has the time we just need to make time available for us, which we have been very successful at.

There is a saying that a dog and his owner begin to look alike as time marches on. 

As both Corky and I age, this is true. We both have long white hair and beards. Often, people will stop us and remind us of this fact – normally I point out to these strangers that Corky is different than me – he has a better attitude.

When we first got Corky, we let his hair (he has hair not fur) grow all the way down to the ground. Not only was it a lot of work to brush him every day, it is not practical for camping. So we started trimming his hair short, especially in the summer.

The Short Future is Accelerating

Corky is 15 years old. The saying that a dog’s age is 7 human years really isn’t accurate; Corky would be 105 years old in human years. There are tables you can find on the internet that calculate dog years into human years, and most are based on the size of the dog; small, medium, and large. According to most of these tables, Corky is 83 years old in human years. Most tables end at 16 years and 89 human years – meaning that the end is near for Corky. One may wonder if animals have a sense of their own mortality. Probably not. As I get older, I do have a greater sense of my own mortality. Family, friends and acquaintances are passing away in greater numbers each year. It isn’t something to dwell on. It should be an incentive to live each day to its fullest and not waste time on silly things like TV or social media.

Nowadays on our walks I pay more attention to the challenges Corky now faces. Like me, his hearing and eyesight are not as good as they once were; in fact his have gotten much worse than mine in the past year. His hearing has become extrremely poor and his eyes are cloudy, which is normal in older dogs. When we walk, if I am not paying attention, he often walks into trees, bushes, or trips over small objects. Unlike humans, he can compensate for these with his sense of smell, which appears to still be outstanding. For dogs, the sense of smell is their main sense. Experts say that a dog’s sense of smell is 10,000 times stronger than that of humans. Since we really don’t rely on smell, it is hard for us to grasp this conception, because we are basically visual creatures. However, if we consider a dog’s sense of smell to our sense of sight, we can put it into a perspective most of us can understand. If a dog’s sight was 10,000 times stronger than ours, what we could see from 1/3 a mile away and dog would be able to see from a distance of 3,000 miles!

Most mornings it takes Corky a bit of time to get moving. We can tell his joints are stiff and on our morning walks he has become a slow walker. Perhaps part of this is the fact he can barely see and he “smells” his way around. Usually on our afternoon walks there is a bit of his old peppy gait still left. He really doesn’t care to run most of the time, but occasionally when he sees (senses) Joyce at the end of our walk, he will run to her.

And so this morning we explore the campground, Corky and I. He can smell scraps of food left over, in empty campsites, and try to trick me into walking into these sites so he can eat the contraband. Of course I’m not going to let him, but most of the time I let him lead the way and we go where he wants… heel is not part of our communication.

And so the end of Corky’s (like mine) life will soon come to an end. That certainty is going to be traumatic for Joyce and me. But death is a part of living. We will get another dog? The answer is probably no. As I mentioned, Corky is the best dog either of us have ever owned. He can’t be replaced.

Click on an image for a full size picture or to view the entire gallery.

The Seventeenth Day After the Day After –>