I Have the Dog with Me
Updated: Aug 18
We all have stories from childhood that have been told to us so many times that eventually they become part of our memory. The peculiar thing is that we may not remember the original event at all. We remember the version of it that survived. The story, polished by repetition, told by people who were there and who, perhaps without meaning to, decided what mattered. That is the case for much of my childhood.
I do not remember very much of it. There are fragments. Shapes moving behind frosted glass. Sounds without a clear source. A familiar movement. The sense of a room. The outline of a person whose face I cannot quite bring into focus. I can see the pieces, but rarely the whole of anything. The stories have become my anchor points. They are the places where memory stops being fog and begins to take on the appearance of a landscape.
In a way, they do not feel entirely like my own. They belong to other people who happened to remember the time I was there. I was often somewhere between five and ten years old, which means the person they remember was not yet particularly concerned with examining her own motives. I had not started writing in journals. I was simply present, and therefore available to become a character in someone else’s story.
There is one story in the canon of “Nic” that returns to me whenever I think about my relationship with dogs.
I was young. I do not know exactly how young, but probably about six. My mother was working and going to school, and I spent a great deal of time at my grandparents’ house on the island. They were working on the house, which meant that I was often left to my own devices. A small ship’s bell was attached to an outside corner of the house. If it rang, I was expected to come back immediately, no matter where I was or what I was doing. I was also supposed to call out as I returned so that my grandparents could hear me. This was necessary because I could be almost anywhere.
I might be in the woods building a fort, climbing a tree, or lying in the tall grass doing whatever it is a six-year-old does when no adult has given her a task. I was a small child in a large landscape, and there were many places nearby where I could disappear simply by standing still.
My grandparents were not particularly devoted to what would now be considered a conventional approach to childhood safety. I was given a pocketknife and matches when I was very young. I learned how to make a fire and carve things while other children my age were being introduced to safety scissors at school.
There was, however, one rule: I was not allowed to go to the beach alone.
The beaches on the island were not the kind found on vacation postcards. There was little soft sand and no useful place to spread a towel. These were Pacific Northwest beaches, made of sharp granite, broken barnacles, driftwood washed ashore in violent weather, slippery seaweed, and water cold enough to make a person reconsider every decision that had brought them to it.
My grandparents always had a dog, and at that time it was either Nicky or Rusty. I cannot remember which one was with me in this story. Nicky was a scrappy little terrier-like dog who had the unnerving habit of diving into the water and eating rocks. Rusty was a large, hairy livestock dog, nearly big enough for me to ride. Both were my best friends.
When I disappeared into the woods, one of the dogs was usually with me. Following. Watching. Playing. Listening patiently as I carried on conversations that, from their side, must have been remarkably one-sided.
In the version of the story that has survived, my grandparents were working on the house one day and sent me out to wander the property. When dinner was ready, they rang the ship’s bell.
I did not return. They rang it again. Then again.
Eventually, they heard the faint barking of the dog and the sound of me yelling somewhere in the direction of the beach.
I was not screaming. I was apparently not in any particular distress. But I had been gone long enough for my grandparents to begin imagining the more unfortunate possibilities available to a small child near cold water and slippery rocks.
When I finally appeared at the house, I was berated for taking so long to return and asked where I had been.
I had been on the beach.
This, of course, was against the rules. I was not about to lie about it.
And this is the part of the story that everyone remembers. The part I am still told with great flourish by those who remember me as a small but confident character.
“I wasn’t alone. I had the dog with me.”
I apparently delivered this explanation with enough certainty that my grandparents reconsidered the rule. From that day forward, the beach was no longer entirely forbidden. I simply had to tell them where I was going, and the dog had to go with me.
She Was My Soul
There have been many dogs in my life. Important dogs. Dogs who have left their paw prints deeply on my heart and then, in the way of dogs, gone on ahead.
One of them was Rose, my soul dog.
She died in 2017, and her ashes have rested in a small urn on my nightstand ever since. When I met Rally for the first time, I saw something familiar in his eyes. The same color. The same build. The same size. It was difficult not to wonder if Rose had picked him for me, and if, in whatever mysterious way these things sometimes seem to happen, she knew this was when I would need him.
Rose and I went on many adventures together.
There were long road trips when she sat in the front seat, staring through the windshield as the landscape passed. Every so often, I would look over at her and wonder what could possibly be occupying her thoughts. Whatever it was, I suspected it was more important than whatever I had been thinking about for the last hundred miles. What does a dog think about when it looks out the window at seventy miles an hour on a stretch of highway in Nevada?
On one of our trips, we found a campsite in the coastal redwoods of California. I have returned to that campground four times since Rose died and failed to recreate the trip each time. The campsite remains, but the particular arrangement of weather, solitude, Rose, and whatever else made those few days feel complete has not returned.
The campground is down a dirt road that winds through a narrow crevice in a bluff before opening onto one of the few places where you can camp on the beach in the park. There are only a handful of sites and no room for RVs or large rigs. It is the sort of place that quietly discourages people who require electrical hookups and a respectable amount of personal space. Perfect for tents and cars.
Roosevelt elk often come down from the bluffs and move along the beach, eating the sweeter grass and berries before disappearing back into the fern-filled gullies.
We arrived around midday and found an open site. It was midweek, and there were very few people in the campground. The ocean mist rolled in and out beneath a high sun, while enough clouds crossed the sky to soften the glare. It was a good spring day, cool and bright at the same time.
I set up the tent and began getting things ready for a fire later. Sunset would be around six. Rose sniffed around camp and then wandered off to investigate something in the dune grass. She was usually off-leash. I sometimes called her my shadow. On a hike or in the woods, I might not always be able to see her, but she knew where I was. If I worried, I could call her name or use a particular whistle pattern, and she would appear.
(Without much thought, I found myself developing a whistle for Rally when he came into my life. He responded to it immediately. We have used it ever since.)
I pulled out my teapot and set water to boil. Then I found the book I had been reading over the previous week. Tea and book in hand, I sat down as the sun came through and began warming the air, lifting the mist. Rose returned and sat beside me. She was alert but calm. She watched seabirds moving down the beach and looked at me whenever I got up to refill my teacup.
The afternoon passed.
I turned the pages of my book. Rose half-dozed. A few more people arrived.
One of the new campsites belonged to a family with a small child. They seemed quiet enough. Their kid was perhaps seven or eight years old and, thankfully, not the usual screaming terror of a campground. They also did not immediately rush toward Rose in order to ‘pet the doggy’, which earned them the mutual indifference of both Rose and me.
After they had set up camp, a herd of elk came down along the beach and through the bluffs into the campground. The first cows were about a hundred feet from my site.
Rose became alert.
She did not stand. She simply raised her head and watched them. She had been around elk and other wildlife before, so I was not especially concerned.
The herd moved closer. There were probably twenty or thirty cows and calves, though I could not see any bulls. I moved to the other side of the picnic table, and Rose followed.
This time she sat upright.
We watched.
Then the neighbors appeared, cameras in hand and suddenly full of enthusiasm. Rose and I both turned to watch them as they moved toward a nearby cow that was grazing. They seemed to intend to get close enough for a photograph, or perhaps close enough to touch it, which is a common human desire when confronted with a large animal that has not yet demonstrated its ability to object.
I called out before they got too close and told them it was a bad idea. The cow raised its head, saw the approaching people, and walked in the other direction, entirely unbothered. That night, sitting beside the fire, I wrote in my journal about how narrow and precise my thinking had become during those few minutes.
I was not afraid.
I did not overthink.
There had been no room for the usual machinery of worry, no appetite for imagining consequences that had not yet happened. I had simply watched the elk, watched Rose watching the elk, watched the family with their cameras drifting toward an animal large enough to injure them without meaning to, and understood what needed to be said.
Perhaps that is the canine mind.
It does not make life simpler.
It simply refuses to complicate the moment before the moment has asked to be complicated.
Perhaps that is what is best in those times.
A Little Girl and a Little Puppy
Now, in the present day, I have Rally, and he is teaching me another version of the canine mind.
Rally is the first puppy I have ever had. He came into my life at the ripe age of nine months in February 2025, which was apparently still young enough to count as a puppy but old enough to arrive with a fully formed personality and a great many opinions.
With him, I am experiencing a whole new world. We are growing together in a way that feels magical. What I have learned from a lifetime of dogs is that you have to listen for what they can show you. So far, Rally has shown me that there are more opportunities to be goofy than I had previously allowed myself. More opportunities to play. More opportunities to spend time being awkward with your limbs and laughing at things that would not seem particularly funny to anyone else.
He has also reminded me how quickly two creatures can imprint on one another.
As I navigate this new path forward, single at forty-three, I think back to that character of myself boldly stating, “I am not alone. I have the dog with me.” I do not know if the six-year-old version of me understood loneliness, or companionship, or any of the complicated things that come with growing older. She only knew that she had gone somewhere with her best friend. Therefore, she had not gone alone. Maybe it really is that simple.
I have spent a lifetime sharing roads, campsites, forests, long drives, and quiet rooms with dogs who asked for nothing more than to be included. Some of them are gone now. One of them sits beside me as I write this. And as the road ahead changes once again, I think perhaps that little girl was right all along.
I am not alone.
I have the dog with me.
BOOK: Never Cry Wolf - Farley Mowat The book that sparked outrage. Mowat describes his experience (somewhat fictional) of observing wolves in subarctic Canada. They were being blamed for the declining caribou populations, but he discovered that instead wolves were killing small mammals. That the decline in caribou was likely due to human factors. We showed that we demonize wolves, make it to be the scapegoat of our sins, when it shouldn't be. I get this all the time with my dogs. Even now, people are scared of Rally.... and they shouldn't be, he is harmless.
SONG: Man of the Hour - Norah Jones
I love this song because you have to really listen to it.... to hear that she is singing a love song about her dog.
If you would like to see more behind the scenes check out this substack:
Thank you for reading my post. This post/essay, like many of the ones I write, is a blend of my personal experiences, travel, memories, stories, and shared conversations. These solely represent myself and my opinions and thoughts. When it involves personal friends I have given them nicknames unless they have given explicit permission to use their given name. There are times that I am able to pull from what I wrote down in my journals at the time an event happened, others I am trying to recall memories that have been altered by brain injuries and a lifetime of simply living. I may not always get it right, so please forgive me for some unintentional variations.
I always welcome feedback and thoughts on my posts. Please feel free to send me an email or comment below.
Love from the road,
Nic & Rally
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