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Man’s Best Friend Overboard
We were at the Lucy Woodstock dock, just above Memphis one hot, sticky, if-Hell-is-anything-like-this-I’m-gonna-straighten-up-and-do-right afternoon. We had two anhydrous ammonia barges strung out, each one was 300 feet long (the length of a football field) and 50 feet wide. They were finally empty and we were preparing to head up river. Someone hollered, “Hey, there’s a dog in the water!” We all hurried over to see, and sure enough a black Labrador retriever was in the river. He was about midway of the first barge. He was trying to swim upstream to get around the barges. He was tiring fast, and every time he would stop swimming the current would take him backward. The noise and vibration from the engines probably frightened the dog; he seemed particularly disinterested in letting himself get washed around to the stern of the boat, so he would try even harder to swim against the current. “That dog’s gonna get wore out and drown.” Nobody wanted to see that happen, but what could we do? The empty barges were about ten feet out of the water, too high for anyone to reach over and grab the dog. The longest day I live, I’ll never forget a deckhand we called Tick—he answered to it, so we kept calling him that. Tick was a great guy, but not known far and wide for his critical thinking skills. Tick grabbed a line and threw it to the drowning dog. It reminded me of the Andy Griffith show where Barney shows his dog, Ol Blue, a picture of an escaped criminal. “Go get ‘im, Blue!” Sometimes God sends people like Tick into the game to provide us with comic relief, even in the tensest situations. We don’t always appreciate it. The rest of us were trying hard not to appreciate it, but it didn’t work. “Jesus, Tick, you tryin to knock him out or somethin?” (We’re talking 15 feet of 2-inch line with an eye spliced in it.) “What’s he supposed to grab it with?” Meanwhile, the Captain was calling for us to “Cut ‘er loose!” When Captain Charlie said to cut her loose, he expected to hear someone shout, “All gone!” within four or five seconds. But we, the whole crew, were out on the port side of the tow, shouting encouragement to a drowning dog. Captain Charlie would cuss and hop around like a banty rooster when he got mad. He was cussing and hopping with gusto that day. He could not see the dog, but he could see us staring into the river and gesticulating wildly. A grandfatherly exhortation came over the speaker: “Ya’ll lost yer fuckin minds? Cut ‘er loose!” Fortunately, of the bargemen was clearheaded enough to fetch a pike pole (a long pole with a hook on the end of it). We hooked the dog’s collar and dragged him, much against his will, downstream. At one point the dog’s collar nearly came off over his head. That would have been the end of it, but the patron saint of dogs, deckhands, and those who love them was with us. We managed to haul the dog behind the boat, and over to where he could see the bank. The dog wearily, shakily paddled the remaining few feet; it was all he could do to pull his forward half onto the mud and lay there, his hind half still in the water. When I hear someone talk about being dog tired, I have a perfect visual to go with it. After we had been underway for about an hour, got all the couplings good and tight and the bargemen were satisfied that the equipment was okay, we headed for the galley. The speaker in the galley crackled and Captain Charlie crooned, “Ya’ll in there?” “Yeah, Cap.” “I just got a call from the guys at Lucy Woodstock. That dog is havin a heart attack and they want Tick to come back and give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.” No, Captain Charlie, please don’t let it drop. Please don’t fail to remind us about it every chance you get. Run it right into the ground, would you? “Millions of dollars worth of boat, barges, and equipment and I can’t move it because there’s a goddamn dog in the river!” For the remainder of the trip, Captain Charlie referred to us as the Muskrat Sally K-9 Rescue Squad. I thought a lot about that dog and how he nearly died fighting against the folks who were trying to save him. If he’d just let go and floated gently down the stream everything would have been fine. Ignorance and fear are not the best tools to have in your survival kit. Sometimes we all do that. We will work ourselves to death, struggling against the very thing that could help us if we would just let go and trust it. But we get our minds paralyzed sometimes and will do anything to preserve our present position, no matter how much it hurts us. Some folks would rather be right than happy. They will argue about anything, stuff that, as Captain Charlie would say, “don’t mean shit to a tree.” We might be afraid of the unknown—the sound of the engines—and run from it just because it’s unfamiliar. We might be so fixed on our position and course of action—politics, religion, favorite color, career, anything—that we have no open space where new information can get in. Daniel Boorstin, former director of the Library of Congress, said this in his retirement speech: “The great obstacle to progress is not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge.” Ignorance can be remedied with information, but if we ever become convinced that we have all the answers we need, about anything, then we stop our progress—as individuals, as families, as societies, as nations. Sometimes we just need to let go, stop struggling, stop worshipping our opinions, stop worrying. We want to relax, stay afloat, and let the current carry us downstream to a safe place. When we are in a panic, not fully present, or reacting in knee-jerk fashion, we might not appreciate it when Mother Nature (via friends, circumstances, or freak accident) hooks on and yanks us in the direction we need to go, even while we struggle against it. In times like those, about the best we can do is hope our collars don’t come off.
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