CAPE COD DOG

“The cure for anything is salt: sweat, tears or the sea.”  

– Isak Dinesen

                I believe this. I feel this. I have felt this for a long time. The past two years living in Texas have been my first ever away from the sea. That has meant a lot of sweat and tears to keep me balanced. That’s why when I visited Cape Cod in September, my trip was really about visiting my salty people and soaking up my salty, sea air. It was about short runs on the beach chasing the sandpipers and listening to the gulls and the osprey. It was about long walks down to the cut fighting my grandmother for that rare piece of blue sea glass or collecting mermaid scales, mussel shells and lucky stones with my Mom and my aunts for our next attempt at a glue-gun art project. I wonder if that is what it is about for Pumba, too.

                Pumba is my ten-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever. She spent eight years on the Cape with me before our move inland. We have lived through a lot together: a marriage, a divorce, a move … changes. She has never complained. That’s why when Continental Airlines charges me twice as much for her ticket back to the sea as they do for mine, I cough it up. Pumba has earned her trip home.

                Two summers in a row now Pumba has flown on Continental’s climate-controlled Quikpak from DFW to BOS. All of my nieces spend their summers on the Cape; at swimming lessons and camp and the snack bar on the beach. So does Pumba. Kind of. Dogs aren’t really allowed on Barnstable beaches between May 15 and September 15, but Pumba knows her way around – she knows the back roads and the locals, and she sometimes lets her human cousins tag along.

                I was reminded this September of what a Cape girl she is. Now officially allowed back on the beaches, her days started with waking my Mom up early for a quick drive down to the shore. At this point in the summer, they had their routine down: a jaunt up Wianno Avenue; around and down to Dowses’ Beach to chase off a few seagulls (no, never the piping plover) and catch some new smells in the seagrass and seaweed; then down the beach, stealthily hopping over rock jetties (I won’t reveal my Mom’s age, but she is in her sixties and Pumba is about the equivalent of a spritely seventy-year-old) to get to the Wianno Club beach; up the stairs and across the field to the lake to rinse off and do a little loop around in the kayak. Drive home. Hang out in the shade of the drooping branches of the maple tree, with that gentle breeze drying her off, waiting for any visitors to come up the driveway; watching the town drive or walk by on the streets just down the hill.

                Even when I was living there, I spent more time on the beach off season that I did in season when she was not allowed to go with me. Somehow I felt too guilty being there, knowing how much she would love it. Knowing that she was instead home alone, frustrated as she watched out the window her sworn enemy squirrels climbing up the bird feeders and devouring the seeds, she helpless to chase them off.

                The one summer we all went to Cuttyhunk it was great! Pumba sat in the front seat of the golf cart with my Mom while the rest of us walked down to the beach. There weren’t any “No Dogs Allowed” signs. Nobody complained that Pumba romped in the cold, clear water with us. Certainly nobody minded when she came out, rolled around in the sand, and then dozed under the beach umbrella. Content. I wonder, what is she dreaming?

                This last visit I saw many dogs in all their glorious happiness: heads out of a car window, ears flapping; trotting down the beach to greet each other and play in the waves; strolling around downtown, proud to be included in daily activities. Someone made the joke about coming back in their next life as a Cape Cod Dog. Yeah, I guess I hope that too. Maybe, if I’m lucky, Pumba will come back as my human Mum and will find the time to take me to splash and play on Long Beach. To take in the smells of the grasses and the shells, or even low tide. To run full tilt down the beach with the sand in my paws, the sun warming my face, and the wind at my back like a bird about to take flight. To put a conch shell on the branches of the dried out cedar tree. To get my fill of salt.