As North America was colonized, the European arrivals killed every wolf they laid eyes on, for pelts and as protection of their livestock against prey. The systematic annihilation of the buffalo forced the wolf to change its habits, and livestock were, of course, far easier prey than wild animals.

Here’s a stunning example of the horrific treatment of the wolf in America as late as the 20th century. Warning: The paragraph that follows is extremely graphic.

“On a Saturday afternoon in Texas…three men on horseback rode down a female red wolf and threw a lasso over her neck. When she gripped the rope with her teeth to keep the noose from closing, they dragged her around the prairie until they’d broken her teeth out. Then while two of them stretched the animal between their horses with ropes, the third man beat her to death with a pair of fence pliers. The wolf was taken around to a few bars in a pickup and finally thrown in a roadside ditch.”

Before and after that, the wolf was killed with strychnine-laced meat, shot, trapped, clubbed, set on fire and given mange.

From only 1870 to 1877, an estimated 400,000 wolves are killed by the United States government. Between 1883 and 1918, nearly 81,000 were killed in Montana alone.

Hunters working for the government killed the last recorded wolf in Yellowstone National Park in 1940. By the 1970s, it was estimated only a few hundred existed across the entirety of the United States, and the species was listed as endangered in that decade.

Reintroduction of the wolf in the west as well as the Appalachians was discussed as early as the 1960s, and began in the 1990s.

Today “at least 1,700 wolves now roam Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. There are more than 4,000 in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota. New populations are taking hold in Oregon and Washington, and wolves have been sighted in Colorado, Utah and New England.” (AP)

And guess what happened.

They’re feeding on livestock. They’re eating cattle and sheep and they’re taking down elk and deer and the hunters are mad, too. Here’s a description of how the “nuisance” wolf is handled by the government:

“Since late July, at least six ranches near Ennis have suffered cattle killings by a wolf group known as the Horse Creek pack, which lives at the base of the Gravelly mountains.

“Within two weeks of the first calf being killed, wolf specialists with Wildlife Services killed two adult members of the Horse Creek pack in hopes of deterring the others.

“One was shot on July 29 and the second on Aug. 6 — just a day after U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in Missoula, Montana ordered the region’s wolves back onto the endangered species list.

“After the attacks continued and several more calves died, state officials on Aug. 12 ordered the entire pack removed. Another calf was found dead on Aug. 13, and two on Aug. 17.

“Two more Horse Creek wolves were shot.

“On Aug. 18, three more calves turned up dead, bringing the total dead livestock to at least a dozen.

“The remaining four members of the pack remained at large late last week. But there was little doubt they would be killed, said Carolyn Sime, Montana’s lead wolf biologist.”

Even so, studies show that wolves don’t kill near as much livestock as coyotes, bears, mountain lions or even domestic dogs. Yet measures such as burying wolf pups in their dens and then poisoning them with carbon monoxide gas are actually on the table for discussion and enaction again.

The initial eradication of the wolf in the United States was an act of sheer desperation taken to gruesome, sadistic ends. Certainly human beings felt the need to protect themselves and their livestock. What happened to the wolf was wholesale annihilation. Perhaps we can forgive them for their fears; the wolf is a predatory animal, and it does what it does. It is not evil. It just is.

But I have to ask: What on earth did the people who reintroduced wolves and fostered their proliferation expect was going to happen?

It boggles the mind. Did they expect that the wolves would exist solely on field mice, birds, fish and deer? Did they think they wouldn’t take down a sheep or a cow?

What on earth where they thinking? Is this the level of science they are practicing? A head-in-the-clouds, rose-colored-glasses science that never considered that the wolf would be incompatible with human beings, just as it was before?

What has begun is the second wholesale extermination of the wolf on this continent. The first time wasn’t enough. We didn’t learn from it. We didn’t think it through. There are no fences out there to keep them safe from their own instincts and hunger…and us.

What we’ve done is we have restored a species, only to be forced to destroy it again.

It is a beautiful, majestic animal. I am taking no sides here. I understand the love of the animals, the desire to see them thrive again; I also understand the fears of ranchers and families with children and pets.

What I don’t understand is how we could have done this to the wolf…again! Why we nurtured it along to a self-sustaining population only to have it destroyed. Again.

The first extermination of America’s wolves was a tragedy, horrific and dark.

The second? This will be just as graphic. You’ll want to look away, it will be so disturbing.

Why didn’t we just leave them alone? Perhaps it would have been better to just let them go extinct. So long as we cannot live with their presence, it would have been better to just let them go the way of so many other species we wiped out from this continent.

But no. We’re too damn smart and our do-gooder ways will mean thousands of these animals will now suffer painful, terrifying deaths.

How, in God’s name, could they not have known what they were doing?

We should have just let them go.

A whole passel of artists spread out from the Chez Hope headquarters to Argus Spa to show their works, mingle with participants, and though the weather looked like it might bust loose and rain like hallelujah, brethren at any moment, the people came to see it all.

My pal Gary Drinkwater was at Scelfo’s Insurance, and as always it was a delight to see him and catch up. His work, of course, gets special thumbs-ups from me, not just because he’s my friend, but because we share some sort of kindred spirit of expression. There are many times I see in Gary’s work a visualization of my words, as if he was in there with me when I was putting them down.

Francis Todd is another artist whose portfolio not only impresses, he also often seems to focus his camera on things I see and try to put down on paper (or computer screen, though I hate the sound of that.) He was the absolute center of attention at Main Street Café during the walk.

I certainly don’t want to leave anybody out. Everyone’s work was just wonderful, and the city’s own finance director Bianca Ferguson at Meyer’s Shoe Store showed off a collection of her paintings that were delightful.

The works of Kendra Jones and Mark Judice at Chez Hope, Jon Eenigenberg and Gail Drinkwater at Floors Etc., Laura Zuniga at Merle Norman, Lee Bigler at Four Seasons, William H. Parr at Scelfo’s Insurance, Caroline Simoneaux at Meyer’s Shoe Store, Andrew Storm at the Fad News Stand and Catherine Siracusa at Argus Spa, were each and every one enjoyable and talented.

Well done to all involved!

——

The Washington Times reports that “the federal government has posted signs along a major interstate highway in Arizona, more than 100 miles north of the U.S.-Mexico border, warning travelers the area is unsafe because of drug and alien smugglers, and a local sheriff says Mexican drug cartels now control some parts of the state…they warn travelers that they are entering an ‘active drug and human smuggling area’ and they may encounter ‘armed criminals and smuggling vehicles traveling at high rates of speed.’”

Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said his deputies “are outmanned and outgunned by drug traffickers in the rough-hewn desert stretches of his own county.”

Babeu said “he asked the Obama administration for 3,000 National Guard soldiers to patrol the border, but what he got were 15 signs” and 30 troops.

The failure of Washington over the last few administrations to serve the people and the states – rather than becoming a bully and a tyrant – continues to accelerate.

The failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina, the failure of the Gulf oil spill and the failure along the Arizona border are sending a clear message to the people of the United States: Washington, from the administration to the Congress, has gotten too big, arrogant, powerful and stupid.

That the United States of America would file suit against a state, any state, being overrun by drug lords, thieves, rapists and killers is insane. Certainly, no one wants to paint all illegal immigrants with broad a brush, and certainly only a small percentage are so violent.

But the people of Arizona are in fear for their lives and property, and all the federal government can do is challenge their authority to defend themselves…and put up signs.

Put up signs! Are those signs going to defend you if you take a wrong turn in southern Arizona and end up in the middle of a drug cartel deal? Are those Guard troops going to be spread so thin they’ll be pointless?

How did we come to this? It’s our own fault. For too many decades we were apathetic, we let Big Brother take care of us. Now we’re paying the piper.

——

The media continues to develop their remarkable powers of telepathy. Here’s but one example this week:

Bloomberg reports, “President Barack Obama blamed ‘a network of misinformation’ for the increasing number of Americans who believe, incorrectly, that he’s a Muslim, and said he’s unconcerned by such rumors.

“’The facts are the facts,’ Obama, who was born in Hawaii and is a Christian, said.”

My italics were added to both paragraphs. First, let me say I don’t know if the President is a Muslim and frankly, I don’t give a gosh-durn. I learned long ago to like or dislike a politician by their actions and policies, not their religion, their sexcapades, their choice in music or whether they like strong coffee.

But the media is a different story.

It takes an amazing feat of psychic power to write “incorrectly” and “is a Christian.”

Those of us who do not have the ability to read minds would write, “incorrectly, according to the president” and “and says he is a Christian.”

You can prove a lot of things. You cannot prove Obama is a Muslim. Some say his birth certificate states he is a Muslim, and that’s another reason he doesn’t want it seen.

My birth certificate has my race down as “white.” While that is certainly partly true, it is also true that my parents wouldn’t have dreamed of putting me down as “Native American” despite the fact that they left the hospital and took me home to a reservation and my grandpa was chief of the tribe.

Forty-some-odd years later, the infant whose parents wrote “Muslim” on a birth certificate, if that is true, may or may not be a Muslim. I personally don’t care. I judge a leader by their actions.

It’s certainly a technical issue, a minor glitch, but it shows the mindset of the media now. They are willing to state “facts” without proof, and in this case, there can be no proof. I could suddenly start going to synagogue every Sabbath for years and years, but does that make me Jewish? Maybe. Maybe not. The point is, you can never really truly know.

Those of you who have read this dribble for many years will recall that I tend to try to take a moderate approach to environmentalism. I try to position myself somewhere between the Greenpeace movement and the abusers of our natural resources.

It hasn’t been easy. When I look at what has happened to my beloved Atchafalaya Basin, my dear Lake Fausse Pointe and most of all Grand Avoille Cove, a part of me would gladly lie down in the path of a bulldozer to protest. But the other side of my brain understands that, after the flood of 1927, people’s lives and properties were at tremendous risk, and scientists and engineers did the best they could with the understanding they had of hydrologic systems at that time. If we had known then what we know now, we would have done something different, but I can’t blame them.

Similarly, I can support regulation assuring clean air, clean water, preservation of ecosystems, but there has to be a balance.

The longing that I wear on my sleeve in these writings, the one that thrives on woods and water, clean air and sunshine, is the greater of my composite parts.

My theory on what drives disregard for natural places is not new, and will be controversial, but here goes anyway.

Religions and civilization have created a wedge of detachment between human beings and the natural world. When we were cast out of the Garden we were chastised that if we were going to achieve fulfillment and grace from then on out, it would be by hard work and a fair amount of suffering. Dominion over the earth and all the animals in it was handed over to us. While it is argued that scripture indicates with authority comes stewardship, it is at best a vaguely made and overlooked point. Mankind is the single most important creature under Heaven and Earth, you see.

Nowhere is this more clear than the colonization of Australia, the Americas and other wildernesses overrun by Christian nations. They disdained naturalist indigenous belief systems as pagan and in dire need of having their souls saved from damnation. Within a century of arriving in North America, species had been wiped out completely, incredibly vast areas deforested and more. You’d be surprised how very different this continent looked 500 years ago compared to today. In fact, the vast majority of the United States bears absolutely no resemblance at all to how it looked five centuries ago.

Civilization, largely created for primitive reasons early on but more sociological ones later, detaches human beings from natural order. As human communities grew into cities, a distance between those who lived within and those who lived without grew larger and larger. Cities, by their very nature, are unsustainable, and generate nothing whatsoever in the form of resources except money. For this they rely on the rural community and natural world for their food, building materials and most every product they consume.

So where does that leave us in the 21st century?

A couple of years ago I was fishing the Comite River north of Denham Springs. My fishing partner and I came across an apparently illegal pebble mine, a spot where a huge gash had been carved into the Comite’s high-bluff banks, and a deep hole like a scar. I was furious. But not much later, I was making a very rare run through the drive-through at a hamburger joint, and as I was waiting, I noticed the landscaping outside the window, consisting of non-native plants and “mulched” with river stones, gravel and pebbles.

There is a line, to me, between the needs of human beings for resources for survival and for ornamentation. That a river had to be eviscerated for ornamentation around a fast-food joint in a city is insane.

Should a mountain be systematically blown to pieces to retrieve ore or coal? Should cities continue to expand and bloat, spreading out concrete and asphalt over surrounding forest, grassland and streams?

It’s a difficult area to find moderation in. If Kisatchie Bayou was somehow threatened by some ecological destruction, I would certainly fight tooth and nail to save it, no holds barred, kids gloves off, all-out war. Conversely, my opposition to Washington’s drilling moratorium in the Gulf of Mexico recognizes the needs of human beings for energy, jobs and livelihoods, with the caveat that they be performed safely, and responsibly.

In short, if human beings and wilderness are to coexist, we must put aside thousands of years of paradigm based on our religions, our lifestyles and our propaganda. Government must be a regulatory body, to be sure, but it must do so fairly and based on common sense. The government does not have the right to cripple business and industry in the name of environmentalism.

But make no mistake: Corporations do not have the right to destroy wilderness to make a buck. It is no more fair to we who love a forest or a river or a desert mesa that it should be ruined for resources or money, than it is to handcuff business and industry beyond it’s ability to supply the resources we need as a civilization.

There must be compromise and there must be alternatives. Moderation, and equality of rights. Washington’s current cap and trade fiasco is not the answer. Neither is continued urban sprawl and blowing up mountains. We must make a slow, measured trek to sustainability. We didn’t get to this point in a decade, we won’t get out of it that fast either. But we must begin, with advances in technology that make acquisition of resources safer and less destructive, alternatives to fossil fuels and overall making less of an impact on the planet.

Is that too much to ask for? I hope not. We can’t let the alarmists scare us into accepting sky-rocketing fuel costs and such. Nor can we allow the continued reckless butchering of earth and water.

There’s probably some truth to that, up in the frigid north. Myself, I always tell people, “Fishing is fishing, it doesn’t matter how you do it.” Same thing about boats: “A boat is a boat, it doesn’t matter what it’s made of.”

But the dirty little secret I’ve been hiding for many years now is…it does matter to me, at least a little.

My friend Pete Cooper Jr. recently had a fine article published in Louisiana Life magazine entitled “Rednecks and Fly Fishing” in which he credits the introduction of a fly rod at a pool on a Texas Hill Country creek for saving him from redneckdom. Pete got me to thinking – as Pete very often does, that’s why I call him Jedi Master because he’s my fly fishing Obi-Wan Kenobi – about how I really feel about some things.

Someone once said – it might have been me, but I’m not so sure – that fly fishing is one part science, one part art and one part magic. Getting that rod and line to do what you want it to is no easy matter, though some people are born to it and master it in no time flat.

When, for instance, you are trying to cast into a 30-knot headwind with a fly that’s approximately the size of a Cornish hen and end up with line wrapped all around your body like a kitten that got into a ball of yarn…you just say, “It’s a special technique.”

On the other hand, I introduced my cousin Jim Ray to fellow fly angler Gary Blum a couple years ago, as a fly fisherman.

“In training!” Jim threw in modestly.

“We all are,” Gary said. “We all are.”

That hit the nail right on the head, but think about it for a moment. What’s harder: Getting a fish to bite a blob of earthworms, shrimp or half a crab on a hook…or a concoction of feathers, fur and tinsel on a hook?

I’ve seen flies that should have sent fish high-tailing it for the nearest impenetrable brushy cover in the lake, which incidentally, is where they are usually hanging out when you want to catch them. But those flies sometimes work. I’ve seen lures which casting rod fishermen use that are clearly designed to catch fishermen, not fish, but they work, too.

On most of my few redfishing trips to the bay, I diligently cast a fly to the little suckers for an hour or so until I give up and get out the old bait casting rod I had to dig out of the back of a closet where nobody can see it. Armed with a shrimp I’d gladly have boiled or fried for supper as bait, I catch redfish.

But I cast the fly, first. Never forget that. I am like those who used to buy “indulgences” from the church: I can be pious, but vulnerable to temptation.

My fly fishing puts me at a disadvantage: I certainly catch less fish than the bait chunkers under most circumstances. But to me, casting a half-pound lead weight to get a shrimp on a hook down to the fish is an act of brute force. Casting a fly rod is a musical score, a sleight of hand and a fair amount of plain honest luck.

Oh, you say that sounds hoity-toity? Listen here: To cast bait, you pull the rod back and pitch it as hard as you can. That’s like hammering a nail. Fly rods do not cotton to such coarse methods, they respond only to gentleness and talent, with a smidgen of pleading and praying thrown in for good measure. To cast the fly rod, you must have a bit of line out, which you lift off the water, let unfurl behind you, and snap forward to cast. That’s more like a brush stroke on a canvas.

This is why bait casters often have a difficult time learning to fly fish…the muscle memory ingrained from a lifetime of pillaging and plundering must be undone, replaced by such things as philosophy, history and literature.

Furthermore, when I am casting to fish and happen to misjudge the distance behind me from the rod tip to a cypress tree, the resulting snag some 20 feet up in the air may seem like I have fouled up…but I am fly fishing, and therefore beyond reproach.

As mentioned, I do cast bait when I have to, but my days of perch-jerking with earthworms on an Eagle Claw No. 10 Aberdeen hook under an orange and white bobber are behind me. I am a recovering bait fisherman, so I don’t use plastic worms Texas or Carolina rigged, nor spinner baits nor crank baits. Am I any better a person than I was then? Of course not. Am I more full of myself since I hold my nose slightly more toward the sky than I used to? No, that’s just me adjusting my bifocals to see the tiny strand of 2-pound test leader I’m trying to push through the eye of a fly hook about the size of a gnat.

Witness the fly fisherman: He is carrying enough gadgets to assemble a Cray super computer; his vest, waders (if applicable) and boxes of flies are state-of-the-art. He looks like he could have stepped right out of an Orvis ad in a glossy magazine. He must adorn himself so professionally and tastefully in order to coerce a creature with a brain the size of a BB to bite a fly made of copper wire, yarn and roadkill. He was not content with the bait and lure fisherman’s system of line size, 10-pound test, 6-pound test, etc., so he contrived a system that goes this way: 0X, 2X, 3X on up, just to show how scholarly we fly fishermen are.

But there are fly fisherman, God save their souls, who fish with tiny plastics meant for casting rods on their fly rods. While I don’t preach – or haven’t, until now – my philosophy is, “Why don’t you just use a casting rod?” But hey, I’m starting to sound like they did in 1492, so I relent to save my civilized soul.

When I was shooting the Louisiana edition of my Fly Fishing America television show adventure, I was thoroughly ribbed by my bait-casting buddies to soak my Clouser minnow – that’s a famous sinking fly created by Bob Clouser – in the shrimp juice from the ice chest. I steadfastly refused! Absolutely unthinkable. I caught no fish, but I maintained my dignity for my arrival at the Pearly Gates, because I’m sure Norman Maclean was correct when he wrote, “He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”

So I don’t see myself as any “better” than a bait or lure fisherman, because I don’t think I’ve ever packed an ice-chest with fish while fly fishing, unless it was one of those little shoulder-carry jobs. I can’t be very holier-than-thou, because I still put my pants on one leg at a time in the morning. I got no airs about me, the Red Sea does not part for my transit, and I have not walked on water. When I make a perfect cast to the perfect spot where a fish must surely be waiting to eat the fly and nothing happens whatsoever, it’s no big deal. I am fly fishing, dangit, that’s what counts.

Fly fishermen are disciples of Thoreau’s comment, “Many men go fishing without realizing it’s fish they are after,” but bait fishermen do realize they are after fish, filleted and fried, broiled or baked, in deep vats of oil or on the half-shell on the grill. The fly fisherman knows he does not need to eat a hymnal to have a semi-religious experience.

But in this few pounds of gray matter inside my skull, yeah, fly fishing is not only what I do, it’s what I practice, so to speak, and wooden boats are not “better” than fiberglass – or as some wood aficionados refer to them, “snot boats” …I said some refer to them that way – but they are certainly warmer and more beautiful.

I’ll catch some grief for this column, to be sure. Some will be from my bait casting friends who’ll be offended because they didn’t catch the tongue-in-cheekedness (I am also a wordsmith!) of this rant. Some of the grief will come from faithful readers who couldn’t care less if I fished with bagels tied to a broomstick, just as long as I quit wasting their time by writing about it.

But it’s not so much that I think I’m elite or purist, it’s just that I think I’m doing something important, somehow. At least to me. Something that’ll open me to an enlightenment of some kind that other methods of fishing don’t provide. For me.

And hopefully this fall, my pal Pete and I will take off to a hidden crick somewhere in the pine-studded hills with our fly rods, and he’ll out fish me as he always does. But be warned, my friend! One day I’ll deliver the same message that Darth Vader did: “I’ve been waiting for you, Obi-Wan, we meet again at last. When I left you I was but the learner…now I am the Master!” Yeah…he’s that good a fly fisherman.

Of course, I’ll have to fall to the dark side to say that, which is, of course, a glob of earthworms under a red and white bobber on 10-pound test line. Or cast plastic worms on my fly rod. Naw. I’ll remain the young apprentice.

The president’s own oil spill commission questioned the moratorium on offshore drilling, and were told by Washington that the moratorium will stand, no bones about it.

There was even a quote in The Huffington Post that is alarming: “The nation’s top drilling regulator, Michael Bromwich, says he will propose a replacement for the moratorium by Halloween and leans against exceptions.”

Rumor has it the “replacement” for the moratorium will be more lenient, but that Bromwich “leans against exceptions” once again illustrates the arrogance, dictatorial powers at play in our nation’s capital.

Moreover, the administration knew the moratorium would kill some 23,000 jobs in the Gulf of Mexico, and issued it anyway.

This would be a horrific move even in times of economic bliss; but with the economy in shambles, the lingering effects of the spill taking its toll on many outside the oil industry, and the tourism dollars lost due to the disaster, Washington took a worst-case stance, rather than sending out an army of inspectors to certify rigs thoroughly and quickly. Instead, they are setting up a bureaucratic web of red tape that likely will cripple the industry further even when the moratorium is lifted.

After declaring the oil three-quarters gone, independent scientists quickly countered that actually, some 80 percent is still out there, mired in the bottoms of the Gulf of Mexico, or floating in plumes which Washington and BP still don’t believe in. In fact, this disturbing news comes from The Scientist in an editorial by Linda Hooper-Bui, an ecosystem biologist at Louisiana State University A&M and the LSU Agricultural Center:

“Some Gulf scientists have already been snatched up by corporate consulting companies with offers of $250/hour. Others are badgered for their data by governmental agencies. Some of us desire to conduct our work without lawyers, government officials, or corporate officers peering over our shoulders. In the end, it may be the independent, non-biased researchers who can deliver credible scientific results that perform the crucial function of assessing the damage wrought by this disaster…if we survive professionally.

“In southern Alabama back in late May, my PhD student’s ant samples were taken away by a US Fish and Wildlife officer at a publicly accessible state Wildlife Management Area because our project hadn’t been approved by Incident Command…we’ve had similar experiences in south Louisiana, where our research trip was halted after driving more than 150 miles to a study site. On the way to our sampling sites in Grand Isle, LA, were turned away by a sheriff’s deputy blocking the road who said that he was told to allow no one who wasn’t associated with BP or NRDA to pass that point. We’ve also been blocked by the Wisner Trust, one of the largest private land owners of marsh habitat in Louisiana, who in the past allowed LSU researchers access to their property. The lawyer representing the trust indicated that they are coordinating over 700 different people associated with BP and NRDA and that they simply cannot approve access for anyone else.”

We here along the Gulf Coast are suffering one part of a much larger problem: The arrogance and complete autonomy of a federal government, particularly an administration, that believes it can do anything it wants, to whomever it wants, and it doesn’t matter who it hurts or who doesn’t like it.

A government “of, by and for the people” has morphed into a government that is self-serving and self-replicating. Time and time again Washington thumbs its nose at Americans, by suing Arizona over its immigration law despite the fact that every poll shows the majority of Americans support it; 70 percent of us oppose building a Muslim mosque near the Ground Zero site, but the administration circles around the issue like a pack of wolves; the stimulus packages; health care reform; cap and trade, the list goes on and on.

So heavy-handed has Washington become, Nancy Pelosi herself even said of the mosque issue, “There is no question that there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some and I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded.”

That’s just a prime example of everything that’s going on in Washington has come to, on both sides of the aisle: There is no public opinion. The people do not have thoughts or opinions or preferences. It’s all politics, and somewhere, somehow, someone is responsible for a ploy.

The economy is in shambles, and likely to worsen, the jobless rate is horrific, and the president keeps going on vacation. During the high point of the oil spill, many of the president’s closest allies in the media turned, criticizing the federal response and the incompetence of it. Since declaring “mission accomplished” in the Gulf of Mexico, CNN and all its minions have turned right back to propaganda ministry.

The attack on social security continues. Many people call it an entitlement, and I guess it is: American workers are “entitled” to it because they contributed to it all their working careers. Granted, there are some people getting it who don’t meet those criteria.

But the commission working on what to do about the deficit in social security has already clearly indicated their preference: Raise the mandatory contribution and cut benefits, especially by raising the full retirement age.

There’s a buncha folks up there in Washington who have been raiding the fund, and if the fed paid all its IOUs, things wouldn’t be so bad. But of course, not only will they not be paid, they can’t be paid.

Another example of Washington squashing us under the heel of their boots.

They get themselves into a financial bind and they come back to you and me for their bailout.

That’s our money in the social security fund. It should never have been touched.

We have to force them to stop raiding it, and force them to put it back. How about all that damn money spent on fighting wars? That would go a long way to repaying our money.

Raise the retirement age? Bugger that. In a Congress that is 44 percent millionaires, it’s easy to make such decisions for those of us who have been paying into social security all our lives and don’t have a cushion of millions to fall back on. They won’t work until they drop, but they don’t mind if we do.

Make no mistake, as a dyed-in-the-wool moderate centrist, G.W. Bush’s administration fared no better. The right is as screwed up as the left.

In fact, I was appalled to open a story on the wire from the great Associated Press (tongue firmly in cheek) that said 1 in 5 Americans believe Obama is a Muslim “incorrectly.”

Think about this for a moment. I’m not saying I believe he’s Muslim, or Christian or Jewish or anything else, because there is no way I can know for sure. For the AP to say “incorrectly” in a news story, not a column, not an editorial, is shocking.

How, then, does AP support its declaration? Circumstantial evidence and innuendo. He claims to be Christian, his press agents say he is Christian, so the poll numbers show 1 in 5 Americans are “incorrect.”

How do you prove “incorrectly?” And how do you put that into a news story without a single shred of evidence?

You write, instead, “1 in 5 Americans believe President Obama is a Muslim, though the President asserts that he is a Christian. Friends, family and staff attest to the President’s claim.”

That’s responsible journalism, a condition apparently gone extinct. That’s the way I would write it, as taught me by real newsmen.

The saddest thing in my life as a human being is that our dogs don’t share but a fraction of it with us.

Their lives are so incredibly brief, they remind me of an ember shot from a bonfire: Growing softly, flaming brilliantly and just as quickly gone. Those who do not love dogs can’t imagine the vacuum left behind. Certainly it’s not a fellow human kind of vacuum, but it is every bit as deep and empty.

It’s nature’s double-edged sword. To survive in nature, they must grow quickly, racing toward adulthood at breakneck speed to mature and fend for themselves. The price for this is that their time on this earth is unmercifully short. If we had never, as humanity, befriended them tens of thousands of years ago around a campfire, we might never have known that pain.

When I was a youngster, my dad had a Weimaraner named Prissy. She was a beautiful, lithe dog who loved nothing more than for me to fret over her. Oh, I know she loved me, a bespectacled tyke of about five, I guess, pulling on her ears, her tail, putting my face in hers and all other manner of aggravation. Prissy had to love me, or she’d have bit my nose off for what she had to put up with. But she took it all without complaint. I even, my parents tell me, fed her chinaberries, which she ate dutifully.

Mom had a Chihuahua mix named Chico. He was a bit larger and stouter than a typical Chihuahua, and he got his own Christmas presents. I don’t remember what was inside, but on Christmas morning Mom would give him his present. He’d rip off the wrapping and enjoy whatever it was all day. Chico was a champ. Mom says before I was born, she took Chico everywhere with her. He was mighty put out by my appearance but, like the proverbial “good dog” never took it out on the funny-looking kid with the glasses and crooked legs.

When I was a bit older, maybe 10 or 12, Dad got me a white German shepherd from the pound because I had been begging for a dog. Was a good dog, but had the unforgivable habit of chasing our horses. Couldn’t break him of it, and eventually Dad brought him back to the pound. I didn’t connect with that dog, somehow, and wasn’t too crushed.

The most significant early dog, was Spock. A Sealyham and schnauzer mix, Spock was the runt of the litter and had pink eyes and pointy ears. At about four, he caught Parvo disease before anyone knew anything about it, and survived, but he was blind when he recovered. He lived a long life after that, and once he learned his surroundings you wouldn’t even have known he was blind, except for now and then he’d misjudge a distance and fall face-first off the back porch or something.

My mom babysat for a little boy named Mekko. He was maybe two. Spock would nip at Mekko now and then when the boy would get too rough, as little boys do, and make him cry. Mekko was in a phase at one point when he referred to everything with “the” or, “the daddy” and “the granny” and so forth. One day he was playing too rough with Spock, Spock nipped and Mekko yelled, “No, the Spock!” and bit him back, right on the ear. That was pretty much the end of all their altercations to have reached an uneasy truce.

There were others. A Lab-mix that I also didn’t click with. You’ve read about my beloved English springer spaniel Shadow, and my cocker spaniel Chance, who helped me survived a nasty divorce.

Before Bogie came along, I took Suzie’s 10-year-old black Lab, Daisy, to stay with me for a time. Daisy became my best pal. We’d go for long walks in the fields and she loved to fish with me at the ponds. I taught her in short order to swim where I wasn’t fishing. Nothing doing but if I caught a fish, Daisy had to smell it. I even gave her a few smaller perch, which she would take and pitch around merrily for awhile, then hide in the tall grass and consume with a crunch crunch crunch sound that, if I didn’t know better, I might have mistaken for a lion in the bush.

She is still with us! Bless her heart, she is slow and arthritic, but the spark in her eye is bright as ever, and she’s nearing 13 now. My wish was that I could have kept her and Bogie, our yellow Lab of two-and-a-half, together in the fenced portion of the yard, but Daisy wouldn’t hear of it. The pup was just too hyperactive and annoying, and Daisy quickly let us know she wasn’t having anything to do with that nonsense. In no uncertain terms, she said to Suzie and me, “I am too old and too dignified to put up with that little brat.”

It’s a shame, though. There were a lot of things I wanted Bogie to learn from Daisy that we’re having to teach him ourselves. I had hoped just by osmosis and example Bogie would learn that if he wanted a petting, he had to sit down. I wanted him to learn that there are more than two speeds in our walks: Stop and full-speed barrel-busting forward.

Mostly I wanted Daisy to teach him the finer art of being quiet. I am sure he’ll grow into this, but Daisy, at ten, was well acquainted with peace and reflection. Many times we’d sit together at the bayou side, me tightlining for catfish, and both of us watching my line for a tug from Mr. Whiskers. She’d sit there with me forever, if I wanted her to.

But I see Bogie growing into the dog I want him to be, a dog very much like Daisy and Shadow. Now and then, he’ll pause and lean forward, nose aloft, eyes half-closed and nostril’s flaring. I am sure he can smell all that Daisy can, but I am not sure he has the wisdom and the years to let the scents tell him all they tell her. To a dog, scents are as acute as vision, and paint a portrait every bit as complex as our eyes do, maybe more.

Daisy would do that. So would Shadow. Lean into the breeze, breathe deeply of then, now and tomorrow. When I read Mr. Hale’s quote at the top of this column, I knew there was a man who loves and understands dogs.

There are insufferable numbers of canine psychiatrists and even “mediums’ out there who profess to use science to understand our best friends.

For instance, they say a dog lives in the moment, doesn’t understand past or future. When you leave the house, they say, a dog thinks you’re gone forever. Then why do they start pacing the floor and looking out the window when it’s time for you to pull up in the driveway?

“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness forgot about little puppies,” author Gene Hill wrote. Their lives are heart-breakingly short, but the joy they bring us who love them is unsurpassed by any other creature.

It wasn’t an iPhone. It was a knockoff. But this bad boy had Internet and email capability, a full touch-pad keyboard and more bells and whistles than I could count or surely comprehend.

As a self-confessed Luddite and Walden-esque follower of Brother Thoreau, I admit a certain amount of shame on the acquisition. But time always reveals that leopards do not, in fact, change their spots: I have grown to hate it and everything connected with it.

First of all, I concede that texting is a remarkably useful thing. Most of all, texting is simply divine when you just want to send a quick note or question to someone without risk of getting into a lengthy conversation on a phone call.

“Hey, who did ‘China Grove’?”

“Doobies. How’s the fishing?”

You know what I mean. Also, my fingers are too clumsy, calloused and fat to use the touch screen keyboard and I often hit the letter next to the one I intend, so I use whatever’s handy as a stylus, an ink pen, fork, my pocket knife, straw, coffee stirrer, you name it.

I really grooved on having Internet access for the first month or so, but after awhile I got tired of trying to read weather and news on it. Zooming did no good, because it makes you scroll from side to side.

Now, I realize this is not a primo phone, and there are better. I got all obsessed with a friend’s new Blackberry and vowed, “Next time I’m due for an upgrade I’m getting one of those!”

But I think what annoys me most is what I pay for this rotten thing. It’s insane. Cell phone charges in general are just nuts. I am paying an outrageous amount of money every month for a device that I do not like, and a service that does nothing but hack me off.

For one thing, I hate telephones. They are a necessary evil, but every time one goes off I start to cussin’. If I look at the caller ID and it’s something like “unknown name, unknown number” the cussin’ accelerates a notch or two in volume and caliber of chosen words. If I do not know your name or your number, I will not answer your phone calls, cellular or land line.

Here’s another thing: I hardly use the Internet feature on my phone anymore and texting just as infrequently. Why am I paying the equivalent of ten six-packs of a good import beer for it?

Because I fell for the slick advertising, of course. That’s why.

As it is, Suzie and I can’t stand the commercials on the tube. We don’t understand what they’re trying to sell us in half of them (and are pretty certain we don’t want it) and find the other half so brain-dead stupid we wouldn’t buy their products anyway, after they’ve insulted our intelligence so profoundly.

Like the one a few months ago where some androgynous creature – I think it was a girl but I am not sure – is gyrating on the screen and singing, “I…know…what…you…want!” It’s a good thing she did, because I obviously don’t have a clue and still didn’t by the end of the commercial.

But back to the phone. I am also concerned about radiation. Yeah, I know, give me an aluminum foil skullcap, but there’s a lot of evidence out there that those microwaves mess with your brain waves, and believe me, my brain waves are near flatlined as it is. I also have seen indications that a man wearing a cell phone on his hip causes sterility, impotence and possibly prostate cancer. While I do not plan on fathering any more children, the other two are not high on my list of “what…you…want!” either.

I worry enough about brain tumors anyway without the added threat of putting a cell phone to my ear and letting it transmit high-frequency signals through my skull. Thick as my cranium may be, it can’t be good for what little cognitive ability I possess.

So I think I’m going back to a basic phone and a basic plan, which is too dadgum expensive anyway for someone who rarely uses the thing, and even then under protest. I want to keep my texting options open, even if I have to pay per use, because sometimes – don’t take it personally – I just don’t wanna get into a lengthy conversation. All that Internet stuff can go, though. I got a perfectly good computer or two that does Internet and yeah, it’s at home or at work, but I don’t carry around my microwave oven, television set, table saw, refrigerator or washer and dryer on my hip, either.

Downgrading is what I’m going to do. The problem is, when I go to the web site to do so, they’re going to throw all this gadgetry and gosh-wow stuff at me. iPhones and Blackberrys, watch videos on your phone, choose from four hundred zillion apps, 3G, 4G…I have to be strong. I won’t fall for the slick advertising again, you hear me?

Down and out, of course. Melancholy. Depressed. Call it what you want. Harry Middleton called it “the meat bucket blues.”

I feel…lost. A stranger in a strange land. I have been tossing and turning at night when I should be sleeping, waking exhausted as if I never set my head to pillow at all.

This isn’t the place I grew up in, became a man in. The changes that have overcome these lands and waters are staggering. Most of them have been about vanishing.

I look around me, and I scarcely recognize my surroundings. So much has changed. My beloved lake is drying up, silting in, and before I die it may be gone, replaced by willows and invasive species, perhaps a few shallow channels to cut across it in a boat. The basin is virtually vanished already. I have no quail fields to pursue autumn dawns. I have a handsome yellow Lab who’ll make three years old in December. I set out to make him a bird dog, but gave up the task when I realized that there were no birds to speak of, and no access if there were.

There was magic when I was young. It was “a world with dew still on it” as Norman Maclean wrote, full of wonder. It’s gone now.

All gone. Even the little bird that once came in spring to speak to me, as it spoke to my grandmother. It’s gone now. All I have left here are the people. The friends that I have grown so close to and lean on too much. Everything else burned away, and left only ash.

My oak tree – five centuries old – lies half in the yard. It split and part of it fell a few years ago. It’s too massive to have removed except at great expense, which I probably wouldn’t do even if I had the money. It lies there, graying and splitting, like a tombstone. It obscures the view between the patio and the bayou and reminds me that there is finality. All things must pass.

Really, what is left? When I was young, I could go walk in the woods, or along a cane field road that would have a few scant trees, woody and weedy ditches and fencerows where I could scare up a bird, a rabbit or a field mouse. There’s no place to walk in the woods anymore. If it isn’t all overgrown into an impenetrable thicket, it’s posted, and owners have become so shy of lawsuits they keep everybody off. I could drive to a state park half an hour away but that’s synthetic. Uninteresting, sterile and impotent. Just slightly better than walking down the hall of a hospital. I don’t want benches, water fountains and landscape timbers on my walks in the woods.

I guess I’m frazzled. My skin is crawling and I am about to jump out of it for want of a place less dismal. The little switches in my brain short-circuit and misfire, and I get to feeling hopeless, abandoned. I don’t feel I belong anymore, because my deepest roots, the umbilicals that sustain me, are all tethered to land and water and sky.

Bogie puts his chin on my knee and wags his tail. I pet his silken head and he sighs, deeply. Bogie knows. His senses – on the order of something like a zillion times more acute than mine – detect my mood, feel the heat of the wildfire. In my clouded imagination, Suzie, me and the dog are roaming somewhere, in woods and on water a tad uncivilized at least, a little wild, a bit unpredictable and unpackaged.

“We’re so used to the fake and the packaged that encountering something real can amount to a borderline religious experience,” said author John Gierach.

So I muddle through the blues, and expect they’ll fade in a day or two. They always do. Would that I could be content with things synthetic! I’d make my way along in this life and care nothing for wildness. Have no interest in boxed-in ravines where frantic water runs a frenetic, chaotic course along stones. Feel no thrill in the scent of dew among the pines, the pull of a fish at the resonating tip of my bamboo fly rod, or the quiet peace that comes at dusk when a hawk circles the sun, celebrating its life.

That’s not possible, though. The artificial, the prepackaged and cellophane wrapped life leaves me cold. The rest has all vanished, or is vanishing. This isn’t the place I grew to love from the moment I first focused my eyes on it. It’s a shadow, a thin reflection of itself. A spectre.

Should I linger here in this vanishing, fading bottomland just to be near the dead? It’s more than ancestors that have died. Harmony and resonance have passed. Magic has succumbed.

Harry quit using the word “wilderness” in his writing early on, believing there was no true wilderness left in the United States, maybe even North America. He used “wildness” instead, a term I borrow now.

Like Harry, I demand a lot of wild places. Probably more than they can give. I expect them to soothe my pains, cure my ills, provide me with the solace I so desperately need.

Where does this thing come from? What little gnarled, misshapen strand in my double-helix has left me so dependent on green things and liquid things and things that go on all fours or on wings? I sit and consider it sometimes, but I can’t figure it out. There’s no clues, no trails to lead me to the scene of the crime, where common sense and contentment were shot at point-blank range. Perhaps it’s all the X-rays I had when I was a child for various ailments. Maybe all that radiation zapped a twig of DNA, fried off a little snippet of it, and left me with a crippled gene, my ability to be satisfied with a life synthetic. With things that are not wild. With places that are not hard-surfaced, or lit with incandescence and planted in well-ordered, trimmed rows.

These are the dreams that haunt the border between waking and fitful, troubled sleep.

(Photo by Kevin Minor)

Two convicts, aided by a fiancée of one of them, were linked to the brutal murders of an elderly couple whose charred remains were found in a camper in New Mexico as they fled northwest through the Rocky Mountains.

One was captured in Yellowstone National Park Monday and said he was glad it was over. As of Tuesday, the search centered around Glacier National Park in Montana for the last.

There’s never a grizzly around when you need one, someone noted, and I concur emphatically. I can’t imagine a better sentence for these scum.

——

As BP and the Coast Guard continue to brag that they can’t find any oil, word comes to me from the coast that they ain’t looking real damn hard.

Allegedly, you can dip your hand into clear, pretty Gulf water, grab ahold of some bottom and bring up a handful of muck and crude oil. Crabs caught in the area are full of black goo. Planes are heard circling and spraying dispersant at night.

Sky News reports, “Patrick Hue is a fisherman in the town of Buras, south of New Orleans. Nearly 50 years old, his dark tan and taut frame are evidence of a life spent at sea catching plump shrimps that are world renowned. He says the oil is still there and he will take you out onto the Gulf to prove it. Circling his boat in the shallows off Buras, the outboard motor churns the muddy water and oil soon floats to the surface – the sheen glistening in the unforgiving sun.

“Dragging his hand through the mixture he holds up his palm and a black smear of crude emerges.”

Some 39,000 claims are in limbo as BP holds back payments in the apparent hope that when the fed takes over the payments they’ll be the bad guys.

With November elections right around the corner, it’s obvious Washington wants to put this thing behind them as quickly as possible. They don’t want the colossal failure of the response to tinge the ballot.

——

Our “friends” up at the New York Times have editorialized that the drilling moratorium must be slow and thorough, and while admitting that 30,000 jobs might be at stake, it’s necessary to prevent another Deepwater Horizon style disaster.

I vote for a moratorium on Yankees editorializing on our livelihoods, cultures and hungry families, how about you?

The drilling moratorium is heading back to court this week. The Times-Picayune reports:

“The U.S. Department of Interior, which issued a new drilling moratorium on July 12 after the original was struck down in court, has asked U.S. District Court Judge Martin Feldman to dismiss the case brought by Covington-based Hornbeck Offshore Services LLC. The Interior Department argues that the rule that was the subject of Hornbeck’s original complaint – the first moratorium – no longer exists.

“Hornbeck counters that the new moratorium is basically the same as the old one ‘in an effort to evade judicial review,’ but offers new justification for the policy after the fact.”

Goes to court today at 10 a.m.

——

While I caught a little expected heat from my last comments on hydraulic fracturing for natural gas deposits deep in the earth, I have to stand my ground.

Nobody should be exempt from clean water regulations. Like offshore drilling, if it’s safe and it’s done responsibly, fine and dandy, we need the energy.

But I insist that it’s obvious that if a concerted effort was made by the Bush-Cheney administration to exempt the process from clean water regs, something must be amiss.

While the current honchos in Washington are anti-fossil fuels, the former bosses were anti-environment, and I do not trust either set of maroons any farther than I could throw them.

——

That heat wave weekend before last really took it out of me. I basically stayed in the house the entire weekend except to slip out for a quick stogie now and then.

As we hit 100 degrees, we put Bogie in the house with us and Daisy, our 13-year-old Lab, in the workshop with the window unit on. The house air conditioner never stopped until about 10 p.m. It was utter misery.

Seems we only have two seasons here anymore: Summer and winter. Spring and fall seem to be a distant childhood memory, or at best, come and go so fast I hardly know they flew by.

It’s still pretty hot. The best thing the heat wave weekend had going for it was the humidity was down a little. No more. At 5 p.m. it’s absolutely a sauna at home. That little storm that ripped through Monday evening cooled things off nicely, but before dark the sun came out and broiled everything.

Did you catch that sunset? Wow! From our house, it was flaming, brilliant orange. Really beautiful.

I’ll sit back and pray for a long, cool fall and mild winter. Like the fall of 1993, when I planted my first garden and was still getting tomatoes into February of 1994. I live for fall and winter like that.

It bears repeating that when I told my father I wanted to plant a vegetable garden, he grunted and said, “The thing you need to understand about gardening, boy, is that when that garden needs tending, that’s when the fish are biting.”

Wiser words have never been spoken, and my vegetable gardening days ended not long after that blessedly cool fall and mild winter. The old man was pretty smart after all.

It is in the highest esteem that our dogs hold us; we should be humbled and grateful at their kindness.

Bogie, our young yellow Labrador Retriever, is now just past two-and-a-half. He has become quite the gentleman on almost all counts – greeting visitors calmly and bolting after other animals being his only character flaws – and is a joy in my not-so-old age.

Bogie…and that’s Boh-gee, not Boo-gee, he was named after Humphrey Bogart, not Saturday Night Fever…is quite a handsome lad, too. Weighing in at about 65 pounds, he’s on the small side for a Lab, but of such muscular build and remarkable coloration most everyone who meets him remarks on his dashing good looks. They get a good inspection of this, because Bogie is normally leaping up to kiss them, and I am frantically yelling, Sit! Sit! Sit! rather like a simpleton. Waaay across the yard as I’m issuing such commands, our 13-year-old black Lab, Daisy, obediently sits.

I went several years without a dog, and like with fly fishing, all of a sudden it came upon me that I could no longer live without one.

For the life of me, I can’t imagine how I went so long without those most loyal and dearest of friends. After my beloved Shadow, an English springer spaniel of uncanny intelligence and downright charitable character, died I supposed I was grieving for a long, long spell.

Now a strapping young man, Bogie has the ability to make us laugh, warm our hearts and, yes, infuriate us as well.

In the mornings, I get up early to get ready for work. Bogie is usally there at the bedroom door, and after my shower, when I get my coffee and go sit at the computer to check email, he has the cutest way of strolling over to me, tail wagging, head low, eyes half-closed and brows furrowed. He puts his chin on my knee and stays that way while I’m tending to my emails, his tail wagging, and I scratch his ear or his forehead and tell him what a good boy he is, until it’s time for us to go outside.

Bogie knows the sound of the fridge opening and instantly is in the vicinity. If I take out a bottle of water, he drops his ears and goes back to his rug to chew on his toys. If I take out anything else – an orange, steak, jar of mayonnaise, lemon, syrup, an onion I forgot in a zipper bag some six months ago, anything – he is at unequaled attention. The eternal optimist, Bogie is, like most dogs, always alert for a handout or a carelessly dropped morsel.

When I get home from work, he is usually lying in the front doorway of the shop. As I approach the door, his tail starts tapping the concrete floor, and when I reach him, he rolls over on his back and begs for a belly rub. I spend a little time fretting over him, giving him a belly rub then making him get up so I can vigorously knead the skin on his back and rub his ears, before I go inside to change clothes. I always come back out to have my after-work-stogie, feed him and we discuss this and that.

At night, when he curls up to sleep, there was never a more consummate bundle of cuteness. His paws, which remind us of rabbit feet, are wide and soft and nearly white, though most of him is straw-colored. With his eyes clenched shut, chin tucked over his front legs, he is the epitome of contentment and watchful guardian.

I feel better with a dog in the house. I have a much better chance of hearing the dog barking at an intruder and getting to my shootin’ iron than I would without him. While Bogie might not tear a burglar’s throat out upon entering, he’ll certainly keep him occupied with wet kisses long enough for me to make a citizen’s arrest.

I still call him “the puppy” and baby-talk to him. Little babies don’t turn me into a babbling idiot like it does most adults, but puppies do, and to me, he’s still a puppy.

“Whoever said money can’t buy happiness forgot about little puppies,” author Gene Hill once noted. Right as rain.

“Why, there’s the puppy, daddy!” I say when I get home, speaking in the royal-tense. He comes to me shaking his whole behind in greeting. “What a pretty puppy! What’s the puppy been doing all day while daddy’s been working, hmm?” Bogie eats all this up like a doughnut, making me feel that acting and speaking like a complete imbecile is worth it.

He’s also known around the house as Bogie Butt. That’s because in many of the photos and videos we have of him as a little puppy, he is showing us his behind, skinny tail up in the air, as he is growling and attacking a vicious throw pillow or an old rope. You couldn’t circle around fast enough to get his face with a camera, he’d circle faster. I am thankful that he does still answer to Bogie, for I’d hate to be out in public walking him or something and he runs off and I’d be calling, “Bogie Butt! Here, Bogie Butt! Here, boy, here!” They’d probably arrest me.

He has to be walked on a leash, something that disappoints me, but he is too taken by temptation. Another dog or a cat or squirrel, and Bogie goes stone deaf and an invisible fire lights under his behind and vrrrrooooooommm! Off he goes, hearing neither command nor cussing nor pleading. Try as I might, I haven’t broken him of that yet, but I remain hopeful. I keep telling him he’s not going to be able to vacation in the mountains with us if he keeps that up. He just kisses me in the face as if saying, “Silly man, I know my way home!”

And he probably does. The puppy is smart, to be sure. Like Shadow, he is uncannily smart. So I know he understand me, he obeys me all the rest of the time. He cannot feign ignorance, and any dog who can hear a banana being peeled from the other end of the house certainly can’t claim deafness.

I worry and fret over him way too much, as my beloved will affirm. I’ve always been like that with my dogs. Can’t help myself. Because, as Gene Hill once said, “He is my other eyes that can see above the clouds; my other ears that hear above the winds. He is the part of me that can reach out into the sea. He has told me a thousand times over that I am his reason for being; by the way he rests against my leg; by the way he thumps his tail at my smallest smile; by the way he shows his hurt when I leave without taking him. (I think it makes him sick with worry when he is not along to care for me.) When I am wrong, he is delighted to forgive. When I am angry, he clowns to make me smile. When I am happy, he is joy unbounded. When I am a fool, he ignores it. When I succeed, he brags. Without him, I am only another man. With him, I am all-powerful. He is loyalty itself. He has taught me the meaning of devotion. With him, I know a secret comfort and a private peace. He has brought me understanding where before I was ignorant. His head on my knee can heal my human hurts. His presence by my side is protection against my fears of dark and unknown things. He has promised to wait for me – whenever, wherever – in case I need him. And I expect I will – as I always have. He is just my dog.”