I don’t know why I had to stay after school one day. All the buses had left and I was the only kid left on the playground.
I was swinging by myself when I saw a white dog running back and forth at the edge of our playground.
She was beautiful. Her long white speckled fur swayed gracefully as she ran. I jumped off the swing and ran toward her.
She stopped, looked at me, then ran toward me.
She nearly knocked me down, covering my face with wet dog kisses.
By the time my grandmother arrived, the beautiful white and brown-speckled dog was my friend. She eagerly jumped in the car. It was my grandmother’s dark green 1970 Mercury Cougar with a soft black top.
The dog was young, trembling, and very thin. She looked like my grandfather’s dog Mac. I remembered Mac and Rusty, my grandfather’s hunting dogs, very well. Mac was a Llewellyn setter and Rusty was an Irish setter. Both had lived to be 20 years old.
I uttered the words every child who’s ever found a stray dog said, “Please, can we keep her, Nana?”
Nana told me that she probably had owners who were missing her very much. But since we were the only ones around, we took her home, and immediately advertised in the newspaper. I made posters saying “Found Dog.”
This went on for a couple of weeks, but nobody ever called or tried to claim the young dog that I named “Freckles” for her light brown spots.
When we took Freckles to be checked at the vet, my grandmother said, “She looks like an English setter and — ”
The vet completed her sentence: “She’s English setter and English setter.”
We went home with our presumed pedigreed dog. The vet agreed with my grandmother since my school was located just off Highway 38, maybe somebody had been going to the mountains with Freckles in the car, and she’d jumped out and run away. Her owners were probably from Los Angeles or even farther away.
Freckles stayed with us.
I already had DC, pictured above, a soft-furred and gentle Siamese mix cat. She was named after the movie “That Darn Cat,” but she didn’t act mischievous. DC was loving, quiet, and affectionate.
I’m sure she probably didn’t like Freckles much, but the two never fought. Freckles’ fur was soft and velvety. I soon learned I had to bathe her often to keep her white fur clean. This was also true of my pony Dapple. He liked to eat watermelon slices I placed in the fence around his corral.
I had a dozen doves to care for, a guinea pig, and a parakeet whose name I’ve forgotten. And the garden to tend, weeds to pull, roses to prune, and lawn to mow.
Schoolwork, clarinet, guitar, tennis, swimming —
Just Me And My Dog In The Great Outdoors
I may have missed some dirt road softball games because my favorite thing to do was take Freckles for long adventures in the Santa Ana riverbed.
One day we were walking along the asphalt path by the riverbed when I saw something that I interpreted as a little hut: maybe it belonged to a fairy or dwarf, I reasoned. It was about four feet high and even had a little oval doorway.
I knelt and peered through the door. There were many shiny things inside: silver pull tabs from beer cans, bottle caps, bits of broken glass. I saw shiny beads and a metal belt buckle.
Then the hut’s owner emerged.
In my memory, he was about as tall as the nest: four feet. He had two long, sharp orange teeth. He stood on his hind legs like a person and staggered toward me, hissing in fury.
Freckles & I ran back as fast as we could.
It wasn’t a fairy or a dwarf. It was a packrat.
Another day, I saw a fat little ball of striped feathers under a creosote bush. I lifted the branches and saw there were half a dozen similar little fluffy balls of striped feathers with beaks. Looking around, I saw no mother. I ran home and returned with an empty gallon ice cream container. I don’t know why my grandfather had a few of those in the garage, but he did. They were made of brown cardboard and had a metal edge around the top.
The little baby birds toddled into the container and I took them home.
Bampy told me that I couldn’t return them to the wild, that once their mother smelled human smell on them, she would reject them. He also said the mother might have been killed.
So I made gruel for them out of instant oatmeal mixed with milk and fed them through an eyedropper.
They grew. A few weeks later, they were big enough to go out on their own and I took them back to the riverbed and let them go.
I would find horney toads (horned lizards) and play with them. Bampy said they spit tobacco juice: it turned out this was their blood, intended to ward off predators. I was going for a tan the summer I turned 13 and reading Lord of The Rings over and over. Freckles would sit by me and lick the suntan lotion off my arms. There was, I think, no such thing as sunscreen back then: just Coppertone and baby oil.
I looked over the book one day to see a dark, multi-legged form hopping across the concrete pathway between our house and the garage.
It was what Bampy called a “triantula.” A tarantula: yes, they can jump five or six feet in the air.
One morning in the winter, I went out the side door to go feed the animals before school and nearly stepped on a rattlesnake. It was so cold that he’d come near the house for water and warmth. I found a frog in Freckles’ water bowl: he was frozen, half-in and half-out.
One day after school, I heard the doves flying around wildly, crying out.
I ran out to their cote, which Bampy had made out of my little girl playhouse by closing the windows with chicken wire. It had two rows of wooden nests in the back.
A snake’s head came out of the top row with an egg in his mouth. Yolk was dripping down his snake neck. Then I heard the rattle.
I ran for Bampy’s .22 and pushed it through the metal chicken wire.
I shot him and he dropped the egg, but he swayed back and forth, furiously rattling. I shot him two more times, and he finally sank down out of the nest, curling on the bottom of the dove cote.
Bampy knew a dentist who collected rattlesnake skins and rattles. He called him and the man came and collected the six-foot specimen. He had killed three birds and eaten almost every egg, but the surviving birds soon recovered.
When my father came to visit, he’d eat greedily of the loquats and dark red plums on the fruit trees near where I’d sun myself, reading with Freckles by my side.
And if it wasn’t too hot, we’d go out to the Santa Ana riverbed, aka the “wash” and go adventuring.
One day there was a huge storm in the mountains. Most of the time the riverbed was mostly dry, and the Santa Ana river was a small stream. It rained all day and all night, and all the next day. The following morning I woke and it was still raining, but I heard huge booms in the distance. When the rain finally stopped, I took Freckles out to the wash and the river was gigantic. It was raging up to the asphalt service road where I’d seen the packrat.
The booms were giant boulders crashing against themselves.
I saw a green roof and red brick chimney in the middle of the river, carried down from the mountains.
Many evenings, the coyotes would come to the back fence and howl and cry for Freckles. She would bark back at them.
In those days, coyotes were truly wild. You could tell from their eyes. They would look at you with obvious hatred and hunger.
Years later when I lived in Woodland Hills, my Jack Russell Terrier, Badger, harried an enormous coyote — twice his size — when I’d let him out of the house to go relieve himself in the middle of the night. Fortunately, the huge coyote thought the terrier was just a nuisance and went on his way. This big coyote was alone, not part of a pack.
By the time Bruce and I moved out of Orange County and to Florida, the coyotes were ranging along the sidewalks in South Orange County as if they were dogs belonging to the neighborhood.
One morning I woke early. For no reason I understood, I felt compelled to part my bedroom curtains and look to our side yard.
A red-tailed hawk was perched on the two-foot slatted fence about three feet from the window, a squirrel in one clawed foot. He ate delicately, pulling bits of meat off the squirrel’s body and making tiny joyous cries.
The day that Bampy died, I came home from school on the bus and walked into my living room to see my entire family assembled.
My brother told me that Bampy had died and I ran into the back yard. I put Freckles on her leash and we went out.
Into the backcountry.
It’s where I have always gone when I needed to grieve. To heal.
To feel truly alive.
I included a picture of my best friend Cathy and me at Laguna Beach. We were 14 and having fun. In the picture on the right, I’m standing by the path I’d take when going out to the wash with Freckles. Center picture is me and DC, the Siamese cat.
Amazing to think that kids don't have adventures like this now. We were lucky to have been free to roam around all day, just be home by dinner, or when the streetlights came on, whichever was earlier.