A woman called on a Friday that June. We’ll call her Mrs. Daft. She had a dog she wanted to board for the weekend, starting right away. It was 5 p.m. It was 32 degrees, we already had 24 dogs to be walked three times a day, plus I had spent several hours of my ‘free time’ baking dog biscuits. I was exhausted. I knew John would have said no, and that fortified my own resolve. I told Mrs. Daft that we couldn’t take her dog. Then she played her trump card. She had been referred by a good friend of mine from my law firm days. With an inward groan, I decided I had to say yes.
Mrs. Daft said they’d bring Max, a mixed breed dog, at 6 p.m. In accordance with our new policy, I told her firmly that we would be closed between 5:30 and 7 p.m.
“That’s no good”, Mrs. Daft informed me.“We will have to be there at 6:30”.
I again said no. They must wait until 7:00. She reluctantly agreed. We staggered back to the house to rustle up some supper. At 7:00 p.m., we returned to the kennel, expecting our new arrival to be sitting at the locked gate, panting with eagerness to get in. Or, going by previous experience, climbing over the gate.
Seven o’clock came and went, seven-thirty, eight o’clock and we were now, in theory at least, closed for the day. At 8:40 p.m., having walked the last of the dogs, we were about to start our beddie-bye routine.
John looked out the kennel window and saw a car driving up to the house. This was in and of itself discouraging, because by this time, in our continuing battle to keep the hordes of lookie-loos from accessing our house when we were closed, John had placed a sawhorse across the lane where it diverged between the house and kennel roads, blocking the way to the house. Undeterred by this, the Dafts had manoeuvered around the sawhorse, parked their car in front of our house and could now be seen approaching the house door.
Eventually they must have figured out that they were in the wrong place, but decided for reasons best known to themselves to leave the car at the house, and come in procession up the lane towards the kennel. Our hearts sank. Three kids were being dragged up the road by a dog that was racing wildly out of control, barking its head off. The parents followed at a leisurely pace, burdened down by the dog’s belongings.
They arrived. I took the parents and Max the dog into the interview room while the kids remained outside. Over Max’s hysterical barking, bounding about and smashing furniture into walls, I pointed out that they were very late. They told me there was a big accident with road closures, and it took 90 minutes to drive from Kanata, usually about 30 minutes away. Of course, if they had left at 6:30, planning to arrive right at 7:00, they would have been on time.
With a mental sigh, I abandoned my attempt to impress upon them how much they had imposed upon us, and asked for the vaccination certificate. The father told me he’d left it in the car. Which was parked back at the house. Meanwhile, the kids were racing around outside, teasing all the dogs they could find in outside runs, and climbing the security fencing. John was really unhappy. He went outside and yelled at the kids.
There was a stage wait while Dad trudged back up the lane to the car, re-appearing in due course with the certificate. It showed that Max’s shots were two years out of date. I said that we would take him this time, but if there was to be another time, his vaccinations would have to be current. As events transpired, this latter point was completely moot.
All this time, the dog had been yelping, lunging and generally acting like a maniac.
The paperwork for check-in finally done, the family left the kennel. I took Max for a walk, and oh look – yay – they hadn’t left at all. They were all still fussing around at their car, which was still in our private driveway, directly blocking the walking route I was traversing with Max. Which of course set Max, who I could barely control anyway, off on another bout of hysterical behaviour.
I finally wrestled him back to the kennel by main force, we got everyone bedded down, and shut up shop at 9:30 at night.
Saturday morning arrived. When we came into the kennel we were immediately hit by the unmistakable odour of dog shit. Max had crapped all over his bedding, all over the floor and all over himself. John cleaned that up while I started getting the dogs outside for the first play period. We then fed and started the process of walking our 25 dogs. Because of course, no employees had shown up for their scheduled shifts.
When I finished Max’s walk, I again muscled him back into his room. As I left the kennel with two other dogs for their walk, Max went out the dog door to his outside run and proceeded to bark, howl, scream and generally make a sound that would have drowned out the combined noise of all the souls in torment in hell. I made a note to myself that I would have to close his dog door and confine him to his room when I got back, but by the time I returned, the noise had stopped.
I thought with relief, “Oh good, he’s finally settling down,” and went about my business.
A short while later, one of our neighbours appeared, to ask if we’d lost a dog, because he had just seen one nosing down the road in front of his house.
“No,” we replied with conscious rectitude, “All of ours are present and accounted for.”
Out of curiosity, or just to make conversation, we asked what the roaming dog looked like. Our neighbour gave a description of Max that would have been the delight of a police sketch artist. We started to feel uneasy.
Just to be on the safe side, we went to check on Max. The door to his room was closed and locked. No Max. Assuming he was in his outside run, John called for him to come inside. No answer. John stuck his head through the dog door flap. The door at the end of the outside run was also closed and locked, but Max had disappeared leaving, as the Bard says, not a rack behind.
Now, when we put up the fencing in the dog runs, both inside and out, I told the fencers to take it up to the ceiling inside and to the roof outside.
“Oh,” I was told condescendingly, “that’s not necessary at all. You can save yourself money by having us just put up a standard fence panel which has a height of six feet.”
“But that will leave a gap at the top. The fence won’t meet the roof line outside or the ceiling inside,” I pointed out.
“That won’t be a problem,” these experts assured me.”You see, the runs outside are eight feet long, and inside, the dog’s rooms are only six feet long. That’s not enough length for a dog to get up sufficient speed to jump and launch itself through the small gap at the top. And anyway, it is such a little gap that psychologically speaking, if the dog even notices there is a space there, he’s not going to think he can get through it.”
As I was given this advice by the fencing company who had done pretty much all the fencing in pretty much every kennel in Ottawa, I let myself be convinced.
Right. They never met Max. He had obviously effected egress somehow through the gap between the top of the fencing and the roof. Whether he jumped, climbed or levitated, I don’t know, but the incontrovertible fact remained, Max had gone bye-bye.
Our neighbour had said that when he last saw the dog, he was running up the road towards the next (very busy) county road. Leaving aside the obvious danger from passing cars, this road was the location of Strongarm Kennel. I had a sudden and very unwelcome vision of Max deciding to pay a drop-in call to our arch-rival, and Kennel Boy chortling as he told his future customers that dogs run away from Oak Meadows to come to Strongarm.
John jumped into his truck and took off in hot pursuit. I locked the dogs who had been playing in the common room, back into their individual spaces then posted a note on the door, because on top of everything else, we were expecting visitors that morning. The note indicated that we’d had an emergency and hoped to return shortly.
‘If anyone asks the nature of the emergency,’ I thought as I was composing the note, ‘I’ll say I had a heart attack.’ That was pretty much the truth at that point.
I then took the car to help with the search. I got as far as the corner of our property when I saw John’s truck coming back from the other direction, Max perched beside him on the front passenger seat looking like he considered himself to be the luckiest dog on the planet. When I stopped to make contact, it was clear Max had chosen to cool off after his labours by swimming in the scummy ditch. He was soaking wet and stank like a sewer. John said that when he spotted Max, he slowed down, opened the door and called his name. Max literally jumped at the offer of a car ride. As far as Max was concerned, this was living large. A run and a swim topped off with a car ride. Best kenneling experience ever! Max would have given us five stars on Trip Advisor, if Trip Advisor had been a thing then.
Exhausted, and with our hearts still racing, we told ourselves that at least it couldn’t get any worse. We would close Max’s outside dog door, and he would stay on lead or under close supervision at any time he was outside until he went home on Sunday.
The next morning when we let our own dogs out of the house at 6 a.m., we could already hear barking from the kennel, an unusual occurrence. When we arrived, we were met by Max at the door to the kennel wing. Well, technically by Max and once again, the overpowering aroma of dog excrement. He had figured out how to climb the fencing at the front of his room and had escaped into the aisle in his dormitory wing. About a quarter of the dogs there had messed in their rooms, no doubt in reaction to Max frolicking up and down the aisles, peeing jauntily in through their doorways and dropping truly awesome amounts of dog shit at judicious intervals in the process.
So once again we cleaned the Augean stables, then got on with feeding and dog walking.
People started arriving. Three dogs were picked up, which we expected, along with a visitor who had been scheduled and oh, goody, three other visitors not on today’s agenda who decided on the spur of the minute to drop in. John ended up stuck with most of the comings and goings, while I ended up doing 12 walks, a personal record which I never beat.
From time to time, I could see through the window in the door which separated the dog wing from the kitchen area, that Max was in the aisle, having escaped again over the top of his run. I repeatedly returned him to his room, counting the hours until he was due to be picked up at 5:00 p.m. Not to mention wondering what the hell we were going to do if other dogs started to behave this way.
Two of the groups of visitors had shown up together. A former law school classmate of mine and her husband arrived with a whole group of friends. They parked right in front of the door, having driven up the laneway at breakneck speed. They all smelled like alcohol and were acting rather strangely. I deduced a Sunday brunch heavy on the mimosas. Lucky, lucky bastards. Sunday brunches or even mimosas no longer existed in the universe John and I now inhabited.
The other visitor – we’ll call her Lulu – was a young woman with two kids and two little dogs in tow, rejoicing in the names of Tinkles and Lucky (the dogs, not the kids). I took the old law school acquaintance and her juiced up group and John took charge of the Tinkles/Lucky group.
I finally finished with my group, whereupon John shoved Lulu onto me and hightailed it out of there. I asked her twice whether she had any more questions or if there was anything else I could do for her. She replied in the negative, smiled sweetly and vaguely at me and kept her ass firmly planted on the couch in the common room. John returned. I shoved Lulu back onto him and hightailed it in my turn to take care of some unfinished business in the back.
Returning through the kitchen, I glanced towards the window in the dog wing door to determine if I needed to put Max back in his room. I stopped cold in my tracks, trying to make sense of what I was seeing. When my brain finally processed the information it was receiving from my disbelieving eyes, I realized I was looking at Max hanging upside down from the top of the fencing in his room, like a trussed turkey. One front and one back leg were jammed firmly around the joint where the metal uprights formed the corner. I stared at Max in disbelief and he looked calmly back at me, not barking or crying or even wriggling, just as happy, as my mother would say, as if he was in his right mind. In fact it was the calmest I’d seen Max since his arrival.
I snapped out of my shocked stupor and raced in to try to extricate him. No luck. He was too heavy and I was too short to heave him up and over. I left him hanging and erupted back into the Common Room like a cork from a bottle. John was still trying unsuccessfully to dislodge Lulu from the couch. She seemed to have made up her mind to come here as some kind of Sunday morning entertainment for her and the kiddies, and she wanted her full morning’s worth of fun.
“I need to borrow John. We have a little bit of a situation back here. Thanks for visiting and we’ll see you again,” I said, with a sickly attempt at a smile, in a voice that I am sure was verging on hysteria despite my best efforts to control it.
I dragged John through the door and into the dog wing, where I pointed mutely at Max doing his imitation of a fruit bat. I enjoyed his moment of stunned silence.
Between us, heaving and stretching, we endeavoured to extricate Max. After much effort and cursing, we managed to free his legs and lift Max up and off the bars. One of his legs was scraped and raw. He was not putting weight on it.
There was a moment of fraught silence, while the three of us, John, me and Max, stood still, panting from effort and adrenaline. The silence was finally broken by John, who offered a consolatory thought.
“Well, I’m thinking that at least this will be the end of ole Max’s climbing expeditions.”
We shut the door on Max, we hoped for the last time, and trudged back to the Common Room to pull Max’s information and find out who his vet was. Oh joy, there was our friend for life, Lulu, still hugging the couch. I had had enough. In a firm but I hope reasonably kind voice, I told her that we had an emergency and she would have to leave. She mulled this over and then announced that her daughters needed to use the bathroom after this marathon visit.
Nobly restraining myself from grabbing her by the neck and shaking her like a rat, I showed her where the facilities were. She disappeared with the two kiddies while I returned to the common room to find that Tinkles had lived up to his name and anointed every visible surface there. Meanwhile, Lulu and her daughters, judging by the amount of time they spend in the bathroom, apparently gave themselves a facial and a manicure, and for all I know, a quick whirlpool in the toilet.
Finally, finally they left and we got down to discussing what was to be done about Max. It was Sunday, the vets were all closed, and an emergency visit would cost a lot. His owners would be back in 6 hours. We decided to do nothing.
The combination of events, fatigue, adrenaline rush and a general burning sense of the unfairness of life, had put me in a tearing rage by this time. I was beside myself at Max’s owners, who had never taken the time to train their dog or their kids, at my friend who referred them here and at all the unexpected company; the people who seemed to treat us as a goddam petting zoo. By now it was well after our nominal closing time, and we weren’t even close to being finished with our regular work.
I marched back into the play room armed with the mop to erase the signs of Tinkles’ activities, cursing fluidly, loudly and inventively, only to be brought up short by the sight of two genteel old parties standing at the counter. They told me they has seen us on TV and decided to drop in. I closed my eyes and counted to ten, then growled ungraciously that we were supposed to be closed, but I supposed that since they were here, they could have a quick tour.
I started with the play room since we were already there, describing our philosophy and its purpose and asked them what kind of dog they had.
“Oh, we don’t have a dog dear!” they replied with astonishment, as if this ought to have been perfectly clear to the meanest intelligence.
I said, “Okay then, you want to see the cat room.”
“Oh we don’t have a cat either,” they said, chuckling merrily at my stupidity. “We don’t have any animals at all. We just saw the piece on the news about you, and thought we’d like to see your place for ourselves.”
There was a moment of tense silence. John, who entered upon the scene at this point, later said he thought the top of my head was going to pop off. I got a terrible grip on myself, gathered them up, raced them through the kennel in silence and bunged them back out the door, which I locked firmly behind them. If Hades himself showed up for a tour that morning, looking to board Cerberus, he would not be getting in.
Later that day when Max’s owners showed up, we told them the epic saga. They didn’t appear even a little bit surprised or upset. They just informed us chattily that they knew Max was an escape artist. In fact, he was so determined not to be confined that he had destroyed several crates at home breaking out of them. Did we have any suggestions?
“Yes,” we said. “Our suggestion is, lose our phone number.”
****The weather turned hot and dry. There was simply no rain. The water in the swale beside the lane which had flooded the driveway three feet deep in April and May, was gone. The grass turned brown and dry, as if it were August instead of June. News reports talked about a possible drought. John started to worry that our wells would run dry.
I remember talking to a man from southeast Asia who had moved to Ottawa. I asked him what he found to be the most striking difference between living in Asia and living here. One of the first things he said was that everyone here talks about the weather: “Wow, it’s unbelievably cold; wow, it’s unbelievably hot; wow, there’s a lot of snow; wow, I’m sick of this rain”. If we get nice weather, we all go around telling each other “We’re going to pay for this, eh!” In this man’s country of birth, there is the rainy season (when it rains) and the rest of the year (when it does not).
It’s true we are a weather obsessed people, maybe because we have almost no natural disasters to add drama to our national psyche. The Red River in Manitoba floods every few years, and the Maritimes occasionally get hit with the tail end of a hurricane from the Gulf. There are sometimes forest fires in British Columbia or in the north of the prairie provinces. There was the great Ice Storm of 1998 in our area and in western Quebec. There has been an occasional small tornado or big wind storm that might tear a roof off here or there. That’s it.
We may be hip deep in snow and freezing our asses off by January, but we’re used to that. We build our houses for it, put snow tires on our cars and dress accordingly. We make sure we have lots of salt and sand and a working snowblower, and we’re good to go.
A 5.5 earthquake hit Ottawa once. It lasted perhaps thirty seconds. I was driving home at the time, and wasn’t even aware of it until our cleaning person came racing out of the kennel, waving her arms, yelling “Earthquake!” I had heard a rumbling sound while driving. I had taken it for a big truck passing on a nearby road, or perhaps blasting at the local quarry. Apparently it had been an earthquake. My reaction was “Huh.”
The media went into overdrive. People were as thrilled as someone in California who sees snow fall. Despite everyone’s best efforts to create some drama, it appeared that in the Ottawa area, the damage from this terrifying occurrence was exactly zero – not so much as a broken tea cup to report.
Notwithstanding this, downtown buildings had been evacuated en masse, and all public servants were sent home for the rest of the day. I can only imagine this was done so they could soothe their shattered nerves, because certainly nothing else was shattered. Hours after the great earthquake had come and gone and it had been widely reported that there was no damage of any kind, we received a voicemail from a client wanting to know if we were able to continue normal operations the next day, and would it be safe to bring her dog in.
We may not get many natural disasters around these here parts, but what does come our way, by golly, we try to make the most of.
To be fair, since writing this, Ottawa suffered a great deal of damage when three tornadoes touched down the same day in residential parts of the city. The weather is changing, and not for the better. But in the Ottawa Valley, at that time at least, there were no tornadoes, no earthquakes (worth mentioning), no volcanic eruptions and no hurricanes. Certainly no drought.
So when rainless day followed rainless day, it became scary and tense.
You have to understand that in Ontario there is literally water almost everywhere. You can’t throw a stone without hitting a lake, stream, river, puddle, pond. If you want to build a house in rural Ontario, you never start by asking where to find water for a well. No. You get a drill company to come out, they drill down, and they find water sooner or later. The only question is how deep do they have to drill, and will the water they find be sweet and potable. I suppose there are such things as coming up dry when looking for a well in Ontario, but I’ve never had experience of them.
No, in Ontario you ask, where can I build my house that I won’t get a flooded basement, or a flooded driveway in the spring runoff. It rains, it snows, it sleets, it freezes rain, but it does something at least two or three times a week on average. If you get a week without rain, everyone talks about it. A possible drought, after record flooding from the spring melt, especially in June when everything should have been green and lush, was just freaking weird.
On June 23rd, I was at the kennel and John came over from the house and pulled me outside, pointing to a massive towering cloud of black smoke to the southeast. He had been listening to the radio and had learned that there was a forest fire in Lanark County heading our way, consuming 100 feet of forest every 5 minutes.
We regarded the column of smoke with dismay.
We had coped with record snow in January, record spring flooding two months before, a drought and now to cap it all off, we were in the path of a forest fire. Who had decided we were going to be visited with Old Testament meteorological conditions the minute we decided to start a business, a good deal of which took place in the great outdoors?
We went on about our business nervously, with one ear cocked to the radio for news of the arrival of hosts of locusts and/or frogs falling from the sky.
We obviously weren’t the only ones following the progress of the fire. For the rest of the day, we fielded frantic phone calls from clients. Those with dogs or cats already in residence wanted to know what our contingency plan was if the fire headed our way. Clients who were supposed to be bringing dogs or cats in within the next few days wanted to know whether they’d still be able to do so.
I had to ban John from phone duty when, after becoming increasingly short with these people, I heard him snarl at one man, as if speaking to the village idiot, “How the hell do I know whether we’ll still be here next week? I don’t have a crystal ball! Now, if you don’t mind, my ass is about to catch fire and I’ve got to go move twenty or so dogs and cats to higher ground!!!!””
As the afternoon wore on, the news got more ominous. The radio reported that the plume of smoke could be seen from 40 kms away and that ash was falling in Ottawa suburbs. We decided that we had indeed better form a contingency plan.
I called the biggest kennel near to us which was well out of range of the fire, to see if they could accommodate our 26 boarding dogs if necessary. We would pay their fees of course. This kennel had 50 runs, and if we were at 26 dogs, with only 24 rooms, they must be full too, or close to it, right? At best, I expected them to say they had a few rooms available and I would have to go on trying other kennels further away from us. No, as it happened, they told us there would be no problem taking all our dogs.
So, on to the question of transportation. We called The Duchess, because not only did the family have a truck, The Duchess loved to interest herself in the concerns of the entire county. I know what you’re thinking. People looking for favours should refrain from making snide comments. But a looming crisis didn’t change the facts.
We asked if they would be willing to help move dogs to the other kennel if necessary. The Duchess not only said yes, she called us back to say she had recruited other neighbours to form a convoy. You see what I’m saying?
Clarence and other neighbours volunteered to do whatever was necessary. Several friends called to see if we needed help. Even some clients, like the wife of a lawyer I used to occasionally cross paths with, called to offer to assist in anyway they could.
The evening news reported that 150 people had been evacuated from their houses in Almonte and along Highway 44, which was our nearest crossroads. Two water bombing helicopters and an airplane were being used in the fight to contain the fire to the other side of that highway.
About 8:45 that night a Provincial Police officer (OPP) arrived and said he was giving residents a preliminary evacuation warning. We were to be ready to go on 30 minutes’ notice. But as he followed this up by saying there was no reason not to go to bed, we were, to say the least, a little confused.
I think the local police were as weirded out as the rest of us by the thought of a mass evacuation. The last time a fire of this magnitude had happened in our area was well over a hundred years before. The next county road north of us was still known as the Burnt Lands Road. To put it mildly, natural disasters were not something the local OPP routinely handled.
We started thinking about our own household and whether there was anything in the house we felt we must save, aside from what we would pack into our suitcases for an indefinite stay – somewhere. We had no idea where really. It was all academically interesting in a bizarre kind of way. Our house was stone and the roof was metal. I kept getting distracted by trying to picture how a fire would work on it. Would it even burn?
It felt like a group discussion exercise in Philosophy 101. If you only had your car and a pickup truck, and knew your house was going to go up in flames in the next two hours, what, besides your pets, would you take?
I must have either been in shock or panicky, because initially all I could think of to load in the car along with our own cats and remaining dog was the flatscreen TV (which was so big it wouldn’t have fit anyway). I was like Prissy packing to flee the burning house in Atlanta, shrieking as she dumped armloads of china into a trunk, where they crashed and broke.
****
I know Gone With The Wind is a racist movie. But can I say, I always admired Prissy. Yes, I know she was meant to represent the disgusting stereotype of the lazy, stupid **insert offensive term for person of colour**. But as portrayed by the talented and wonderful Butterfly McQueen, she transcends that so beautifully. Prissy engages in guerilla warfare through her subversive micro-rebellions against the people who purport to own her. Sent on an urgent errand, she takes as much time as she possibly can. Threatened by Scarlett to be “sold south”, she reverts to performing the expected role of terrified slave. As soon as Scarlett turns her back, she expresses the mad rage she must spend her life suppressing, and spits on the ground in disgust. Packing for flight, she does as much damage as she can under the guise of being frightened.
I like to think that the reason Prissy was so late returning from her errand to find the doctor was that she took the opportunity to slip strategic information out to Sherman’s invading army. Yeah, Prissy the union spy. Someone should write that novel.
Yes, that is a total digression, but I think the times call for it.
****
On reflection, it seemed that I was pretty much living in ‘Gone With the Wind’ and the movie reel had now reached The Burning of Atlanta. I kept peering out the window, wondering if I would see General Sherman marching by. Or perhaps Bambi and friends.
We ended up putting our photo albums and family videos in the car along with an overnight bag, and we were done. The big screen TV would have to fend for itself. We figured we had to leave as much room in the vehicles as possible for transporting dogs and cats, and anyway, when you come right down to it, what can’t be replaced?
We did go to bed, but we had trouble sleeping. Aside from a nagging worry about what would happen if the fire did indeed turn this way and 30 minutes’ warning was not enough to evacuate the kennel, we couldn’t stop discussing the ramifications of the situation. We agonised about what would become of us if our kennel burned down. Insurance would pay, but only if we rebuilt. Replacement cost insurance payments wouldn’t cover the tens of thousands we had invested in soft costs like advertising, development fees, architects’ fees, property taxes and everything else. It wouldn’t give us back the business momentum we had built up through our PR efforts and our coverage in the newspapers and on TV.
Worst of all, we would have no source of income while the kennel was being rebuilt. It wasn’t that our business insurance didn’t include income replacement. It did. But the payments would be based on what we could prove our income to have been before the fire. We had not been in business long enough to build up any kind of substantial revenue. We had only officially opened in April. True, we had just achieved full occupancy that week, and were looking at a busy summer. But at this point, aside from the last week’s big earnings, our provable income was the pittance we had earned through keeping dogs and cats in the house in the winter, what had come in from keeping dogs in the half-finished kennel during March Break and the trickle from our scant boardings in April and May. Averaging that all out, the replacement income would maybe stretch to cover the cost of a room in the local Motel 6 for the next month or so.
In exactly one week, my income from my law firm would be finished, because it was almost exactly a year since we had moved to the country and taken the great leap forward, turning our backs on the law. How nicely ironic if we had put in all that money, effort and time, pushed ourselves and everyone else so hard to get the kennel open, and achieved full occupancy in record time, only to have it all go up in flames within three months of opening. We would be crashing and quite literally burning.
We actually broke into laughter at this thought. The laughter might have been tinged with hysteria.
No call came in the night to evacuate, but morning found the fires still burning and still more or less heading our way.
We were left hanging in the wind, and that wind kept shifting. It was impossible to predict for sure what was going to happen. What to do? Approaching doom or not, the dogs and cats still needed us. There seemed to be no better plan of action than to get up, go to the kennel, walk and feed the dogs and feed and play with the cats.
We entered the kennel in expectation that the animals would all be freaked out by the acrid smell of the smoke which was by now thick in the air. Imagine our surprise to find that the dogs were in a rollicking good mood, bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and raring to go. Even when outside playing or walking, they were all completely oblivious to the dark fate hanging over us. In addition to the gloomy skies and the taste of stinging smoke in the back of our throats, the temperature was 33 degrees (91 Fahrenheit) and it was terribly humid.
So this, we thought, is what hell looks like. Maybe I had insulted Hades by declaring that if he came for a visit, he wasn’t getting in. Maybe he was paying us a visit in person anyway.
Okay, we were just getting punchy by then.
Despite the imminent threat of compete immolation, people still wanted to bring us their pets for boarding. We had already figured out that no matter how bad the weather and road conditions, or in this case, how serious the looming disaster, people who are bent on getting away on vacation will show up, come hell or high water. In the case of Oak Meadows, we had had both conditions within two months.
People returning from vacation, whose dogs or cats were safe with us, might well choose not to brave a snowy or icy road. Their desire to be reunited with Fido after a long absence was trumped by their fear of the road conditions.
But not on their way out of town. Oh no. People want their vacation dammit. Otherwise sensible and calm, when they’re determined to get out of Dodge, they’re not letting minor inconveniences like apocalyptic blizzards or raging forest fires stand in their way.
These hardy souls had their work cut out for them in attempting to reach us. The OPP had closed all the roads around us, except for local traffic. We had to co-ordinate with the clients as if it was a military operation. If they didn’t have a cell phone (and in 1999, lots of people did not), they would have to let us know their ETA at the closest intersection that was still open to traffic. We then had to drive down to that point to meet them and convince the police to let them through.
A debate would follow. Not surprisingly, the officers on the scene questioned the necessity, not to mention the wisdom, of dropping off a dog at a boarding kennel when a forest fire was threatening to burn out everything in a ten square mile radius. We would then assure the officers that we had a contingency plan. If the officer was particularly truculent about not letting the client through, we would transfer the dog or cat and his belongings to our car, and ferry them back to the kennel by ourselves.
The evacuation order had not yet been issued. We had a right to go back to our home. The addition of a cat or dog to our vehicle didn’t change that. The officer might look like he wanted to forbid us from taking the pet along, but couldn’t come up with a good reason to do it.
More often than not, the client was simply allowed to come too. We would all trek back to our little island, preceded and followed by police cars with flashing lights. Once the dog or cat was dropped off, the police would escort our client back to where the sane people lived.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that it is just possible that this is not the way it works in more sophisticated jurisdictions. If we had been in California or some other place where this kind of natural disaster was common, we probably would have been evacuated long before. At the least, we probably wouldn’t have been permitted to add to the population of dogs, cats and people who would have to be removed to safety in the event the fire picked up pace and suddenly threatened our establishment.
But I think the OPP were in as great a degree of denial as the rest of us. The whole situation was so surreal. Nut cases blithely carrying on with their dog and cat boarding kennel business as usual in the midst of the forest fire probably didn’t register as being any weirder than anything else going on.
It was hard though, not to feel like Frodo and Sam on Mount Doom, waiting for the end of the world. Only in our case, we had no reasonable expectation that the Eagles would be flying in to save our asses.
We survived the day and no call came requiring us to evacuate. Later that night, from what we gathered from news reports and consultations with the OPP officers, it seemed pretty certain that the fire was going to be contained, and we would not have to face a future where our business had gone up in smoke, taking most of our life savings with it.
Another crisis survived.
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