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the continued absence of Charlotte the Dog
Tuesday, November 26 2024
I woke up a few times during the night, and every time I did, my anxiety would ratchet up a notch with the realization that Charlotte had yet to return from wherever she'd gone last night. The first time I awoke, I managed to go back to sleep. But after the second time, I decided to get up and go look for her in the night. I was concerned that maybe something had killed her, since there was nothing else I knew of that would keep her from coming back into our nice warm house. (And tonight it was particularly warm, as Gretchen's mother cannot tolerate temperatures lower than about 78 degrees Fahrenheit.) So I walked along the road in front of our house, shining the light on either side to look for a dead black dog. I then walked up the Farm Road a short distance, cut down to the Stick Trail, and went over to my big stone wall south of Chamomile to check the part of the wall I'd fixed yesterday afternoon. If a chipmunk-seeking Charlotte triggered a collapse by dislodging smaller stones beneath those big rocks I'd put at the top, she could easily have been killed. But the wall looked to be fully intact along its entire length. A cold rain was falling, which is something that would've normally forced Charlotte to come home even if she'd, say, found a delicious deer carcass in the forest. Something was keeping her from returning. I returned home, climbed back in bed, and eventually fell asleep.
Early this morning when I awoke again, I could tell Gretchen was awake, and eventually she declared "we're in hell!" and got up. I got up too and immediately went on another hunt for Charlotte. This time I walked along the escarpment west of the Farm Road, looking across wide swaths of forest for a black dog. I then cut across the Farm Road and walked the entire length of the Chamomile Headwater Trail to the Stick Trail, and then homeward, occasionally calling out for Charlotte along the way. Somewhere along the Stick Trail, I thought I saw something move, and when I headed off trail to get a better look, I spooked a couple deer. I felt bad about it, because it's hunting season, and those deer are just trying to hide out until it is over.
Back at the house, Gretchen's father was up, and we all had a fairly gloomy breakfast together. Gretchen's father had other things to talk about, which was a welcome distraction, but our brains kept drifting back to Charlotte. Where the hell was she? And where had she spent the night? It had been cold, and she has thin pit bull fur!
Eventually Gretchen and her father went into Kingston to try to find a suitable replacement refrigerator. I stayed back, posting about our lost dog on Nextdoor.com and Lost Pets Of The HudsonValley. Then I hiked up and down Dug Hill Road some distance in both directions from our driveway, expanding my search of the ditches and mounds on either side of it for Charlotte's corpse.
Later, after Gretchen and her father returned (they'd bought a refrigerator, but it wouldn't be coming until Friday), I made a flyer in Adobe Photoshop. Meanwhile, it was getting a little too warm outside for us to continue using the east deck as a refrigerator, so Gretchen and I started moving things into coolers and insulated shopping bags and putting cold packs in with them.
When we ran out of cold packs, I decided to go buy a bag of ice down at the Stewart's in Old Hurley. While I was down there, I posted the Charlotte poster in the post office and on the Stewart's community bulletin board. I also taped a poster to a utility pole at the corner of Dug Hill and Hurley Mountain Roads. Gretchen had suggested I also put one in Kiefer Sutherland's mailbox (he lives in the three million dollar house down there), so I did that too. The mailboxes of the rich and famous, it turns out, are nothing like the mailboxes of us mere mortals. Ours is covered with dents and the hinge makes a sound when you open it. Sutherland's mailbox, by contrast, seems to be made of the same sheet metal that is used to make wood stoves. And its hinge felt like it included rings of ball bearings.
Back at the house, Gretchen had finally gotten an email from the tenant of our 1L apartment in the brick mansion on Downs Street. She's the one who has yet to pay her November rent and who hasn't been replying to any of Gretchen's messages. Her story, which may or may not be true, was that after some incident at work, she's been in a psyche ward without access to her phone. To explain why she'd communicated with a member of her organization and not us, she said that she'd known that person's phone number by heart and placed a call to her with instructions that she call the other people (such as us) who needed to know. Gretchen was at a loss in terms of how to respond. What if this tenant no longer has a job (she wasn't yet sure whether or not she'd been fired)? If she couldn't pay rent, we didn't want her as a tenant. And we have a month-to-month arrangement with her. But we also don't want to be unnecessarily harsh in case she really has, you know, just gotten out of a psyche ward. So Gretchen asked her father what he thought. He's a pragmatic person who doesn't appreciated being screwed, but he also thinks the world is a "cruel place," and that we should be willing to give the woman some grace. We could recoup one of the months of rent from her security deposit and, additionally, he thought that if we end up not collecting a month of rent in addition to that, that's the kind of loss we should be able to handle in our situation. My attitude is decidedly harsher than this, but if that's okay with Gretchen, and if our potential losses to this tenant have a known limit, than I can live with it.
To help process Charlotte's absence, I kept making additional forays out into the forest. I did a fairly comprehensive search of our neighbor A's field (the one between her house and the Farm Road), which is now mostly a dense grove of small white pines. Next I hiked a little ways down the Chamomile Ravine below our downhill neighbors' place. (Crazy Dave has built a crude but fairly large stone wall down there, along with a few cairns, one of which is surprisingly tall and thin.)
Finally, I went on a long walk in the forest southeast of our house, starting on the Gulleys Trail, which I periodically vered off of so I could look out over the edge of an escarpment to call Charlotte's name. Several years ago, a tornado had knocked down numerous trees in this area, opening up some spectacular views. At one such view, I looked out and saw, high in a leafless oak tree, what looked like a fat porcupine. He wasn't moving, so perhaps it was some brown lump of material that only looked like a porcupine. But if it was a live porcupine, it was the first one I'd ever seen that I hadn't been led to by a dog. From there, I cut across the "Valley of the Beasts" (41.9247N, 74.1018W) via the remnants of the Mountain Goat Trail abd then went along what had once been the "Canary Hill" or "Overlook Trail," which has great views of the main buildings of Farm Hub. I hadn't walked through this area in something like eight years. In that time, there had been a massive blowdown of most of the white pines on the north side of Canary Hill (41.9239N, 74.1006W). There had been less damaged on east flank of that hill, where the trees are mostly chestnut oak. But there was no trace of the trail (Canary Hill Trail) I'd laid down through that area. There were, however, a few remants of stone cairns I'd erected where the Canary Hill Trail turns westward to eventually join the Stick Trail. The Stick Trail itself still gets constant use and is well-defined as a visible rut through the sedges and leaves. The forest is beautiful at this time of year, especially when there's a hint of fog. But there was no trace of Charlotte in any of it.
Back at the house, I distracted myself from the misery by playing bee and eating some stuffed shells leftover from the meal Gretchen had made last night. I kept looking over the posts we'd made about Charlotte and marveling at all the people sharing the story. (The shares now numbered in the hundreds.) I also looked over the various individual cases on the Facebook page of Lost Pets of the Hudson Valley. Most of the posts about cats were about ones that had been found, and a good many of the posts about lost cats didn't seem to have happy updates. But most of the posts about lost dogs did have happy updates, which gave me a little hope about the chance of seeing Charlotte again. I mentioned this to Gretchen, hoping it lessen her despair.
Eventually Gretchen's parents wanted to see performances by our neighbor A (who would be coming to Thanksgiving) in the various television shows and movies she's been in. So I used Bittorrent to download a few, including the Dick Cheney biopic Vice. While Gretchen and her parents were watching these, I was in the laboratory drinking booze (but not too much!) while waiting for 150 mg of diphenhydramine to kick in. I wanted to be able to sleep tonight despite the circumstances.
At some point today, I'd compared the devastation of Charlotte's disapearance to the devastation of Donald Trump getting another four years as president. "I'd gladly take eight more years of Donald Trump if we could get Charlotte back," Gretchen declared.
The poster I made and posted today to help find Charlotte.
Click to enlarge.
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