Summer Vacation Report: The fire this time

This week, The Missus and The Boy are off visiting her familial colleagues. They go near the end of every summer and I usually plan a big project… that inevitably fails.

So this year, I was just going to lay low, read, watch TV, play some guitar badly, that sort of thing. Low hanging fruit, ambition-wise. How could I possibly fail?

Well, although I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a failure as yet, it has had aspects of failure attached to it. Maybe more failurey than failurish. And then only when viewed through the prism of my pre-planned regimen of resting and relaxing.

Let me explain…

The Kids left on Saturday and I labored feverishly all day Sunday to get ahead on work so I could take the Big Dog to the vet the next day. He’d blasted out his ACL, and the least expensive, most reliable doctor to perform the still-wildly-expensive operation works elsewhere in the state, a couple hours away. The vet was gonna open him up and drill a metal rod onto his leg bone to replace the tendons he had previously detached from their points of skeletal origin. (See finished assemblage below.)

Adding in the surgery and recovery time, I was looking at a best-case-scenario of a 16-hour day. A tedious 10-hour stretch of boredom, bookended by two long-ass drives through unfamiliar, barren territory.

It’s like all my least-favorite things got together and decided to throw me a party!

Putting aside how much the operation was going to cost and some friends’ misgivings, we scheduled him for the Monday of the week The Kids would be gone. Since the dog and I had to be out in the boonies (but it’s a ski resort, so there is a lot of money around, hence the high-end doggie doctor I suppose) by 8 a.m., we left at 5. We had a pet-sitter coming over to hang with The Little Dog for a while a couple times during the day.

I’d been dreading this massive, day-devouring task for almost a week now. But it was finally upon me and we headed out to go do this thing. The poor doggie had no idea what was going on, just that every time we take him for a ride in the car, it ends badly for him, so he started in with the howling and yelping and bouncing all over the back seat. And the only light outside was coming from Moroni’s trumpet a block over.

The drive was uneventful until after we’d left the freeway and commenced the longer part of our journey, on the usual winding piece-of-shit two-lane highway you find on the way to anywhere rich people vacation. It was deserted enough that I could use my brights and only had to douse them a couple times for oncoming traffic.

After a while, some fog moved in. I played with the lights, wondering if regular lights might be better in fog. It didn’t seem to make a difference in the awful gunk. Then a bunch of something—bugs? I was hauling ass—started hitting the windshield, and I was puzzling over that when I turned a curve and the hillside on my immediate left was a wall of flames. I could feel the heat hit the drivers’ side of the car and was grateful The Big Dog was curled up on the other side of the back seat. I sailed past and fumbled with my phone to call 911. Somebody should put this shit out before someone gets hurt!

It wasn’t too long after that that I came to a short line of brake lights, and the glow of another fire ahead of me. I pulled over, and the long and the short of it was they’d just set a firebreak and we could be there all day. Or I could take the back way to where I was going, that I hadn’t mapped out ahead of time and didn’t even know existed before that moment. Well, on the rare occasions that I set my body into motion, it tends to want to remain in motion. One sodbuster was pulling his pickup truck around and I asked him if he was going the same place I was. He said ‘u-yah’, then agreed to let me follow him after he tried unsuccessfully to pound some very simple directions into my empty head.

Eventually The Big Dog and I got to the vet’s and were an hour late. I’d been on the phone with them all morning, but still managed to overshoot their place by about 5 miles and it had all been hilariously hassle-laden. There was even a natural disaster thrown in! The Dude would definitely not approve.

The doggie doctor talked to me but I was already hip to the deal. Let’s just do this thing. The doctor kept talking and pointing, but I’d already left and gone to my happy place.

Afterwards, I headed out with, hey, at least one fewer hour that I had to kill.

I drove up to the fancy resort destination, Posh Town, and all the people were beautiful and the main street is quaint with all sorts of cozy, upscale storefronts. I felt like I was in a movie, but it’s one of those movies that guys only ever go to on first or second dates. I was a fish out of sparkling mineral water and got the hell out of Dodge just as quick as I could. There was another little town down the road a spell, looked a little dingy and working class—I got right away that the hardscrabble little burg was where all the workers from the fancy ski town live. Grubby Town is where they stash their blue-collars when not in use.

I loved it. I stayed in Grubby Town all day. They have a nice little library with wi-fi, someplace else that sells tuna salad sandwiches, some cool back country to explore and then when the heat and smoke were getting impossible, a movie theater that looked like a penitentiary on the outside but with sweet air-conditioning on the inside.

Saw the new Matt Damon flick only because it was playing then, and it wasn’t the Smurfs. I liked it more than I thought I would. The plot itself was pretty by-the-numbers sci-fi, your classic reluctant hero’s journey, but the details and even the performances were thought provoking, especially Jodie Foster’s. On paper, her part couldn’t have looked that rich, but she brought her A-Game and invested her character with an inner life she never shares that actually occurs to the audience to wonder about.

And there are enough subtextual allegories to current affairs to keep left-wingers smug and right-wingers in a lather, so it even worked as sci-fi. Kudos to Elysium.

Afterwards there was still time to kill and it was getting hot out. Went for a walk in the shade at the foot of a small mountain just down the road until I noticed all the bullet-pocked “NO TRESSPASSIN” signs around, and crept carefully the fuck back on out of there.

Finally got the call about the dog and went to pick him up. Post-op care instructions followed, which I had the presence of mind to record so The Missus could bullet-point them for me later (true fact). The poor dog’s left leg was a denuded, bloody, patchwork-looking mess, but part of their deal is, the stitches are on the inside somehow, so the dog is less likely to chew them out. It was still pretty damned ugly and sad, though.

At that point I had to decide whether to take the more direct route back that could go up in flames at any moment, or the longer, surer way back. I opted for certitude. As I passed the turn-off to the direct route on my way out of town, I considered it again, and again decided against it.

When I eventually got back to the interstate, the air was clear and I was kicking myself for not taking the shorter route. Until I got to about 10 miles the other side of that highway’s exit and the air got dirty brown with smoke again. Today they’re having meetings in Grubby Town about whether or not they’re going to have to evacuate in advance of the fire. The whole town I spent Monday in could be a memory by week’s end.

It messes with your head.

Eventually we arrived back home, safe and reasonably sound. Not sure what the pet sitter was doing when she was here, but it apparently involved more sitting than pet. The master bed had been shoved across the room, slammed diagonally into the far wall, and something wooden had been masticated and expectorated all over the front room carpet. Which was not unexpected; that’s why we paid someone to watch the dog to make sure we didn’t come home to this sort of this destruction.

But it doesn’t matter, I’d already decided to take The Little Dog to the vet and board him for a few days. There is literally no way I could have restrained him from accidentally damaging The Big Dog during the initial recuperation.

I only mention this because, as I may have previously mentioned, The Little Dog is a crafty, crazy fucker. He’s like Obi, but without the ill will. Or like Woody, but without the good will yet. So I lured him into the car first thing the next morning—the last place I wanted to be after all the driving the day before—and schlepped him down to the local vet, where we board our dogs when necessary.

I walked him the 10 feet from where I’d parked the car into the carpeted foyer of the vet’s office, where he immediately hunched over and produced a healthy dump. Right in the space where, if I let the door shut, the bottom would catch and scrape the poo in an expanding crescent shape from where it landed to where the door closes. And the desk lady was not at her desk. I was stretched like a contortionist, restraining the excited Little Dog, keeping the outer door open to keep the poo from spreading and pushing the inner door open to cry for help.

That’s right, folks. Three hands.

When help arrived at last and I was able to pull the dog back out the door, he left a final plop on the concrete stoop for good measure.

Needless to say, The Little Dog made my mixed feelings about abandoning him disappear like magic.

Ideally and not coincidentally, that’s it for adventure this week. I sure hope Grubby Town and Posh Town don’t burn up. I liked the people in Grubby Town and as I said, I’m pretty sure most of them are support staff for the people who patronize Posh Town. If either one of them goes, the other is screwed.

The Big Dog is coming around, too. His leg is starting to purple with bruising, but I was warned to expect that, too. And tonight he came up to me and tried to get me to play with his bone with him. Telling him to fuck off and let me watch TV never felt more comforting.

The bulk of my workweek is behind me and we don’t pick up The Little Dog and The Kids until Monday. If this is my last post on the subject of this vacation, I will mean I have succeeded in my modest intentions at least for the latter half of the week.

If not, someone please remind me what comes after the fire…?