"Need another 100lb tensile strength dog leash on aisle four!"

Our house in Borderland sits atop a steep hill in a neighborhood of other houses atop steep hills. The area was planned in the late 1980s to be nice and woodsy, with houses constructed of natural materials and not all on top of one another, like a typical suburb. Being a nice and woodsy area, though, we also live side by side with other things that live in nice woodsy areas, such as the family of five deer who frequent our yard. We like having them around, too, cause they're cute and have not yet started to eat our perennials. They also give the dog something to do because Sadie considers them her arch-enemies and barks at them whenever they stray too close.

A couple of Saturdays ago, Sadie was doing precisely this as the deer milled around the back yard, snuffling beneath the snow and leaves and eating the acorns they find there. The wife and I also watched, amused at Sadie's rage. For their part, though, the deer didn't seem to care one whit that the dog was barking furiously at them from behind the glass of the back door. Some even seemed to stare back in contempt while chewing up mouthfuls of acorns. That is, until the wife decided to open the back door and let Sadie out. I almost stopped her from doing it, cause I knew we'd NEHEHEHEver get the dog back in the house if she was out sans leash--at least, not for a long time. However, the notion of how satisfying it would be for Sadie to get to chase them was way too delicious to kibosh. It would be like Christmas morning for her--just pure joy. So I stepped back.

The deer all looked pretty shocked as Sadie came flying out the door toward them in a blaze of snarls. Sure, she nearly broke her neck slipping on the icy deck before she could get into the grass, but they all five vanished in a flash of bobbing tails from our unfenced back yard and were quickly out of sight down the steep backside of the hill. I knew there was no way Sadie would ever catch them, but in the five seconds I could see her before she too vanished down the hill, she looked like she was having a blast

Half an hour later, Sadie was still outside. This wouldn't have been so bad, except she knew we wanted her back in and took to taunting us, playing keepaway with herself. The wife apologized to me profusely, but I wasn't mad since I knew this was precisely what would happen. Eventually, we coaxed Sadie back in through the combination of hunger and a Pupperoni.

Cut to this past Wednesday.

A few hours before Thanksgiving relatives were to arrive, I decided to run a few errands and was going to take the dog with me. I was on the way to the garage with her when through the back window we spied the deer family nosing around in the snowy grass again. Sadie lit up with barking, running back and forth from the back door to the kitchen windows just making as much noise as possible. Again, the deer gave her the ungulate-equivalent of the finger and continued to chew, staring unafraid in Sadie's direction. Sadie dialed up her barking a few more notches, but this seemed to have little effect. The deer slowly and casually began moving toward the steep back part of the hill. Only one of them hung back, turned to face us and then squatted down and started to take itself a deer dump. And it took its time taking its dump, seemingly as if to say: "Hey assholes, look at me! I'm shitting in your yard! Whatareyagonna do about it? Huh? NOTHIN', that's what!"

"Do you see that deer shitting in your yard?" I asked Sadie. She indicated she did by barking even louder.

What I did next seemed like a good idea at the time, though I don't know why. Maybe I was just pissed off at my perception of the deer's bad attitude. Whatever the case, I had an instant vision of Sadie and me chasing after this deer and it running from us in terror. This seemed like a nice vision which could, easily enough, be made a reality. Before I could think it through any further, I grabbed Sadie's retractable leash, clipped it to her collar and opened the door.

Sadie blazed across the still snowy deck, hung a quick left through the walkway between sections of deck railing and was in the yard before I could step out the back door. About that time, she reached the end of the retractable leash's range and I suddenly felt myself jerked onto the snowy deck. It then occurred to me that I would never be able to maneuver my way through the walkway and into the yard without slipping on the ice and busting my ass on the deck, so I made a command decision to let go of the leash and save myself some pain. It banged against the railing once and was whipped into the yard, trailing along behind the dog as she bounded for the backside of the hill, just a-barkin'.

"Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, oh shit," I said as Sadie vanished down the hill. It occurred to me at that point that I might have just killed the dog. It was very possible that the handle of the leash would become entangled around a tree and the dog would break her neck, or even slide down the hillside and hang herself. Even then I could hear the leash handle cracking against trees as the dog continued her chase. Then all went silent.

As quickly as I could, I dashed into the yard and then onto my trail leading down the hill. It was slow going, what with the snow and the slippery leaf cover beneath it. I saw no sign of the dog, nor could I hear any indication of where she was at. There were no barks, and no more cracks of the leash handle.

"Sadie?" I called.

Nothing.

"Saaaadie!" I called again.

In the distance, to my left, I heard the sound of crunching in the snow and within a few seconds could see Sadie on her way back, traveling along the deer trail that intertwines with my walking trail. Dragging along behind her was the black plastic leash handle. I called to her some more and she seemed to be trying to get to me, but then the handle wrapped around something and she came to a stop.

I moved along the deer trail, being careful to hold on to whatever little trees I could reach. This was the steeper side of the hill, where going is usually pretty tough without snow and leaves underfoot. A misstep here could potentially mean a slide down the hill toward the rocks and then a considerably steeper slide down to the lower road beyond that. After a minute or so I reached where Sadie was hung and unwrapped the leash handle. It seemed broken, as the leash wasn't retracting into the handle. Then I saw that the reason for this was because it had been pulled through the two halves of the plastic housing and was pinched between them. Once I'd freed it with my now icy numb hands, it retracted a little, but not as enthusiastically as usual.

At this point, we were closer to the bottom of the hill than the top. From where we were, I reasoned it would probably be easier to move along the side of the hill and then down to the road at the bottom, where we could walk back on the road, which would lead a bit more gradually back up the hill (where we recently were attacked by yellow-jackets) and to the street in front of our house. Before I could put this plan into action, though, Sadie tried to climb up the hillside, wrapped the leash around another small tree and then slipped in the snow and slid past me and back down the hill, coming to the end of her rope, so to speak. That's when I realized that even if we were to try and make it to the bottom of the hill, doing so with a leashed dog was unlikely to work out well because of all the little trees she could get tangled around. That said, I sat down in the snow and slid on my butt down to her level, at which point I unclipped the leash from her collar and set her free. She vanished back up the hillside, no doubt in search of deer.

Once I'd freed the leash from the tree again, I too began the long trek back up the hill. By then I'd retrieved my gloves from my coat pockets, which helped quite a bit with the numb fingers, but going was still very slow. After a few minutes, I made it to the lower section of my trail and followed it up to the back yard, where Sadie was nowhere to be found.

Eventually she did turn up, but refused to get near enough for me to grab her. I tried my usual tactic of offering her a ride in the car, which is often enticement enough to come in, but not this time. She just moved further into the neighborhood and then down the hill toward the lower road, me following along. After 20 minutes of coaxing, she came within ten feet of the open car door, where I stood offering her safe passage and no repercussions for her disobedience (being as how it was my fault for letting her out in the first place). You could see decisions being weighed in her little doggy mind. Finally, though, she looked at me plaintively, as if to say, "I know I'm in such huge trouble, Pa, but I gotta run free while I have the chance." And off she dashed.

I gave a defeated cry of "NOOOOO!" but knew there was no use in standing in the street screaming at her. The neighbors probably think I'm nutty as it is. Instead, I climbed into the car and drove on to my errands. And when I returned, an hour or so later, Sadie was waiting at the back door to come in.

Thanksgiving

I don't believe I ever told this story on the old blog, for it's a tale that actually pre-dates the old blog by a year or so.

Back in 2002, the wife and I were headed south to North Carolina to spend Thanksgiving with my in-laws. Being a student at the time, she didn't get out of class until late Wednesday afternoon, so we got a late start leaving town. The traffic on I-77 wasn't bad most of our way to North Carolina, at least not the southbound side of the road. The northbound side was glutted, because most folks raised in WV flee the state in search of a place that has ready employment and only come back for Holidays.

At around 11:30 p.m. we had just pulled off of I-77 onto I-40, near Statesville and found ourselves in some truly thick holiday traffic. It would be around half an hour before we reached the inlaws' place near Hickory. Up ahead, the cars seemed to be moving along at a nice clip, even with most of them in the slow lane.

Ten minutes later some activity caught my eye in the road up ahead and I couldn't tell what I was seeing at first. Around a quarter of a mile away I could see a pair of red lights spinning in a circle, like reflectors going round a bicycle wheel. Then I realized that what I was looking at were the tail lights of a car literally tumbling down the interstate.

The traffic in the slow lane became suddenly slower as drivers began braking. I checked my mirror and saw no one coming in the fast lane, so I whipped into it to help avoid the crush. I braked as gradually as I could, because I knew that with a sudden accident like this people behind us might not be aware of the situation and might plow into us causing another accident if we were to halt too quickly. The potential for a multi-car pileup was very real.

By the time we came to a stop, we were near the front of the fast lane line, with only one car between us and the now stationary vehicle that had been tumbling moments before. It was a blue Chevy Blazer, lying on its roof in the middle of the interstate, blocking both lanes.

“I have to help," the wife said. She wasn’t just being altruistic. She was only a second year student, at that point, but as a medical professional in training she had an obligation to help when presented with a need—and after such a tumble, the driver of this vehicle would no doubt be in such need.

We got out of our car, stepping into the 28 degree North Carolina cold and headed for the Blazer. Its driver's side was facing toward us, its roof partially crushed and all the windows smashed. There were bits of broken glass everywhere. A woman, was trying to crawl out of the driver’s side window. Somewhere I could hear a cell phone ringing. My wife rushed over to the driver.

Other people had come from their cars by now and were standing around gawking, much like I was. I felt sort of useless, standing there in the cold with no idea what to do. I had no medical training. I didn’t even know CPR, but at the very least, I decided, I could run interference for those who did.

“Does anyone have a cell phone?” I shouted into the growing crowd of onlookers.

“I do,” a nearby man said. He held it up for a visual aid, but made no move to actually use it to call for help. I waited a few seconds for this to dawn on him, but it didn’t.

“Call 9-1-1!” I told him.

“Oh... Yeah,” he said and began dialing.

That done, I began looking for my next task.

It was really cold. I was standing there in a long sleeve shirt having left my coat in the car. I ran back our car and retrieved our coats. While I was at it, I grabbed the penlight I keep in the armrest compartment, just in case we'd need it. Then I dashed back to the scene.

As I handed the wife her coat, she said, "Go back and get the blanket out of the trunk." I hadn't realized we'd packed a blanket, but as it turns out it had been packed in case of an emergency. As the wife later told me, when she was growing up in Alaska her father always used to stress how important it was for her and her sister to always have supplies packed in their cars—like blankets, matches and candles—in case they ever became stranded out in below zero temperatures. In such conditions, having a blanket and a candle could mean the difference between life and death.

I brought the blanket back and my wife wrapped it around the driver, who was still only partially out of the Blazer's window. She seemed incoherent at first, but kept insisting, “Answer my phone… answer my phone.” That's when I realized that the cell phone I had heard ringing earlier—that I could still hear ringing then—belonged to the driver. Another man standing there followed the sound to the phone, lying in the grass by the side of the road. He picked it up and answered it. I only heard part of his conversation with the driver's husband, but it amounted to him breaking the news to the husband that his wife had just been in an accident and was now hanging out of her upside down blazer.

What the driver of the Blazer said next, however, completely chilled me beyond the cold of the weather.

“Where’s my baby?”

“Oh, shit,” I said. Two of the other men standing near turned and bolted for the other side of the vehicle. I followed. Another person was already on the other side of the vehicle and had opened up the back door, revealing a section of blackness. I took out my light and aimed it into the Blazer's back seat, afraid of what it might show. The light fell upon the face of an infant that was awake, quiet, and still seated in a child-safety seat. The seat itself was not strapped in upside down, as you'd expect, but was instead resting upright on the interior roof of the Blazer, having somehow come loose from its seatbelt harness and tumbled right side up. The child in the seat blinked up at us in surprise, but wasn’t crying and seemed completely unhurt. While I provided light, one of the other men retrieved the car seat and then we all walked around to show the mother her kid was fine. The baby was then taken to the nearest warm car to get it out of the cold.

More people were on the scene, standing in nearly every available space around us. Some were trying to be useful by using whatever bits of the car they could find to scrape broken glass onto the shoulder of the road. Meanwhile the wife and some other bystanders were crouched around the driver as she talked on her cell phone to her husband, who had been traveling in a separate car along the same stretch of road and who was then trying desperately to get back to the scene of the accident. From what we gathered, the driver had originally lost control of her vehicle while trying to reach for her cell phone to answer a call from him earlier.

Soon enough, the husband himself had made it to the scene. And within twenty minutes, an ambulance, a fire/rescue truck and a tow truck had reached the accident scene, having driven up the empty section of I-40 this accident had blocked. The driver was loaded up and taken off to the hospital. Her blazer was then pulled out of the middle of the road and soon enough everyone returned to their cars and resumed their collective journey, I'm sure a lot more thankful then when they stopped.

Peril of the Circus Animals

It was an eventful weekend around our house in Borderland. The snowy weather finally managed to look scenic without being bitterly cold and uncomfortable at the same time; we got a lot of work done around the place, in anticipation of T-Day; and we nearly managed to kill both of our pets.

T-Day first...

Thanksgiving is occurring at our house, this year, and we have anywhere from three to fourteen people coming to stay with us. This being the case, we've been actively forcing ourselves off our our collective ass in order to finish a lot of the post-moving-in projects we've been meaning to get around to since we moved into this place back in May. You know, things like painting ugly walls, unpacking annoying full boxes, filing annoyingly piled paperwork, unpacking and storing 300 + plus collection of CDs away in annoyingly expensive binders (which also involved gutting and disposing of all the jewel cases), fixing the parquet in the foyer from where it buckled five seconds after we moved in, and figuring out which Tardis we're going to have everyone bed down in.

On Saturday morning, the wife had to go in to see patients at the hospital, so I began tacking down the buckled flooring with finishing nails. It worked brilliantly and I managed to do it in such a way that no one will ever notice there are nails there at all, provided they don't lift the area rug. Moments after finishing the job and feeling quite satisfied and handy about it, I heard the sound of crunching plastic coming from elsewhere in the house. Crunching plastic is never a good sound, particularly with our dog Sadie around. She has mostly stopped chewing up things she's not supposed to, but every now and then she has a relapse and we lose half of an $80 pair of shoes. I followed the sound to our bedroom where I found Sadie lounging atop our bed with the mangled and exposed wires of an electric blanket cord dangling from her mouth, the cord itself plugged directly into an electrical socket.

To put this in horrifying image in extra perspective, since the cold and snow have descended on us here in Borderland we've been sleeping with the electric blanket on every night. And, each morning, the wife arises and leaves the blanket on so that I will continue to be warm and snuggly while I sleep through her shower. Usually I get up to go fix breakfast for her, but I almost never turn off the blanket myself. Sometimes I will notice it later in the day. Other times, the wife will notice it later in the evening. This particular Saturday morning, however, the wife had noticed the blanket was still on and had pointed this fact out to me, even going to far as to turn it off in my presence so that I could see an example of how this process is accomplished and, hopefully, apply it to my mornings in the future. Thusly and no thanks to me, because the circuit to that part of the cord was broken by the off-switch in the control box, mid-way up the cord's length, Sadie had not been electrocuted by her indiscriminate chewing. Of course, the reason the cord had been in sight for her to notice in the first place was because I'd taken the dog-hair-encrusted comforter off the bed to wash it, leaving the electric blanket exposed.

I was sickened and infuriated all at once. Leaving aside my own culpability in the matter, the damn dog shouldn't have been chewing cords to begin with. She's only done that sort of thing once before, but I decided to put the fear of God into her over it to head off future indiscretion. So I screamed at her while she was in mid-chew and chased her around the house screaming at her further about how she can't chew on cords and how she nearly killed herself and was never to do that again until I was pretty sure she was about to wet her doggy pants in terror. And before you write and say something like, "Foolish pet-owner, don't you know that dog's can't understand complex sentences screamed at them," she did bloody well too understand me. I know this because when the wife came home and I showed her the cord, the dog took one look at what I had and slunk out of the room with a guilty and fearful expression on her little doggy puss. Mission accomplished.

Cut to mid-afternoon.

Avie Kitty and Sadie Dog are good friends at this point. Whenever we take Sadie out on her leash to potty, Avie sits at the back door and mews to come too. It's very cute, so we often let her come outside, at which point she dashes off to explore the flower bed. The cold and snow don't seem to bother her much and she eventually comes to the door to be let in, or takes refuge somewhere beneath the deck. Only, when Avie came back to the door, seemingly to be let in, she dashed away as soon as I'd opened the door for her.

Hours passed, the sky dimmed and it began to grow colder. I stepped out to the edge of the back deck and called the kitty, expecting her to come out from beneath the deck. She didn't, nor was there any rustling to indicate she was even down there. The last time I'd seen her, she'd actually been running away from the deck, so I was betting she was elsewhere entirely. And so went the pattern: I'd go out, call for the cat, she wouldn't come and I'd head back in to repeat the process twenty minutes later. Soon I began walking around the house calling for her, but still no kitty. The wife asked if I was worried about her.

Nah, I said, knowing that cat's are fine outdoors, even in cold, and are prone to wandering. She'd be back.

Of course, it was no coincidence that I decided to have a tuna melt for dinner, nor that I put the remainder of tuna I hadn't used on the back deck as bait. No kitty took it.

As night fell and the temperature began to edge toward the 20s, I couldn't help but feel a bit stressed. The wife, too, began to fret, fearing Avie would freeze to death or that something had devoured her.

"Oh, please," I said. "The dog can't even catch her, so what chance does anything else have?" I went on to espouse my belief that even if Avie was out in the woods somewhere, she would hole up under some leaves or otherwise be perfectly fine in her fur coat. This positivity didn't stop us, though, from bundling up, flashlights in hand and walking around the yard checking treetops for kitties. This search then extended into the trail I've cut into the woods behind our house, then to the street, then down the road, all the while calling, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty," at nearly 10 o'clock at night. No cat. And none of the tuna had been touched when we returned.

Sadness and parental worry in our hearts, we realized there wasn't much else we could do but pray, so we headed to bed, where we worried further, not sleeping.

Just before turning off my light, I decided to fetch the scarf my mother-in-law had given me when we first brought Avie home from her house, which is Avie's favorite item to sleep on. I opened the back door and put it down next to the can of tuna. The tuna had not been touched. Then, just in case, I called, "Here, kitty, kitty, kitty."

From beneath the deck, I heard a stirring in the leaves, then Avie poked her head out and climbed up onto the deck. I picked her up and gave her a smooch on her kitty head. She wasn't the least bit cold. I snatched up the tuna can so she could have some before I realized it was frozen solid.

The wife didn't even look up as I set the cat on the bed and only noticed Avie after the kitty she touched the wife's arm with her nose.

"Where was she?"

"Under the deck," I said.

The wife's eyes narrowed.

"If she was under there the whole time, I'm going to kill her."

We decided it was best to think she was just stuck up a tree for a while.

Welcome

Hola and welcome to my new blog, Borderland Tales.

For those of you who are new to the program, this is a thematic sequel to my previous effort Tales from the "Liberry", a blog that chronicled five years of my exploits as a "liberry" ninja working in a library in the Tri-Metro area of small West Virginia towns. Being as how I moved away from Tri-Metro to the somewhat larger and semi-cosmopolitan area of Borderland, and am thus no longer employed as a "liberry" ninja, it was thought perhaps a new venue was in order to continue my tales of libraryless, coffee-swilling, boring-ass domesticity. This is it, until such a time as a better theme comes along.

Because I don't have a regular parade of lunatics wandering in front of me to provide blogging fodder, I cannot promise the daily update schedule made famous by TFTL. However, my own bad behavior and the observed bad behavior of other people and/or pets, should suffice for two or three updates per week. I'll also likely import a few of my previous "liberry-free" exploits to help add some backstory.

I was going to call this place Tales from the Borderland, but some other jerkweed writer already took that. So Borderland Tales it is.