Space

Tonight was a typical night, at least for this summer. The boy and I had dinner – tonight was leftovers, he had steak, I had monkfish – but it was later than usual as he had spent the late afternoon swimming with his friend. We watched the last bit of a Pixar film and by that time it was within an hour of lights out, so he got his second hour of screen time – playing an interminable online game where one solves idiotic puzzles and logic games to get points to, in his case, build an airport – before brushing his teeth and going to bed. He gave me a big hug, told me he didn’t have any clean clothes – I reminded him he had a giant pile of clean clothes that he had forgotten to bring up to his room and put away properly – he told me okay – we hugged some more, the light went out, and I left the room. I checked again in 15 minutes and it was silent, completely silent, the way only eight year olds can be silent when sleeping. If he had been trying to fool me, there would have been sound.

The dog wanted a walk so I grabbed the leash and a couple of plastic bags. It was already pitch dark out, it being late August in Maine and at 10pm there is no more twilight, there is only the moon, and tonight had nothing, so I opened the door without the leash on and poof – she was gone. The streetlight a few hundred yards down the way revealed her chasing a fox, or a coyote, or another dog, but moving at full speed – and then she was gone again, leaving the cone of light, and all I could hear was the faint and loosening sounds of her tags bouncing against her chest in the distance.

My first thought was a memory. It was probably six or seven years ago and it was a fall evening in Greenwich, London, and I had taken Gordy for a walk. It was in the days where the ex-wife and I were not really on speaking terms, although we were living together and I was doing the cooking and beds and she was doing the vacuuming and clothes cleaning and dusting, and she took care of the dog during the days and when I wasn’t around and I took care of the dog in the evening when I was in town and on weekends always. It was a night when I had come home from Canary Wharf vaguely late – the ex-wife and the boy having had the leftovers I had prepared for them, the boy in the bath – and I took Gordy for a late night walk. It was probably late fall or early spring because in my memory the park was already locked – we lived a couple hundred yards from Greenwich Park – so I took the long way up the hill to Blackheath Road and then looped around through the council housing and, because Gordy was the best dog in the world at the time, I let him off leash.

The spaces around where we lived in West Greenwich – bordering on northern Lewisham – were mostly semidetatched housing, some of it a couple of hundred years old but a lot of it crap brick faux south London terrace housing – and the in between bits were scraggly grass or cracked parking spaces or crumbled and impassible-to-the-infirm cobblestone walkways. But it was all paradise for Gordy and, on that night, for her quarry. It was a fox. There were plenty of foxes in West Greenwich back then, and after the park was locked, my sense was always that the ones who had gotten locked out were particularly annoyed. They were ready for the dogs on a walk, but more than that, they were ready for a night on the town. Gordy, off leash, on that night, was just an excuse to rumble.

Those spaces that the fox and Gordy tore through were made of brick and concrete and tarmac and bad soil and lawn not worthy of the name and a few shrubs that clung to life, all of it floodlit every hundred yards by streetlights, with the spaces in between shone on by yellow lamplight from the endless and unseparated flats and houses that made up the urban landscape. The spaces I saw my dog and her quarry tear through tonight were grass, and forest, and every now and again a house, and the lamplights were few and far between, creating those odd cones of bright white energy-saving LED light that are so distinctly separated from the darkness outside the cones. She and her prey would shimmer for a second inside the light and then disappear into utter darkness, and my memory would go back to the more in-and-out lightened hum of Gordy chasing his cockney fox across the council blocks and the twisting turns of Royal Hill and Hyde Vale and Prior Street and back to Circus Street and home.

The spaces aren’t actually that different, really, especially not to a dog. They are carpeted differently – here with more grass, the streets wider between the carpeting, the spaces for escape more open and therefore more accessible when chasing your fox – there in London more built up but for all of that only harder on your paws, the spaces for escape fewer and therefore the chances to come upon your fox or raccoon or skunk that much more tempting. Gordy never really wanted to catch the creature he was chasing, and my dog now isn’t that different – both just want to chase, both just want the adventure. And for both, I think, the space is irrelevant to the fact of the chase – it’s just a background, the way my son would choose a different setting in one of his video games.

For me, space is also not entirely relevant – and that’s because I know that everyone faces a different background in their lives and almost everyone finds a way to deal with it. We are a painfully adaptable species – in fact so adaptable that we drag other species alongside us, dogs and cats and viruses and gut bacteria – we drag an entire ecosystem along with us into the spaces we next wish to inhabit, and we demand that those species evolve with us to the new environment. I did it to Gordy – although it was actually easier for him to live in London and the UK and France than it was for him to put up with the progressive passive-aggressive types in Wallingford – and I’m doing it again to my dog today, who I think would much rather have the hours of deer chasing in Georgia to the clipped half hours and 45 minutes of controlled walking with me here in Maine. The space, for her, has become constrained with a choice of venue that was all me; the space, for Gordy, became a sort of open template but still, that choice of change was all me. And I flew him back to the US when he was nine years old without any real consultation.

But what occured to me tonight wasn’t about London versus Maine – although I felt a pang of regret for ever leaving the greatest city on earth, I will admit. What occured to me tonight was that the dog at the edge of my voice found the space that she lived in to be natural. And that the space in Greenwich that Gordy ranged about was also, to him, natural as well. Natural in the sense that it was beyond their creation, and therefore had to be faced as though it was created ex ante and had to be accepted as a given. Greenwich was more or less a built human environment; Scarborough is more or less a semi-rural compromise between homesteaders and the nature that creeps up and inhabits everything in between. To a dog, there’s no difference, even if to a human, it’s everything.

The deja vu moment I had tonight was that – when I was taking Gordy for walk six years ago, in a suit and tie because he needed the walk badly enough that I couldn’t justify taking five minutes to change out of work clothes, and we walked through the human imposed world of Greenwich – I felt as connected to the entirety of the world as I did earlier tonight, when the lovely new dog and I walked in the dune grass and felt the crunch of clam shells under our feet. There really wasn’t any difference in my connection with the dog close to my voice, despite the fact that one world was brick and cement, and the other was grass and tidewater. Above both spaces were stars, and inhabiting both spaces were a dog, another creature trying to run away, and me.

While we have built up our own spaces – and in our self-centered mind destroyed the spaces of nature – what we’ve really done is just the same as the fox, or the coyote, or the dog. We’ve changed the spaces we find ourselves in and made them our own. But so has the dog at our feet, and the fox that she chases. All of us – man, creature, and plant – have changed the space we find ourselves in, to our benefit and to our cost. If we reflect properly, we can see the space through another creature’s eyes. My dog in Greenwich saw a playground as surely as my dog in Maine saw one tonight. And their quarry – which I can happily report in both instances made it without capture – saw only a landscape of possibility, of escape, of living to see tomorrow.