Gimme Shelter

I guess The Ancient Evil Versus the Good Boy starts at the shelter, so this walk down memory lane should start there as well.

In the winter and spring of 2018 I volunteered at a shelter in Rochester, New York. This was not of my own inclination, rather, I was following the lead of my Dad, who had already been volunteering there for several months at that point. (Follow him on Instagram at shelterdogwalker and Twitter at rescueDogWalker for all things dog--and more recently, feral cat--related.)

So, there was that. In the background, I’d recently decided to stop competing in mixed martial arts and had started searching for a job in the museum field with no real concern whether that job was located, and everything was up in the air. Even farther in the background, I’d started writing fiction, which few, if any, people knew at this point. To put a bow on it: I felt an important chapter of my life had ended, the next was uncertain, and I was looking for a story to tell. Then there was the shelter.

Now, those are just the bullet points, but I want to keep this moving along. (Though quickly: you should make a donation to a local animal shelter if you can, and the shelter in my novel is not based on any particular organization.) 

A volunteer dog walker at a shelter is, well, exactly that. You take the dogs out on a walk, which seems pretty straightforward. It’s not though. Some dogs are leash trained. Some pull like they’re Balto reincarnated. Some are justifiably wary of humans. Some are a little too friendly with humans and just want to latch to your leg and get to work. Some are badly scabbed and burned and scarred beyond belief. Some are confused and frantic, looking for families that have abandoned them or owners who have passed away leaving them alone. Some are goofy.   

Every dog is different, and every walk is different too.  

Then there’s the stark contrast of the goodness of an animal shelter, the volunteers and workers, and the dogs themselves, compared to the way some of those poor dogs came in. (See above for a reminder.) I believe there are few places in the world where the scope of human decency to depravity can be seen in such an active, immediate way as in an animal shelter. You look one way, and there’s a person who has spent the better part of an hour gaining a dog's trust still lovingly tossing treats until it’s comfortable enough for them to move closer. The other, and there’s a malnourished and malformed dog with what looks like cigarette burns all over it’s body because it had spent it’s whole life in a crate, which it’d outgrown until the wires had cut into it’s flesh after someone had decided to just let it stay there until it died of dehydration. (Said dog, just to add, was thankfully discovered and brought in, named by coincidence after a personal hero of mine, and fostered.)    

There was a lot to unpack and try to make sense of, and if everything looks like a nail to a person with a hammer, everything also looks like inspiration for a book to an aspiring author. 

I was still working and applying for jobs and writing something that felt forced, then on the days I’d go to the shelter, I’d take a few dogs on some walks. I noticed something quickly. When I’d start, my mind would be all cluttered, worried about all the aforementioned things, but as the minutes passed and both the dog and I settled in, those thoughts would dissipate. Each walk was like a little therapeutic adventure while everything else in my life seemed up in the air. I could daydream a bit, explore the surrounding area, and connect with a dog.    

And, it was on those walks that The Ancient Evil Versus the Good Boy started to take shape, especially when a shelter dog and I walked past this one evening: 

To be continued…