Travels With Sadie 14: Stick With It

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creativity, dogs, fiction, invention, life, pets, story, tools, writing

At age nine, we moved to a new house in a housing development with about 20 houses. All around us on every side were large fields and woods. During much of the year, I would spend as much time as I possibly could outdoors. Sometimes, I would arrange to explore with a friend, but most often, I went on adventures by myself. On countless occasions, soon after one of my walks began, I would find a stick. On rare occasions, I would pick up a perfect stick and it became a sword, a club, a spear, a staff, or a walking stick. Most often though, the stick would need to be modified. I generally held down one end with my foot and pulled up with my hands so as to break it to the needed length. Sometimes, it was necessary to find a forked tree instead. I would put the stick in the small space between the double trunk and push on the stick till it broke.

Imagine my surprise, seventy years later, to find that my Golden Doodle Sadie likes to do the same thing. I take her for a walk, and she likes to find a stick. Sometimes, she carries the stick as is, but more commonly, she likes to break the stick first. She does this by holding one end down with her foot and lifting the other end with her jaws.

Sadie’s younger brother Bailey loves to play ball and swim and go to the dog park just as much as Sadie. But, so far, he’s shown no real interest in finding, carrying, or modifying sticks. It might possibly be because I made a point of explaining to Sadie that I was using a tool for many “stick-like” things. Indeed, Bailey does show an interest in grabbing the grabber out of my hands. He certainly likes bones and loves to steal things from his older sister Sadie. But, so far as I can tell, he could live a stick-less life of satisfaction. I suppose I could too, but historically, it’s amazing how much of my life I’ve spent with a pen, a pencil, a ping-pong paddle, a baseball bat, a tennis racket, a golf club, a leash, a grabber, a broom, a shovel, a weeder, an axe, a knife, a hammer, a screwdriver, a saw, a piece of chalk, a magic marker, a box-cutter, a spoon, a fork, or an iPhone in my hand!

Sometimes, Sadie breaks the entire length of a found stick into short pieces. More often, she shortens it to a more convenient carrying length and carries the stick in her mouth for a time. Once in a while, she’ll carry a stick all the way home and she’s even tried to bring it into the house though I typically tell her to leave it outside. On the next walk, she has found the stick and continued carrying it.

Her fascination with sticks isn’t limited to walks. Sometimes, I go hang out with her and play ball out in the garden. She walks through the garden with me, searches for lizards or plays any one of a score of ball games that we have co-invented. But if we’re out for long, she’ll eventually go into the brush, find a stick, bring it over to her favorite spot near the Italian Stone Pine and chew on or modify it in some way. I go sit in a chair on the stone patio and watch her.

Meanwhile, she watches me do some exercises or take photos while she chews on her stick.

It’s easy to find differences, but it seems to me, that I was taught in school to put much more emphasis on finding differences than on finding similarities. I doubt it’s just me. We’re taught both explicitly and implicitly that humans are the whole point of evolution: the pinnacle; the only animals who (fill in the blank); the only ones with souls; the smartest ones, etc.

It’s all BS. Sure, there are differences between any two things. Or, two groups. Or, two nations. Or, two religions. Or, two blah-blahs. But, it’s mainly mere habit and inconvenience that prevents us from seeing the vastness of the similarities.