Seadog

By Bill Coolidge

A young man stands on the bluff, a narrow two foot ridge created by last night’s summer storm. His left hand holds his brown billcap. His white t-shirt and yellow bathing suit riffle with the wind as he looks up the beach. I’m watching him from the front dock of my rental cottage overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The waves are crisp as the off-shore wind closely crops their cascading edge and sends spray backwards. I follow the man’s gaze and catch the sight of bustling water.

Just beyond the breakers a dog paddles, searches for something in the water. He finds it and mouths the object, turns around toward shore, his mouth triumphantly holding on to his ‘catch.’ As he swims toward shore, a breaker captures him, rolling him toward the beach. As he gets swamped, I can see his feet pedaling forward, airbound, surrounded by the curl of the wave. A delicate moment matched by his fierce determination.

The black Labador Retriever, scampers up the beach, past me, to the waiting man. The dog holds his ‘trophy’ high as if he were bringing back a duck. He sits at the man’s feet and drops his bounty. The man picks it up and twirls it around his head as if he were a shotputter, then slings it out past the front row of breakers. Out bounds the dog, his tail flagging left and right, left and right, spunky. Glad joy.

“Seadog” plunges in and swims in a circle and looks back at the man. The dog can’t see the ballsock. His owner points off to the right, and the dog paddles over and grabs it with a furious bite, frustrated at needing help.

This game of ‘throw and fetch’ continues for twenty minutes until the dog comes lumbering out of the water and sits, a pace away from the man. He doesn’t drop the ballsock; the game is over.

The next morning, while sipping coffee on the dock and watching the quick upward path of the sun, the seadog comes running along the beach, full blast. A few gulls lift up at the last moment and flop about while the seadog dances, prances and barks. They land fifty yards away and seadog goes bounding after them. Later a tall blond teenage girl appears on the brink of the dune. Brushing her blond hair away from her face, she whistles once, one of those piercing shrieks. “Seadog’ stops his chasing and looks around. He dances back to her, panting and drooling, his task complete.

That evening the threesome show up. Each gazes along the beach. Seadog angles off along tideline without any eye contact with the gulls. Back and forth he weaves until the last gull has flown over to the pier, the beach cleared. ‘Seadog’ lopes back, drooling, a wide smile on his face.
“That’s some kind of dog you have!” I yell.

“Oh, he’s good all right. He won’t hunt for ducks or geese and he won’t fetch the newspaper. He spends his days chasing those darn seagulls.” The man bends over and scratches seadog’s back, then he puts on the leash.

My days at the beach hinged on watching the flight of birds and dog at sunrise and sunset. Bookends to some quiet days of reading, floating on waves and staring out to sea. What catches me off-guard is the wild imagination of that seadog, back and forth, up and down the beach. His own unique way of birding and fetching. No marshes, no duck blinds or shotguns. Seadog followed his own intuition. He created a life along the breakers, bounded by sand below and by black headed gulls above, all laughing.

Dogs improvise, hauling driftwood branches around, ready for a tug of war. Children improvise: broom sticks for bats, plastic spoons for shovels, made-up stories in place of books. Adults prefer the real thing.

Once at the beach, many years before, my daughters wanted to play hopscotch. With a stick, I outlined a detailed design on the sand at low tide. We played, throwing the shell, hopping, smudging and cheating until the tide came in. That night after a bedtime story I drove to the grocery store for ‘real’ chalk to play hopscotch along the sidewalk in back of our cottage.

After breakfast I led the way, making careful hopscotch designs with the pastel chalk. “Okay, who wants to play?” I asked proudly. Both girls looked at me, then at each other.