Mac is an extraordinary dog, a golden-Lab-colored Chow with a fluffy, curved tail, thick coat, pointed ears, black tongue. Most exceptional are his liquid-brown eyes, full of presence and intelligence. With them, he makes prolonged eye contact. My friend, Evelyn, says, “Once you get ‘the look’ from him, you’re his.” We didn’t begin our relationship with his laying his head in my lap several times a day to be petted. We started with his lunging toward me against a choke chain, ferocious barking and aggressive defense of his territory. Repeated commands of “Mac. No. Friend. Friend. Friend,” gave me access to Evelyn’s forest home in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona where she lives on a secluded acre of ponderosa pines at an elevation of 6500’.
Evelyn and her mother were among 30,000 people evacuated in the June 2002 Rodeo-Chediski Fire, the worst in Arizona history with 720 square miles burned until the recent Wallow Fire surpassed it at 841 square miles. For two weeks, while camping out in a gymnasium, Evelyn and her mom didn’t know if their home or her hair salon would still be standing on their return.
During my migration from Santa Barbara to Albuquerque, I stayed with Evelyn for a month while five wildfires raged through drought-stricken Arizona. We watched them on the news each day. It was a little unsettling. But not as much as walking out the front door to my car to discover a towering pyro-cumulus cloud of heat and smoke nearby. When I drove to the post office, a neighbor reported the fire was eight miles away. Winds were carrying it away from town. Power to the entire town was shut off for the firefighters’ safety.
Evelyn’s 93-year-old mother is on oxygen 24/7. No power, no oxygen machine. Evelyn switched her mom to a portable oxygen tank, and we all moved from the hot, no-longer-air-conditioned house to the front porch. Evelyn, who is subject to heat stroke, began to flush. Down in the valley, Phoenix was having triple-digit temperatures. One day it was 119 degrees. The mountains are about twenty degrees cooler, but still hot. When dusk came, the oxygen tanks were checked and found almost empty. “We need to go to a hotel in Payson,” Evelyn said. “You can stay here.” With Mac. With her three cats. In the dark, without power. At an isolated mountain property. Near the fire. When they left, Mac ran, agitated and whining, through the house, looking for them. Kerosene lamps provided light for reading. Front and rear security screen doors were locked, but the doors themselves were left open as the only source of ventilation. My bedroom door would need to stay open, leaving me accessible to Mac’s nocturnal wandering. He never hesitated to nose open the bathroom or bedroom doors to inquire into my activities.
I called my friend Marge, a retired librarian in Ventura, CA with a new passion for communicating with animals. She agreed to “talk” with Mac. While reading pet-expert Laura Stinchfield’s blog, she learned animals communicate in pictures. Soon after our conversation, Mac calmed down, lay down and fell asleep without a care in the world. I slept without interruption through the night, bedroom door left open. The next day Marge explained when she communicated with Mac, she found out he was afraid. He could smell the fire. She told him I would protect him and keep him safe from the fire; he was to protect me and keep me safe from intruders. She explained to Mac that animals can calm themselves and told him how. She told him I needed my own space so I could sleep. That’s exactly what happened. Marge was thrilled with the success of her first effort to communicate long-distance with a pet.
The power came back on at 1:30 a.m., the firefighters extinguished the blaze, Evelyn and her mom returned. The wildfires continued to burn, making 2011 “Arizona’s worst-ever wildfire year,” according to the L.A. Times.
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