Dog Day Afternoon –

Yesterday afternoon I was biking to the YMCA at around 4 PM. Even though it had been another beautiful day—sunny skies and 80 degrees—I had not been outside all afternoon. Gabe was sick and we were having what his dad likes to call a layover day. But by 4:00 PM, after watching six consecutive episodes of the HBO show “The Wire,” I had hit my TV saturation point and needed to get my blood pumping.

Though there are lots of beautiful trails and roads outside the city, there is nowhere pleasant to walk or bike within Tucson - big streets full of strip malls surrounded by small dead-ends with no sidewalks and depressing houses and trailers - so the gym was my only option. I was riding along Grant Road, one of several enormous thoroughfares, when I nearly hit a lean young rottweiler skittishly running in the bike lane. My bike scared him and he darted into the traffic, nearly causing an accident as several cars screeched to a halt and then honked at him to be on his way. I saw some women calling to him from a parking lot so I decided to bike ahead and grab him for them.

The dog ran to a 24-hour taco stand and looked like he was about to place an order. It became clear that those people I had seen were not his people. He left the taco stand and darted down a side street. A woman in a truck pulled up next to him. “Is that your dog?” I asked.

“No, is it yours?”

“Nope.”

We proceeded to chase the dog: by foot, by bike, in her vehicle, for an hour. He darted through the rush hour traffic of Grant Road at least three times, trying to run away from us. We got a tortilla from a second taco stand and lured him over. He returned to Los Betos, his favorite Mexican restaurant, and at one point we cornered him in a driveway, and for the first time he growled at us. Someone gave us his leftover rice and beans and we tried to catch up with the dog. By this point he had returned to a smaller side street, and the woman turned to me and said she was done. If I wanted to continue the chase I could, but she was done being a Good Samaritan. She had already given a ride to someone who had run out of gas and that was her good deed for the day. Plus, she had just seen a news story on rabies, “the world’s deadliest virus,” and didn’t want to chance getting bitten.

“He just doesn’t want to get caught,” she rationalized. Besides, she had already rescued three dogs this year, and the humane society charged $25 for every dog you drop off. Though she didn’t want to see him end up on Grant Road again, she was leaving. I was on my own.
I was ready to call it a day as well, happy that at least he was running along a side street and not in the heavy traffic, when Gabe called. “Where on Grant are you?” he asked. He had hopped in the car with a loaf of bread and a small rope and was ready to catch this dog. We decided that his name was Rex. Rex didn’t like Gabe’s car and took off into an alley as soon as he heard the engine. We followed him through the alley and got him onto another side street. He liked the cinnamon bread much better than the plain tortilla! Gabe lured him close and asked me to go back to the car to get the rope.

The rope was a joke, but on the way back I saw a man working in his yard with a dog. I asked if we could borrow his leash. His wife, a very sweet schoolteacher with a lot of patience and a gentle manner, came out a few minutes later with a red leash. We were sitting on the curb by her neighbor’s driveway. Rex had tired of the bread at this point but really liked the new treats the neighbor had donated. The woman, whose name we never learned, had him eating out of her hands. She was able to see that the collar had proof of a rabies vaccine but no phone number on it. Every time she made a slight move to grab him he leaped away. We were constantly starting from scratch: we’d lure him over and feed him and then a car would pass and he’d dart away. I have never seen such a skittish big dog. He was probably only a year old and didn’t seem upset by the neighborhood dogs stuck behind their fences, who would bark viciously at him each time he explored a new front yard. Rex never barked back and was really sweet, though he was clearly hungry and had protruding ribs.

The teacher’s husband, a gruff and burly man, was getting frustrated. “Just grab the damned dog!” he shouted at us several times. To demonstrate his no-nonsense approach to canine obedience, he let out another bellow. “Hey dog, get over here!” Rex, understandably, stayed away.

The teacher begged him to stop and keep his distance. Rex was clearly scared of men. She asked her husband to go inside but he said he was not leaving. After a while she went to get reinforcements, a bag of beef jerky and a whole bag of treats. The beef jerky were long and chewy and she hoped that it would take Rex a little longer to eat them, giving us time to grab his collar. She assured her husband that we were making progress and begged him to be patient. But as much as Rex liked our treats he would not let us touch him. He ate right out of my hands and would let me touch his chin, but make a move for his head and forget it - he was gone!

I apologized to the woman for pulling her into this drama and for causing trouble with her husband. She assured me that this was no trouble, “I do this kind of thing all the time. In the neighborhood where I work there are tons of stray dogs. A lot of my students have dogs that they can’t afford to register with the city so if their dogs run away they don’t ever see them again. I used to bring dogs to the humane society all the time but now they’ve started charging for it.”

Tucson does not seem to be a good place for dogs. Last week Gabe and I were driving on Interstate 19 and saw a dog wandering around the median. We exited but by the time we got back he was gone. Most unwanted dogs are left in the desert to die. Even urban dogs must learn how to navigate cacti and desert heat from a young age.

“If it weren’t for Rex here I never would have gotten to appreciate this sunset,” the teacher thanked me, “I would hope someone would do this if our dog ran away.”

I have never lived anywhere that has as many consistently beautiful sunsets as Tucson; every night the sky turns amazing shades of pink and the mountains are aglow. I’ve also never lived in a city that gets as dark, as profoundly black as Tucson does at night. It feels even darker than the countryside because the stars are not as bright. In order to protect the Arizona sky and because there is a major observatory nearby, Tucson has one of the strictest outdoor lighting codes in the country.

Streetlights do not use florescent bulbs and are generally 40% dimmer than those in most cities. On top of that the city only has enough money to light the major streets leaving neighborhood associations responsible for funding their own streetlights. As a result most of the city is pitch black by 6:00 PM. So when the sun sets in Tucson, the sun really sets. This is especially noticeable in this season of light, not only are there no Chanukias around there are virtually no Christmas lights or trees. It’s ironic that this is one of the brightest and darkest Decembers of my life.

It was quickly getting dark, the husband was getting grumpier, and Rex was getting full. The husband must have gone inside for a second because he suddenly had a flashlight that his wife begged him not to shine on us. “What are you going to do with that dog if you catch him?” he growled at his wife.

“You’re not bringing him in the house! Don’t put the leash on him! I don’t want you putting the leash on him.”

“Why don’t you go inside honey?”

“I am not going in without you!”

“Then you’ll have to wait a little longer.”

Then out of nowhere this big man looks at us as if his wife is not there and says: “She had a stroke 2 weeks ago. She is not well. Don’t let her touch that dog. I don’t want her to fall down!”

I did not know what to say. She seemed completely with it and competent; she did not look frail or confused. So Gabe and I said nothing and watched as the teacher calmly handed Rex more treats. When Rex took off again she proudly welcomed us to Tucson, thanked us for our effort, and slowly walked home with her husband.

Dejected Gabe and I headed back to the car, or so we thought. When we stepped out of the alley there was no car but there was a Rex. Gabe took it as a sign and ran down the right alley to get the car while I stayed on the pitch-black street with poor Rexy. A woman walking her dog yelled at me to grab mine, I told her that I’d been trying to grab him for over 3 hours. She ran home, scared of a dog fight and told me that the humane society was closed and to watch out because she was bitten last year when she tried to rescue a stray. Has everyone in Tucson rescued a dog at some point?

Gabe put his brights on and we tried one last time to lure Rex into the car. But it was so dark and so apparent, as the first woman told me, that he did not want to be caught. We put my bike in the car and went home dogless and cold to light the Chanukah candles.

The following are some requisite Tucson sunset photos along with a few desert shots, couldn't resist: