On Thunderstorms

When I retired from teaching in 2012, I moved back in with my parents in Ithaca. The only one at that time who was fully enthusiastic about my new life plan was Izzy. With the exception of the summer of 2010 which I spent almost entirely in the hospital, Izzy and I had spent every summer since her adoption in Ithaca. She loved Ithaca. When we’d drive home to visit my parents, as soon as I took the exit for Whitney Point – a full 45 minutes away from Ithaca – Izzy would sit up and start panting and whining in anticipation. My dad used to joke that Izzy was like a “fresh air dog” that came up from the city for the summer to spend two months in the country at the doggy equivalent of summer camp. With access to real grass in the backyard (as opposed to the pee pad we constructed on my balcony out of bricks and pebbles) and almost daily visits to the lake to swim and chase her ball, Ithaca was a proper utopia for a dog that was used to 30 minute walks with a dog walker through downtown Baltimore.

Just because she is happier in Ithaca, did not mean that she left her doggy shenanigans in Baltimore. As she got older, her fear of thunder took on an extra element of intensity. To illustrate, the last time she was crated during a thunderstorm, my mom and I returned to find the bottom of the crate on the other side of the room, blood all over her dog bed and a broken tooth from her apparent efforts to escape. Henceforth she was never again crated during a thunderstorm. I felt so guilty, just imagining her abject terror while attempting to tear the metal crate asunder while I was out to dinner with my family. Fast forward a few months, Mary – one of my dream team Ithaca caregivers – and I were out running errands. Halfway through my shopping spree at EMS, a storm unleashed itself in true Central New York form. There were literal sheets of rain coming out of the sky and intense lightning that seemed to bounce itself through the parking lot in front of us. I purchased a water bottle and Mary and I made a quick break for the van to head home. The rain eased a bit, from torrential to steady, but the thunder and lightning continued throughout the 15-minute drive back to my house. As we turned onto my street, I noticed a man walking his dog in the distance and commented, “what kind of idiot walks a dog during the pouring rain without an umbrella…?” But before I even finished the sentence, I realized that the idiot was not walking just any dog down the street, he was walking my dog down the street. Without a leash. Mary pulled up alongside the stranger and rolled down the window. Before she could explain who we were or ask the man what he was doing with Izzy in the pouring rain, my – at the time 11-year-old dog – jumped through the driver’s side window and clawed her way behind Mary (shredding the back of her neck in the process) to land in my lap. All we heard from the man during the struggle was, “I just found her in my garage.”

When we pulled into the driveway, I was shocked to see my mom’s car was not in the garage. I thought perhaps my mom had let her out to go to the bathroom and Izzy had discovered an unlatched gate in the backyard. Instead, we discovered an empty house (with the exception of two very anxious shih tzus), with the back door ajar letting a steady stream of rain into the living room. Mary walked onto the back deck to see if the gate was open. It was not. Using deductive reasoning we concluded that Izzy had freaked out upon hearing the thunder, depressed the lever door to get out of the house and into the backyard, jumped over a 4 foot fence and wandered down the street until she found someone to rescue her.

Every time I tell this story, I can’t help but imagine all of the ways things could have ended badly. What if Mary and I had not turned onto the street at the same moment the man was walking her past my house? How long would he have walked her in the rain trying to find her owner? He was not my immediate neighbor, he lived several houses away and Izzy’s address was not on her collar. What if in her panic to escape the thunder she had run into traffic and been hit by a car? Living in a town with frequent thunderstorms, my options felt pretty limited: don’t leave the house when it might thunder, put her in the crate and risk her ripping her own teeth out, or trust the weatherman and drug her every time it’s supposed to storm? There was no good answer, but while I waited in trepidation for storms, I realized that there is one perk to my favorite four-legged friend finally getting old: she is starting to go deaf. A few months ago we had our first Ithaca spring thunderstorm, and Izzy – mercifully – did not hear it.