Fianna's Story, Part One of Three
A dark wind from long ago once blew down That Mystic Road
Hello, Everyone! Thank you so much for staying with me over this past beginning time of That Mystic Road. If you know someone you think would enjoy going down this road with you and me, please feel to invite them with the link below.
I tried to write a story for the one year passing of my sister Cheryl’s passing on November 24, but I couldn’t seem to finish it. Now the days are shorter, darker, colder, and my mood has sent me wandering down the overgrown path to a long-ago time. Time for a winter story, time for a story about a black dog, Crazy Bill and the coven of witches waiting out the end times watching for flying saucers.
I don’t give a lot of backstory, but let it suffice for now to say I lived for ten years inside an intentional community called Glen Ivy Hot Springs. I’ll be telling stories about those mostly happy days, but this story is about how I left and why and with whom and what happened next.
I will be sending it in three parts interspersed with some more festive holiday fare. Thanks to Lloyd Meeker for his feedback, which was wonderfully supportive and constructive.
Cheers, Everyone
Fianna’s Story
Dogs don’t live long lives, so you already know there will be tears. But a dog’s story enters your own story at a certain point and changes everything. Fianna has been gone thirty years now, but I can still see those over-sized puppy paws and feel the zip in my chest the first time she licked my hand.
Crazy Doc Holga handed her over, and she filled my arms like a child. She was a purebred black Lab with wide set eyes on a broad forehead and nothing to distinguish her from any other Labrador retriever except her humor and her stubbornness.
My partner Bill was running through his inheritance trying to cure whatever tropical intestinal disease he’d picked up during his four years in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. Maybe he had that tropical disease or maybe some parasite was eating his brain from the inside out because that Bill was crazier than a betsy bug. He had two distinct personalities; one was obsessed with his health and was viciously critical of all things political. He ranted against politicians with a kind of compelling rationality that was mesmerizing to witness, like watching a hunting snake striking repeatedly with deadly accuracy. The other personality was the charming Irish lover, salesman and consummate thief.
I could get him to switch between the two simply by saying, “Bring the other Bill back,” and the shadowed personality would move forward into the conversation and the original would recede back. I never could figure out which was the suicidal one, but when he was around, and I had to leave the house, he might say, “I think this is the day.”
I’d pause and say, “What did you have in mind?”
He’d say, “The bathtub would be easy to clean.”
And I’d cock a fist on my hip like a huffy housewife, “I’m not coming home to a bloody bathtub and a half-dead wannabe corpse. Do you have a Plan B?”
“Okay, I’ll get on a bus to North Dakota and get out in the Badlands and just walk until I get lost.”
“The Badlands are in South Dakota, but that sounds good. Just make sure not to tell anyone or take anything with you. Let it be a mystery.”
“Fine.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
“Okay. I’ll be home at five, and if you’re still here and alive we’ll have fish for dinner.”
Fianna was a snow dog. She’d run up the snow banks then slide down in flying poufs of fine white snow. I’d stride along with my hands in my pockets kicking the snow. Fianna would run up behind me and land with her paws on my backside--she knew which pocket the dog biscuits were in. Though often tempted, I never gave her a treat just for being cute with her happy eyes and long, soft black ears. I’d make her, “Sit!” Then I’d walk away as far as I thought she could endure it, then call, “Fianna! Come!” And she’d come tearing down the road through the snow toward me, ears flapping back, laughing the way dogs laugh when they’re having a good time.
As she was about to catapult into me, I’d say, “Fianna! Sit!” And she’d slam into a sitting position, sliding the last two feet on her butt to fetch up at my feet, ready for the biscuit.
Why did I hook up with Crazy Bill in the first place? I had been in love with another man, Eric, but when it came time to make a choice between going with Eric on a church mission to Argentina or going to graduate school, I chose graduate school. However chickenshit that I was, I failed to inform him of that fact. This goes against everything I have become now, but at the time I guess I thought I loved Eric too much to be honest. I took up with Crazy Bill, hoping Eric would notice I had a new boyfriend when he came back from South America. I paid for that dishonesty in the many levels of hell anyone who hooks up unknowingly with a manic schizophrenic knows all too well.
Crazy Bill overflowed with Irish charm. He was quick-witted, insightful, passionate, and super smart. “Too smart for his own good,” his dad, Pops Martin, used to tell me. “Don’t get mixed up with Bill. You’re a nice girl. You can do better.”
Bill and I hooked up in California in 1987 during what turned out to be the only healthy window of time in his life. We went on early morning runs together followed by dawn soaks in the hot springs, the early morning light shafting through the rising steam. We picked oranges off the trees and squeezed our own juice.
Was Crazy Bill crazy in those days? Listening to the voice of Pops in retrospect, I think he knew Bill was unstable. It was a time of entanglement for me, the entwining of those ribbons of emotion that were to prove so difficult to break. Have you ever tried to break up with an Irishman? They will wring your heart dry with their tears and pleadings.
I told a friend at that time that I felt I had known Bill in a previous life and that I owed him a karmic debt. Whatever that meant, and I call it all bullshit now, let there be a very large check mark by my name and his on the Akashic Record. Anyone who has stayed too long with a crazy partner knows what I mean when I say I put in my time. (Now, I know it is insensitive and politically incorrect to call someone “crazy.” So sue me.)
What is evil? When did it first fly in over the hills from the east and start circling our valley?
I awoke to fresh snowfall. In the window, I placed a blue lacquer vase with three yellow daffodils. Behind this spring brightness of blossom was the black and white world--the pine branches stark through the still falling snow. I felt that metaphor, that only here in this house on the mountain was there safety against the chill of what seemed like evil outside forces. Of course, the metaphor was a bitter joke. Fianna lived right there with us--where safer or better for a dog than so remote a mountaintop? What evil is abroad, what massive mischance that she could be snatched off the mountain and thrown down so many miles away into the outskirts of Loveland?
I had come home that night of March 15, 1991 exhausted. I had met an astrologer who had warned me it was the Ides of March, that the planets were star-crossed and retrograde. “Go home,” she warned, “Wrap yourself in cotton batting and don’t come out until May.”
I was startled, “What about this weekend?”
“Stay off the roads!”
This was Sandie Sabo, 250 pounds and proud of it. Normally of sunny disposition, this late afternoon she looked harried and worried when I ran into her at the dentist’s office. “Go straight home. Don’t leave the house.”
It was my idea that Bill needed a dog. He was home alone all day while I was teaching down the hill at CSU Fort Collins. He’d have to take care of a dog, and that would get him out of himself. He’d start expressing love toward another being, and that’d make him less crazy was how my thinking went.
I gave all these reasons to Dr. Holga, and she bought him this $400 puppy from a local breeder. Crazy Holga was a successful alternative practitioner in Loveland strung out on self-prescribed drugs. She explained to me about the flying saucers that cruised up and down Eden Valley every night between Sunrise Ranch and her ten acre spread at the town end of the valley. The flying saucer aliens were beaming people aboard that summer implanting crystals in their foreheads.
Dr. Holga’s girlfriend was Crazy Nurse Randi who had her own office in the clinic where she would neutralize your alien crystal implants using radionics.
In the clinic waiting room was a giant coffee table book documenting cattle mutilations by the aliens. These were photos of dead cows from all over the West that had cubes of hide and flesh surgically excised from different parts of their bodies. There was no blood, for some reason, and no explanation for the death of the cows. We were to understand the aliens had been doing this.
Naturally, Bill had found his way long ago to the Crazy Clinic where Crazy Doc Holga and Crazy Randi recognized him as a fellow conspiracy theory nutjob. Crazy Bill did some work around Crazy Doc’s Crazy Ranch, and sometimes the three of them and a group of fellow Fans of the Aliens all camped out on a warm summer night smoking dope and watching for flying saucers.
So the Doc brought Bill the dog, but the baby black Lab went into my arms first, and that was that. Bill said he didn’t want a dog anyway, and he wouldn’t help with the dog, but he didn’t mind if the dog lived with us.
I named her Fianna after the Irish Soldiers of Destiny who guarded the boundaries of Ireland in the winter and in the summer lived by hunting.
Fianna was just a puppy, and I was just a lost child, even if I was in my thirties. I knew nothing about raising a dog, but one of Bill’s personalities seemed to know a bit, so before long, she knew to be let out and to sleep on the floor by my bed within licking distance of my dangling hand.
Early in the morning, Fianna would weasel her cold, black nose under the covers and nuzzle my toes. Together we went on long hikes all that golden fall and snowy winter. I didn’t know how much that pudgy little body could take of walking, but when she was through, she’d plop herself down in the snow and refuse to move. Stubborn, yes. But I’d pick her up and carry her home. By the time she was too heavy to carry, she was strong enough to outlast me on any day hike.
Soon, Fianna was big enough to ride shotgun in my Jeep on sorties into town. I had to leave her with Bill when I taught as I couldn’t leave her in a subzero parking lot for three hours. Bill did nothing for her usually, as he was wrapped up in his own agonies.
On that Ides of March, I went straight home, but it was still dark and cold when I arrived. Fianna came out to the drive to greet me. My intention was to immediately tell Bill what Sandie Sabo had said about the Ides of March and not going out, but he demanded even before a hello, “Did you remember the Uni-Som?”
“Oh, god, I’m sorry. No, I didn’t.”
He grabbed his hat and keys and stormed out of the house, winding down the hill in the dark, not seeing a black dog just behind him, following him down the mountain.
On the way home from the university that night, I had come up 1st Street, where I was to find her two days later. I had come over a rise, and suddenly I plunged into impenetrable fog. Although I instantly hit the brakes, I was going too fast to avoid any animal or person that might have been crossing the road just there. The Jeep was out of the ground fog as quickly as I’d gone in. “Sorcerer’s mist,” I thought to myself, and uneasily remembered stories of witches and sorcerers who could conjure evil mists to settle in low places or appear as an unexpected danger to travelers.
How improbable that she should come so far to that exact place; how many turns and choices had she had to make to end up precisely there? Did someone pick her up and bring her down the mountain? When I found her, her red collar was gone. Had she been tied to a tree, frantically fought to slip her collar, and then tried to find home?
Friday night, she didn’t come home. Saturday, I searched for hours, approaching people in remote homesteads with my card and the question, “Have you seen an eight-month old black Labrador female with a red collar?”
At home, I called the Humane Society, and perhaps if I’d gone into town to look, I would’ve found her then. But I was tired, and Bill didn’t want to go with me, and I slept while Fianna became more and more lost. That evening, I sat in my office and cried, for she still hadn’t come home. We put a light in the window. I took my drawing pad and drew her under a great dark tree, waiting for me, but then I saw I had inadvertently also drawn a ghost dog hanging by its neck from a limb of the tree, and both dogs in the picture had red collars. I always believed it was at that moment some car barreled through the sorcerer’s mist and hit her. The man stopped, dragged her to the side of the road--perhaps took her collar to call me, but I remember the number was unreadable.
Sunday morning, St. Patrick’s Day, I rose, dressed, and determined to go into the Humane Society. It seemed impossible this story wouldn’t have a happy ending. But coming down 1st Street, I saw a black body on the side of the road and hoped against hope that it was some other black dog. I pulled the Jeep around, got out and knelt by her. By her long, soft ears I knew her. I knelt on the roadside by the body of my lost dog and wept.
It was a grievous day. When I walked into the house and fell sobbing into Bill’s arms, he, too, began to weep, knowing before I said that I’d found her. Together, we gathered her food, her dishes, her green toy, and the soft blanket she’d come in, and drove down the mountain of sorrows to where she lay. We wrapped her in the blanket, put her in the back of the Jeep, and drove to Doc’s house. Here they all were, Doc Holga, Nurse Randi, Jill and Joanne, names I no longer recognize, and Bob, who ran the feed store. They had all known Fianna and gathered us in, all weeping, my grief coming from far down in my lungs where there was a place like the moon, so airless I couldn’t breathe.
How kind they all were in that particular moment. Crazy Nurse Randi had no tears, but she appropriately played the role of the Death Crone, blessing the body, blowing sweetgrass smoke across it. We all rubbed white sage into Fianna’s fur, then wrapped her again in an old gray blanket.
We caravanned in two cars along Horsetooth Reservoir out to La Porte, where we left Fianna’s body at the animal crematorium. She came home with me in a round turquoise tin, ashes wrapped in plastic. Anyone who has ever had a dog knows a dog spirit never really leaves you. Fianna’s body was there on the side of the road, but her little black spirit body leapt into my arms and entered into the country of my heart that, like dreamtime Ireland, needed to be defended in the winter and in the summer taken to the wildlands to wander.
I placed the tin on the bureau by the yellow calla lily in its lilac paper. Beyond the light was the cold, snowy world. Standing there with my hand on the blue tin, I had a quiet conviction that Fianna’s life had been sacrificed for mine. Some new strength came into me as if a thread of smoke from the tin had wafted up my hand and arm and into the mysterious chambers of my heart, and I knew I had to change everything about my life.
And I did.
One of the things I love about your writing is how I can hear you talking, the tones and inflections, see you, watch your face and gestures, so to speak. Your writing is alive with you. But, because it is written, there are parts, maybe more personal, that I'm not familiar with, and I love those too.
I have never heard about Fianna, although I did know about your relationship with Bill and I remember him well. Can’t believe he’s still alive and never carried through on his continual threat to kill himself, usually in a dramatic way that would send a message. I forgot that you also lived at Sunrise. As close as I feel to your family, that whole period with the Emissaries is largely unknown to me, especially how it affected you, Toren and Lisle. Mostly I know what Cheryl and Mickey have told me, about their experiences. Once you all decamped to Arizona our lives went in very different directions, only to converge again years later when you all ended up back in the Washington-Oregon area. I am so grateful for being near each other again, both geographically and technologically (even though auto-correct doesn’t like that last word!!)