Chapter Text
Act Three: All Dogs Go to the Beach
Ira Glass: That brings us to the final segment of today’s program, Act Three: All Dogs Go to the Beach. So far all of our stories have been about humans, the ways we’ve adapted to this new post-Stranding world and attempted to rebuild our lives in the process, often with surprising familiarity. But we haven’t the only ones affected by this change: what about the animals in our lives?
Now, our pets still can’t talk—at least not the last time I checked—or else this might be a very different kind of radio program. Luckily for us, we have writers who can imagine what it might be like for them to live through such an earth-shaking event. Peter Englert brings us one such story.
Peter Englert: At the ripe old age of fourteen, Droopy the Basset Hound was living out her golden years and enjoying every minute of it. Sure, her joints were old and tired, and her vision was beginning to dim around the edges, and her paw pads were worn as smooth as a cloudless sky. But none of this bothered Droopy—she was content meandering through life at a leisurely pace.
Droopy shared a bunker with her human companion, whom she referred to as Her Very Best Friend In The Whole Wide World, or simply Best Friend for short. Best Friend was strong and kind and a generous giver of belly rubs, but he was not terribly bright, as much as it pained Droopy to admit. Her frequent attempts to make conversation with Best Friend were met with blank smiles and the occasional pat on the head, a response she found both endearing and mildly irritating. She supposed Best Friend simply lacked the mental faculty to understand basic canine communication—despite her unmatched elocution—so she contented herself with the wordless gestures of love that Best Friend seemed to grasp: slippers fetched from another room, scraps of food passed beneath the dining table, and so on.
In her younger days they lived in a busy city full of other humans and other dogs and great big machines made of metal, but an awful commotion had driven them into the mountains where they now lived, alone but for each other. Droopy didn’t mind the move; there were fewer things to smell out here in the countryside, but the wide expanse of greenery on all sides more than made up for it. Best Friend, though, was having a tougher time adjusting to the change. He was always glancing over his shoulder, scanning the horizon with an apprehensive gaze, and sleeping in short, restless fits. Droopy stayed close and guarded Best Friend at all times, not sure what she was protecting him from but remaining vigilant all the same.
Old though she was, Droopy’s nose was still as keen as a newborn pup’s.
[DOG BARKING]
They went out for walks three or four times each day, weather permitting, which gave Best Friend the chance to stretch his legs and Droopy the chance to take care of private business. Their odds of being accidentally separated were nearly zero, but Best Friend still preferred to be led along on a leash—a request which Droopy obliged in good spirits. She tugged gently, steering Best Friend this way and that, taking care to lead them alongside the bubbling brooks and through the sloping ravines. They never encountered another soul, human or canine, though Droopy sometimes swore she could see groups of shadowy humans congregated in the distance. Best Friend appeared not to notice or perhaps just didn’t care. Droopy was happy to be the sole object of his affections, and so she let the matter be.
Best Friend would nervously pull on his leash whenever it grew cloudy, urging Droopy to follow him back to shelter. Sure, even back in their city days he had hated to go out in the muck, but this was entirely new—now he acted like a cornered squirrel whenever the sky threatened to open. Droopy sighed woefully at this behavior, but ultimately she found it harmless to indulge him: didn’t we all have irrational fears, deep down? So she padded along dutifully beside Best Friend during these episodes, noting quietly to herself that country rain did smell a little different. City rain had carried the stench of pollution, but out here its scent was much more subtle, a blend of wintergreen and asphalt and untamped soil that formed an oddly cloying mixture.
There were other alarming changes in Best Friend’s behavior besides this newfound paranoia: his footfalls were heavier and more labored, he spent whole afternoons languishing in bed, his coffee sat untouched for hours until it was undrinkably cold. And his scent, once familiar and reassuring, had also grown unfamiliar—where Droopy had formerly picked up hints of aftershave and roast beef sandwiches, she now found the musty tones of an old broom closet. She hated to appear clingy, but Droopy couldn’t bear to tear herself away from Best Friend’s side.
On days when Best Friend seemed especially out of it, Droopy would fetch him a pair of thick woolen socks and say, through a series of affable tail wags: My Very Best Friend In The Whole Wide World, please stay here. Get some rest. I am perfectly capable of going out alone, should you only be so kind as to open the bunker door for me. I promise that I will return to your side at once.
But, as always, these exhortations were lost on Best Friend. He would haul himself to an upright position, mechanically put on his socks and boots and coat, and scratch Droopy behind the ear before removing the leash off its peg. She, in turn, would sigh and begrudgingly lead the pair outside, vowing to make their walk quick.
It was on one of these walks when Best Friend suddenly collapsed. It had taken him longer than usual to get out of bed that morning, moving in stiff bursts like a wan, empty-eyed ghost. He didn’t even make it five paces outside before crumpling to the ground in a heap.
Best Friend lay face down against the earth, unmoving. The leash slipped from his grasp.
For a moment, Droopy froze—canine and human locked together in a single horrific tableau. But she came to her senses at once and lunged into action, barking with all the strength afforded by her windy old lungs. She nudged Best Friend with her snout, attempting to roll him onto his back, but Droopy was not a particularly large Basset Hound and Best Friend was not a particularly small human. Her efforts, valiant though they were, were ultimately futile.
By this point her barking had dwindled to a low, deep whine. Droopy sent a probing nose into the hollow space between Best Friend’s face and the compacted dirt, looking for some telltale sign of airflow, but she found only an oppressive stillness.
Droopy thought of the old city dogs whose owners had suddenly fallen ill: how they were carted away in those boxy metal machines, how they sometimes returned and sometimes did not. But she couldn’t imagine anyone was coming to help Best Friend, not all the way out here. Droopy threw her head back and mimicked the shrill cry of those machines, sending a piercing distress signal through the hollow wilds.
[DOG HOWLING]
She paced the length of Best Friend’s body for quite some time—minutes, hours, who could say?—before finally curling up at his feet, huddling against herself for warmth..
She awoke to find that the sun had moved halfway across the sky and Best Friend had not moved at all. Droopy noted, with the detached curiosity of the newly grieving, that his odd musty scent had grown much stronger.
A light wind began to pick up. Droopy scanned the surrounding wilds, but she found that they were no less alone than before. Best Friend’s only hope rested squarely on her aching shoulders. She sighed as she rose to her feet, shook the cricks out of each leg one by one, and weighed her options.
She considered the groups of blurry humans that often lurked in the distance and wondered, with a furrowed brow, whether she could petition them for assistance. You never really knew with strangers, especially human strangers, but at this point it seemed like a worthwhile gamble. Even Best Friend would have to agree—you couldn’t rough it alone.
Droopy squinted into the light, vaguely recalling all the times she'd spotted those distant humans but failing to remember where, exactly. She fixated on a faraway spot and decided that this was as good a direction as any.
With only a moment’s hesitation to look back at Best Friend, Droopy took off running, leash whipping behind her like a dancer’s ribbon.
But this burst of energy was short-lived; the sun had hardly sunk behind the foothills before Droopy felt herself tiring, each year of her long and wisened life weighing heavily in her bones. She slowed to a trot and reconsidered: was this really such a valiant plan after all, or was she merely charging headlong into danger? And was she even going the right way? Surely she would have run into someone by now, or at least picked up their trail. But, she reasoned, humans were restless creatures. There was no way to zero in on their exact location without first sweeping a much larger area. Even a scent hound was only capable of so much. So she continued through the long night, trudging on beneath the crescent moon, only stopping at dawn to sleep fitfully for a few more hours.
Her journey took her across a smattering of rivers and ponds from which she sipped generously. Each body of water was pristine, their taste and scent both unmarred by the trappings of civilization. She found her thirst abundantly quenched and her strength revitalized. Droopy’s hunger was also sated by the strange mounds of fungus dotting the landscape, which were host to swarms of small, plump creatures that sailed through the air. These tiny tidbits were roughly the size of kibble and about as crunchy, but their flavor was far more succulent—like dandelion stems and bone marrow.
She plodded along. Another night and day passed before Droopy finally caught wind of her target. Multiple targets, in fact: she identified at least half a dozen unique scents woven together in a single odorous strand. She followed the trail cautiously, keeping any enthusiasm at a low simmer lest her quarry turn out to be an ordinary herd of deer. But the scent grew more pronounced as she followed its course, reaching an olfactory crescendo of sweat and soap and freeze-dried meal packets, and Droopy kept her nose pressed steadily to the ground. Her tail wagged excitedly, despite herself. There was something comforting about a scent so distinctly human.
The odorous trail snaked its way up a rolling hill, which Droopy climbed in great, heaving strides. From the summit she had an impressive vantage point over the area below. She drank in the view with renewed excitement, despite her poor vision, and surveyed the valley before her. She could just make out a variety of blurry shapes: some large and immobile, others smaller and drifting about. These smaller shapes were roughly human in size and shape. If she had to wager a guess, then she’d found her target—they seemed different up close, not at all like the distant humans she remembered, but time and distance each had ways of playing tricks on the mind. This was certainly the place.
Droopy scrambled down the slope, gravity pulling her faster than her legs ever could. She became tangled in the leash about halfway down, somersaulting over herself in a dreadful display of ungainliness. She landed at the bottom with a thud that kicked up clouds of dirt on all sides. But as the dust settled, Droopy was delighted to find her intuition was correct: there were no fewer than ten humans right before her very eyes.
The larger shapes turned out to be a series of open-air tents spread out across the valley, about a dozen in total, all flanked by a series of tall metal beacons. Clearly some kind of settlement. Each human was dutifully carrying packages back and forth between the tents, stacking and unstacking their parcels in practiced, mechanical motions.
They reminded Droopy of the deliveryhumans who sometimes came by the bunker with packages for Best Friend, always equipped with a friendly grin and a treat or two. But Droopy couldn’t see these humans’ faces at all—they all wore masks and helmets that obscured their faces entirely.
None of the humans seemed to notice Droopy’s ungainly entrance. Not one of them so much as glanced in her direction. Their task, whatever it was, must have been terribly engrossing.
Still, this was hardly the time to be shy. Droopy cleared her throat and launched into the speech she’d spent the last two days rehearsing:
Friends, humans, countrymen, she barked, lend me your ears. I come to you with the utmost urgency. My very dearest friend—a human, in fact, one of your own kind—has fallen ill. As a mere canine, she continued, punctuating each bark with a certain sort of doggy pathos, I am helpless to act alone. Please follow me at once. I fear our time may already be running out.
Her barks echoed briefly across the valley before giving way to silence. No reaction. The deliveryhumans continuing shuttling packages back and forth as if nothing unusual had occurred. Droopy sighed at her predicament, once again cursing humans for their inability (or maybe unwillingness) to breach the language gap. Honestly, if she could understand so many inane commands without issue—”sit” and “stay” and “roll over and play dead with your tongue sticking out in a wholly embarrassing fashion”—couldn’t they at least put in a little effort?
Droopy trotted over to the nearest box-stacking figure, hoping that actions would speak louder than words, and politely nudged the back of their leg. But the masked human continued to ignore her, instead picking up the hefty pile of containers and carrying it off in the opposite direction. Droopy scrambled out of the way, narrowly avoiding a boot to the head, which caused the human to stumble over her leash and drop a small parcel without noticing. Perhaps, she thought to herself, a good deed would curry favor with this mysterious bunch.
Several things occurred all at once:
Droopy picked up the fallen package, gently curling her lips over her teeth so as not to puncture its plastic casing.
The deliveryhuman turned around to search for the missing item and noticed that a dog had wandered into their camp—a dog who appeared to be stealing a piece of cargo.
Another nearby human pointed at Droopy in an act of wordless accusation, then let out an impossibly high shriek.
The beacons dotting the camp’s perimeter sent out a sonar ping to triangulate Droopy’s location.
And the rest of the masked deliveryhumans began to close in around her.
Droopy stood still at first, tail wagging idly, just happy to have drawn attention to herself at last. But as the group converged upon her, she spotted some of the humans brandishing weapons that crackled with electricity. It quickly became clear that this was not the kind of attention she wanted.
She bolted and wove through the crowd, skidding for purchase across the dirt and grass. Deliveryhumans lunged with their arms outstretched as they attempted to stop her, but Droopy was too quick—she wove right through their legs, sending them tumbling through the air.
Two more humans piloting sleek machines converged on her flank. The leftmost rider drove out in front of Droopy, making an obvious pass to cut her off, but she simply turned on her heels and took off in the opposite direction. She was pleased to discover even an old hound could outmaneuver a bunch of clumsy bipeds, and outmaneuver them she did on her four old legs.
Droopy bounded across the landscape with all the power and adrenaline she could muster. She didn’t think to drop the package until she was nearly past the edge of camp. The item was of no interest to Droopy, but it clearly meant a great deal to her attackers—they could keep it if they wanted it so badly.
She continued on and on, not daring to stop or look back until her legs gave out from beneath her. Droopy lay on her side, panting and wheezing and cursing her rotten luck. At least, she noted with bitter consolation, nobody was following her anymore.
Droopy groaned. She really blew it. Her one chance to get help, and she blew it big time. It was unclear if she had acted out of line or if these humans were just particularly hostile, but it hardly mattered when the end result was the same: Best Friend was still alone, defenseless, and very far away. Droopy wasn’t even sure which direction would lead her back to Best Friend, let alone how much distance separated them.
And just to kick her when she was already down, storm clouds were now gathering rapidly on the horizon, their bellies dark with the threat of rain. Droopy trained a wary eye towards the scene. Even out here all alone she could feel the phantom tug on the leash, so ingrained was Best Friend’s nervous mission to steer them out of harm’s way. But where Droopy had once found this behavior laughable, perhaps even a tad pathetic, she now found herself agreeing with his judgment—maybe it was time to seek shelter.
Maybe Best Friend was smarter than she’d realized.
She rose to her feet and began walking again, walking more than she had ever walked in her entire life, searching for any kind of refuge from the imminent storm. She was lucky enough to encounter a small outcropping about half a mile away, a stony shelf nestled against a hill with just enough overhang to accommodate a medium-sized Basset hound. Droopy settled into the niche and made herself as comfortable as she could among the rocks.
Best Friend’s old leash spilled out into the open air. Droopy leered at the filthy piece of cloth, both amused and annoyed that it had clung to her for so long, though by now it was hanging on by a mere thread. She should have chewed the damn thing off days ago. Without Best Friend holding the other end, it was worse than useless.
It wasn’t long before the rain let loose, its drops falling just inches from Droopy’s face. She realized, with sad amusement, that this was the first time she’d been caught out in a downpour since her city days.
The rain’s scent was even stronger up close: a sticky mix of asphalt, wintergreen, and freshly-plowed soil. The soil smell, at least, finally had a traceable source—this bizarre countryside rain seemed to kick up the earth, teasing and taming new sprouts in quick succession, fast-forwarding through an endless cycle of rebirth. She’d never seen anything like it.
Droopy sat like this for some time, watching the rain idly. There was nothing scary about it up close. Curiosity prodded her to walk out into the storm, to invite the sensation of rain upon her skin after such a long dry spell, but exhaustion kept her rooted firmly in place.
She thought her imagination was playing tricks on her when she spotted blurry human figures on the horizon. They were reminiscent of the figures she sometimes saw on her walks with Best Friend, but much closer than ever before.
Droopy squinted through the haze. The humans were approaching her.
The dark silhouettes eventually came into focus against the backdrop of Droopy’s aging vision. Upon closer inspection, their bodies were made of something far more nebulous and ill-defined than ordinary flesh. The figures were indeed human-shaped, but each body was made up of a thousand smaller particles that moved in unison like a dense cloud of gnats, floating aimlessly above the earth. They were bound by tethers that disappeared up into the clouds, which, Droopy noted, looked an awful lot like leashes.
One of these bodies was strangely familiar.
It wasn’t its shape or height that Droopy found recogniziable—no, she swore she could smell something different about this floating figure. A certain brand of aftershave. Roast beef sandwiches with too much onion.
Best Friend.
He looked nothing like himself: faceless, ethereal, drifting in the wind. But she recognized his posture, the size of his frame, and the comforting scent of home. Nothing else could ever come close.
Droopy stared at this strange new version of Her Very Best Friend In The Whole Wide World. Even now she wanted nothing more than to stand by his side, to bring him his slippers, to be pulled along on a too-short leash. She stood up and stepped into the rain—hesitantly at first, then bounding forward in huge steps.
The rain was cool but not cold, and it bore down on all sides like a tight embrace. Droopy felt herself growing stiff, her wrinkles deepening, her ears dragging even lower along the ground, but she continued running with all her might. Best Friend’s shape turned to look at her and held out its arms in welcome. She closed the remaining distance with a final joint-rending push off the ground, propelling herself through the rain in slow motion.
Droopy’s heart leapt as she sailed towards him—her human, her Best Friend, with whom she had been reunited at long last.
[MUSIC - “IT’S RAINING AGAIN” BY SUPERTRAMP]
[SINGING] Oh, it’s raining again... oh no, my love’s at an end... oh no, it’s raining again... too bad I’m losing a friend...
Ira Glass: That was Peter Englert, reading a piece of short fiction from his latest book: Voidout Johnny (and Other Bedtime Stories), available from a delivery service near you.
[SINGING] C’mon, you little fighter! No need to get uptighter! C’mon you little fighter, and get back up again...
Credits
Ira Glass: Our program was produced today by Danna Chivvis and Nadia Reiman. Our staff includes Elna Baker, Elise Bergerson, Susan Burton, Ben Calhoun, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Kimberly Henderson, David Kestenbaum, Seth Lind, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, B.A. Parker, Alissa Shipp, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, and Julie Whitaker. Our managing editor is Diane Wu, and our executive editor is David Kestenbaum.
Special thanks today to Sarah Koenig, who used to be one of our producers on the show. Sarah, we miss you! Be sure to check out her podcast, Serial—season seven is out now, and it follows the story of a bridge baby gone missing, taking us down some very unexpected rabbit holes in the process. I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Whether you’re a porter out on the road or a prepper in the confines of your own home, you can stream our entire archive of episodes, for free, on thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.
Thanks as always to our program’s co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. You know, he was telling me about the time his mom tried to take him to a Cher concert as a kid, but by the time they arrived all the tickets were sold out:
Caller 2: We got home just fine, but I had tears streaming down my face the whole time. Embarrassing as hell for a twelve-year-old.
Ira Glass: I’m Ira Glass, back next week with more stories of This American Life.