The End

This is the hundredth blog entry, the last daily update, and the first entry I’ve written without Duke hanging out nearby.  Duke is now at the home of John Cosgriff.  He climbed into my lap as I drove over to John’s house, his muzzle resting on my left leg and his back legs lying on the console.  Duke will stay with John when I fly back to Georgia tomorrow for a two-week sabbatical.  He tried to follow me out the door of John’s house when I left.  I pointed back inside and made him stay, then I walked out into the dark.

Back at the cabin, as I usually do in the evenings, I paced around the living room trying to figure out what to write about.  This time I kept music playing.  I paced into the tiled kitchen area, then turned around and paced over the rug past the lamp and beside the bookshelf, then started to turn again and glimpsed Duke’s tennis balls resting on the shelf.  That’s when I started missing him.  Often while mulling over the evening’s writing, I’ve thrown tennis balls against the walls for Duke to chase or lobbed them into the air for him to catch.  Now the balls looked lonely.  If you believe in writing the truth – and I do – there was only one thing to write about.

I picked up a tennis ball and threw it against the far wall.  It bounced back to me halfheartedly, and I walked over to it and flung it again.  But throwing tennis balls, like one other activity I’ve been missing recently, just isn’t as much fun alone.  I placed the ball back on the bookshelf.  I walked over to my computer to shut off the music.  If I was going to write about aloneness, I had better let myself feel the silence first.  But I didn’t have the guts to turn the music off.  I have spent, in this single and wandering life, plenty of lonely time – I was not eager to go back to it.

I have said goodbye to more than one pretty girl to pursue this single and wandering life.  I received a Christmas card from one of them today, one to whom I said goodbye five and a half years ago when I graduated college.  I left her to wander around in my truck with a dog and no steady job.  Which has a familiar ring.  At the time that I left, I loved her.  Loved her wholeheartedly.  But the road called.  Now, she is engaged to be married and is gainfully employed in New York City.  Probably, I reflected, I made the right decision for the wrong reasons.  I sent her an email to emphasize the differences in our present situations.  If she’s keeping score, I thought, she’ll get a kick out of this.

It’s a tradeoff that I decided to make.  Probably a tradeoff that most of the fur trappers had to consider.  What is the price of freedom?  They left everything that they knew, spent several years wandering the Rockies, and then – at least most of them – returned to civilization.  Maybe what I’m doing is similar.

There was really no choice.