Whelp, I had to say bye to Oregon yesterday. Read’s staying one more week. I got in to Boston this morning after a long night of travel on a delayed red-eye flight. All that sleep deprivation, followed by rides on a bus, then the subway, then another bus, had me feeling nauseous. Like “start scoping the immediate area for a trashcan just in case” nauseous. But when the apartment door opened, there was Samson jumping and wagging. Not many greetings can compare to a happy dog. A Samson-lunch-nap trifecta cured me.
August marks the 6th anniversary of my time with this pup. I’ve been meaning to type out the story of our meeting, and today was the lazy kind of recovery day for making that happen. Previously this story has existed only as oral history, and if you’re a non-blog friend you probably know it, but for all others, I offer The Genesis of Samson.
I spent the summer of 2004 as the live-in “Art Lady” (official title…no lie) of Camp Oty’Okwa. The camp introduced city kids from Columbus to the wilds of Hocking Hills State Park in south central Ohio for 7-10 days at a time. The job was 20% art education, 30% mentoring, and 50% disaster cleanup. It was exhausting and crazy and easily one of my favorite jobs ever.
Sometime after we’d started painting a spectacular 80 ft. camp mural, but before I got a raging case of conjunctivitis, the youngest cabin announced there was “a Rottweiler puppy living in the forest.” Hey sure, if you guys say so. I just kept on sorting lanyard lace while they talked. A lot of the kids had never been to the woods before camp, so I figured they were confusing their wildlife identification or pulling a prank on the Art Lady.
Days later they brought me the sorriest looking dog on a rope. I was shocked. He was bloated with weight but had no fur on his back. His tail was tucked, his head down. He winced when anyone got close.
“We caught him with hot dogs, Miss Katie!”
“That is one horrible looking dog. And it’s no Rottweiler puppy.”
“Yeah he is. He’s going to get HUGE. Feed him more hot dogs.”
Then they went on a hike and left me standing there holding the rope. I like dogs, but this dog was pitiful. He was skittish and meek, fat but malnourished. His body was all out of proportion. I took him into the art room and told him to sit in the corner while I set up the day’s projects. He sat and watched, never untucking his tail and never uttering a peep. At bedtime he followed me into my cabin and slept on a bottom bunk, and in the morning I woke to a clean cabin. The dog was pitiful, but he was housetrained.
The kids started calling him Samson.
That week the camp janitor, Scotty, provided some backstory: Sam and a little white dog had been at camp since fall. Whether runaways or cast-offs, the dogs gorged on trash all winter and then crept into the heated buildings and slept. More than once Scotty found the dogs passed out in pools of their own vomit and had to chase them back into the cold. The white dog was hit by a car in the spring, and ever since Sam had been wandering the woods by himself. Scotty had seen Sam fighting raccoons for the trash.
Hmm…a lonely, depressed, trash-addicted raccoon fighter. I was starting to like this dog.
Samson worked to reverse his reputation as a wayward drifter. Counselors told me he was tagging along on overnight hikes and chasing off raccoons. When he wasn’t hiking, he slept under my table in the art room or waited for meals to end outside the mess hall doors. Every night I stood in the activity field and whistled. Out of the dark a little black form came running, and together we walked to our cabin.
The day my grudging affection for Samson turned to love, everyone in camp was gone on a hike. I was cleaning up the art room and across the field, Scotty’s truck was parked in front of the mess hall, meaning he was cleaning too. I looked up to see a portly blob approach Scotty’s truck. The little dog looked left. He looked right. Then he carefully peed all over Scotty’s truck tires and ran away. I had witnessed one runaway dog’s revenge for getting kicked out of a winter’s worth of heated buildings. It was hilarious.
On a two-day break between camp sessions I took Sam into the city for a vet visit. My coworkers tried to prep me for what they thought would be bad news: that dog is old, he’s sick, he’s old AND sick, etc. But after a thorough check-up the vet said that Sam was only 4 or 5 years old. “He’s just had a terrible life is all.”
If that vet was right, Sam’s now 11 going on 12. Hopefully he’s got a few more years of adventure in him.
