London Schertzer photo

Bweezee is snatched.

Not so much snatched as arising of his own accord – opening his heart (so to speak) to that doing the snatching. The law of Gravity tells us that the earth’s gravitational attraction for us is equal to our pull and attraction to it. So, Bweezee pulls the Unknown as it seemingly pulls him off the terrestrial plane into the dimension: n+1.

I was there, I saw it happen. There’ve been times I thought it was going to happen to me, but I became frightened, and thereby, resistive. I usually regretted it later. But this incident, there at the New Old Hobo Drive-in, I was neither frightened nor resistive. It was as if the sky opened up and swallowed him.

My younger brother found Bweezee as an abandoned pup along the highway east of New Old Hobo and brought him to my house. I had just buried my former old dog, and have long felt that nature senses a “dog vacuum” in certain places, much as it senses and ‘corrects’ vacuums of air and other things. So Bweezee, still not entirely weaned, filled the canine vacancy at my domicile (a trailer in those days).

The earth groaned strangely then, as now, but I knew (and could feel) it then. Bweezee thrived on such stuff. The smellier the transient, the more horrendous the dung, the wilder the thunderstorm, he could not resist. He would still come home, of course, but only after absorbing all the essence he could. (And, yes, he would mildly resist the necessary soaping and hosing down after most such incidents).

Then there was the backpacking trip to the Desierto Dos Cerebros. Bweezee was about two years old, and the same brother and Sarah, a mutual girl friend, and I went exploring for a weeklong trip. On the third day, while hiking up El Cumbre Dos Cerebros, the highest point within the Desierto, what could perhaps be described as Bweezee’s first “near-Rapture” occurred.

Halfway up the peak, Sarah’s hair stood up on end. I then noticed the goose bumps on my arms, though it was not cold, and a tingling sensation all over. Bweezee seemed absolutely ecstatic – barking wildly, leaping, twirling rapidly round and round. A sub-sonic throbbing – more like a varying hum – enveloped us. Bweezee stopped his extroverted behavior, sat, ears perked upright. I remember thinking that he looked very “expectant”. He looked up, not straight up, but at a point midway between the horizon and directly above. What he saw, none of the rest of us could. Dogs hear things we can’t, and probably their other senses extend to non-human-perceptual ranges as well.

Two days later we were slowly re-tracing our route back to the Desierto’s entrance. We were crossing a mile-wide alkali flat between ranges of hills when the throbbing/hum returned. It was more intense – at least the pronounced metallic taste in my mouth was an indication that this experience exceeded the previous – and Bweezee immediately repeated the gymnastics of the previous episode. This time, however, he was not so wild. His leaping pirouettes were graceful, and many such leaps involved two or more complete rotations. What is that in ice-skating, a triple or quadruple salchow? Bweezee yelped differently, too, as if there was a tenor and alto and bass component all together concurrently in each bark. I was too stunned to be scared.

This time, my brother and Sarah were not so quiet as after the previous episode.

“That dog of yours is positively crazy!” spat Sarah.

“Sarah, whatever it was that we all experienced, wasn’t that crazy?” suggested my brother.

“Yeah, but that dog scares me. It’s like he’s part of it”, Sarah continued. And yes, she was right. I was beginning to feel that Bweezee was not so much of this world, but also of another, the world where the unfathomable and unknowable dwells.

Bweezee gave me little time nor occasion to forget those incidents, as similar experiences became almost expected after that wilderness backpacking trip. We didn’t have to venture so far, either. Frequently, we were just outside my trailer.

Sometimes, a month would go by before there’d be a demonstration of Bweezee’s ethereal aerial gymnastics, replete with multi-chordal yelping – concurrent with my own body (and brain’s) reaction to the stimulus (tingling arm-hairs, occasional paralysis, and strange pressure(s) on my solar plexus were common reactions; but there is no “ordinary” reaction to the unordinary. “One never expects the spanish inquisition!”) There were periods that such experiences would occur almost on a weekly basis. I decided not to discuss this with anyone. My brother, and, especially, Sarah, avoided me since our mutual trip. I had the feeling that they thought the strangeness we all went through was my fault.

The parcel my trailer was parked on was sold to a developer, and so I moved. I worked part-time as the projectionist for the New Old Hobo Drive-in, and my employer had no argument against my moving the trailer onto his property to be closer to work.

Bweezee and I would pick up trash and pull weeds in addition to the afore-mentioned projection duties. Well, Bweezee didn’t assist directly, but his company was help enough. The spanish inquisition, being what it is, had been dormant for weeks. It was a coolish breezy day, the beginnings of cumulus forming in the sky when IT happened. This time, I felt the ground shake, with a combination rumbling sensation/sound. Bweezee immediately stopped mid-trot between marking one speaker-post and the next, ears straight up, his head tilted. The metallic sensation in my mouth, the crunch at my solar plexus, and the tingling scalp went far beyond what I’d experienced before. When Bweezee went into his skyward leap, with a rainbow yelp of many colors, and did not come down, I was not surprised.