Kubla Demise Marks End of an Era

Published December 1999 - Kotzebue, AK

Kulba the Wonder Dog slipped into the afterlife peacefully this past summer after months of declining healthy accompanied by an increasingly dangerous disorientation that saw her nearly hit by a truck in Kotzebue this past April because she didn't hear the vehicle coming. The late, great Kubla, however did make it past 14 human years, born the same year John and Susan married in 1985. Although sad about not reaching the millennium, Kubla was happy to end her worldly suffering, promising to send the family her heartfelt greetings from the afterlife. Although Kubla's irresistible urges as a trash hound grew exponentially in old age, she nevertheless lived the loyal, saintly life of a truly special canine creature loved by all, prompting St. Peter the Great Dane to usher our little angel straight through the Pearly Gates and into a warm, comfortable spot in Animal Heaven, where today she sits among dozens of overflowing trash bins available around the clock if she feels the organically grown gourmet dog food she gets regularly just isn't enough. Although all the family misses Kubla dearly, the children especially got excited when the following letter arrived from Kubla recently. Indeed, in life Kubla was splendid little doggie, but in death her fine nature has surged her legacy into legend. After all, she even writes letters extraordinaire from the Great Beyond. We still love you, Kubla, and we especially thank you for the following recent letter.

Dear Family,

Hi! It's Kubla! Boy, I sure hope you miss me as much as I miss you, but I want you to know that what I'm doing is just fine in Animal Heaven, so don't worry. The food up here is fabulous (all you can eat all the time and LOTS of trash cans to pick through) and so is the company. I do want to tell you, though, that much of this letter is for the four children, who don't know a lot about my history, particularly the "early years", and, well, in some ways I'd like to set the record straight.

Anyway, I'm amazed. I've run into so many former pets up here from both sides of the family. For example, from John's childhood I ran into Penny, the overweight little beagle given to the Creed family by Rollie and Ruthie Bailey, distant cousins I understand who lived at the top of Waschusett Street in Leominster, Mass. The Baileys lived way past the Powers farm where John spent so much time, especially in the summer, with Moe, Barry, and Rickie and the other 11 Powers children.

Believe it or not, the Powers had more old dogs over the years than kids. Tony and Pebbles are both up here, mad a lot though because they miss hunting woodchucks in the hayfield stone walls with Moe, John and Rickie. Tony, a little-but-tough white dog, said he loved to trot down to one of the lower pastures to fetch the cows and bring them home along the road at the of the day. Tony said that sure wouldn't fly today, as those roads now have become ever more dangerous and full of cars. (We sit up here a lot and just look down at the world, watching our loved ones go about their lives. That's how we know this stuff.)

Penny, the Creed family's longtime dog, said she used to get picked up a lot around town because she liked to wander so much, and I understand the local dog catcher called her "real smart" for the way she used to elude him. Penny loved to visit John during recess at his elementary school. In Animal Heaven I've even met the "original" Kubla, John's dog acquired about a year after he got out of high school. Cure little thing!

When Susan was growing up, her family had a dog, named Diggory, aka Houdini for his ability to wriggle out of collars. Yes, indeed, he's up here living up to his reputation, for the story goes he escaped hell, had a "cooing off" period in purgatory, and finally made it to heaven. (Sure glad I didn't have to take that route. I never like to be uncomfortable, as you know.) As far as anyone knows, Diggory remains the only black Weimeraner ever to have lived (usually a gray-colored breed). But then again, I'm the only so-called "Arctic Spaniel" ever to grace the earth.

I also met a few other canines, such at Sophie and Angie (of Rolling Stones fame), who took care of Susan's grandmother, Gran, for many years in the 1980s and 1990s. I also met Bascombe, a basset hound with a chunk taken out of his ear in a dog fight. Oh yes, I've met a lot of goldfish, gerbil, rabbits, ducks, guinea pigs and other assorted animals from John and Susan's past, as well as some casts, who run around heaven herding dogs!

My Life

I look back at my own life with no regrets but some disappointments, but more on that later. I do remember how mad John was when you first brought me home, Susan. Some family on the army base next to Fairbanks had taken me in with a fishhook in my mouth, causing an infection. Guess I'd been wandering around, skinny, sick, and homeless. they nursed me back to health but couldn't keep me because they already had a dog. Susan answered an ad in the local paper and brought me home without telling John. They'd only been married a short time. Boy, was John mad, which lasted about five minutes, because I was such a naturally friendly dog and yes, cute and cuddly. Almost right away I became "John's dog" and he took me almost everywhere he went for years and years.

My first trip back East in 1987 at about two years old was a disaster, though, and I must tell you I never forgot it. John put me in a little box, and then put me on this noisy thing in Fairbanks and we flew for hours and hours until Susan's Uncle Will Baldwin picked us up in New York! I was shaking and nervous, because I had never seen so many people, but I did enjoy Susan's sister Jane's wedding to Carl as a nice opportunity to run around with some other family pets. Luckily about a month later John took me back home to Alaska, which I would happily never leave again for the rest of my life.

Life for me in the Goldstream Valley outside Fairbanks included a lot of jogging through the hills with John and meeting new canine friends in the neighborhood. John used to love to let me out of the car at the bottom on Bonanza Trail, and I'd run home alongside the car. I could cruise almost indefinitely in those days at about 22 mph.

Eventually country life in Fairbanks ended, though, when John moved to Kotzebue in 1987 and Susan joined him in January of 1988, when my life as a Arctic Spaniel truly began. Kotzebue differed greatly from Fairbanks, as Kotzebue lies on the windswept Arctic coast of Northwest Alaska where the cold winters last a looooooooooong time. But as long as I could hang out with my best bud John, nothing else mattered. For years I accompanies John wherever he went in town, be that work, the post office, or the store, where I'd faithfully wait outside without a leash (lots of trash to pick through, so I never minded). At work, I'd jump into John's boss's lap almost every day. He called me a "people dog" because I'd wag my tail for almost anyone, banking on getting a scratch behind the ears.

Then in June of 1989, I must say, life as I knew it changed forever. john and Susan were living for the summer in a little cabin with no running water in Fairbanks. I had noticed the previous months that Susan had suddenly grown an enormous gut, but then one day she and John came home, and Susan's stomach wasn't big anymore. Instead, they were carrying this little baby around, calling it "Myles." I was shocked, you guys, because whenever we used to ride in the car before that, John would drive and I'd sit on Susan's lap. She stroke me and talk to me, brush my coat. Suddenly both of them seemed preoccupied with what they kept calling "our new addition to the family."

I was a kindly sort, so I wasn't about to do anything mean to this new baby Myles, but I must have spent the entire month gazing off into the distance. Thanks for trying to be nice to me then, but I had lost all my energy. John and Susan spent so much of their time tending to this "new addition" that I felt left out. I remember crying all summer wishing for the way life used to be. And John suddenly had become "Papa" and Susan was now called "Mama." Weird. Now that I'm in Animal Heaven, I want to apologize for my behavior during that time, although I couldn't control my sadness. Sorry.

Mama and Papa did eventually spend more time with me after the first few months of Myles's life, but within 18 months a new baby, Tiffany, was born, and I felt I lost even more ground then. When Tiffany was about two or three years old, though, Mama and Papa started taking regular walks almost every day around Kotzebue, mainly to pick up their mail. They would carry Myles and Tiffany to day care in their "Burley" bicycle cart converted into a baby stroller, then walk to the post office across town. I'd bound around, sniffing the ground for scraps and scents of other dogs, racing up ahead or lagging behind but never taking my eye off Mama and Papa. I almost never strayed far, yet I never really had to be trained to stick with whomever I was with.

Maybe I was forever grateful for someone taking me in after I almost died as a puppy. Those daily walks continued right up to my last year of life, and today from my perch in Animal Heaven, as one of my favorite morning rituals I watch Mama and Papa still taking their morning walks to the post office, although they don't do it as often as when I was around. In fact, half the time they jump on their treadmills at home, particularly on especially windy days when the wind-chill factor drops to, say, 50 degrees below zero or lower. Thanks for getting me out of the house for exercise on all those stormy days.

When the twins, Trevor and Deirdre, came along in 1996, I'll tell you now, I felt as if I'd become more of a household fixture than a pet.. Now I'm not complaining, and I realize that working two jobs and raising two kids, two of them infant twins, doesn't leave a lot of time to pet the dog, but I did wish for simpler "old days" compared to a house filled with babies and kids who had come to outnumber Mama and Papa and Kubla! And the noise! It only increased as the babies grew, and they began to come over to me, who was minding my own business on my bed in the corner, and hassle me. Pull at my ears, drag me around by the collar, that sort of thing. For the record, though, I am proud that I never growled once, even though I know I looked sad about it.

I must admit, a couples, in my more selfish moments, I thought, "Hey you kids, I was here first!" At the same time, I felt obligated more than ever to protect these children, because I could tell they meant so much to Mama and Papa, so I took to barking whenever I heard a strange noise. Mama appreciated my barking when Papa had to go out of town on business. In later years though, I got so hard of hearing that I stopped barking. Hey, you don't bark when you don't hear anything, alright?

Last spring I really started to slow down, right Mama and Papa? One day I went to the post office with Mama and Papa, who didn't recognize how cold it was. The cold never really bothered me, as I had always grown a nice thick coat, including "ptarmigan paws" around my feet to insulate them from frozen ground, ice and snow, but on this day I was shivering miserably at the post office. Mama and Papa warmed me up nicely, though, and got me home safely. Remember when you arrived home that day? The local radio station reported the wind chill at 100 below zero!

Mama and Papa didn't take me out on walks much after that day, but I was just as happy to stay inside and sleep my canine elder status away, particularly because during the day, nobody was home. I could blissfully pursue my bad habits of getting into the trash and sleeping on the couch. No matter how much you scolded me, Papa, I just could never stop doing things. The couch was so soft, and the trash was always full of hidden treasures, even if it did occasionally make me throw up on the rug. Speaking of that, remember the time I ate all that rotten "stink fish" outside and threw up all over the rug? Oops, maybe I shouldn't have brought that up, because I don't think the smell ever went away. Sorry.

Back to my final months. One day last May I could hardly walk. Papa had to pick me up to go outside, and I also was making trouble with the rug. Those were not fun times. Kotzebue doesn't have a vet, so you have to fly pets to Nome or Anchorage, and I was so sick that Mama and Papa didn't think I'd make the flight. They decided it was time to go, so they called "The Dog Lady of Kotzebue," Judy McClain, who said that a local homo sapiens doctor at the hospital was out of the stuff, but if Papa would call his vet in Fairbanks to send out the material, this local doctor could administer it.

Well, I was listening to all these phone conversations and, right the and there, I decided I wanted one more glorious summer in Fairbanks. In the few days it took for the "stuff" to arrive in the mail from Fairbanks, I underwent a miraculous recovery and was up and walking around with relative ease again. I appreciated that stay of execution, as it made me a bit of a folk hero up her in the clouds as well as great "doggie copy" for the Animal Heaven Gazette. Thanks for taking me to Fairbanks last summer, even though I, as always, hated the jet flights it always takes to get there.

Anyway, I did have some good weeks in Fairbanks, but as you know I was also not doing well even that warm, sunny summer. Obviously I was not going to survive another Arctic winter, especially because those jet rides into and out of rural Alaska always took so much out of me. Mama and Papa mercifully spared me that suffering, although for days they couldn't bear to do what they knew was necessary.

One day, though, toward the end of the family's summer in Fairbanks, Mama and Papa turned solemn and serious after a phone call to the local dog pound. They told Myles and Tiffany that morning that I was not coming back to Kotzebue with the family, and they had to let me journey to this place on that day. Later that morning, Mama and Papa looked at me for a long time and petted me softly.

Papa shuffled slowly into the place where they were bringing me, and he could hardly speak to the lady behind the counter to tell her why he was there."Bring her around to the back," the lady said quietly. By this time Mama and Papa were both crying as they carried me into this room, where a very nice young woman began whispering to me in a soothing voice. She took off my collar and handed it to Papa.

Papa and Mama both hugged me for a long time. "Goodbye, Kubla," they said softly. "We love you." Then they went back to the car and cried for a long time. They had only known married life with me. I am writing from Animal Heaven to tell you that with many good memories between us, I know that an important era in your lives as closed. We enjoyed a long, splendid life together.

For months afterwards, I know Mama and Papa still automatically thought of me when it was time each night to let me out for "air," and they looked around unconsciously for me on their walks to the post office. They often have said, "Kubla was such a good dog."That makes my tail wag. Keep smiling, everybody!

Love,

Kubla