October 08, 2008

11:19 a.m.

The Simple of Home

It happened just like I knew it would, and yet I'm still in a little disbelief. I'm home.

Many years ago I read The Plague Dogs by Richard Adams (Watership Down) and it was one of my very favorite books. It's about two dogs who are taken by a science lab and subjected to cruel and terrible experiments. They escape, and the scientific community puts out that they are carrying the plague and should be shot on sight -- because they don't want the world to know of their nefarious experiments. The big black dog, Rowf, has been drowned repeatedly to see how long he can be dead and still get revived. He has a phobia about water. The little dog, Snitter, had his brain snipped so that he doesn't think properly and he thinks there are flies in his head. Their adventure (with a fox they meet) is juxtaposed over that of the humans who are trying to kill them, and a very nosy, unlikeable reporter named Digby Driver who, in the course of pursuing this story, undergoes an amazing personal transformation.

In the final climactic scene the dogs are chased into the sea and they both drown. But by then, Digby has figured it all out and found the man from whom the dogs were stolen, and the owner rescues them at the last minute and saves them.

In dog lore, there is a place all dogs go when they die, called, of course, the Isle of Dog. Rowf and Snitter think they've died and gone to the Isle of Dog, because when they wake up everything is all right, they are with their master again, and... miraculously, Snitter's brain has knit itself back together and all the flies have gone. As they lie by the hearth, Snitter says, "It's jolly being dead, isn't it, Rowf?"

In the last couple of weeks, as I imagined being home again, this phrase kept coming into my mind. My apartment needs a lot of work, my big suitcase is still AWOL, and twenty other things need tending to immediately, but I am on the Isle of Dog and it is jolly being dead.