***A young Bernie scoping out her backyard, with the infamous chicken coop I referred to in my February 27 post.***
Lake Tahoe, January 1995
As I've mentioned many times, Bernie and I spent a great deal of time me mountain biking her running in the Tahoe mountains. The last couple years, after Poochie went away, we had a relatively standard route--it made me bust my butt riding up the mountain, offered me a picturesque resting spot, provided Bernie with more than enough running time and time to explore her inner dog, and the trail down the mountain tested my mountain biking skills adequately and depending on how frisky I got, it could be pretty intense. Finally, this route offered Bernie the chance to sit and swim and frolic in her favorite watering hole at the bottom of the mountain.
I'll interject that I crashed more than once on my mountain bike but not often, and the only time I had any visible injury was when I was going uphill, a steep incline, at about one mile per hour. My front tire hit a root, stopping me cold and spilling me over. My eyelid hit my handlebars, and it split open. This was about a month after I'd split my head open because of the wind--it blew my car door when I was climbing into the car and totally messed up my groove, and I ended up hitting my head just above my right eye on my car. Hard. It was dark for more than a moment following that, and resulted in a trip to the ER and stitches. Anyway, because I'd just been there and done that, I let the eyelid be, even though it split all the way through. It self-repaired just fine. That's my interjection.
So as with many things in life, when you deviate from your normal path, cool and good things often present themselves. In that spirit, Bernie and I went right instead of left one day upon reaching the mountain. There were trails everywhere back there, to the Forest Service's chagrin, which was somewhat odd because in my three years back there, I saw maybe a dozen other people total, even less bikers. So we went right, rode and ran, and came upon a raging creek. I'm sure Bernie looked back at me as she spotted this, not to ask permission to jump in but to declare, I'm going in. While not large enough for rafting or anything of the sort, this was a formidable and COLD rocky stream of water, to the point where there was no way I'd be able to recover her should there be trouble. But dogs will be dogs, and owners who like their dogs to live "wild" will be themselves, and off Bernie went without any resistance from me. She struggled some but loved it. She was a strong dog, her front legs and chest powerful till the day she died. She banged on the rocks a bit, and eventually I joined her. For those of you who have ever skied Heavenly in South Lake Tahoe, that's from where that water cometh--from the snow on Heavenly's mountains.
It's amazing how therapeutic it is to watch a dog just be a dog--be one with nature, those were always my favorite moments with Bernie. To the very end, there would be moments where I'd kind of trip out over the whole "there's a live animal that dwells in my house." It was a really cool sensation for me. While I love the city and its sounds, activities, and weirdos, I also enjoy the simple fact that I am but a simple organism on a planet full of myriad organisms, mortal but powerful in my own right.
We all go away, yet we all live on via those we've loved, made smile, enlightened, and even pissed off.
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