I don’t recall that anyone ever taught me that some places possess a spirit, a genius loci. If someone did, it must have been when I was very young because I don’t remember ever not noticing how a place felt, its spirit, as well as how it looks. Over the years I’ve encountered some picture-perfect locations that struck me as sterile and others the conventional wisdom would slap a condemned notice on that possessed more spirit than the greatest cathedral. When I first visited New Hampshire as a child, I intuitively recognized that I was as close to being home as I could ever be on this earth. Decades later when I learned that this place met the ancient spiritual criteria of a dragon’s or tiger’s lair, I understood why the realtor’s fuzzy faxed picture of the nondescript little structure and its property made my heart flip when I first saw it.
Unlike Tom Ryan’s genius loci which resides in the breath-taking White Mountains of New Hampshire, mine resides in the pre-foothills or footlets of the Whites, the tippy-toe hills that channel the Little Sugar into the Connecticut River. It’s a small, pantheistic, androgynous, interspecies spirit for whom the English language possesses no adequate pronoun. But what the English language now does possess thanks to Mr. Ryan and Following Atticus is one of the best accounts of what happens when the power of the spirit of place joins forces with the spirit of the human-animal bond.
Tom Ryan describes himself as an overweight, middle-aged, newspaper editor with a paralyzing fear of heights who climbed 188 peaks in the White Mountains during three winters with his dog, Atticus M. Finch. Admittedly I’m biased, but the fact that Atticus is a 20-pound miniature schnauzer with uncropped ears and a real dog coat instead of a manicured one immediately endeared him to me. Add the pictures in the book that perfectly capture the little dog spirit and, yes indeed, the joie de vivre that I’ve seen in my own little dogs and I was hooked.
But the story also hooked me because it transcends the “This animal saved my life” formula that characterizes so much of the genre. Even though the author follows his dog much of the way on their arduous hikes and personally experiences great physical and emotional pain during this period along with enough adventures and disasters to keep the adrenaline flowing, he never positions Atticus as his emotional and physical protector. Relative to his dog, his criteria are simple: keep Atticus safe and let him be a dog. Atticus has the freedom to lead because he trusts Ryan to do so when necessary.
The book also beautifully points out how little in this era of ever more complicated behavioral/training methods, gadgets, and drugs dogs actually need to know to keep them safe compared to how much we often want to teach them. As I read about Atticus’ off-lead behavior in downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts as he made news-gathering rounds with Ryan, on treacherous snow- and ice-covered mountain trails, and inside the hallowed halls of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, it became clear that the two of them had what no amount of training, gadgets, or drugs can confer: the deep trust in each other that enabled them to transcend personal challengers as well as those posed by +4000’ mountains in winter.
Training, gadgets, or drugs can’t bestow that kind of trust any more than climbing mountains can because it comes from within. It doesn’t result because of something we do to the animal. It results from who we are in all of our sometimes achy-joint, lazy, out-of-shape, whiney crybaby, less-than-glorious state as well as when we’re at our best. (I’m speaking for myself here, not Tom Ryan!) If we don’t trust the animal, the animal can’t trust us; if we don’t trust ourselves, we can’t communicate trust to the animal. So the suck-it-up, life-changing lesson that the bond teaches is that the only way we can share that kind of transcendent relationship with a member of another species is to learn to trust ourselves first. And like climbing mountains, it’s sometimes frightening and difficult work.
Other times, Ryan’s and Atticus’ courting of the spirit of the White Mountains resembled that of a tiny male black widow spider and his even tinier dog trying to woo a much larger, sometimes grumpy female who could just as easily eat them as mate with them. But although the spirit of the mountains and life in general did sometimes try to grind up and spit out man and little dog, it never succeeded. And given the richness of the rewards both bestowed, including what Ryan learned about himself and his dog from the experience, I doubt that was ever the intention. Granted the spirit of the Whites may not be as subtle as Einstein’s God but it, too, isn’t malicious.
But if the human and canine relationship with the mountains sometimes seemed more like the dance between prey and predator, Ryan’s and Atticus’ relationship with each other is more like a game of physical and mental developmental leapfrog, with each of them raising the bar for the other like two kids playing “I double-dog dare ya!” In fact, some of their heart-stopping, laugh-generating, what-were-you-two-thinking (!) escapades so reminded me of the behavior common to younger male mammals of all species that I’d forget that they weren’t members of the same one. I think Ryan would have made a hell of a dog and Atticus would have made a hell of a human. But the human-canine unit they form together is better still.
All of which is my way of saying that this is a book for those who love hiking and dogs as dogs, are fascinated by the human-canine, human-animal, and/or human-nature bond, those who suffer from midlife existential angst, look forward to it with trepidation or have survived it and want to revisit it vicariously, and/or those just want to enjoy a good read from beginning to end.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.
I don’t recall that anyone ever taught me that some places possess a spirit, a genius loci. If someone did, it must have been when I was very young because I don’t remember ever not noticing how a place felt, its spirit, as well as how it looks. Over the years I’ve encountered some picture-perfect locations that struck me as sterile and others the conventional wisdom would slap a condemned notice on that possessed more spirit than the greatest cathedral. When I first visited New Hampshire as a child, I intuitively recognized that I was as close to being home as I could ever be on this earth. Decades later when I learned that this place met the ancient spiritual criteria of a dragon’s or tiger’s lair, I understood why the realtor’s fuzzy faxed picture of the nondescript little structure and its property made my heart flip when I first saw it.
Unlike Tom Ryan’s genius loci which resides in the breath-taking White Mountains of New Hampshire, mine resides in the pre-foothills or footlets of the Whites, the tippy-toe hills that channel the Little Sugar into the Connecticut River. It’s a small, pantheistic, androgynous, interspecies spirit for whom the English language possesses no adequate pronoun. But what the English language now does possess thanks to Mr. Ryan and Following Atticus is one of the best accounts of what happens when the power of the spirit of place joins forces with the spirit of the human-animal bond.
But the story also hooked me because it transcends the “This animal saved my life” formula that characterizes so much of the genre. Even though the author follows his dog much of the way on their arduous hikes and personally experiences great physical and emotional pain during this period along with enough adventures and disasters to keep the adrenaline flowing, he never positions Atticus as his emotional and physical protector. Relative to his dog, his criteria are simple: keep Atticus safe and let him be a dog. Atticus has the freedom to lead because he trusts Ryan to do so when necessary.
The book also beautifully points out how little in this era of ever more complicated behavioral/training methods, gadgets, and drugs dogs actually need to know to keep them safe compared to how much we often want to teach them. As I read about Atticus’ off-lead behavior in downtown Newburyport, Massachusetts as he made news-gathering rounds with Ryan, on treacherous snow- and ice-covered mountain trails, and inside the hallowed halls of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, it became clear that the two of them had what no amount of training, gadgets, or drugs can confer: the deep trust in each other that enabled them to transcend personal challengers as well as those posed by +4000’ mountains in winter.
Training, gadgets, or drugs can’t bestow that kind of trust any more than climbing mountains can because it comes from within. It doesn’t result because of something we do to the animal. It results from who we are in all of our sometimes achy-joint, lazy, out-of-shape, whiney crybaby, less-than-glorious state as well as when we’re at our best. (I’m speaking for myself here, not Tom Ryan!) If we don’t trust the animal, the animal can’t trust us; if we don’t trust ourselves, we can’t communicate trust to the animal. So the suck-it-up, life-changing lesson that the bond teaches is that the only way we can share that kind of transcendent relationship with a member of another species is to learn to trust ourselves first. And like climbing mountains, it’s sometimes frightening and difficult work.
Other times, Ryan’s and Atticus’ courting of the spirit of the White Mountains resembled that of a tiny male black widow spider and his even tinier dog trying to woo a much larger, sometimes grumpy female who could just as easily eat them as mate with them. But although the spirit of the mountains and life in general did sometimes try to grind up and spit out man and little dog, it never succeeded. And given the richness of the rewards both bestowed, including what Ryan learned about himself and his dog from the experience, I doubt that was ever the intention. Granted the spirit of the Whites may not be as subtle as Einstein’s God but it, too, isn’t malicious.
But if the human and canine relationship with the mountains sometimes seemed more like the dance between prey and predator, Ryan’s and Atticus’ relationship with each other is more like a game of physical and mental developmental leapfrog, with each of them raising the bar for the other like two kids playing “I double-dog dare ya!” In fact, some of their heart-stopping, laugh-generating, what-were-you-two-thinking (!) escapades so reminded me of the behavior common to younger male mammals of all species that I’d forget that they weren’t members of the same one. I think Ryan would have made a hell of a dog and Atticus would have made a hell of a human. But the human-canine unit they form together is better still.
All of which is my way of saying that this is a book for those who love hiking and dogs as dogs, are fascinated by the human-canine, human-animal, and/or human-nature bond, those who suffer from midlife existential angst, look forward to it with trepidation or have survived it and want to revisit it vicariously, and/or those just want to enjoy a good read from beginning to end.
If you have any comments regarding subject matter, favorite links, or anything you’d like to see discussed on or added to this site, please let me know at mm@mmilani.com.