Rocky

By Carrie Jacobson

The dog park is a great invention! You take the dogs, unclip their leashes, and let ’em run. They make friend (or enemies), they get more exercise in 30 minutes than we humans could give them in a week, and you get to watch the mesmerizing dynamics of a pack in the making.

This painting is of Rocky, a pit bull pup, and one of the sweetest dogs in the DP (as we’ve taken to calling it within canine earshot). I brought liver treats the first day, and while my dogs wouldn’t take them, Rocky thought I’d brought ambrosia from Mount Olympus.

I’ll be leading a dog-painting workshop at the Wallkill River School Nov. 7. Click on the link to the right to find out more; there’s plenty of room, if you’d like to join!

Rainy Road

By Carrie Jacobson
The highway glistened in a cold rain last week, and promised adventure, and people to see and places to go. For price, size and delivery information about this original oil painting, contact carrieBjacobson@gmail.com.

By Carrie Jacobson

Chapter 19

The story so far: Zoe, a mostly blind lhasa apso, is trying to find her way from the Pike County shelter back to her owner, James Dunning, in Middletown. She’s helped by Kaja, a big red dog who’s been living on her own for a while; they’ve just been joined by Loosey, a cat. The three have met up with a Sheila Macrae, who’s delivering wood in Pond Eddy. She gives them a lift to her home in Deerpark.

That afternoon, the woman invites them into her garage and builds a sort of nest for them. The garage is not heated, and the day has turned chilly, but the woman fills a corner of the space with old rugs and old sheets and blankets, and the dogs and Loosey snuggle together and are warm and comfortable for the first time in a long time.

After dark, she comes into the garage with bowls and two bags of food and a jug of water.

“How are you three getting along?” she asks. “Are you warm enough? I think you’ll be warm enough, if you can all sleep together, and it’s my guess that you’ve been doing that. You’ll have some good food in your bellies, and you’ll get some good sleep, and then tomorrow, you’ll have to be on your way, because I can’t keep you, no, indeed. Bethann would have my head if she found out you’d even been in the garage here, but she’s away and there’s no reason she’d find out, not unless you all come back and tell her.”

She talks like this the whole time, low and steady and soothing, and Zoe remembers James talking to her the same way, and how she loved it, just the sound of his voice, directed at her. He didn’t even have to touch her when he was talking to her like this for her to know he loved her.

She drifts off to sleep thinking of him, and dreams of thick rugs and fireplaces and a quiet voice that never stops talking.

In the morning, the woman comes out to the garage, fills their bowls again and opens the garage doors. She watches them eat, and then she pets Zoe and Kaja, and picks up Loosey and holds her tight.

“I wish you all could stay with me,” she says. “I’d give you a good home. But I can’t have you, and you’re on your way somewhere, so you go now. If I see you, I’ll help you out again, you can count on that. And I’ll be thinking of you. So get along now,” she says, and shoos them out of the garage, and closes the door behind them.

The travelers find themselves on Route 209. They can smell water and food to the east, and so they head that way, walking as far from the road as they can. Kaja leads, and she takes them into the woods, and through backyards, and across side streets. Cars rush past, so fast it feels that the wake they stir will push Zoe into the road.

Late in the morning, they come to the Neversink River. A green bridge takes the roadway across the river, and Kaja sees no other way across.

There is no walkway on the bridge. It’s just roadway and railings, and the cars zoom over it. She waits until she sees nothing and hears nothing, and she sends Loosey.

“Go!” she tells the cat. “Go! Run!” and Loosey steps one white paw on the bridge. She stops, picks up her foot, and then puts it down and races across.

“Now,” she tells Zoe, “we go together.” She nudges the little blind dog onto the bridge, and keeping Zoe between her own body and the railing, Kaja pushes them toward the opposite bank.
Suddenly, a car appears, in the other lane, but coming toward them. It starts onto the bridge and the structure shakes beneath the dogs’ feet. Zoe stops. terrified and trembling.

But the driver sees them and slows, then stops, and Kaja thinks they’re safe, but then she hears a car coming from behind. She pushes Zoe on, but the little dog is scared, terrified, and she freezes up again. Stops dead in the middle of the bridge. Kaja nudges her with her nose. She can hear the car coming up behind them. Zoe won’t move.

Then the driver of the stopped car gets out. It’s a young man with tattoos and a braid, and he’s smoking a cigarette. He looks at the two dogs, and for a minute, Kaja thinks he’s going to yell at them, hit them, the way her man did, all those times, loud and awful, yelling and cursing and burning her with his cigarette and kicking her with his huge feet. He looked like this man, and smelled like this man, and Kaja begins to tremble, and she feels a snarl rising in her throat.

The man takes a step toward them.

The other car inches onto the bridge.

The man swears.

Kaja tenses, ready to attack. If he kicks Zoe, he will kill the little dog.

But the man stops, in the middle of the bridge, and he waves his arms at the other car and it stops.

He puts himself between Kaja and the other car. Kaja can hear his own car running, and she can hear the radio playing through the open door, and she nudges Zoe again, and this time, the little dog starts moving, walking, and then running, and in a minute, they are over the bridge and into the woods, where Loosey is waiting.

Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com

By Carrie Jacobson

Bert is my brother’s bulldog. He’s been a good dog for a long time. Now, he’s creaky and grumpy and very white in the face. A burglar would have to wake him up to get a rise out of him. To have me make a painting of your dog or cat, contact me at carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

By Carrie Jacobson

The story so far: Zoe, a mostly blind lhasa apso, and Kaja, a big red chow mix, are traveling from the Pike County shelter to Middletown to find Zoe’s owner. They have just rescued Samantha Morrone from a near-tragic rafting accident on the Delaware, and have holed up for the night in an abandoned car. Samantha, her brother Ashton and their parents, Angie and Pete, are looking for the dogs, who have been joined by a cat named Loosey.
Chapter 18
In the morning, Angie keeps Samantha home from school. She’s OK, really, but Angie just can’t let her out of her sight. Yesterday, she came too close to losing her. And she didn’t even know! This makes Angie feel sick inside. It makes her feel like wrapping Sam in a blanket and tucking her into bed and keeping her there for the next 10 years, while she waits on her hand and foot. She’d do the same with Ashton, too, but Pete took him, first to search for the dogs, and then to go to school.
Pete and Ashton drive past Glen Spey first, looking for the dogs, searching and calling out the windows, but they see nothing, not a person, not a cat, not a dog, nothing but cars.

Pete turns around and doubles back. He leaves Ashton at the school, where he joins a group of his friends, all looking at something that one of the boys has. Pete taps the horn before he drives away, and Ash turns and smiles and waves, and Pete feels his heart lurch.
He looks for the dogs as he drives down 97 again, headed for his office. He doesn’t see them, though he passes within a couple hundred yards of where they’re sleeping, curled together in the abandoned car.
In time, they get up, stretch, and head back to the road. The cat trots along with them, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes vanishing for long stretches.
At one point, she comes out of the woods carrying a dead chipmunk. In the next hour, she kills two others. Kaja and Zoe and Loosey the cat, bellies full, curl up together in a sunny spot near a house  just off Barnes Road.
They’re sleeping there when someone rattles up the driveway to the house in a beat-up old truck, carrying a load of wood. The driver turns the truck around, backs it up to a spot behind the house, and gets out and pulls down the tailgate.
At first, Kaja thinks the driver is a man, but as she watches, she begins to see that it’s a woman. She’s built like a man, and her haircut is like a man’s, and she’s wearing a big flannel shirt over a T-shirt. But Kaja watches, and she can tell from the person’s movement, and from her scent, that she’s female. And strong.
The dogs watch as the woman tosses the wood from the truck. She works without stopping, without wiping her brow, without bothering to hitch up her jeans or pull down her shirt. When she’s done, though, she opens the door of the truck, pulls out a paper bag, and goes around to the back of the truck. There, she sits in the sun on the tailgate and eats a sandwich and an apple and drinks from a thermos.
She takes out a cigarette then, and smokes it, and tosses the crust of her sandwich toward the spot where the dogs are hiding.
“Come on out,” she says, and her voice is low and soft. “Come on out, dogs, I see you there.”
Zoe takes a step toward the woman. She can’t see her, but she can smell her, and she likes the smell. It makes her think of home. She takes another step, and now she can smell the sandwich.

She doesn’t like eating animals. She doesn’t like eating trash. She likes eating kibble that comes in a bag. She likes the crusts of sandwiches, and little tastes of meat and cheese, and fresh, cool water in a bowl, and suddenly, her old life comes back to her, and she misses it so much, she begins whining. She creeps toward the woman, and when she gets close enough, the woman offers her a cookie, and Zoe walks right up to her and takes it.
The woman lifts her up, and holds her on her lap and pets her. Kaja, watching, creeps closer, too, and the woman bends and pats her on the head, then rubs her ears, and Kaja lies down beneath the tailgate.
And as the woman continues to caress Zoe, she begins to laugh. Loosey the cat has come out of hiding, too.
“Well, aren’t you all something,” the woman says. “Your own little ‘Incredible Journey,’ eh? Except you’re supposed to be a Siamese,” she says, pointing to Loosey.
“Come on,” she says, “get on in.” She puts Zoe in the now-empty truck bed, and pats it. Kaja looks at her, and at little, blind Zoe, and then she jumps up. The truck smells like wood and dirt and warm sunshine on a cool October day. The woman pats Zoe and then looks at Loosey.
“If you’re with them, then, come along,” she says, and the cat leaps up, light as moonbeams. The woman starts the rattling truck, heads out to the road and turns toward Port.

Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com

Purple Haze. Oil on stretched canvas, 8x10. For price and delivery information, contact carrieBjacobson@gmail.com

By Carrie Jacobson

There’s something about an abandoned house that speaks to me. I see these houses, I pass them day after day, and I watch nature take them over, take them back. As vines climb up their sides, as the fields push their way into the lawns, as the roofs fall in and the paint weathers off, these abandoned places speak more clearly to me. This one is on Route 17K, just outside Montgomery. Last week, the purple wildflowers shone softly in the autumn sun, and the goldenrod bent and swayed in the wind.

By Carrie Jacobson

The story so far:

Zoe and Kaja are traveling from the Pike County shelter to Middletown to find Zoe’s owner. They’re sleeping at the edge of the Delaware when the river rises and nearly sweeps them away. At the height of their trouble, they see Samantha Morrone, a young girl they’ve met on their travels. She’s adrift on a raft, being swept down the river. Kaja, the big red dog, rescues her, and then she helps get Zoe, a nearly blind lhasa apso, to safety. She also rescues Loosey, a cat who’s ended up in trouble on the river.

Kaja

Chapter 17

The sun is nearing the horizon as Samantha, Kaja, Zoe and Loosey climb the bank, toward the road. When they reach Route 97, Samantha sees they’re just about in Handsome Eddy, which she knows only because she thinks it’s such a funny name for a town. Well, it’s not really a town. Not much of a town. More like a wide place where rafters like to hang out.

Samantha is scared. She is cold and wet and her teeth are chattering, and she is scared. She knows she almost died out there on the river, and that’s scary enough. But when she thinks about what her parents are going to say, what they’re going to do, she’s even more scared.

Maybe she should just run away. Go with these dogs, wherever they are going. Never go home. She made it this far, she thinks. She can’t be in much worse trouble than she’s in now.

But she’s hungry, too, and so cold. The big red dog noses into a driveway. She looks at the house, and then looks at Samantha. The dog isn’t talking, not in words, but she might as well be. The dog is telling Samantha to go to the house. Call her parents. Face the facts.

She starts down the driveway, and then tells the dogs to sit. They do, and the cat sits, too, which makes Sam smile. She turns around once, and they’re still there. Then she rounds a curve in the drive, and nearly runs to the house.

She knocks on the door. Nothing happens. She looks for a bell, but doesn’t see one. She knocks again and waits. She begins to realize how cold and wet and scared she is. She’s trembling. Her hands are white, she sees, her fingernails blue. The day is cooling, and her wet clothes are starting to feel icy on her skin.

This time, she bangs on the door, hard, and when it opens, there’s a woman standing there, and Samantha has seen her before, and when the door opens, Sam smells dinner cooking, and out of the blue, just like that, she begins to sob. She flings herself into the woman’s arms, and nearly collapses.

“Oh, dear,” the woman says, “oh, dear! What has happened to you? Come in, come in, come in, now, and ssshhhh, stop your crying, dear, you’re safe now, safe and warm,” and, talking all the time, she nearly carries Samantha into the living room, puts her on a couch, wraps her in a blanket, and goes to make her a cup of tea. By the time she gets back to the living room, Samantha has fallen asleep.

Outside, in the driveway, Kaja and Zoe and the cat wait. They hear the door open. They hear voices. They hear the door shut. And then there’s nothing.

They wait. The sun falls. The breeze picks up. Kaja noses toward the road, and they set off. She looks back once. She can see that a light has come on in the house. She likes the girl. She could love the girl, she knows. But they have to go. They have to find Zoe’s man.

Mary Dubrovnik lets Samantha sleep for 10 minutes, then wakes her. The girl would sleep all night, Mary knows, but she has parents and family and they must be worried sick. The girl is familiar, she’s from somewhere nearby, but Mary can’t place her.

She wakes Samantha, and gets her phone number, and calls.

Angie answers. She’s breathless.

“Pete!” she shouts, when Mary gets the sentence out, “Pete! She’s safe. She’s, she’s – ” her words fall over themselves, and she begins to cry, and Pete takes the phone from her, finds Mary’s address and tells her he’ll be right there.

By the time he arrives, Samantha is warm, fed and nearly dry. By the time he arrives, Zoe and Kaja and Loosey have feasted on the remains of a roasted chicken from someone’s trash can. They’ve drunk water from a stream and they’ve found an abandoned car behind an abandoned shed, and curled up on the back seat, warm and safe and sheltered, and fallen fast asleep.

Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com

By Carrie Jacobson

Chapter 16

The story so far: Zoe and Kaja are making their way from the Pike County shelter to Middletown. Kaja, a big red dog, is helping Zoe, a mostly blind lhasa apso, find James Dunning, her owner.

On the way, they meet Samantha and Ashton Morrone, a brother and sister who live in Barryville with their parents, who run a hotel. The kids want to keep the dogs, but Pete Morrone, the children’s father, says no. He later relents, but it’s too late. The dogs have vanished.

They’ve made their way down the Delaware, and spent the night in a cave. But a heavy rain has made the river rise, and Zoe has been swept off the bank and onto a tiny island, where she’s discovered a cat clinging to a piece of driftwood.

Kaja stands on the bank of the Delaware and barks. The water is rushing by so fast, so strong, it’s roaring, roaring, and Kaja can hardly hear herself. She can see Zoe, wet and bedraggled, sniffing at the cat, and the cat sinking down into itself and baring its teeth as if it’s going to leap on Zoe and attack. Please, please, she begs, please don’t do anything to scare that little dog into the water.

Kaja decides to swim, then, and she wades into the river, but instantly, she’s pushed downstream. She makes it to the bank and tries again. Same result.

This time,  she gets her breath and shakes herself and walks up the bank, up the river, until she’s above the island. She walks in and in an instant, is carried downstream, past the island.

Once more, she makes it to the bank, and this time, walks even farther upstream. She wades into the water, launches herself, swims as hard as she can, and ends up, soaking and cold and exhausted, on the island with Zoe and the cat.

Zoe meets her, barking and wagging. Kaja sinks down on the sand, her muscles too tired to keep her upright, and Zoe licks the big dog’s face, licks her ears, rubs her little body against the big dog’s, while the cat, wet and cold and terrified, watches.

The cat’s name is Loosey, and until an hour ago, she lived in a house in Barryville. She was out in the yard, climbing on a piece of driftwood, when the branch broke free and was swept down the river. It snagged on this island and Loosey jumped off. No matter what, she thought, this had to be better than drifting down the Delaware.

Now, she’s not so sure. She’s trapped on a tiny island, in the middle of a raging river, with two strange, wet dogs. She’s had better days, she thinks.

Then, as though a door has closed, the rain stops. The sun comes out. Kaja and Zoe, still exhausted, fall asleep in the sun. Loosey dozes on her branch. And the river continues to rise.

Upstream, Samantha and Ashton Morrone see that the rain has stopped, and go out to their fort. Their dad is at work, and their mom is busy with some hotel guests, so they just call in to her that they’re going outside, and in a minute, they’re scrambling down the riverbank to the fort/raft they’ve made.

Samantha steps on it and it rocks under her feet. “Whoa!” she says, and takes another cautious step. The raft rocks again, the water lifting it, nudging it, pushing it. Samantha steps toward the far edge, and in a moment, just like that, the raft is loose, and drifting downstream.

“Sam!” Ashton calls from the bank, “Sam! Oh no!”

“Get help!” Sam wails. “Get Mom!”

In a moment, she is out of sight, hurtling down the river.

On the island, the water is rising, and rising quickly. Kaja is asleep on her side, and the water reaches her feet, and she’s up instantly. In a while, she knows, there will be no island. The water will cover it, and they will be swept away.

She’s nudging Zoe to the edge of the water when she hears a human screaming, above the rush of the river. She looks upriver, and she sees Samantha, and the raft, and without a thought, she leaps.

The brown water churns against her and buffets her, but somehow, she manages to get near enough to the raft that Samantha can see her. The girl tosses her a rope, and Kaja grabs it with her teeth. She turns around and tries to swim toward the bank, or toward the island, but now the river is pulling her downstream. She summons all her strength and heads toward the island, and just as she is about to pass it, just as she is about to miss it, her feet hit something solid, a boulder or a log or something, she doesn’t know what, and she grabs onto it and, with all her might, pulls the rope and the raft toward the shore.

Samantha leaps into the water, toward the island. She holds the rope and searches with her feet for purchase on the riverbed. The water is so strong, it knocks her sideways, but then she finds something, a rock or something underfoot, and she wedges herself against it, and pulls on the rope and hauls herself onto the tiny island.

She lies there, panting and crying, and then she gets up and hugs the big red dog with all her might.

And then she sees that it’s not over, that if they don’t get off this island quickly, they’ll be swept away.

But this time, the raft will help. She pulls it around until it’s between the island and the shore. It’s a distance for a dog to swim, but not so far for a girl. She ties the raft to a log on the island, and then she takes another rope, ties that to the raft, and heads toward the shore. She’s knocked downstream a ways, but not that far. She makes it to the bank and then walks upriver until she can tie the rope to a tree. Then, holding onto the rope, and then the raft, she makes her way back to the island.

She picks up Zoe and, holding onto the ropes and the raft, carries her through the water to the bank. She goes back for Kaja, whom she leads and guides through the water. And then, she goes back for the cat. She doesn’t know where the cat has come from, or how the cat figures into all of this, but she’s not going to leave her there.

And then, as they sit in the sun on the bank of the Delaware, wet, exhausted, weak, they watch as the rising water covers the island, knocks the raft loose and carries it away, toward the sea.

Carrie can be reached at carrie@zestoforange.com

A note for readers: The real Kaja, our big red German shepherd/chow, suffered a series of seizures and/or strokes this week. She appears to be on the mend, but if you can hold her in your thoughts, we’d both appreciate it.  Carrie

The real Kaja

By Carrie Jacobson

On Golden Field. Oil on stretched canvas, 16x20. Contact carrieBjacobson@gmail.com for price and delivery information.

As summer winds into fall, the fields are coming alive with autumn’s bright and burnished colors. Here, mule ears bloom an astonishingly brilliant yellow in a low, swampy marsh.