Post date: Feb 15, 2009 2:12:10 PM
In 1997, Jon Krakauer published Into Thin Air, his personal account of the 1996 Mount Everest climbing expedition that claimed 8 lives. From that point on, I became obsessed with Everest. I read and re-read "Into Thin Air." I read the "Vanity Fair" expose. I watched the painfully bad TV movie. I read a stack of Everest memoirs by other authors. I watched the Discovery series. Suddenly Everest was everywhere. My SO and I joked that we were going to write our own book called "My Everest," in which we would explore our fear that we might be seized by a sudden, irrational urge to climb Everest ourselves.
As my 7-year-old lab Touki and I headed into what I hoped would be the home stretch of our AKC agility MACH title (36 double Qs, almost 600 points), the Everest metaphors came back to haunt me. Everest has it all: cheap symbolism, tragedy, irony, hubris, greed, heroism. It's practically synonymous with "lofty but achievable goal." Anyone who has money, reasonable fitness, decent skills, and maniacal determination can theoretically get to the top of Everest. This, plus the fact that it is the "tallest mountain in the world" (not the hardest climb, just "tallest"), is what makes it so seductive. It practically adds itself to any list of lifetime goals:
Climb Everest, get MACH. Anyone can do it with money, determination, and a little luck. After years of frittering around in CPE, NADAC, and USDAA (where our ambitions never went beyond one underwhelming visit to the Nationals and a PD3 title), Touki and I suddenly found ourselves doing pretty well in AKC agility. Much better than we had in the past. We stopped knocking bars. We finished our MXJ (more than a year after finishing our MX) and started accumulating double Q's. We passed the 20 QQ mark. We were making slow but steady progress on our MACH points. Even though getting our MACH had never seemed like a serious proposition before, all of a sudden we appeared to be within striking distance. "My Everest."
But like Everest, the MACH is a harsh mistress. In the Everest chronicles, there are those few who can seemingly move up and down the mountain at will, but for most there are no guarantees. Jon Krakauer summited Everest, returned to camp, and climbed into his sleeping bag for a nap. Few others in his party shared his good fortune. In agility, dogs that are blessed with speed, consistency, and competitive longevity (there are countless things that can interrupt or end a dog's agility career) can rack up the MACHs. For everyone else, it is a crap shoot.
A recurring theme in the Everest memoirs is climbers who make it almost to the top and then are forced to turn back. Small errors and misfortunes have a cumulative effect as climbers move up the mountain. Delays in leaving camp, injury, unexpected changes in the weather, exhaustion, hypoxia, a chance slip on the ice, equipment failures, the bottleneck created by other climbers on the final stretch, insufficient supplemental oxygen--there's no margin for error. I'm struck by how many of the people who don't make it the first time go back and try again. Some of them pay for their obsession with their lives.
The MACH is also a marathon with little margin for error. Touki and I didn't commit til late. Then we lost 3 summers of competition in a row to injuries: in 2006 I was on crutches with a foot problem, in 2007 she had a broken toenail and an abscessed tooth, in 2008 her bad nail broke again and got infected.
After her last series of nail problems, I thought we might be done with agility. But she came back to competition in October 2008, and immediately started getting double Qs again. Our Nov-Dec trials at Rancho Murieta were some of our best ever. Finally, we seemed poised to clinch our MACH.
On our last day at Rancho Murieta 6 weeks ago, a curious thing happened. Touki refused the table. I didn't think much of it until a few weeks later, when she refused the table in Santa Rosa. The next day, she refused it again.
Shortly after that, I turned her too sharply onto the dogwalk in practice, and she slipped off. She refused to go back on it. I had a followup practice session where I got her on it again, but she wasn't performing it normally. She would hesitate, and then fling herself forward like she was trying to get it over with as fast as possible to get to the meat on the other side. In our next practice session, she went over the dogwalk exactly once. After that, she stood there and looked at it. Then she started refusing the A-Frame.
Touki is far-sighted, and that affects her depth perception. Since her last eye exam 2 years ago, I've been keeping my fingers crossed that her eyesight would hold out long enough for her to finish her MACH. But alas, time seems to be running out on us. She was recently examined by a chiropractor who pronounced Touki the most sound dog she had seen in months. Her joints and her back seem fine. She's jumping and weaving well. She just doesn't want to go on the contacts. In talking to other people, this seems to be a common phenomenon--middle-aged dogs who start refusing contacts because of deteriorating eyesight.
Needless to say, the irony is not lost on me that while I've been worrying about Trevor's eyesight because of his PRA, Touki's worsening eyesight might be ending her agility career at age 7. Yup, got it, universe. IRONY. You can stop hitting me over the head with a 2x4 now.
I'll get her eyes tested again. I'll consider corrective lenses (yes! they have them for dogs), but somehow I don't think that jabbing my fingers into Touki's eyes is going to improve her enthusiasm for agility too much. We'll still do jumpers in the hopes of getting our points some day. I'll keep trying to get Touki back on the contacts. But deep down, I kind of feel like she's telling me "Who cares if we can see the summit from here? It's time to turn around, Mom."
Touki never asked to go to Everest. But she pushed herself to perform way outside of her comfort zone because she wanted to be with me. In the process she taught me everything I know about agility and dog training. Thank you, my sweetheart. I love you.