Stranger Than Fiction (True Stories)
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"Air scenting… In a case where you don't know exactly where the person started, there's still the scent in the air. There's a scent cone that goes like this"-she waves hands in the air-"and you can get the dog to work a Z pattern. They might do it naturally. You want them to go toward the source of the scent."
Still petting Yogi, Michelle blinks, her eyes bright with tears. She says, "I look up, and they're pulling him out of the culvert. That's the only victim I've ever seen, because most of the time, like in Honduras, they come in and dig the victims out after we've left. But I went into deep shock the moment I saw him, and I had this profound urge to just hold him, this little guy."
She says, "We got up to the house and did different interviews and then went into the house to cheer up the family-because the dogs are supposed to cheer up the family-and it was like walking through this aura, this energy-like an environmental condition… like being in a fog.
"We didn't process this like we should have," Michelle says. "I came back home and put Rusty with the other two dogs, to play, and I went off to work. I've always felt like that stuck with him too long because I didn't debrief him, and I don't think I knew how to process it. I don't think I understood what happened-as far as the deep shock-until I went to Honduras.
"You're supposed to let them go find a live person-and I did do that. You make sure, too, that you wash everything. Their jacket. My clothes. Everything that they have on. Wash everything in the car, everything that could've come in contact with the death scent. Just a little bit of that scent and they're depressed again."
She says, "Going back home, the scent pretty much permeated the car, so it would've been good to clean that out as well."
Rusty and Murphy, Michelle's border collie/shepherd mix-like all the victims they found-are dead now. Murphy was put down when he was fourteen and a half years old, after suffering with back problem for three years. Rusty was put down after his kidneys failed.
Looking at photos of children, children hugging Yogi in picture after picture, Michelle talks about meeting a little girl in Tegucigalpa. Her legs running with staph infections, the girl was dipping water out of a puddle of sewage. Michelle put disinfecting tablets in the girl's water. A journalist rubbed antibiotic cream on the girl's legs.
"We had to walk most places because there was the mud, and everyone who saw Yogi would smile," she says. "And if we stopped somewhere, they'd just swarm around to touch him and say, 'Dame lo! Dame lo! Give him to me! And he was just thrilled with it. He loved the attention. I know he understood how important the work was, and I'd tried to explain to him along the way, 'This is very important. You're doing good things for people.»
In a picture of the collapsed soccer field, Michelle points out a crowd that stands at the far edge. "People would stand up here on the edge of the field and just watch us, and this one little boy said, 'Thank you, in English."
She says, "Stuff like that would just destroy me. It was just too heartbreaking to have human contact like that."
She smiles over one picture, saying, "We went to an orphanage to cheer up the dogs. A kid would run and hide, and then the dogs would find him."
Over the next picture, she says, "This is an island. We drove two hours over washboard roads and hairpin turns in the back of a dump truck to get there. This is the back of the dump truck, it's real dusty. We found three bodies."
She pets Yogi, saying, "I think it aged him. He's seen and smelled things most two-year-old pups won't have to go through."
In another photo album, Yogi sits with very thin, smiling men.
"I believe in Bodhisattvas," Michelle says. "In Buddhism, there are beings that are enlightened, and they come back to help others. I think Yogi's purpose in being with me is to help me be a better person and do things. For me, walking into Our House would've been difficult without him, but with him it was like home."
Talking about the AIDS hospice where she now takes Yogi, Michelle says, "I wanted something that was compelling and meaningful, and I kept hearing about Our House from people. At first I asked if they wanted someone to do Reiki, and they said no. Then I said I had this really neat dog, and they said come on over. And that was it. We just started going there every week.
"A lot of them have just lost a pet," she says. "Sometimes that's the mitigating factor: Well, if I have a pet I can't move into Our House. And then the pet dies, and there is a lot of grief associated with that. And anyone who lives there is a little like a refugee. They've lost at least a lover. And, materially, they've lost their household."
Scratching Yogi's ears, Michelle says, "That's just part of his job. The comforting. That's what I mean by the Bodhisattva, that he's more concerned with comforting and helping, almost even more than his own well-being."
She says, "The trip to Honduras was a real seminal moment for me. One of those watershed moments. It was a high in a certain way. You never wondered what your purpose was while you were there because it was so clear. You could just be totally immersed in it."
Both dogs are asleep now on club chairs in this gray ranch house in the suburbs. The backyard is outside sliding glass patio doors, pocked with mud from the dogs running around.
"Prior to going to Honduras, I'd just finished school," Michelle says. "I'd just got my master's, and I'd left Hewlett-Packard. It was like, 'Hey, there's this whole multidimensional world out there beyond trying to fit in stupid corporate culture. Where's the meaning there? One day of searching in Honduras-and I consciously thought this while I was down there-is exponentially more meaningful than twenty years in the corporate world.
"It's just so beautiful," Michelle says. "Part of me cries, still, when I see a dog working, whether it be a Seeing Eye dog or a Yogi when he's at his best. I'm just in awe of it."
She closes the album of Tegucigalpa, Honduras-the pictures of Hurricane Mitch-and puts the album on a stack of albums.
She says, "It was just eight days. I think we did what we could."
Human Error
You've probably seen Brian Walker on television. If not, you heard him on the radio. You saw him chatting with Conan O'Brien, or on Good Morning America. Or he was on with Howard Stern one morning.