Levon & the Vortex

A dog's coming-of-age story.

OUR FARM DOG, Levon, is an Anatolian shepherd who just turned one year old. He has needed a lot of care and attention during this year of puppyhood, and now finally he has become an adult. I believe that he came of age after one dramatic and life-threatening event that I want to tell you about.

This is the story of that event. I wrote it as a prose poem.

You should know that I live on a dirt road, and one-fourth mile down it is a farm pond formed by an earthen dam, and the dirt road runs across the top of the dam. I walk the road, often daily. The dogs walk with me.

Every dammed pond needs an overflow pipe that protects the dam from blowing out. During most weather, this particular overflow pipe operates steadily and safely. It is not covered with a grill and doesn’t need to be. Water trickles through, keeping the pond at a manageable level and diverting water off the road.

The outlet pipe is about 2.5 feet in diameter. It is made of metal.

The pond is on the east side of the road, and the outlet pipe goes underneath the road and empties on the west side. The water that empties from the pond continues on as a stream, joining Slaughter Creek and then the Altamaha River.

During major rainstorms, I learned recently, the overflow pipe becomes a hungry beast. It creates a dangerous vortex that will suck you down it.

A very scary thing happened to Levon at the pond after a lot of rain fell here. Here’s the story. It happened about a week before the last hurricane, Debby, and about 8 days before Little Fawn, the baby granddaughter I’m mothering, arrived.

First, here’s Levon as a big puppy.

Here’s what the dirt road looks like.

Here’s what the dammed pond looks like in summer. The pond looks peaceful enough, murky with green duckweed, colonized by cattails.

RAIN FELL HARD all afternoon and at evening I walked the three dogs along the lane. At the dam the pond overran the road, scouring the clay. I wet my boots crossing it. Duckweed had pooled in the lee of the drainpipe, and frogs resting bankside startled as we passed,

one by one leaping, croaking and covered with duckweed, into the vortex. The dog Levon wanted to jump after them and I called him back. A minute later I heard a tremendous splash and he was in, instantly above his head. He rose once like a green monster covered with clumps of weed,

clambering for the road, and then a horrible vastness pulled him down and under and away. He never rose again. Levon, I screamed. An alligator had taken him, surely—he was large and would be a match. I stood above the green and noxious vortex, water sheeting

across the road behind me, everywhere the roar of power, and I screamed into the lake, Levon, Levon, please, Levon. Then I knew he’d been sucked down. I also knew not to jump in after him, not to give my life to avoid the coming grief. I ran to the other side of the road,

watched brown water rushing from the outlet. I was screaming and screaming, but the dog never emerged. I recrossed to the vortex, threw myself onto the road, and plunged my arms as far as I dared into weed-thick water that boiled on its way down,

down to the center of the earth. I could feel the open pipe sucking at me. I could feel its ravenousness. Somewhere under me, beneath tons of earth and berm, perhaps stuck midway a wide pipe, my beautiful dog was drowning. The thought was more than I could bear.

I flung myself to my feet and ran again to the other side and still the outlet rushed to empty the storm into the roiling stream. I bent to the pipe screaming for my dog. I begged the water, I begged the lake, I begged the storm, I begged the wilderness to save him.

But too much time had passed now and I wailed then, I keened, I screamed over and over to please, no, don’t take him, give him back. Levon, come back, please, Levon. Levon. My anguish went unheard, too far from neighbors. There was nothing to do but wait

until the lake subsided and then rescue his body, so much like a small child’s, those intelligent, golden-brown eyes. There was nothing to do but turn for home to wade through the awful gauntlet of shock. There was nothing to do but make a call to my partner,

his true owner, and start down the trail of grief. Then ahead I glimpsed white movement. Suddenly my dog—it was my dog, in the flesh—attained the road from creekside. He had survived. And I ran to him and gathered my arms around him, still trembling,

smashed and reconstituted, weeping, for he had been returned to me. He had a tired and faraway look in his eyes. He wanted to talk to me, but some things are too terrible to say. Hours later I still shook, trying to process the terror. My childlike dog had been returned to me.

A hungry maw took him. It shot him down the gullet of no return, through a birth canal where nothing with lungs survives, but I beat at the earth with my fists and I screamed at it and I begged and begged, and it had mercy on me. Oh my god, this beatific gratitude.

Now Levon has begun his second life.

Note

I’ve analyzed what happened from all angles. I think that Levon was sucked immediately into the drainpipe, which miraculously was free of strainers and debris. He shot straight through the dam, underneath the road where I was standing, and was dumped into the roiling creek on the other side. The creek was raging, and he was swept downstream. Likely he was carried hundreds of feet into the woods before he was able to get purchase on a bank and climb out. Then he walked back to the road, dazed and shaken. I glimpsed him climbing from the west side of the dam, back into the roadway, and I couldn’t believe my eyes.

If you’ve been reading my posts, you know that my life has been wild lately. There was the hurricane. And the newborn. One night a tree fell, just barely touching the house. It has been a lot.

I thought long and hard about sharing this story with you. It’s traumatic, plain and simple. But it’s also a miracle, that a large dog traveled through floodwater through a culvert underneath a road and survived.

And am I glad.

Here’s a picture from a few days ago of Levon and the baby enjoying life.