Dogs, Balloons and Their Humans

I hope, in my piece last month, I didn’t gush insufferably about the almost magically melded utility and amenity of my upstairs combined sleeping and “writing-study” apartment. Few nonagenarians can be so handsomely set up, and all that is only what’s inside, what’s behind the glass, so to speak. Outside lies a vaster infinitude of miracles which, with rough descriptive economy, we may call “The View”.

Through a wide eastern window (unless it’s cloudy) the sun rises over an immense acreage of open unfenced parkland, with waterholes and billabongs as they drain their way irregularly down to join the Yarra River in the vicinity of Marcellin College. Directly across the road from my front gate passes an unpaved, rough dirt footpath, on which cycling is forbidden and skateboarding impossible; but where a broadminded municipality expressly permits dogs to run off the leash.

I am thus afforded daily a procession demon­strating, not merely aspects of canine nature, but of human; don’t think that any species remains unaffected by the restraint imposed by attachment to a leash, whichever end of it they may adorn.

To report first on the dogs, they most certainly score high marks: over years, never a fight; little even in the way of serious disobedience. A more heterogeneous assemblage of breeds and varieties cannot be imagined: an immense and stately great dane, tall enough to put a saddle on, standing gravely close to his owner, imperturbable, as a tiny excited silky terrier repeatedly hurls himself bodily aloft in unsuccessful leaps to lick the big fellow’s nose.

Ecstatic tides of throbbing canine energies flood across the parkland where it adjoins the “leash-free” path. Young dogs bursting out of their hides with steam built up overnight from confinement in backyard or house, race around at speeds enviable even on a greyhound coursing track; old acquaintances are renewed with friendly yelps and a crazy gallop together; new friendships are formed with just a little more formality—tentative nose contacts, developing, if all the vibes are right, into tail-wagging so frenzied as to threaten severance of the stern from amidships.

I suppose that, without the intervention of human-ordered selective breeding, nearly all dogs would look something like dingoes or wolves. But the indubitable canine quadrupeds who thrive in our park vary enormously from each other in form. For the most part, these alterations have not been imposed on the animals for the animals’ own benefit, but for trivial reasons like exhibiting or showing. The stern Winston Churchill countenance of the bulldog does nothing for its ease of breathing or span of life. How do a dalmatian, a dachshund and a dandie dinmont all recognise each other as dogs? But they do, and not only at breeding time, either.

It is pleasing to report that (according to such wholly casual and unprofessional observations as I can offer) the human duties of the loop end of the leash are being honourably discharged. Very likely a vet would find matters for attention, but I see no signs of gross ill-treatment or neglect. I am sometimes irritated by the silliness of the training methods, and the fatuous baby-talk of what should be the clear language of command. But I suppose we must face it—we’re always going to have some dogs with more brains than their owners.

A significant few owners cheat on their obligation to remove their dog’s droppings immediately from the place of deposit. It isn’t exactly a delicate job, but it isn’t half as horrible as the task of the innocent “treader-by”, who must scrape it from his own shoe and (in a worst-case scenario) from his hall carpet.

It seems almost to have been a social rule for centuries that “who walks a dog carries a stick”. On “my” dog track, the rule has in a few cases been honoured with great-grandpa’s carved cedar walking stick, or with his Malacca cane, but, overwhelmingly, with any old bit of twig or light branch picked up in bushland or off the woodheap. Here I can report a very marked and daily-continuing change. Dog walkers are adopting the conventional English riding crop with the leather flap at the lower end, and more are doing so daily; the dog track is indeed a whole new niche market for the saddlers, and for the new-style outfitters who followed the great R.M. Williams to trade in such wares.

In my earliest days here, two young men drove up and parked, one producing a handsome domestic cat, and the other a sleek ferret. Both animals already wore a neat and secure little harness, to which leashes instantly were clipped. The “walk” that then began would have been the most unremarkable thing in the world, had the animals been dogs; but dogs they were not, and showed no sign whatever of performing a sudden species change just to oblige. The couple of hundred yards they were, in their recalcitrance, dragged, pushed, coaxed or carried was a farcical failure; and unless the performance had been watched and afterwards discussed with a couple of neighbours, I should not have been game to mention it here, lest you should think I’d gone bonkers. A few days later, one of the neighbours returned to it: “Got a theory! They were students working up an act for one of those not-too-prudish college charades; the lewd associations of ‘pussy’ are legion; ‘giving the ferret a run’ will get a wink and a leer and a snigger in any saloon bar in town. What do think of that?”

What do you think, gentle reader?

My broad west window offers a view wholly different from the east, though equally remarkable. On a rising plane, one’s vision soaring over the heights of Kew, one can follow the vapour trails of incoming aircraft as they begin their descents into Melbourne’s airports. Alternatively (provided you are an early riser) you can watch the rise of the squads of the gaily coloured and striped hot-air balloons, as they begin their eerie and periodically silent journey for that day. True, they enjoy the help of modern radio communication, navigation and meteorologic aids. In other respects, every balloonist remains as wholly at the mercy of nature and the elements as Captain Cook; “time and chance happeneth unto them all”, and he may stay aloft no more than a matter of minutes, and come to land in the next suburb; or the trip may finish much later in the day, in a different region of the state.

Often I have stood by my west window, neglected coffee turning cold, mesmerised by the tension of that rise-and-sink, rise-and-sink as the lumbering creatures find—or do not find—a steady atmospheric updraft to get substantially free of the cramping clutch of earth.

Though I have never so much as stepped into one of those stout baskets slung beneath a balloon, it is to a balloon I owe one of the most exciting moments of my life. Let me tell you.

In the early mid-morning of one fine day, and greatly to my irritation, my reading was repeatedly being distracted by an intermittent roaring sound from outside. What could it be? It seemed to be getting louder. I went to the window—the west window, as it happened—and saw the cause: a cheerfully coloured hot-air balloon was bearing directly down upon me. No, I am not joking. I cannot pretend to have preserved even a shred of that “icy calm” or other form of sang froid we used to favour in our pulpwood heroes. The “situation report” which follows is truly the very best I can do for you out of a mind briefly unhinged by what was for me the novelty of the situation, and also “highly fluid”:

Distance when first sighted: 750 yards

Height: 50 feet above my window

Direction of travel: right at me

Speed: awesome

The pandemonium was completed by the monstrous roar as the captain burnt off fuel in a vain effort to gain altitude. He actually passed between my house and next door, a trailing rope slapping my roof with a bang, just cleared a fringe of trees to enter the parkland opposite, and sat down heavily on the grass.

Well, what’s so remarkable about all that? No one was killed, were they? Nobody injured? No significant damage? And don’t I say that one of the main reasons I regard my whole life as a blessed one is that it’s seldom been dull for long?