JESSIE

In numerology, the number fifteen is associated with love and relationship. Fifteen years ago, a fifteen-year-old horse crazy girl found a stray puppy at the barn and brought her home for good. Shannyn named her new best friend Jesse and never ventured far without her. Now Jesse is a fifteen-year-old gray-faced, deaf and mostly blind old girl, and her beloved companion has journeyed to a country far, far away.

The heartbreaking choice to leave Jesse behind was made in December 2019 when Shannyn’s Marine staff sergeant husband was transferred to one of the 31 active US military installations on the Okinawa prefecture of Japan. A 22-hour trip crated in the belly of a plane would be an excruciatingly stressful experience for a senior dog, so Shannyn’s mom Letitia invited Jesse to live out her golden years in the country. It was an easy offer, as Letitia loved her daughter’s furbabe as her own.

Jesse soon acclimated to full-time life with Letitia and her pack of new playmates. She had freedom to roam in a fenced pasture but as hounds are apt to do, she would find a giving spot in the wire, then push through and disappear like a phantom. Jesse never went too far from home, though, just a short jaunt across the road for a visit and a biscuit and then maybe a drop-in on the people building a new house down the hill. And because she is an old, slow, low-rider of a good dog, Jesse makes friends easily with children, adults, and other animals.

Her many fans considered Jesse the neighborhood ambassador and they watched out for her. They knew her comings and goings, her favorite paths. And she never missed a meal. That is, until a dragster of a thunderstorm dropped 150 decibels (way beyond the safety range for canine ears) right on top of Jesse while Letitia was working third shift at the local hospital.

Deaf or not, dogs feel storms well before people do. And Jesse wasn’t waiting around for the other dogs to decide what to do. Off she went in a blind panic on a Saturday night when the sky trolls got drunk and decided to go bowling.

Monday afternoon around 4pm, the message came in. “Hi, I’m not sure if I have the right person but a lady… my daughter’s dog is too old to ship…there was a bad storm…I posted everywhere…what to do… before the fireworks start…”

Two hours later, Letitia stuffed two spare bottles of Liquid Smoke in her pockets and off we went on a walkabout that, as it progressed, felt much like living inside a weird board game. Success depended on timing, intuition, helpful characters, unhelpful characters, perplexing landscapes, observation, trespassing, patience (scads of patience), dumb luck and divine intervention.

In other words, it was a typical track.

We followed one of Jesse’s well-known trails across the road, feeling that she would take the path of least resistance. Old dogs usually do not travel uphill because they can’t, so we stayed on mostly level ground. This strategy produced zero visible results and we had no sense of her being in that area.

What did Jesse do? Where did she go? There had been no reported sightings. She wasn’t tucked up under any buildings or in any garages that we could see. We were stumbling blind, much like Jesse, and the concern that she had fallen into one of many steep ravines gnawed at me.

Path of least resistance, I muttered. Path of least resistance. She’s not in the ravine. Too much thick brush. Too wooded. She’s not there. So up this little gravel spur we walked, following loud voices directly ahead of us.

“They don’t sound very friendly, do they?”

“No, they don’t. But we have to check.”

The Louds didn’t laugh at my lame joke about forgetting the pie and they didn’t want to see photos of Jesse. They wanted us to move on. But they didn’t shoot us and for that we are grateful.

Daylight was dimming fast, so we scurried back to the car, drove down a slow road with a pretty name, and spoke with a gentleman who told us the story of his two rescue dogs before directing us down the hill. “Lots of dogs live down there,” he said. “Many strays pass by here on the way to there. I don’t know what happens to them, but I hear barking night and day.”

That’s when we got our first big break. Pastor Dave was visiting his mama down on the end of that well-populated gravel road. His niece fetched him from the house for us and after hearing our story about Jesse, he told us stories of the dogs who came through and stayed, which ones were feral, and who was buried where. I gave him my card and we skedaddled as the sunset whispered “hurry” in my mirror.

We dropped down one more gravel road, this one unpopulated except for a trailer and an abrupt young man who misled us and sent us further away from Jesse’s home.

As I was figuring out how to use the intercom system at the bougie end of the road and unintentionally aggravating a resident by leaving multiple patchy messages, my phone rang. And that’s when Jesse’s track began to pop like a cork being eased out of a shaken champagne bottle.

“It’s Pastor Dave,” the caller said. “I know where your dog is. She is in the back of a car right down the road.” He paused, then continued over our excited yelling. “Hush, listen. My sister Kimberly was driving and passed by a woman who looked like she needed some help with an old dog that was sitting on the side of the road, so she turned around and stopped to help.”

But, that’s not all,” Pastor Dave continued. “I told mama about you two women coming down to the house looking for a lost dog,” said Pastor Dave. “She called Kimberly and told her to be on the lookout. And Kimberly told mama that she was looking at the dog right then, so I called you. I’m talking to you while mama is talking to Kimberly. How about that?”

Taking those curves like Petty, I hollered, “We see them, Pastor Dave! Thank you! Thank you!”

And then I lost my phone.

Net net, fifteen minutes after Letitia and I speak with Pastor Dave about Jesse, two women who are perfect strangers work to save a confused old dog sitting just two feet off a curvy country road. The first woman on the scene, an oncology nurse named Jamie, a woman whose inner light shines in every direction, tries in vain to flag down help. Car after car passes her by. Enter Kimberly, a compassionate former hospital employee who initially drives past Jamie and Jesse, but spots the rescue effort for what it is and turns around to assist. She and Jamie are able to get Jesse into Jamie’s car.

Not a minute later, Kimberly’s phone rings and it’s her mama asking her to keep an eye out for an old wandering dog. Kimberly’s eyes are on said dog right that second. Mama relays the good news to Kimberly’s brother, Pastor Dave who calls me right away. Within seconds, Letitia and Jesse are reunited before the July 4th fireworks began to explode and scare Jesse further away from home, or worse. And that, gentle readers, is the chin-dropping net net.

Timing. Helpful characters. And characters who appear to stand in the way but serve to reset the clock in a missing pet’s favor. Maybe there are no unhelpful characters after all. Divine intervention? Door Number Fifteen? What’s at play here? As some smarty pants holy maharishi somewhere once said, all will be known in due time.  

Plus, I learned how to track a missing phone.