YACK on: First Trip
Grant Sanders
This week marked a momentous occasion in our lives. Our dog, Seven, went off island for the first time. And a whole new world that he never even knew existed opened up to him.

Our task was to be with my father while my brother Mitchell flew off to Sweden to engineer some major biotech deal. He's a Ph.D. and the founder of some kind of biotech firm. And he's always flying here or there to ask someone to write an eight-figure check for a Petri dish full of some kind of special proteins or something. I pretend to understand it, when he explains what he does. I nod a lot when he talks about it, not wanting to be rude, and not wanting him to think I don't know what a "plasmid" is. This, time, Mitch was flying to Sweden, so there was no one to take care of my father and make sure that he got fed and was given his six pills in the morning and three pills in the evening.

So Seven and I were drafted.

We prepared the large vehicle on Wednesday morning for travel and headed to the SSA to get on the noon standby list. When we arrived, however, there was one spot left n the freight boat and we decided to get an early start. This is when I started to realize that a trip away from Nantucket was going to be something very different for Seven. And I began to see the world through his eyes.

After backing onto the freight boat, we got out of the car and made our way to the lounge. Compared to the Eagle, the lounge on the freight boat is like sitting in a coin-op laundry for two hours, but with better internet access. Seven was amazed at all of the new textures and smells and proceeded to sniff out the scent of every human and animal that had been on the boat in the past six months. You could almost see him making mental tally of all of the two and four legged passengers, just in case he should run into one of them in the future. Once we got outside the jetty, the boat began to roll ever so slightly. I was fine with it, but Seven had never experienced anything like it, or at least not since he was a very small pup. (I'm not sure if I ever mentioned in my many writings about my amazing dog that he was, in fact, born under a skiff on the beach and raised for eight weeks on a boat in the harbor. But I have now.) As the rolling grew slightly, Seven began to spread out on the floor in order to get better hold of the surface itself. That did not seem to work so he decided the best thing to do was to climb into my lap with my computer and lick my face for bringing him along on this adventure.

When the trip was over, we got up and left about 17 pounds of shed fur on the floor of the lounge there. (Yes, SSA, that was us and not a convention of traveling barbers that made that mess. Please send the cleaning bill to Sharon at The Nantucket Independent. She'll take care of it right away.)

In the car, where he was more comfortable, we made it off the boat and to a secluded abandoned lot on Hyannis where Seven left his calling card and then we hit Jiffy Lube. This was like a trip to Mars for my dog. He had a tough time getting out of the car because of the grey painted floor that was glossy and foreign. It's not wood or sand or brick. To him, this was very strange. Then he really had a few things to say about the idea of a man in a hole under our car. This did not sit well with him at all and we spent the 14 minutes it took to service the car out-of-doors, making the Jiffy Lube shrubbery slightly more distressed.

Soon we were on the road. Now, the longest trip Seven has ever taken in his life was a trip to 'Sconset and back. So after abut 20 minutes on the road, he came to the front of the vehicle, and put his muzzle on my shoulder as if to say, "are we there yet?" We weren't. He did that ten more times before he understood that we were not even close to stopping. He soon realized that extended periods of engine noise over smooth highway miles meant it was time for a good nap in the back seat.

Once we got close to our destination in Leicester Mass., Seven started to squeal like my old lab Gunner used to do when we were getting close to the lake. This kind of spooked me. Was my current dog, the reincarnation of my old beloved Gunner? Hey, anything is possible in this crazy world, but then I shook my head, "nah!" and chalked it up to the possibility that Seven just needed to pee.

We arrived and I opened the car door and he exited it like a spitball shot from a drinking straw. He ran across the dirt road, over the stone fence like a gazelle, across the lawn, over a fallen tree stump, head aloft and ears up for maximum "big air" time, around the house, down to the boat house, off to the waterfront over another stone wall, up on the porch and back to me with a big, stupid grin on his face, as if to say, "Well, dang, if this is not the best place ever!" He had never smelled birch or chipmunks or a real lake. And he liked it.

He liked the cottage, too, because unlike our home, where he is trained to stay in the kitchen he had the run of the place. Kitchen, living room, screen porch and the bathroom with the convenient white lidded water dish.

We went outside and he immediately brought me a big, round stick from the woodpile. After each throw out over the water, the dog would go splash long before the stick ever hit the water. He left a massive wake behind him that spread out in long, graceful arcs across the smooth lake surface and then returned, dripping, to my side with the stick, handing it to me and looking me in the eye as if to say, "Stop throwing like a girl and really chuck it this time!"

This could have gone on all day and I could see we were in serious danger of draining the lake because of the number of times he had left the water soaked, shook off the liquid on land and then returned to the water like a four-footed sponge on a mission. So we stopped and dried off and went to find some food.

And this is essentially what we did for three days when we weren't doing some real work, serving breakfast, lunch and dinner and counting my father's pills. It was Seven Heaven, pun intended. And when it came time to leave, I expected Seven to be angry at me for taking him away from that place, but he got in the car and we took the long ride back to Hyannis, and he waited patiently while I filled up the car with BJ's Wholesale Club goods so cheap I felt like I was stealing. And when the Eagle pulled up and we drove on and got out of the car he looked at me and he seemed to realize we were going home. And his reaction was typical of this dog, who has grown to be such a part of me:

"Cool, another boat! Let's see if I can pull you up and down the stairs!"

YACK on. I

Grant Sanders is the Host of YACK, the Nantucket Online Community at www.yackon.com which he hosts with his dog Seven at his side, most days. His views are his own and do not reflect the editorial stance of the Nantucket Independent. Or his wife, who was not a dog lover when they met, but she is now.