Will's Red Coat: The Story of One Old Dog Who Chose to Live Again

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The Forest

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of old . . .

—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

I woke up early this morning. It was the rain. The way it was lashing at the window beside our bed and thundering down on the metal roof. A few degrees colder and all of this would be snow, and we’d be digging out all over again. As it is, the snow has finally melted from our yard, but plenty remains in the shady nooks of the forests and on the hillsides and summits. It is late April in the mountains of New Hampshire, where winter lingers and rivers run high, and the trout lilies and trillium have yet to appear. Waiting for spring here in the Mount Washington Valley can often feel like an act of faith.

It is still dark outside as I sit at my old scraped and scarred desk, a comfortable hand-me-down from a friend with an old Mississippi accent. A candle flickers, shadows sway, and the scent of cinnamon fills the room. A mug of tea sits next to the candle and a ribbon of steam rises before fading into the darkness. Atticus followed me out of bed earlier, but now he’s sleeping again, this time on the bedding behind me on the floor. His snores speak of contentment, of the early hour, and of his age. Hanging on the wall above the desk is a map of the White Mountains. The two of us know nearly all of these peaks well and in every season. They are as familiar as old friends who wait for us just outside our back door and are as much our home as this cozy house is.

To the right, a tiny red coat with a thick white collar dangles from a hook. It looks a lot like Christmas and is just about the right size for an elf. There is a bit of magic in it. Of this I have no doubt. For that little coat gets me to stop many times each day to consider what matters in life and what it means to be human. That’s why I didn’t box it up and hide it away in the back of some closet. It is meant to be seen, because I don’t ever want life to get so busy and complicated that I forget.

No, forgetting wouldn’t do. Not that I ever could.

A favorite C. S. Lewis quote reminds us, One day you will be old enough to read fairy tales again. Because of all I’ve seen and felt through the years, I’ve come to believe that if we are fortunate, we realize that we can also live them.

The mystery of new stories awaits each of us, something that heartens me at the most difficult moments of my life. You could say that this is what I base my faith on. It is the belief that life goes on, no matter what. And no matter how long winter lingers, spring will always follow.

The memories clinging to that red jacket are not unlike the fairy tales my mother shared with me when I was very young and sitting on her lap, or the stories my father read to me after my mother died, as I lay in bed, too old for fairy tales. Stories of great adventures undertaken by improbable heroes. Those same whispers of possibilities reach out to remind me that many an incredible voyage began without warning. A wrong turn, an unlikely choice, a knock on the door, and the next thing you know, life is never the same. Sometimes even the grandest of stories are launched as regrets. They turn into an unforeseen voyage taking us from where we are to where we are supposed to be, and from who we are to who we are meant to be.

That coat hanging innocently from the hook is a reminder of the importance of letting go and leaping forward, of the depths of despair, the heights of love, and the bonds of friendship.

My goodness, that certainly is a heck of a lot for one tiny coat to carry.

Is it any wonder it is a talisman for me?

Sure, I have my memories and all those photographs, but this was his. And this is his story. Well . . . actually, it is our story. And maybe it wasn’t the rain that woke me up, after all. Maybe it was simply time to tell it . . . to tell our fairy tale.

I am an introvert. It took fifty-four years for me to say it.

Yes, I am a gregarious, chattering, emotionally expressive introvert. People who are just getting to know me don’t understand that part. How is it that I’m not in the least bit shy, but I’m an introvert? They read my revealing words and see me with Atticus at book events talking and laughing freely in front of hundreds of people, and they don’t get it. I don’t blame them. I didn’t get it myself until recently.

It feels good to come clean, to know myself. When I finally admitted it, I felt like I was on the first of twelve steps. But with introversion, there’s only one step. You recognize yourself. What follows is peace and empowerment. You no longer have to try to fit in. You finally understand your social anxiety, and why you are allergic to shallow conversation. But I warn you, don’t get me started on anything I’m passionate about, like my favorite hiking trails in the White Mountains; the Boston Red Sox outfield of Betts, Bradley, and Benintendi; watermelon; or the latest volume of Mary Oliver poetry. You won’t be able to shut me up.

I can also go days without speaking a word and feel the freedom in that extended silence. Words are as essential to me as oxygen, sleep, food, and water. But I don’t need to prattle on endlessly like I used to, in order to revel in their glory. I can read, or write letters to friends, or write my newspaper column and blog posts. Words are prayers, spoken or silently ruminated.

How, after five decades, did I discover I was an introvert? Easy. It’s the way I’ve discovered many truths about life. The forest told me.

Don’t forget, this is a fairy tale, and no fairy tale seems quite right without an enchanted forest. It just so happens that we live on the edge of one.

When people ask me where Jackson, New Hampshire, is, I tell them it is halfway to wild. Ten miles to the south is the bustling ski and vacation town of North Conway, with its outlet stores. Ten miles to the north is one of the wildest, fiercest weather outposts in the world—the summit of Mount Washington. Although I prefer Agiocochook, the name the Abenaki gave that sacred peak: the home of the Great Spirit.

But who am I kidding? We aren’t just halfway to wild; wild is right outside our door. We walk down the stairs and cross the yard to the bear path that descends beyond the high grass into the tall trees and ferns until we get to the river. We rock-hop to the other side and we’re in a magic realm. Within minutes we enter the White Mountain National Forest, a place the size of the state of Rhode Island. Trails spider-web out from there for over a thousand miles. We visit with wild things as often as possible, and occasionally wild things spill out of the forest, across the river, and up into our backyard as well. You see, wild goes both ways.

Here on the edge of enchantment, I have learned to be quiet. I can sit and listen to the river’s flow, the chatter of crows, the night songs of owls, and the wind sighing through the birch leaves. I’ve learned to accept the seasons of the year, and those that make up a lifetime.

I laugh more, talk less, and don’t always answer the phone. I read whenever I can and cozy up with one poem at a time, always in search of sublime sentences that stir things in me I may never completely understand. I gave my television away, but music is always playing. Music and laughter abide in this little home—and quiet, of course.

Often it’s Billie Holiday or Louis Armstrong who fills these four rooms with rhythm and soul and provides the soundtrack to our day. I also enjoy streaming WCRB, a classical station out of Boston, particularly when I’m writing or when I’m in a pensive mood.

While not a religious man, I say my prayers more than I ever have, and not just at night. Since I never learned many of the prayers I was supposed to when I was an altar boy, I make up my own as I go. They are more like conversations with God, who plays the role of a friend who is a good listener. In my most common prayer, I list what I’m grateful for, and starting out each day like this reminds me what I have instead of what I don’t. Sometimes my gratitude is for grand things like my life or health or friendships. At other times, it can be for something as silly or ordinary as a new toothbrush, or being thankful that I don’t use an alarm clock.

Then again, I don’t need an alarm clock, thanks to the three crows who gather in the black ash tree right outside our bedroom window. They define the word cacophony for me whenever I hear their racket, as they caw and squawk and shriek at one another. But some days I get the impression that they’re actually cawing and squawking and shrieking at me, in the hope that I will get out of bed and overfill the bird feeder or leave bread crumbs scattered about as I do in the winter.

For most of my life I didn’t understand the music of the forest, and I was afraid of the song. That’s when my friend Atticus came along and everything changed. He was only eight weeks old the first time we went into the woods in the western edge of Newburyport, Massachusetts. I had just said good-bye to Maxwell Garrison Gillis, an elderly dog who made his home with me for the last year and a half of his life. His time with me led me to care for someone other than myself, or the city I was obsessively reporting on in my small newspaper, the Undertoad.

Before Max, there was little more than meetings and politics in my life—and heroes and villains, and above all, stress. One only had to look at his middle and last name to understand how important my small city life was to me. I’d given Max the middle name of Garrison, after William Lloyd Garrison, the great liberator who was at the crux of the fight for emancipation. He was a son of Newburyport, as was Andrew J. Bossy Gillis, the former bad-boy mayor who was infamous at the same time as Boston’s James Michael Curley and New York’s Jimmy Walker. Both Garrison and Gillis were considered troublemakers who published muckraking newspapers, as was I.

After Max, there was Atticus Maxwell Finch.

I wanted Atticus to experience things Max had never known, at least not that I knew of. Max came to me with a truckload of emotional baggage, and when I held him in my arms as life left him, he left with my heart. Atticus brought it back to me, but more than that, his job was to live a life so full that he’d make up for the one Max had missed out on before I met him.

From the beginning I treated Atticus as a peer, not a pet. While society wanted him to be my baby or my son, and for me to be his pet parent or fur dad, from the beginning we were simply Tom and Atticus. I used polite requests instead of commands, and words like please and thank you were of the utmost importance to me.

Atticus, would you have a seat, please. Thank you.

I talked to him and treated him as my equal—for he was. There was no need for words like master or owner. No need for a collar or a leash—not after the first couple of years, anyway, when he could safely make his way throughout the world with me. Atticus was brought up to be unapologetically himself. My goal was to protect him from the limitations of society and to allow him to thrive. I wanted him to experience everything life had to offer. That’s where the forest came in.

Max was a beach dog. He frolicked on Plum Island each morning and evening. Other than that, he was on leash as I crisscrossed downtown Newburyport chasing after the latest stories about misbehaving police officers, lying city officials, and greedy developers. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I also wrote about good folk. Heroes and villains, remember?

Max had a good life with me. But I wanted so much more for him. Unfortunately, there was nothing I could do about that. Therefore, I did the next best thing and used his short time with me as my inspiration in giving Atticus more . . . more of everything.

I suppose that wasn’t the only factor in raising Atticus as I did. I’d had my own oppressive upbringing as the youngest of Jack and Isabel Ryan’s nine children, and perhaps this inspired me as much as my regrets about Max. No matter what the reason, I wanted Atticus to have the freedom and the unconditional love that Max, and I, had gone without.

Atticus was a miniature Schnauzer, just as Max was. Originally I made the mistake of wanting another Max, but there was only ever the one. And hence I was off on a great learning curve. Even writing the name of a breed makes me feel uncomfortable these days; the older I get, the more I reject labels and limitations. I don’t like to judge a species, a breed, a nationality, or a creed. My preference is to seek out what connects instead of what divides. While I fully understood that Atticus was a dog, I’d never treated him or limited him as one, except when it came to his physical needs. He was always simply Atticus.

Atticus and I went to the forest for the scents and the wildlife. In those earliest of days, wildlife was blue jays and gray squirrels. Young Atticus would give chase, and I’d whisper in his ear, Be gentle, please. They have as much right to be here as you do.

Everything in the world was new to eight-week-old Atticus, but he became especially animated in the forest, where the fragrances, the sounds, and the textures greeted him. The forest was also somewhat new to me, and it was a return to my greatest fear.

I was seven when my mother died. Isabel Ryan dropped a lit cigarette on her hospital bed and died of burn complications six days before Christmas. Before that, the mother I knew had multiple sclerosis. She wore braces on her legs and moved about the house on metal crutches that wrapped around her forearms, and out in the world in a wheelchair. I don’t remember much about her. There are not many photographs, and we don’t have the kind of family that plumbs the depths of intimacy.

My father, Jack Ryan, worked hard to provide for us, and we were relieved when he was working because of his unpredictable, seething temper. The belt, a backhand, or crushing words were delivered to us without much warning. He was a volcano, always on the edge of erupting, and we were like some primitive tribe that deified him as we feared him.

In those first years after my mother died, I used to walk with some of my older brothers to the end of the lane. There was an old farmhouse where an ancient farmer and his wife lived. I rarely saw them and don’t remember them ever talking. Then again, I don’t remember much about those years. They are gone. I think I misplaced them on purpose, perhaps to protect that seven-year-old who hurt too much.

What I do remember is that tangle of forgotten field beyond the farmhouse, and the way it swept slightly downhill to a sprinkling of trees that grew into a dark and ominous forest. It both fascinated and frightened me. It was so dense, it was more shadow than light, more night than day. Strange sounds would greet us, birds and animals and other things I’d never see. On windy days the trees would moan and groan. Boulders would appear as sleeping beasts. The entire place felt as if it were one enormous monster and we were walking in its belly. I’d hurry along to make sure I wasn’t the last in line. We’d walk down, down, down into the sylvan netherworld until we came to a river. There the sun pierced the darkness and the song of the water over the stones was enchantment itself. It was an ethereal melody, bittersweet to my young heart. I’d hear whispers from the water, and from the leaves stirring in the breeze above, and from the deepest shadows and small caves. Come closer, it hissed. Come closer.

Another voice, this one from within, urged me, Run! Run home!

On the nights after we visited those eerie woods, I’d have nightmares. My father would wake me and say it was just a dream, but the dream was all too real. It would return again and again. I’d fall asleep, after pulling my covers over my head, leaving just enough of a hole for my nose to breathe through. When I tumbled into slumber, I’d hear the voices again: Come closer . . . closer.

Run away! cried the other voice. Run fast. Run now.

In my dreams the trees by the river would pull up their roots and menacingly march up the hill, across that tangle of field by the sleeping farmer and his wife, and they’d gather outside my bedroom window.

Come closer.

The forest called to me. Always.

One day when I was home alone the siren song reached out to me, and I followed it. I stopped at the edge of the field, in the last light I’d see for a while. I looked behind me and wanted to turn back, but something pulled me deeper and I surrendered. Across rocks and roots, through shadows, beyond columns of pine trees that felt as if they were watching me, I walked as if spellbound. Down, down to the river I went, where the fairy song was the loudest, and the stillness of the woods pushed me forward to the current.

Come closer. Come closer.

Run away!

I grew drowsy looking at the river’s glint and glimmer as it flowed by me. I swayed in place—waiting, waiting, waiting, for what I didn’t know. But it felt natural, and it felt unnatural.

I feared I would be taken, as in the refrain from Yeats’s The Stolen Child:

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping

than you can understand.

That’s when I ran. I ran as fast and as hard as I could, tripping and falling, stumbling to my feet again, breathless, wheezing for air, not getting any, my heart racing, my lungs screaming. I hopped over dead trees, past ferns that grabbed at my ankles, beyond the shadows and the gloom, and away from the ever-present, ever-louder words, Come closer!

I raced through the last tunnel of trees toward the field, and when I made it, I fell to my knees to drink in the air. I didn’t dare stay there for too long. I was afraid of what I imagined as an enormous unholy hand reaching out, pulling me back into the despair, never to be heard from again.

That was my last time in that darkest of places, from the darkest moment of my young life. I believed if I returned, I wouldn’t find my way home. I would be lost forever, and forgotten, just as I was already forgetting my mother—what she looked like, her voice when she spoke to me, the smell of her red lipstick when she read to me on her lap.

We were all lost in those years after my mother died. My father, who used to beat us, didn’t as much anymore. The violence waned, but his temper didn’t. He grew tired and sullen. With each passing year it was worse. When I was in high school, and the last one in the house with him, it had become a silent, stifling place, and I was a sulking, moody teen. I came to think of him as a man who was tired of living.

My childhood was defined by loss—Isabel dying, Jack decomposing, brothers and sisters fleeing. Whatever innocence I had shriveled up and died. Even hope was impossible to come by. I felt a kinship to D. H. Lawrence the moment I read: If I think of my childhood it is always as if there was a sort of inner darkness . . .

Into my twenties, thirties, and even early forties, I’d fall asleep and be visited by that chilling song of the trees and the river, Come closer. Come closer.

I did just the opposite. I avoided woodlands and sought out the safety of civil places. As I grew up, and grew older, I’d find comfort in bustling communities and a distracted life. I didn’t want quiet, because quiet meant I was inviting the song to reach out to me again. Even then, it would always come, usually when I was sleeping and defenseless.

However, in my attempt to stay safe, I was also half dead.

I became brave only for tiny Atticus, bringing him to Moseley Pines in Newburyport, where he could experience what he needed. He immediately felt at home there, and I discovered that strangely so did I. Hours were spent in a glade of lady slippers, my back to a tree, while I read and Atticus sat up watching the breath of the forest. The way it sighed and settled, how it welcomed shafts of sunlight, and mists that wove like ghosts on chill days when the rains had stopped, or how in winter, the snow among the pines turned it into the holiest cathedral I’d ever been in. Those brief excursions across town led to weekends away in the pastoral hills of Vermont, which led to short hikes and grew into longer walks, which brought us eventually to the mountains of New Hampshire. There we became nemophilists, haunters of woods.

Two years and hundreds of mountains climbed later, I sold the Undertoad and moved north with Atticus. Thousands of mountains later, Following Atticus was published. It detailed the experiences of two unlikely novice hikers: a dog who was considered too small, and an overweight newspaper editor who had a fear of heights.

I started a Facebook page, for marketing purposes, and the page brought readers. They were captivated by the photos I shared of Atticus in breathtaking scenes, or sitting serenely and Buddha-like on summits throughout this glorious enchanted forest. The more I shared, the more was shared with me. Those who were following me while I followed Atticus started sharing stories about their own fears, triumphs, and travails.

Yes, the forest that had always called to me, had always wanted me to come closer, was welcoming me home at last, by way of Atticus, and his primitive and peaceful heart.

My aunt Marijane Ryan, my father’s youngest sister and a former nun who had left the Church to become a therapist and who worked in hospice, pointed out that Jung thought of the forest as a place of the unknown in us. It is frightening, and eventually can turn into a place of transformation or of refuge, depending upon where you are in your personal journey.

It had been all three to me, and now the forest is my refuge.

The mythologist Joseph Campbell, whose life’s work was the monomyth, also known as the hero’s journey, knew a great deal about Jung as well, and his lectures and books often echoed him. Campbell said, "It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life . . . The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out