On Buster Beach

The mystical simplicity and joy-filled existence of our canine companions

On the rocks at Buster Beach

NOTE: I wrote this about a year ago, but couldn’t share it until now.

‘My little dog, a heartbeat at my feet.’
— Edith Wharton

Last month I discovered a weird bit of Monterey trivia. It’s a fact so mystifying that I doubt anyone could offer a rational explanation. Someday I might even launch my own investigation into how this thing happened.

And what happened is this:

A bitty sliver of that beach to the west of Fisherman’s Wharf somehow ended up owned by the State of California. Not all the beach. Not even most of it. Just a scalene triangle-shaped chunk of the beach.

The boundary starts below where that knick-knacky pink tourist place is at the foot of the wharf — The Harbor House, if I’m not mistaken — and then it narrows rapidly to a point just a few feet to the west of where Santa Rosalia statue stands. Except the state property doesn’t go up the embankment to the recreational trail, where the statue is. It’s all down there with the sand and the rock, and about half the time it’s covered in high tide. Lately during the autumn months it’s been covered with sea lions.

The rest of the beach splays out to frame the Monterey harbor, and it’s presumably the responsibility of the City of Monterey.

I know, right? Weird bit of trivia. Why would I care?

I care because that beach is a special place to me. My dog Buster made impressions in the sand here, his fine sturdy feet gliding across this beach behind the wharf. Sometimes we arrived just after dawn when the tide was out and the sand was wet. Just the two of us, we had the place to ourselves. Buster would first beeline along the waterline to chase off the stupid seagulls. Then he’d zoom madly around in full circles before stopping at my feet. He’d look up at me, panting with sublime satisfaction, catching his breath before dashing off yet again like a fur-faced hooligan to bully the stupid seagulls that had the audacity to return to his beach.

Time and tide have washed away his prints — he died on Feb. 12 — but this joy leaves a deep impression on my soul.

That short stretch of Monterey shoreline has a name. It commemorates some long-dead entrepreneur who built a sardine cannery on the site way back in the day. Some mornings you might find pieces of old brick from the cannery shimmering on the beach. It’s called Booths Cannery Beach.

But it will always be Buster’s Beach to me.

‘A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself.’
— Josh Billings

I recently checked my electronic exercise trackers that keep ledgers of how long and how far I’ve walked. Since January 2018 I’ve marched almost 6,000 miles. Most of those miles I had Buster at the end of a leash, so it wasn’t exactly strenuous. To refer to those walks as strolls would overstate the exercise. Dawdling would be more accurate.

Our dawdles were always stop and go; when Buster wasn’t sniffing out astonishing new secrets to the universe from every tree, post, bush and blade of grass, he peed and piddled and peed some more.

Sometimes he’d stop piddling long enough to simply gaze into the horizon, as a swami or a Zen master might ponder the path of mortality.

Add up all those GPS miles, and the two of us dawdled the equivalent of a trip across the USA and back during the 10 years we had together. I cherish every step of that journey. The two of us explored Monterey in our own ways. He cruised right along with me, our morning ritual, that floofed-up plume of a tail serving as our pirate flag.

I prefer a brisk pace, personally, without all the dawdling. Now I think of his pace as a gift; it gave me the time to notice things I might not have otherwise seen. I was often dazzled by this new perspective of Monterey. I took a lot of photographs during those walks, and I shared hundreds of them on social media. I don’t see what I used to anymore, now that he’s gone.

‘Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift. It is not the least reason why we should honor as love the dog of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet born.‘
— Mary Oliver

By now you’ve learned that I’m one of those insufferable pet owners who brags that their dog is the cutest, the smartest and the best behaved dog that ever lived despite evidence to the contrary. I’m sure you’re very much like me, thinking your dog is the handsome-est dog on earth.

All dogs have their unique charms, in their own ways, I’ll grant you that. But let’s face it, by any objective standard Buster was far and away the best boy ever. Certainly the most handsome. I mean, look at the pictures. If you think your dog is cuter than Buster, I’d love to hear you try to prove science wrong.

Buster was a Bichon Frise, a breed designed by a team of divine cherubs to resemble fur-faced angels. If you only know Bichon Frises by what you’ve seen on TV, you'd think they’re all a bunch of over-coifed bougie frou-frou dogs.

I personally think the icky freak-of-nature show-dog cuts on Bichons are hideous. They look like someone spilled bags of cotton balls into a vat of kitsch. But that wasn't Buster. Buster always sported the plain old puppy cut, which in my opinion is handsome enough on a dog. I know that’s controversial among BF owners, but I mean what I said.

‘To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence the constant popularity of dogs.’
— Aldous Huxley

Dawdling around Monterey with Buster was like hanging with local celebrity. Practically every human he encountered lit up when they saw him. They couldn’t help themselves. Toddlers wanted to touch him. Burly men coo’d over him. Teenagers told me they “liked my dog.” Women introduced themselves simply because they hoped I would introduce them to Buster. Tourists posed with him for photographs.

If a polling company surveyed every person ever charmed by Buster, I guarantee that at least 98% of the respondents would say that Buster was the cutest thing they’d ever seen.

In the days since he died, I walk the streets of Monterey without Buster. I don’t dawdle anymore; I have the freedom to walk at my regular brisk pace.

But now I’m just another forlorn chump walking alone and feeling useless and sad without Buster at the end of a leash.

Bearing witness to the endless cheer Buster evoked in the people we encountered made me a happier person. He was a force for joy in a world that needs as much joy as it can get.

‘To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.’
— Milan Kundera

Don’t get me wrong; Buster wasn’t perfect. He could be a screamer. He wasn’t one of those constant yappers, but he didn’t mind expressing his irritation when warranted. For example, Buster detested the bastard skateboarders that zipped past with a clatter. He seemed to think that skateboarding was an unnatural act and skateboards had no business on pavements, sidewalks or recreation trails. And so he screamed at them.

He also had no use whatsoever for most other dogs. He had a handful of close canine friends — females mostly — but he otherwise didn’t care for other dogs. We tried to get him socialized in doggy daycares, but he couldn’t be bothered. Dog parks were a waste of his time. He was wholly indifferent to any gathering of dogs. Why would he slum around with a bunch of anus-sniffing dogs all day when he could be home with his humans, who gave him treats and reminded him that he was a good boy?

While he was mostly indifferent to others of his species, there were certain other dogs that Buster hated with a deep and burning passion. He screamed at them whenever he saw them. It was embarrassing, really, because the dogs he screamed at were typically broken down ancients, creatures that obviously weren’t aging gracefully. These poor old geezer dogs were no threat to Buster whatsoever. But they smelled rancid with age, and age had ravaged their coats and rotted their teeth. Buster didn’t like them one bit. They offended him, apparently.

I don’t think anything pissed Buster off more than one particular old blind dog that hobbled around the neighborhood on shaky legs. Buster screamed at him every time he saw him.

‘Money can buy you a fine dog, but only love can make him wag his tail.’
— Kinky Friedman

I admit I conversed with Buster as though he was a human-like person. Mostly it was nonsense — silly stuff. But it could get heavy sometimes. There was that time four months ago, several days after my son died, when Buster seemed unusually listless and I looked into his eyes and implored him not to die on me. (He held on for another four months.)

But mostly it was silly stuff. Happy talk.

I also know dog talk is ridiculous. Dogs have their own understanding of the world and their place in it is much different than ours.

Dog knowledge is other-worldly, beyond our simple minds. Their in-the-moment grasp of nature seems to be rooted in mystical complexities.

For all we know, dogs might be in direct contact with the one and only omniscient God, and their entire lives might be in service to an astral transcendence we might only know in the afterlife, and we are actually the unwitting companions to our dogs’ journeys to ultimate truth. Spend a decade watching a dog investigating trees, blades of grass and fire hydrants, and you know they navigate a different cosmological plane.

We might think that human communication is complex, beyond the grasp of simpleton animals. But that's because we're not as smart as we think we are.

‘If a dog will not come to you after having looked you in the face, you should go home and examine your conscience.’
— Woodrow Wilson

Anthropologist Elizabeth Marshall Thomas once said “dogs are a window on the natural world.”

Soon after Buster died, a friend sent me this passage, from author Henry Beston’s “The Outermost House: A Year of Life on the Great Beach of Cape Cod:”

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.

Buster was considered one of the more "intelligent" dogs, at least by the standards established by condescending human expectations. Buster knew his left from his right, after all. He knew up and down. He knew the names of all his toys. But he also knew the transcendent delight he encountered every day along the trail, whether it was in the essence of a ceanothus plant or the ethos of a discarded sourdough chowder bowl. I wish he could have shared some of that knowledge with a mere mortal like me. I would have loved to have known those secrets to his world.

We are fortunate that dogs tolerate us, that they allow us to adore them as fellow travelers in the "splendour and travail of the earth."

‘Be thou comforted, little dog, Thou too in Resurrection shall have a little golden tail.’
— Martin Luther

RIP Buster