by Tod Davies.
It was a real community, the place I had chosen. I found that out, bit by bit, day by day.
Happy helped. He was indeed a happy dog, gregarious to a fault. In those days, more than three decades ago, my little alpine valley was a sparsely populated place. It was a wonderfully mixed bag of the descendants of the Greek immigrants who had founded it as a neighborhood, along with loggers, hippies, and the adherents of a Buddhist temple built up on a hill. My realtor announced the presence of this last. I said, “Do I look like the kind of person who would think a Buddhist temple nearby would be a selling point?” And he laughed and nodded.
Then there were people who looked for something more on offer than there was in the city, too. There was me, for example. There was the couple across the street, a strange mix of born again Christianity and New Age philosophy, with her a sensible, hardworking, even overworked wife, while he lorded it over a group of his own disciples. He once said to me, “I am only a simple monk,” while his wife, Donna, who I much preferred, pretended behind his back to stick her fingers down her throat. (I’ll never forget a party they had one year where he announced that he would soon show something never before seen in our valley. A breathless young acolyte said, “Are you going to levitate?” And I disgraced myself by laughing so hard I had to leave the party. He meant he was going to shave off his beard, revealing his chin.) Donna visited me soon after I moved in, looked me over critically, and said, “I think you’ll fit in well here.”
At the time I wondered whether that was a good thing or a bad.
Then down in a swooping meadow to the south were three men who were lovers. The neighborhood called them the Three Amigos. The sister of one was a singer who lived next door to my new home. She and I shared a spring back in the forest for our mutual water source. Up the street lived one of the grandchildren of a world famous comedian, in a log cabin without a foundation or front door lock, but with a history of a ghost, and an original Picasso, inherited from his grandfather, on the wall. Down the street lived a fencing master and his wife. He trained and she fenced in the Olympic Games of their day. People came from all over to train with him in his barn. There was a glamorous picture of her, foil in hand, on their wall.
Happy made it his business to meet everyone in the neighborhood even before I did. As I, fascinated by the community I had newly joined, introduced myself around, inevitably someone would say, “Oh, you’re Happy’s mom! He’s already come by and introduced himself.”
My guess now is that is how Inuit found us.
Inuit was an Australian shepherd just like Happy. A beauty, too. Pale gray and white, with blue eyes. She must have followed Happy home one day after one of his walkabouts. For that was the way it was in those days. There weren’t that many people in our valley, not that many cars. The dogs of the neighborhood roamed free. I roamed free myself. Everyone knew everyone, so that was all right then.
I didn’t know Inuit, though. She had on a collar, and she was obviously well-cared for. But she just as obviously felt a long visit at Happy’s house was in order. Not that I minded. She was an amiable addition to our walks, and the extra dog food expended wasn’t enough to worry me.
Still I thought I should make a push to find out where she lived. I went next door to the little gnome house of a geodesic dome where my next door neighbor, Mouna, lived. She was a fairy tale good witch: tiny, bird boned, with pale blue eyes and straight white hair down to a waist one could circle with two hands. She had already come to visit me and welcome me into the neighborhood. I walked over to her house, down the old rutted path between us that someone told me was a remnant of the old stagecoach trail, with Happy and Inuit bounding beside me.
“That’s Inuit,” Mouna said. “Go home, Inuit! Go home!” But Inuit just wagged her tail and hid behind Happy. My neighbor sighed. “She’s always roaming the valley.”
But who does she belong to?
My neighbor told me Inuit belonged to a woman named Indigo Ray. She gave me detailed directions on how to get to her house.
So the dogs and I set off to find Inuit’s home.
But at the end of the road I thought was the correct one, was a closed gate. On the gate was a sign: “New Shaolin Temple,” it said. “No smoking, no drugs, no aspirin.”
I stopped at that. Surely if this was where Indigo Ray lived, my neighbor would have mentioned something of the sign. I turned back to Inuit, hoping to find some indication that she knew where we were. But Inuit just wagged her tail, and insisted she’d never seen this place before in her life, so we turned around and walked back home—in time, as I recall, for the dogs’ dinner.
But it had been the right place, after all. Indigo’s eccentricities were so commonplace in the neighborhood that Mouna hadn’t thought to mention the sign.
As I said, Mouna was the sister of one of the Three Amigos. And her brother, Tandy, had AIDs, in the days before it was possible to treat that horrible disease. He died before I could meet him, and his obituary in the nearest small town’s newspaper, that named his two lovers as his survivors, caused a furor there. Letters to the editor and all that. I thought that was very brave of Rick and Gary, the Two Amigos, and when I was invited to the memorial, of course I went to meet them and the rest of the neighborhood. I took Inuit and Happy in my car, and found Indigo there. So that was how I met Indigo. The Indigo Ray, it said on her bank checks. We would tease her and call her ‘The’. One of my neighbors called her The Indigo Ray Charles, which she didn’t think was funny at all. She lived by herself in a beautiful illegal structure meant to be a two-story greenhouse on hundreds of acres of land her brothers had bought for her after she walked barefoot through Ecuador looking to be taken up by a spaceship. They worried she was never coming back. Greatly to their relief, she wanted a garden, and when they bought the land, where you would have said it was too high up and too badly watered to offer much in the way of gardening, she moved in and turned it into a miniature Eden. By herself, toiling day and night. Five acres of flowers. Five acres of organic food. A Zen garden. A rock garden. A maze. The New Shaolin Temple, she called it at first, though that phase passed shortly after I met her and Inuit.
The garden was an incredible work of art. I told her I wanted to buy all my herbs and vegetables and fruit from her. She said I was the only person in the neighborhood who didn’t think that stuff came from the store.
She was a born pollinator. She knew everyone. She was famous for her potlucks; people came from miles around to Indigo’s potlucks, even though her road was a disaster, worn out every year by the snow. The first few years I lived in the valley, that road stayed unplowed all winter long. Indigo would park her battered Subaru down by the prayer flags at the road entrance to the Buddha lands, where the Buddhist temple perched on a hill, and snowshoe out, snowshoeing back with her supplies.
We were friends.
She came over to my house. We sat on the deck, and she told me about walking in Ecuador to be taken up by the spaceship (“And were you?” “Sort of.”). How her travels ended with her garden here in our valley, and how she gardened with Nature Intelligences—with the Devas, she called them, the first time I heard that use of the term until later, when a Jewish psychic told me I’d been a deva in a previous lifetime. Indigo, worried, told me about the rampaging gophers on her land, animals who were taking more than their fair share of her produce, no matter how often she begged them to dial it back.
“I talk and I talk to the Gopher Deva and explain this isn’t right, and they have to stop. But they don’t. I don’t want to kill them. I don’t know what to do.”
I thought this over, and asked if she’d ever read the Bhagavad Gita. “The warrior Arjuna has the god Krishna for his charioteer, ” I said. “And before a huge battle, where he’s going to fight and kill men on the other side who are members of his own family, he wants to know what’s right. He doesn’t want to fight. His heart fails him. And Krishna says, you’re a warrior, it’s your job to fight. Just go and do your job.” So, I said, maybe you can think of killing the gophers as it’s your job to be a gardener? Just go and garden?
She was silent at that, and left shortly after. I was worried I’d offended her somehow. A few days later, though, I went to town to shop for food, and when I came home, there were hundreds of red spice flowers in yoghurt containers on my deck, with a note from Indigo. It said the Devas had told her I was allowed to come over to her house and gather as much produce as I wanted, and she wasn’t allowed (the Devas apparently said) to charge me anything for it.
I would walk over to her land, the back way, along the railroad tracks and down the hill next to her spring, with Happy and a knapsack that I would fill up with produce to take home. And I would leave a five-dollar bill, or a ten sometimes, in a magazine, because she loved reading Vanity Fair and the tabloids—with a note: “From the Australian Shepherd Deva.”
She was tremendous with plants. They would do anything for her. But she was strangely distant from her own dog. Inuit would come visit me, and I would call Indigo and say, “She’s here again,” and Indigo, grumbling, would head over. Inuit would hear the old Subaru pulling into my driveway, and look at me, grinning. You could hear her thinking, “Watch this,” and she would lie down under the window, closing her eyes, pretending to be fast asleep. Indigo would come in the house, exasperated, and call out, “Inuit!” The dog would sleepily shake her head and open her eyes, pretending to be surprised to see Indigo. It never failed.
Afterwards, for weeks, Indigo would pay more attention to Inuit, which was, I think, the point all along. And whenever she didn’t, Inuit would come over to my house for a visit.
Dogs are smart that way.