A LONG TANGENT, Day 70: Blind Casey …by M. John Fayhee

“There’s nothing wrong with a good delusion.”

— Quark (Armin Shimerman), from the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode, “The Passenger”

With imminent sexagenarianism looming on my personal event horizon, I decided to do something of relative note. Part celebration that I am not yet dead and part personal challenge to see if I yet retained the physical ability and mental fortitude to complete an endeavor arduous enough that I could brag about it at my local watering hole and the mostly sedentary people I associate with would think I was borderline studly, if not suffering from some age-related delusions of grandeur. They very well might believe I was making the whole thing up, but, as long as I related some decent trail tales, no one would call me on it, even if those tales could be classified as walking a tightrope between fact and fiction.

Circumstances did not allow me to, say, attempt the Pacific Crest Trail, as I had several work projects on the front burner that I did not want to abandon, even temporarily. Plus, there was a good possibility my wife would justifiably have divorced me had I yet again slung my pack and headed to the hills, leaving her behind to keep the domestic ship afloat. Consequently, I needed something close to my home in southwest New Mexico, something I could integrate into my increasingly staid domestic status quo without too much disruption.

I decided to try to hike at least an hour every day for an entire year.

With me almost every step of the way during what turned out to be a successful 367-day quest that covered maybe 1,200 miles was my dog Casey, who was five at the beginning and six at the end.

Two months after we started, Casey went instantly, inexplicably and totally blind. Though she eventually fully recovered, it was a tense experience.

What follows is a chapter taken from that period, excerpted from a book — not yet published, and likely unpublishable — titled, “A Long Tangent: An old man and his young dog hike every day for a solid year.”

Day 70

A couple years ago, a writer friend, who is well known in these parts, was suffering from a serious hip issue that was causing him severe distress. I watched as he hobbled into our local organic grocery store with a limp grave enough that he could not mitigate, much less hide, his listing stride. He tried mightily, though, understanding full well what an outward manifestation of any manner of malady in Gila Country portends.

Sadly, his gallant attempt to walk normally failed. As a result, customers and employees alike, sensing wounded prey unable to run away, streamed down the aisles toward my ailing amigo, obviously regaling in the opportunity to offer unsolicited advice. It was like they had been waiting for such an opportunity all day and, when it arose, they pounced.

With nary a syllable uttered by my friend providing so much as a hint regarding the provenance of his affliction or any previous medical diagnosis he may have received from stethoscope-bearing professionals who know how to operate shit like X-ray and MRI machines, he instantly found himself in the midst of a veritable volcano of recommendations spewing forth from people old and young, tall and short, hippies, outdoor athletes, male, female and whatever lies between.

Suggestions like applying poultices made from prickly pear cactus pulp extracted by the light of a harvest moon; smearing unguents derived from the anal sacs of female coatimundis in estrus; practicing contorted forms of one-legged yoga on a cliff top while wearing a paisley sari and facing east at sunrise; and engaging in guttural chanting while inhaling smoke generated from a fire fueled by a combination of mesquite branches, wild rose blossoms and the ass hairs of a javelina.

Folks were crawling atop one another to shout about rolfing, the liberal application of holy water, chakra realignment, acupuncture, static stretching, grandma’s surefire homemade ointment, dynamic stretching, chelation, pot brownies, praying, exorcism, fasting, ceremonial dancing, orthopedic acupuncture, massage, healing touch, tantric sex, sexual abstinence, tequila infusions, meditation, aromatherapy, sound therapy, sensory deprivation, colon cleansing and on and on.

People were running down the well-stocked pill/supplement/snake oil aisle grabbing fistfuls of products, sometimes randomly, sometimes with apparent purpose, and shoving vials, bottles, jars and ampoules into my friend’s face and instructing him to take three of these foul-tasting pills or rub this stinky green shit made from kelp on his ailing hip before bed while burning a cinnamon-infused candle.

There was enough in the way of boisterous bedlam that no one noticed when my friend quietly procured and paid for a small bag of free-range potato chips and limped his way out the front door.

He ended up getting several rounds of surgery and has, to the best of my knowledge, fully recovered.

Maybe it’s this way the whole world round, but Gila Country seems thick with folks who not only have the inclination, but consider it a divine imperative and mission, to impart unbidden healing-type wisdom upon people they know and perfect strangers alike. It does not seem to matter one whit if the entirety of their expertise in the medicinal arts consists of having once applied a Band-Aid to a paper cut.

I’m certain they mean well.

I made two mistakes. The first was posting on social media a solicitation for “good vibes” (or “healing thoughts” or some such) after Casey went blind. In that post, I outlined the basics: I had put her out in the yard and, when she came back in, she could not see.

The second mistake was, despite the fact — or maybe because of it — that I was still somewhat in shock about my dog’s sudden ocular circumstance, I ventured forth for restorative beverages that evening. The regular crowd was already chatting full bore regarding Casey’s mysterious condition when I arrived. Numerous participants were delighted in that, given the nature of her affliction, they could pontificate both on potential cause and potential options for treatment.

“It’s my guess that she came in close proximity to a mother skunk and got sprayed directly in the face at point-blank range,” one cowboy/carpenter drawled. “My granddaddy told me that, back in 1936, same thing happened to his ol’ coonhound named Bessie. He fed her a passel of collard greens mixed with gunpowder and bound in possum sinew and she was right as rain in two days!”

I mentioned something about how, if indeed Casey had been sprayed by a skunk — which has happened before — she would likely smell like she had been sprayed by a skunk.

“Coulda been a dry spray,” the man responded, sagely, to what I would classify as tepid affirmation by those within earshot.

“Probably a spider bite,” a young hipster suggested.

That’s another thing about Gila Country: Spider bites are the default diagnosis for a host of afflictions covering the gamut from hangnails to brain cancer. If you don’t know what it was, it was likely a spider bite. You could walk in with your arm ripped off to a nub or your skin glowing bright orange with oozing pustules and someone in the room would proffer that, to them, it looked as though you had suffered a spider bite.

I mean, there would have to be populations of hyper-venomous arachnids the size of stegosaurs that have somehow managed to evade the long reach of taxonomy to impart the number, variety and severity of spider bites accounted for in southwest New Mexico.

The young hipster had heard somewhere along the line that a salve made from baking soda, ground-up aspirin and plaster-of-Paris applied directly to the spider bite would do the trick.

Except, I told him, that, upon examination in the expensive canine ophthalmologist’s office, which included going over most of Casey’s body with a high-powered magnifying glass, no evidence of a spider bite was found.

“Maybe it was a rattler then,” he countered, like the vet would not have noticed a snake bite during her detailed examination.

A lady wearing about 200 pounds of crystal and turquoise speculated that it was likely an allergic reaction to some manner of pollen mixture, most likely juniper and cholla cactus buds. I started to mention that, at the expensive canine ophthalmologist’s office, they did a complete set of allergy tests, which came back negative, but could not find an opportunity to insert that snippet into the increasingly agitated discourse because the crystal/turquoise-wearing woman — who had already jotted down a recipe for me to give to Casey that consisted, if memory serves, primarily of eye-of-newt mixed with fairy dust — got into an argument with a self-proclaimed Eastern mysticist, who contended that Casey’s situation came about not because of anything my dog did but, rather, as an extension of some bad, but frustratingly ambiguous, karmic shit I did — maybe even in a past life — that somehow rubbed off on my otherwise innocent dog and, consequently, we would need to engage in an unspecified manner of purification ceremony, preferably in the River Ganges.

An eavesdropping shaman lady sitting two tables over offered to blow some sacred smoke up Casey’s nose. Or maybe it was up her ass.

By the time I had downed a few pints, the discussion had died down enough that I was able to wedge in that, in the three days since I had taken her to the expensive canine ophthalmologist’s office — during which time she received several steroid injections directly into her pupils — Casey’s eyes seemed to be gradually on the mend.

Despite that, the mysticist suggested we all hold hands and, as I had solicited in my social-media post 14 hours prior, send healing thoughts in Casey’s general metaphysical direction. Appreciating the input and intent, I bought a round for the house. Not long thereafter, the conversation organically shifted from Casey toward the best cures for hangovers. You can imagine where that went.

When I rose at dawn, Casey’s sight had improved. Not totally. There was still a milky white glaze covering her eyes, but it was dissipating She followed me to the front door wagging her tail, clearly wanting to go hiking with me. Since she had spent the previous few days cowering in a dark corner, this was cause for celebration. She was under strict doctor’s orders to take it easy for a while. So I did not take her with me when I drove out to the Gila that morning. But it was heartening that she wanted to go.

Those healing thoughts appeared to be working.

For 12 years, M. John Fayhee was the editor of the Mountain Gazette. A long-time contributor to Backpacker magazine, he has written for Canoe & Kayak, Overland Journal, REI Co-Op Journal, the High Country News, Family Camping, the Walking Magazine, USA Today, Islands, Adventure Travel and Men’s Fitness, along with too many other magazines and newspapers to count. Fayhee is the author of 10 books, including “Bottoms Up” and “Smoke Signals,” the latter of which was a Colorado Book Awards finalist. He has hiked the Appalachian, Colorado, Arizona and Inca trails, as well as the Colorado section of the Continental Divide Trail. Fayhee lives in Silver City, New Mexico.
Please visit mjohnfayhee.com.

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