Finding Dogs Sleep Deprived
Lessons from My Anniversary
High school! Graduation! Yay! Years of the public school system finally coming to a celebratory end with a matte blue robe and a graduation cap adorned in plastic flowers. To enjoy it, my best friend’s family was holding a graduation party that weekend down at the family farm outside of Sacramento, in a tiny tiny town consisting of 5 street blocks against a railroad her great grandfather worked on a long time ago. Something about her family that was unique to me was that when one person celebrated, everyone did. That was a little different from my tiny family unit with no extended branches of any kind. I was invited to stay the weekend down on the farm, and I happily accepted. My family’s thanksgiving table always had just us 5 there every year; no one coming, no one going. This big party with blended margaritas for the grown ups and diet Pepsi for me was completely different from what I was used to, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Another thing you should know about me is that I take a handful of mood stabilizing medications every night, and for better or for worse, I can’t sleep without them. The party goes on well into the night, and my best friend and I end up retreating to her car to recline the seats and listen to true crime while the older generations danced and sang. It was while reclined that I realized I forgot my medication. There are some meds I take that I could absolutely go without for a night, but some, like Seroquel, are the only thing that can make me fall asleep these days, which meant I was in for a rough night. Sheepishly, I remember going with my best friend to her mom, asking if we can take a small excursion to a gas station for anything to induce sleepiness, like melatonin supplements, benadryl, even tylenol PM would help. She offers to come with us, and so we go out to some creepy-as-all-hell gas station at midnight and I go in and search the 18+ medication section, which I finally was able to shop in as of a few months before this. Condoms, ibuprofen, lighters. No melatonin, no benadryl, no tylenol PM. Shit.
Awkwardly, I come back to the car. I tell her and her mom I couldn’t find anything, and that we’ll just have to go back to the farm. Eventually, people have danced themselves into exhaustion, so it’s time for me and my best friend to go to her grandfather’s house and sleep in the bedroom her dad lived in decades ago. The house is graffiti-d and peeling and full of secrets, and I feel nauseous. It’s going to be a long night. Me and my best friend go into the room we’ll be sleeping in; across the hall, I hear an oxygen machine smoothly pumping air, with a sort of repetitive breathy whisper that, in the pitch black darkness of the countryside nighttime, sounded like a ghost. I couldn’t see her grandfather, but knowing he was there and didn’t even know that I was there felt so weird. The two of us settle down and get ready to sleep. She manages to fall asleep pretty easily, but I just kind of.. sit there. In this room, a lack of curtains is made up for by a piece of fabric hastily thrown over the window that doesn’t cut much of the light of the moon, which creates leaf-shaped silhouettes throughout the room.
I’m sitting there, silently, for I don’t know how many hours. The thing about this kind of withdrawal-insomnia I have that people don’t get is that I don’t even have a sensation of tiredness, which when I was in freshman year came to be useful when I wanted to pull all-nighters. I had gone 3 nights once without sleeping simply by withholding from taking Seroquel; there was of course a physical exhaustion toll and a kind of twitchy brain fog and a need to throw up but an inability to do so, but that “sleepy” feeling never came. So, I knew what was going to be in store for me. All of a sudden, while rolling around thinking about everything that had happened that week, one of her distant-half-cousins-one-and-a-half-times-removed-in-laws or whatever comes into the room and tells her she needs to come out. I just kind of sit there while she goes out of the room and disappears. After a while, I start to panic; what happened? Is everything okay?
Her distant-half-cousin-one-and-a-half-times-removed-in-laws eventually comes back inside, and she does too. She comes back into the room, and I ask her what happened. She begins to sob and cry incoherently; “Mochi- I don’t”…. “She just”… “He said..”. Mochi was her small chihuahua with fishy breath and trembly legs. Adorable in a kind of alien way. She tells me that she took Mochi out to go potty, and she ran off into the darkness. Fuuucckkk. I calm her down and say that we can find her tomorrow, and that it’s such a tiny town that she should be okay out there for a few hours. We have one of those long talks that is important to have in the moment but the actual details of which are forgotten years later. Something about anxiety and imposter syndrome. And then, she sleeps.
And I sit there for a few hours more until the hot summer sun comes up.
The general feeling of illness you get when your body never repaired itself overnight arrives, and I feel terrible. She’s not doing much better either, probably getting a total of 4 hours of sleep over the night. We put on our clothes for the hot new day and get up to go walk down one of the 4 only streets in this small town, calling out Mochi’s name. She gets the idea to find Butte, her family’s chunky lab, and see if he might be able to sniff her out. So, we walk back to the farm. We get Butte. Butte is of no help, but he’s with us anyway now.
We do a lap around town, and I feel like an Avian Jane Goodall studying the social habits of the chickens that populate this tiny town; I have always loved loose NorCal chickens, like the ones in Yuba City, and I was delighted to find out that people down here just had them. I still wonder why; later, we ended up being permitted access onto different peoples property to hunt for mochi, but I noticed no one ever had any kind of coop or nest situation, so I’m still not sure if they served any benefit to the local people. Sometimes animals can just be nice to have around, though. After a few laps, we both agree to take the car down to Woodland and to get some Dutch Bros. She gets her golden eagle chai with coconut milk, and I get some syrup flavored energy drink over ice with enough caffeine to kill a grown man. Yum. It does help a little, however. As the sun gets higher and hotter, the general feeling of “I think I’m dying” begins to fade off, as my body begins to overcome it like some persistence-hunter-caveman. In a way, I was a persistence hunter, but that day it was only to find a tiny dog that smelled like fish and shook when she got happy.
We drive back into the tiny town, We start with the railroad; we walk down it with Butte and her family’s third dog, Sweet Pea the Frenchie. Eventually we walk out of town limits on accident and end up on some pretty, stone lined property with one house surrounded by road and empty field. We back track but in the wrong direction, yet successfully end up at the back of the farm anyway. We hop through some yards and fences, which in hindsight should have gotten us shot by some rednecks, but we survived anyway. “Mochiiii…”. “Mochiiii.” We come back to the front of the farm and drop off Butte and Sweet Pea to hang out with the kids, and go off into her car again. This time, we circle the handful of roads in town, patrolling for her. We hear some chickens squacking and tiny barks, and I just know that’s mochi. We get out and look for her, but it’s like she’s in someone’s yard. There’s hints that she’s nearby (and there’s only 20 houses in this town anyway), but wherever she is isn’t somewhere we can get to.
Eventually, we had to leave. Her mom contacted different people and tried to let everyone know that their dog was lost, but people had work and so we couldn’t stay on the farm forever. It’s not a great feeling, leaving behind the town you know your dog is in. What if we never see her again? I would like to think that Mochi, as scrappy as she is, might become one with nature or join a pack of other local dogs, of which there were plenty. But also, I am reminded, she was so small she would have been realistically been local dog food. No matter what, it felt like a loss. It was terrible leaving her behind.
For many people with stories like this, they end here. That’s the last time they see their dog. But we got lucky. Not long after, she had been found; some neighbor found her just wandering and they knew it was her. As far as I know, Mochi is still happy and healthy, back home in their air-conditioned house and far, far away from wild chickens. Even though the whole day we spent looking for her didn’t end up actually solving anything, it was nice to bond with my best friend and her family, and now I know those few roads like the back of my hand. I think the lesson I take away from that day down in the valley is that it’s always important to try your best, and that sometimes through ways you will never understand, your effort comes back to you. Though, I could be wrong. But no matter what, I am glad that this story ends in a happy, albeit unclimactic, way. I think it’s important for stories that don’t have bad endings to be told, not just sad ones. And I also think that, for better and for worse, it’s the moments like these that make life special. It’s the slices of life and the tiny wins that make you who you are.
