When Dogs Run Away by Joseph Lapin

When a dog slips out of a collar and runs toward a busy street, the instinct is to chase after it like
a madman, screaming at the dog to stop. At this point, it’s impossible to reason with the dog, but
in the moment, it seems plausible that a command can convince the dog to halt. Take for instance
the other day when I arrived at my office in Ocean Beach, San Diego: With an acai bowl
toppling over with strawberries, frozen bananas, and honey in one hand and a latte in the other, I
opened the door and saw our office dog Layla, a 50-pound Australian shepherd, and a new dog
Penelope, a skittish Maltese that weighed close to five pounds. As soon as I opened the door,
Layla bit poor Penelope in the ass. Seeing an opportunity, Penelope booked it and ran straight
toward the street at a pace comparable to an impala trying to run away from a hungry cheetah.
So, instinctively, I started running, too.

“Penelope,” I yelled. “Please, stop.”

Just recently a group of researchers published a study in the American Association for the
Advancement of Science to understand how dogs process meaning in speech. According to PBS
NewsHour, “It took [the] team months to train six Border collies, five golden retrievers, a
German shepherd, and a Chinese crested to remain still as their brains were scanned.” What they
learned is that dogs process language similar to human beings, and through a combination of
intonation and language, dogs can comprehend their owners.

But in my experience, when dogs run away, language ceases to have any power. The
intonation of a scared owner sounds panicked, and a dog can’t process the words accurately.
They can’t decipher that “Stop” means “If you run into the street, then you’re going to die.”
Clearly, Penelope was confused somewhere between my intonation and word choice, and she ran
down the stairs of our office and straight into the intersection on Cable and Bacon, where cars
often come dangerously close to killing people walking toward the Ocean Beach Pier.

“Penelope, stop,” I yelled, imagining her flattened like a penny left on a train track. How
was I going to explain to the owner, a friend who loved Penelope like it was her child, that her
dog had been run over by a jeep with two surfboards strapped on the top rack driven by a guy
who hopped out and said: “Sorry about your dog, bro”?

I ran faster, spilling the coffee and the fruit, knowing that my entire office was watching
from the windows above the OB Noodle House. To my luck, a family on bicycles approached
the intersection instead of a cadre of cars and trucks revving their engines, and they tried to
corner the dog, but Penelope was evasive, scooting away from their outstretched hands, and I
tried to grab her, feeling like Rocky Balboa chasing after a chicken to build up footspeed as he
prepared to fight Apollo Creed. Finally, I put the acai bowl and the latte on the ground and had
Penelope stopped in her tracks, but she fled to the undercarriage of a Jeep Cherokee. So I moved
behind the Jeep, hoping that I could grab her by the collar, dragging her back to the place she
tried so desperately to run from.

But as soon as I moved behind her, she ran back the other way, weaving in and out of the
grasping hands of the family on their bicycles. “Penelope. Stop.” I could see the shadow of a car
moving in the background the way someone might be startled by the sudden presence of a shark
appearing while scuba diving. When she moved into the intersection, I saw the boyfriend of
Penelope’s owner standing in the middle of the road, and as soon as Penelope saw him, she
rolled over and submitted, exhausted and tired.

§

What is the proper way to act when a dog runs? Not just any run: that panic-run that seems
pushed forward by a ghost in their mind, a vision that exists just outside of the human eye. They
run like a character in a Tennessee Williams’ play sprinting toward the road to commit suicide. I
want to believe in a precise combination of intonation and language that will force a dog to listen
to reason. But I know that doesn’t exist, and somehow, against all logic, it’s become my duty to
try and save the dogs when I see them running.

It’s happened countless times. I’ve seen more dogs lost in the street than I can count, and
no matter what I’m doing, whether I’m heading to a job interview or an important meeting, if I
see a lost dog, then I must stop. I have a feeling it comes down to my own dog. I have a mutt
named Hendrix, and every time I see a dog running down the street I see him heading to some
unknowable disaster, too, knowing that I was responsible for his protection.

But sometimes, I’ve realized, it might be best to let the poor pooch go. For instance, I
was leaving a Denis Johnson reading at the University of Southern California, and I was walking
alone toward my car that was parked somewhere off campus. I was, in fact, having trouble
remembering where I parked. At least it was a warm, summer night, and I couldn’t believe how
empty the roads were, which made me a bit nervous. The area around USC wasn’t known for its
safety, to say the least.

I pushed the button to cross the street, and the campus glowed behind me like a power
plant. I thought about the drive home to Long Beach, where I lived with my wife and dog,
knowing that I would have to jump on the 710, eventually, and drive past the cloud factories and
the Lego-building block machinery that festered off the 405 like a tick that was gradually
sucking the blood out of a city. Even though it defied logic to have bumper-to-bumper on
Tuesday at 10 p.m., there would be some unexplainable happening like an oil tanker catching fire
underneath a bridge, causing congestion. But for the moment, the street was entirely empty.

“Wait, wait, wait,” the robotic voice said at the crosswalk.

As the electronic sign changed from a flat, orange hand to a stick figure walking, that’s
when I saw the brown pit bull running down the middle of the street. For a moment, I wondered
if I should seek cover. Perhaps the dog was rabid, and it was just searching for its first victim, but
I couldn’t turn away; I was transfixed by this dog that was galloping down the middle of the
empty LA street like a vision I needed to capture some meaning from.

“Dog!” I yelled. “Dog. Dog.”

The dog didn’t look at me, and I watched the muscular legs and the eyes that looked as
wide and bright as if it had seen the world after years of living in a cage in a basement. There was
no reasoning, I could tell, with this dog. It had already left this world, and if I tried to bring it
back, then it might take me with it. The green light turned to red again, and I had to wait at the
crosswalk as the mutt ran down the street, further and further into the quiet city.

“Dog!” I yelled. “Dog. Dog.”

§

I wonder if I felt bad about judging that dog. But the most important lesson in learning how to
run after dogs is comprehending when you can help them—and when help it’s impossible. I was
trying to atone for that one incident at USC a few years later when I was walking down
Barrington Avenue in Brentwood, and it was one of those spectacular days in LA that caused me
to wonder if the sky was actually created by CGI. I was headed to grab a coffee on the corner of Barrington and San Vincente, where pretty people stood in line for a $4 beverage, when I heard a
car behind me beeping. Not just once. Incessantly. I turned around and saw a Great Dane, his
giant paws beating down the crowded Barrington Avenue with the Sunday afternoon traffic, and
his leash was dragging behind him.

“Stop,” I yelled.

Instinctively, I started running after the dog who was causing the lines of traffic to divert
like Jim Carey in Bruce Almighty. I bolted down the sidewalk in flip-flops, yelling at the cars on
the other side of the road to move, for God’s sake, pull over so the dog doesn’t get killed. The
Great Dane stamped down the street like the Clydesdales in the Budweiser commercials and
turned on Montana Avenue, heading toward the intersection of Bundy and San Vincente: an
overcrowded boulevard packed with cars. If the dog made it that far, there was no way that it
would survive the four lanes of traffic, and if by some miracle it did, then I knew there was no
way the dog would make it past Wilshire Boulevard a half mile down.

“Is that your dog?” a voice said.

When I turned around, there was a young woman in a brown Toyota sedan. She was
wearing a winter hat, even though it wasn’t cold.

“No,” I said. “It’s not your dog?”

She shook her head no. “I’ve been following the dog since Sunset.” She meant Sunset
Boulevard, but I pictured her chasing the dog as the sun raced across the sky, traversing the
entire city like she was taking part in an ancient journey.

“You want to get in?” she asked.

I looked at the door handle and could see the dog further down Montana Avenue, forcing
the cars in oncoming traffic to swerve out of the way. Without thinking, I felt my hand on the
door handle and opened it, and on a random Sunday afternoon on a walk to grab coffee for my
wife, I was suddenly in a car with a strange woman wearing a winter cap and trying not to smile
when I sat in the car, and we were off, in search of a runaway dog.

“You see where he went?” she asked.

“I saw him head toward Whole Foods,” I said.

She pulled off the curb and into traffic, and I stuck my head out of the window to flag
down the attention of people walking. “Have you seen a dog?” I asked.

An older woman who looked startled when I called to her, simply pointed down the street
to the alley behind Whole Foods, and the car swung into the alley with such speed and reckless
abandon I wondered if people would think we were filming a chase scene in a movie. I looked
through the parking lot and could see the dog in the middle of San Vincente, the leash dragging
behind him, running with the traffic like he thought the aluminum cars were his pack.

“He’s over there,” I said.

She drove through the parking lot, passing the men in orange vests who needed to help
the people in Brentwood back into their parking spaces like they didn’t already have back-up
cameras. She turned right on San Vincente, passing the bouquets of flowers on the side of Whole
Foods, and we immediately hit a red light. Unlike the movies with great chase scenes, she didn’t
try and run the light. The line of traffic from Bundy was moving constantly through the street
like a series of blood cells in a vein.

So we sat there in her car. She broke the silence first.

“You live around here?” she asked, the turn signal clicking in the silence.

“Just on Barrington,” I said, sneaking a glance at her. She was my age, and I could tell
she was smiling from the sides of her lips, almost like Mona Lisa: a smile that was implied rather
than explicit. “Right near where you picked me up.”

The turn signal clicked. It’s hard to describe that silence. I could tell she wanted me to
talk to her, but I felt held back, understanding that certain conversations are left better
unexplored. When the light turned red, we spent the rest of the drive questioning where the dog
had gone. Do you think he turned off Bundy? Is it possible he circled back? Do you think his
owner already found him?

But as we drove further, it was clear that neither of us knew where the dog had gone. It
had disappeared. I mentioned we should ask the people walking in the street if they saw a dog
running. The first person we asked, a man who looked like he had been working in someone’s
garden—his hands and face and jeans were covered in dirt—pointed further down the road. The
young woman with the skull cap looked at me and smiled, as if to say there was still hope.

She drove further down Bundy, passing Nicole Brown Simpson’s old house, and we saw
someone else in the street but no dog. This time it was an older woman in a walker and a
younger man with black shades. The young man was holding the old woman by the arm.

“Have you seen a dog?” I asked.

“Is it your dog?”

“No.”

“It was just running down the street,” the old woman said. “It went that way. Toward
Wilshire.”

If the canine made its way to Wilshire without stopping, then there was no doubt that the
animal had succumbed to a brutal death. Nothing could cross that road that was as wild and free
as that dog. We kept on driving, closer and closer to the noisy intersection that spelled doom for
the canine, and the young woman stopped the car again. I asked a bystander, and they hadn’t seen
the dog. The trail was cold. We stopped and asked another person. But still, nothing.

We gradually crawled closer to Wilshire, and I stared at the constant traffic and listened
to the engines and the honking like I was staring into a meat grinder. I asked the young woman to
turn the car around, and she drove me back on Barrington Ave and dropped me in front of my
apartment that looked like a motel, and I left without asking for her name.

Joseph Lapin is a storyteller, journalist, author, creative director, and photographer living in San Diego, California. His writing has appeared at the Los Angeles Times, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Narratively, The Rattling Wall, and Huck Magazine. He is the host and creator of The Working Poet Radio Show, a podcast and live show sponsored by the Miami Book Fair dedicated to the working lives of creative people. He is currently the creative director at Circa Interactive.