Black Ribbon

didn’t necessarily give a damn about them. Here in this little canine ivory tower, however, every single person had at least one dog, and everyone had come here, as had I, in a way, in search of dog heaven. I had the comforting sense of having cracked up and landed in a specialized asylum in which everyone else enjoyed a form of madness identical to my own.
    On the table in front of my tray rested the Waggin’ Tail schedule, a pen, and a yellow legal pad on which I was listing activities to attend: agility, advanced show obedience, and, if I could fit it in, something called jumps chutes that I’d never heard of and thought we might try anyway. First aid and CPR? Before and after lunch, I had to steal some time to work on a column, but then I intended to catch a little of the afternoon’s Canine Good Citizen testing, mostly because, like a lot of other obedience people, I’d initially underrated the value of the program and now needed to make amends for a couple of elitist remarks about it in old columns. In the late afternoon, we’d go to drill team and to flyball. Yes, drill team. Remember drill team? High school? Brass band music and all. Marching in formation. With dogs. I hoped that none of my highbrow Cambridge neighbors ever found out, because if caught and convicted, Rowdy and I would find ourselves swiftly deported across the river to Boston. (“You were having what?” demands the judge. “This is Cambridge! We expect better than that! Anyone can have fun.” Bang! goes the gavel. “Guilty as charged!” A gang of Harvard graduates starts pelting us with a weird variety of objects banned within the Cambridge city limits—romance novels, containers of green and blue eye shadow, sharp-edged cartons of flowered wallpaper—as Rowdy and I beat it across the bridge and celebrate our escape by parading along the southern banks of the Charles to the strains of John Philip Sousa.)
    And flyball: The dog runs over a series of jumps, gets to a box, and whacks it with his paw, thereby releasing a tennis ball that he catches and carries back over the jumps, at which point the next dog... Well, it may sound silly to people, but dogs think the flyball box is the greatest human invention since frozen Bil Jac, and if you don’t know what that is, I pity your poor canine pal.
    Our first postbreakfast activity, agility, took place in what I think was ordinarily an annex to the resort’s main parking lot, a large clearing in the woods located at the end of a short dirt road. Let’s get the camp layout straight. If you stood facing away from the lake with your back to the big main lodge, ahead of you was the blacktopped parking lot, filled, of course, with vans, station wagons, and other dog-person vehicles, most of them bearing bumper stickers that ranged from the usual loyalty oaths (“I LOVE MY WEST HIGHLAND WHITE TERRIER”) and admonitions to tailgaters (“CAUTION: SHOW DOGS!”) to bold declarations of opinion (“ALL MEN ARE ANIMALS, BUT SOME MAKE NICE PETS”). To the right of the parking lot was the field used in the early morning for lure coursing and, later in the day, for drill team and various other activities. At the far end of that field was a big green-and-white-striped tent so festive-Iooking that I half expected to hear the cries of bar mitzvah celebrants stunned to discover themselves double-booked in the middle of dog camp. As it turned out, the tent was devoted to obedience. To the left, not far from the lodge, was the bunkhouse. The woods began immediately in back of the bunkhouse and ran along the edge of the parking lot to the little dirt road that led to the agility area.
    Agility! Of the many orders and allied organizations that constitute the freemasonry of dog fancy, agility alone requires a large and elaborately furnished temple in which to perform its rites. The first-degree rituals of obedience permit nothing more than a dog and a six-foot lead; and, by AKC decree, the regalia used in higher levels of the craft must be of spartan simplicity: flat-white jumps—no gloss, not even semi—relieved only by the stripes of black on the bar jump and the unobtrusive numbers showing the heights of the high-jump boards—black, too, and purely functional.
    But every temple of agility represents the glorious and elaborate union of the Tall Cedars of the Obstacle with the Order of the Rainbow for Dogs. Dispersed throughout the big clearing in the woods were an astonishing number and variety of