Yesterday's weather was sunny and beautiful, so I decided to accompany the cycling team on its afternoon ride. We were only a mile or so from the school when one of my colleagues noticed a dog lying in the shallow ditch at the side of the road. He was a scruffy white dog, small and harmless-looking, and he lay on his side amidst the creepers and leaves at the bottom of the ditch; his chest was heaving, but he seemed unable to move. The two of us dismounted and clambered into the ditch. The dog saw us, and he licked my hand when I offered it, but he didn't wag his tail or move his hindquarters at all. I immediately worried that his spinal cord was damaged.

Two grossly swollen ticks had dug into the flesh of his left ear, and he was covered with flies, greenbottles and bluebottles and loudly buzzing black flies that clustered under his tail. I peered closer and saw signs of internal bleeding. "My god," said my friend. "I wonder how long he's been lying here."

The dog had no collar or identification, but my friend jumped back onto his bike and rode to the nearest house, thinking the dog might belong to the people there. I grabbed one of my water bottles and began dribbling water into the dog's mouth; he lapped it up greedily, despite being unable to raise his head from its awkward position at the bottom of the ditch. I was scared that moving him might do more damage, but the few drops of water and strokes on his fur that I gave him struck me as utterly inadequate to comfort him. The swarm of flies moved away while I stood over him, but the minute I stepped back to my bike--the minute my shadow no longer fell on his body--they came back in a metallic rush.

My friend returned with a deeply unconcerned-looking man who looked down from the edge of the ditch and said the dog belonged to the owner of the house, not to him. He said he'd call the owner and make sure it was taken care of. Another dog accompanied him, a smallish hound mix, rail-thin, friendly and collarless, with ticks bulging through its smooth brown fur. .

We didn't know what else to do at that point. The man returned to the house, my friend accompanying him partway. I laid my hand on the injured dog's side once more and said quietly, "Go in peace." There didn't seem to be anything else to do.

We rode away.

After we returned to campus a few hours later, my friend drove back out and found the dog still lying where we'd left him. He loaded him into the car and drove him to the vet's office. The vet's report: severed spinal cord, almost certainly from a car's impact, probably occurring twelve to twenty-four hours before my friend lifted him from the ditch. At about 4:30 p.m., on Friday, May 10th, the vet ended his misery at last.

I feel as though I should learn something from this experience. I should perhaps focus on the compassion shown by my friend, or the mercy shown by the vet. But somehow I keep hearing the buzzing of insects in the sun, and the moral keeps coming back as "People can be such bastards." It's not a lesson I needed or wanted, and the cost of tuition is too high.
6:42 PM

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I named the bike. It's made by Trek, and since its purpose is to keep me from being too fat to reach the control panel, I named it "Scotty." (It's black and beautiful, so I thought about "Uhura," but I thought the wife might take that the wrong way.)

I haven't biked in a couple of weeks now; the preparations for departure ate up all my time last week, and the week before that was the Week I Was On Duty. One thing about teaching at a boarding school is that you're called upon to serve in a bewildering variety of capacities. During the WIWOD, I spent Saturday afternoon & evening chaperoning a bus full of boys at a mixer at the Madeira School, returning home at about 1:00 a.m. The next morning I had to be at our outdoor ropes course to supervise the climbing instructors; they don't need much supervision, luckily, but that ate my day until 3:00. We have seated Sunday dinner with our advisees at 6:15 every week, and then it was time to start grading. Grades were due at noon on Tuesday, so I spent most of the day and night Monday and most of Tuesday working on them (no, I didn't make the deadline) before crashing and burning Tuesday night. I was on dorm duty Wednesday, which involves being on call all day and monitoring the dorm during study hall (7:45-10:00) and after lights out, so I got home a little after midnight. And then on Thursday we had our end-of-the-marking period faculty meeting.

Oh, and did I mention classes? I had those, too.

Don't mistake me--none of the above is terribly unusual in the busy world of boarding-school teaching; it's just that having it all come in a single week is a bit--intense.

As a result, I didn't find a lot of time to get out and pedal the metal. Today, I'm going to try to get out and wear off some of the calories provided by John and Flane (Hi, John and Flane!) at their nuptial celebrations. It's looking kind of grey and rainy, though. Perfect weather for a Romulan ambush...
10:36 AM

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