Helter Shelter
In the last 15 years or so, I’ve inspected about 4,000 strangers’ houses. In the course of doing that, I’ve met several thousand dogs. No offense to any of the nice people, rusty furnaces and leaky roofs I’ve run into during that time, but the dogs are the best part of my job. With a few notable exceptions, the dogs love me as soon as I get out of the truck, love me as long as I’m with them and don’t bother me after I’m gone.
Most dogs want to play with me as soon as they meet me. They bring me their slobbery tennis balls and chewed-up Frisbees, run circles around me and jump on me. I don’t mind. A little time with a good Frisbee-fetching dog is worth a few paw prints on my pants.
Some years back, I ran into an underprivileged deep-rural dog who didn’t have any toys. He just had one rock about the size of my hand. As I was walking up to his house, the little black dog picked up his rock, threw it into the air, caught it, then dropped it at my feet. I’d never seen a rock-fetching dog in action before, so don’t you know, I picked up the rock and threw it across the yard. The dog brought it back. We kept the game going for a while, until I accidentally threw the rock under a lawn mower. With the dog busy hunting for his rock, I figured it was a good time to get to work. Two hours later, I walked out of the house, and the dog was waiting for me, with his nose all skinned up and the rock in his mouth. The lawn mower was turned over on its side. That was one dedicated dog.
The worst part of home inspection work is going in crawl spaces. Crawl spaces are where the sewer lines leak, the snakes go to live and the cats go to die. Too many times, I’ve turned a corner in a crawl space and found myself eyeball-to-eye-socket with a dead cat. Usually, the entrance for the crawl space is in the backyard, which is where most dogs live.
When I’m working with co-inspector Rick, it’s my job to keep the dogs entertained while he goes through the crawl space hatch. It’s devilishly hard to do any work in a crawl space when you’ve got a dog following you around. One day, though, I failed to entertain a frisky standard poodle, and the dog shot into the crawl space right behind Rick. A couple minutes later, Rick and the poodle met deep in the crawl space, both of them on all fours. Rick hollered to me, “Can you call this dog? He won’t let me out.”
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“Won’t let you out,” I said. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s guarding me, basketball-style,” Rick replied. “I move left, he moves left. I move right, he moves right. He’s mirroring me and just having a great time. I’m sweating up my coveralls.”
I figured the best way to coax the poodle out was to give him something better to do. So I looked around the yard for a toy. Sure enough, there was a dog-slobbered soccer ball over by the doghouse. I kicked it past the crawl space hatch. The poodle sprinted out of the hatch, gathered up the ball between his paws and tried to get me to play soccer. By then, though, Rick was out of the crawl space. “Sorry, poodle dog,” I said as I walked back into the house. “I don’t play any games that won’t let me use my God-given opposable thumbs.”
In my travels, I’ve run into a few freakish dogs. One family had a houseful of elderly, overweight pugs. The dogs loved me when I walked in the door and couldn’t wait to gather around me. Problem was, as soon as one of the puffy pugs would stand up, its pencil-thin legs would start to slide sideways on the floor. None of the fat pugs could stop the slide. After a few seconds, each dog would get a look of resignation on its face and then belly-flop onto the floor. But these pugs wouldn’t stay down. They’d get back up and start sliding all over again. All that day, I was entertained by the pop-pop-pop of pugs hitting the floor and the scritch-scritch-scritch of them fighting their way back upright.
I think my favorite dog-for-a-day was Barney the basset hound, who might just be the best-loved dog in all of America. Barney had his own room in the garage, complete with a fan for summer, a heater for winter and a TV—tuned to Animal Planet—running full-time. Barney’s bed was nicer than a lot of beds I’ve slept in. And, truth be told, Barney was cleaner than I am most of the time.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a report sitting at the kitchen table of a nice condominium, which was the home of a very friendly Yorkshire terrier. After the little dog gave me a good sniffing, he decided he liked me. So he jumped up in my lap and went to sleep until I finished typing. When he woke up, he stood up on my chest and French-kissed me. I say that’s a pretty good day at the office.