Doggie Paddling To Stay Afloat

About fifteen years ago my wife and I left our house to go to a doctor’s appointment, leaving our seventeen and fourteen year old daughters at home. It was early wintertime, and a deep layer of accumulated rainwater had fully submerged the protective cover over our in-ground swimming pool. The water layer above the cover was almost three feet deep in one area of the pool, and a few days of subfreezing weather had created an ice layer about an inch thick over the entire surface.

We always used the fenced in area around the pool as the wintertime dog run, especially at night, and so when our beautiful collie made it known he had to go out, one of my daughters let him into the enclosed yard.

A short time later she called to him to come back into the house and discovered that he had fallen into the pool, broken through the ice and was doing a self taught doggie paddle in the middle of the ice laden pool. The cover, most of it, which was underwater except for the edges, prevented him from paddling to an area where my daughters might have been able to help him get out.

It was the era before cell phones, and my wife and I had not yet arrived at the doctors, so they called the police, and an officer arrived in about ten minutes. He was not inclined to jump into the frigid water, and he could not reach the dog. His solution was to toss our patio furniture in to the pool one piece at a time, apparently with the hope that somehow the dog would grab hold of one of the chairs, and he could then pull our collie closer to the side.

By the time the officer exhausted the furniture supply, my daughters had managed to contact my wife and I, and we were on the way home.

When we reached the house, the dog had been in the freezing water for, at
Least, an hour and he was tiring quickly. The policeman was poking at him with a long handled pool skimmer, and when my wife rushed toward him, he responded, "He needs to work with me here."

This episode came back to me the other night as I was listening to the aftermath of Tuesday's election. Each side of the political spectrum was responding toward the other side by saying "They need to work with me here," and then they would throw their version of a verbal lawn chair at their opponents and in doing so hit all of those Americans who are doggie paddling just to stay afloat.

As soon as I saw the dog in the middle of the pool that night, I jumped into the water and eventually lifted him out. My hope is that every one of these politicians that were elected both in 2008 and this week jump in feet first to the task because if we all get tired and stop paddling, they are going to drown too.