Harry Bridges the Cowdog.

San Francisco

      In several late Octobers, when the critters were loaded on cattle trucks, I wandered from the Rockies to California and looked for most any kind of job. During the winter of 79, it was feeding long-coupled gray jumping horses and shoveling their manure for a woman who owned a ranch an hour north of San Francisco, out by Point Reyes.  

     Bob was a union longshoreman who always wanted to be a cowboy. I had an addiction to double shots of Jim Beam and barmaids’ smiles.  Bob had a good union job.  I couldn’t avoid living from payday to payday. He floated into the ranch with his sister on the raft of artists who showed up every weekend. She was a painter who had accepted the patronage and marriage proposal of a Lebanese man in exchange for time to paint. She found little inspiration when locked in a whitewashed compound in downtown Beirut, so she fled for home where she could drive a car in public. 

     A longshoreman is accustomed to lugging heavy objects. Bob fit right in with the ranch routine. He was good stout help and became a regular weekend hand. He loved the smell of horse breath and wondered, with me, how a roasted peacock might taste.  

     He told tales of growing up in the city, the son of a longshoreman, how he had lived all his life within sight of his mother’s house right beside the Pacific Ocean, how he always wanted to go to Wyoming and be a cowboy. I told him about growing up in the Sandhills of Nebraska, ranch country, where the call letters of the local radio station were KCOW, and how I had wanted to go west and live right beside the Pacific Ocean, maybe work on the docks. We became tight pals.

    Bob called and invited me to lunch with his wife Patty and the kids on Saturday, that he had a new pickup truck and a cow dog he wanted me to meet. After the Saturday morning feeding, my old Ford stock truck rolled me to their house in the Sunset District, a block off the ocean.

    In the driveway was a new black Ford 4x4 diesel. On the porch steps were Kimmy, one of Bob’s daughters, and a flop-eared pup that looked to be a cross between a cocker and a Gund bear. The dog’s name was Harry Bridges, Kimmy told me, named after some big union boss. Harry had come from the pound three days before, was three-years-old, and preferred Oreos over regular old boring dog food. Harry didn’t look like a cowdog, but I’d seen standard poodles do a fair job of moving cattle. The owners called them French White Heelers.

    Bob and I took the new pickup truck for a demonstration ride. Patty said to be back in an hour, that lunch would be ready. Bob managed to steal his new cowdog when Kimmy wasn’t looking and tossed Harry in the bed of the truck. We drove the truck down into the Mission district to a friendly little bar that Bob knew to have the prettiest barmaids and the greatest variety of Mexican beer north of Neuvo Loredo. When we got out of the truck, Bob said “Stay, Harry. Stay.”

    We would’ve been OK with the Coronas, Pacificos, Dos Equis and Tecates if we’d never allowed the gentleman at the end of the bar buy us a couple of shots of Comemorativo Especial, a pale yellow tequilla that’ll knock your socks off with your feet in your boots. That little act of kindness escalated into a few more rounds and the barmaid got even prettier. When we finally got around to looking above the bar at the Felix the Cat clock, we were an hour and a half late for lunch.

     The truck, parked right in front of the bar, wasn’t hard to find, but even in our south-of-the-border stupor we noticed that our faithful little cowdog was missing from the back. Conspiracy theories developed real fast. We were in a Latino neighborhood, so someone had stolen Harry to breed him to Chihuahuas. The no-good union-busting police had nabbed Harry for being out of compliance with some stupid municipal licensing law. The Chinese were going to make soup from him. The SPCA abducted Harry because of their egg-sucking stance against dogs in the back of trucks. In any scenario, Harry was gone.  

    We hit the streets, calling for a dog that didn’t know his name in a part of the city where English was a second language, and it was tough to explain to folks why we were looking underneath low rider cars and whistling.

    Fear effectively counteracts the effects of Mexican beer. Bob and I were almost sober when we conceded that there was a good chance that we were going to show back up at his house two hours late, without Harry, to a cold lunch, colder cook, and two young kids who had been waiting for three hours to cuddle their new pup.  

    Thank the Gods, this was before the age of cell phones, so we didn’t have a chance to confess before we pulled back into Bob’s driveway, and there was Harry sitting patiently on the front steps, waiting to be let in the house. That little critter had negotiated five miles of intense San Francisco traffic, untold numbers of close scrapes with humans trying to interrupt his pilgrimage, and found his way safely back to his home of only three days.  As it turned out, Harry didn't much like messing with cattle out on the ranch, but he sure got my prize as a fellow that recognized a good deal when he saw one.