3. Vacation Dog

On a recent beach vacation, Feelings & Co producer Jordan Turgeon got to see glorious sunsets, beautiful plants… and adorable vacation dogs. 

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

I’m Jordan Turgeon, and it’s going to be okay.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that the world’s population can be divided into two groups: people like me, who can’t so much as look at a dog while out in public without commenting on how floofy he is … and everyone else in the world. Dog people just get it! 

Our first family dog more closely resembled your average house cat in the way she regarded her humans (which is to say: not much). She would fetch and do tricks like shake your hand and balance on her hind legs. She wasn’t a cuddler. She wasn’t loving or notably sweet.

She was, notably, an escape artist. You’d be forgiven for thinking we were horrible people for how eagerly she’d bolt from us the second she got the chance. If I left the front door open for a moment too long, or if my sister forgot to make sure the backyard gate clicked shut behind her … this dog was gone. Poof! I spent several nights of my childhood in my pajamas, in the back seat of my mom’s car with the window down, scouring the neighborhood looking for that Houdini wannabe.

Our second family dog was a runt and born with a heart defect that meant she’d never be a show dog like her original owners intended. But what she lacked in star quality, she made up for in affection. She rarely left our sight (only to go sniff out a chipmunk) and always came running at my mom’s whistle. At night, she’d start out in my parents’ bedroom, cuddling with my mom until my dad came to bed and made her leave so he could – rightfully – claim his own spot under the covers. Then, she’d come to me … keeping me company while I finished high school math homework – or, more likely, chatted with friends and crushes on AOL Instant Messenger. She’d later sprawl on her side and press her back against the side of my leg as I slept, so I always knew she was there.

(She didn’t visit my sister’s room, but that’s just because my sister slept with the door fully closed, like she learned in fire safety class … whereas I needed the hallway light on and my door cracked open in order to sleep for much longer in my life than I care to admit.

I recently spent a week on the beach – my first “swimsuit vacation” in more than 15 years. My body never adjusted to the four-hour time change, and neither did my friend’s, which meant we were sipping coffee with our toes in the sand by seven each morning … prime time for humpback whale sightings, pink sunrises, and dog watching.

There was Charlie, the lab with flecks of white around his nose. He ambled up to us one morning and sat at our feet just long enough to receive a few well-deserved head scratches before wandering off to greet his next set of fans. His human wasn’t far behind.

There was the Scottish terrier-slash-dachshund mix – a scruffy black dog that was somehow the weirdest and also cutest thing I’d ever seen. (Unfortunately, I said that cute part out loud, though, to which his late-middle-aged owner said, “And the dog ain’t so bad either, huh?” Blegh.)

But I knew, on the fourth morning of our trip, that I’d found my vacation dog. 

Vacation dog. Like, you know, the dog that makes you think, “I should adopt one of these when I get home” … and you forget the part where you have neither the fenced-in yard nor the square footage to keep a furry friend from getting bored.

This furry friend was a Border Collie? I dunno, maybe a Shetland Sheepdog? I’m honestly horrible at breeds. I don’t even know if those are similar. And at first my friend and I worried that maybe he’d misplaced his person. His face was stretched into one of those infectious, permanent smiles, tongue hanging out of his mouth, as he trotted back and forth right where the ocean met the sand.

I crouched low at one point, extending a hand in that very-desperate-but-trying-to-play-it-cool way that screams: “I LOVE DOGS! PLEASE COME SAY HI TO ME! I PROMISE I’M A NICE LADY!”

Instead, this dog threw himself into the ocean! And any dog person knows that the most painful kind of rejection is the one you get from a dog. I felt … low. I felt … betrayed. I felt … unworthy. 

My friend and I had seen dozens of dogs playing in the waves already that week. But this one kept going … swimming farther and farther and farther from shore, until all you could see was the top of his furry head bobbing up and down in the water.

“Um, is he going to drown?” We asked each other. And I’m pretty sure our facial expressions were the equivalent of that cringing emoji, because apparently we forgot how easily we ourselves had floated in that same salty seawater. 

Eventually, the dog turned direction and began swimming parallel to the shoreline, the same way we’d seen open-water swimmers do during their morning workouts. And when he approached one particular oncoming swimmer, my friend and I gasped … because without lifting her head (or her snorkel), the swimmer reached out with a wetsuited arm and patted the dog on the head.

Once reassured that he was, in fact, a very, very good boy, the dog turned around again … this time leading the way.

I wondered, as this woman swam, if she could see her friend’s fluffy feet kicking along ahead of her, encouraging her to keep going. Letting her know he was there with her as she pushed against the current – the same way our family dog used to at night when the stress of school and sports and just being a teenager with a lot of messy feelings kept me wide awake.

They continued on like this the rest of the half-mile walk back to our place … the dog swimming ahead a bit, then circling back to check on his human and get a pat on the head … the two never leaving each other’s side for too long, but trusting each other to keep moving forward – at their own pace.