As I prepared our dinner yesterday afternoon and chanced to look out the kitchen window, I saw our dog Canéla standing outside.
It was windy, and she stood stock-still in the breeze, her fur rippling, her head turned slightly into the wind and her nose held high, actively sniffing the air. From time to time though, with no other apparent influence beyond what she perceived in the air, she would wag her tail briefly, then stop. Three or four languid wags from an upraised tail fluttering in the breeze like a flag, and then slowly stopping, perhaps resuming a few moments later.
I wondered what sort of scents might be carried to her from the north that made her smile the way they did - there was no movement of her mouth, but her intermittent circular wagging made me think so much of a whimsical smile gracing a human face that I couldn't shake the image.
I imagined someone might be barbecuing down the road, or perhaps she caught the scent of one of our neighbours' dogs. Or with most of the snow finally gone from our neighbourhood, perhaps she was simply smelling earth or grass or even freshly uncovered deadfall from a park.
For two minutes or more I watched her, this dog who is probably less than two years old and seems perpetually restless while on her feet, as she smelled, and wagged, occasionally shifting the angle of her head but never moving her feet from where she stood. It amused me to no end, but it also reminded me of something I could not put my finger to.
Last night in bed it occurred to me: memories from my later teens, of sitting in the driveway in my battered 1974 Maverick, dialling the needle of my car stereo from one end of the AM frequency range to the other with painstaking slowness. I had discovered that during the day, my car radio in Leduc could pick up transmissions from as far away as Calgary on occasion, but at night, if the atmospherics were favourable a the ionosphere cooperative, I could listen to broadcasts from as far away as the United States.
I had mentioned this to my father at some point and he nodded sagely, relating similar tales of ships at sea picking up signals from distant shores but only at night. He explained how this was due to the radio waves literally bouncing off the upper atmosphere, often repeatedly, in a phenomenon known as "skywave propagation." But despite this reasonable explanation, the notion of sounds from faraway places being carried to me invisibly over the air, far beyond their expected range, still felt like magic to me.
And so I would slowly, slowly turn the right-hand dial of my car's radio, listening intently for any shifts in the static or the occasional scrap of conversation or even a hint of music - in the '80s, some AM stations still played music, whereas the few existing stations are generally an all-talk format.
One time I picked up an instrumental from the 1940s, an Artie Shaw and His Orchestra sort of thing, and for a moment - the briefest of moments - thought perhaps I had picked up a signal from out of time, perhaps returning to Earth after having been reflected off some object in space. Had I picked up an episode of The Shadow or Little Orphan Annie or The Inner Sanctum or any of the other radio dramas my parents had listened to in their own youth, I might believe it still. But the radio announcer that came on afterwards sounded all too modern, reading the temperature in Celsius from wherever he was.
I would often turn off the radio while leaving the dial tuned to the phantom station, but would never be able to pick up the same one the following day, even if I waited until after sunset to attempt it. Every reception felt like an interception, a lucky grab out of the ether that would never come again.
And I know full well that our dog does not comprehend random scents on the wind in the same way, but I still can't stop the linkage in my mind between the dog on my patio and the teenager in that car three decades ago - her wagging and my smiling, both grateful for a random signal from somewhere beyond.
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