Greg Jensen ^{(10 Posts)}

Barley, a dog, sprawls on a sofa and, her chin on her paws, looks up from the armrest at the camera with a plaintive look. Barley does not, so far as I can tell, experience satiety cues. Even after a full meal, she will remain interested if folks around her are eating food, and will very much give you the eye to see if you might spare a bit for her. I realize that some consider this to be “bad manners” for a dog, but I’m skeptical of efforts to narrowly delimit acceptable dog behavior. As such, I’ll often give Barley a little taste of what I’m having, nothing that would spoil her appetite. In this particular case, Barley was the enthusiastic recipient of a tiny corner of an orange slice moments after this picture was taken.

Barley, a dog, sleeps on her belly with her head turned toward the camera, her snout resting on her paw as if she is striking a demure pose. I often crack wise about the limits of Barley’s stamina, but the truth is that mine isn’t anything to write home about either. As such, while she will sometimes come home from a long walk rather tired, she’s rarely so thoroughly knocked out by a walk that it would be fair to say she’s exhausted. The one terrain for which I hold a clear advantage, however, is hills. She gets tired very easily by steep uphill grades, possibly because they engage some of her secondary muscles differently. In this photograph, we see a Barley freshly home from a summer’s walk up various 15° to 25° grades, so pooped that she flopped onto the bed in a full sploot and could not be bothered to stand up again when sleep came for her.

Barley, a dog, examines a wide 180-degree turn on a downhill slope, such that a driver would round the bend, passing Barley as they do so, and receive their first glimpse of the shoreline at the end of a straightaway. An experience one gets used to living in an area that is at once hilly and woodsy is that a lot of roads need switchbacks to achieve a reasonable grade, but the trees limit your sight lines anywhere but along the road. This can create a feeling of suspenseful disorientation: It can be a bit hard to tell which direction you’re headed (beyond uphill or downhill), and your destination remains out of view, until you make that final turn that brings you, at least, back to the water’s edge. But upon reflection, I realize that Barley has likely never had this experience, because her experience of cars is one in which agency is not merely denied, it’s unimaginable. From her point of view, the boss says “Car Time” and so car time it is, but it’s a pure lottery every time she gets in. Will this drive bring us to the office? Or the grocery store? Or the vet?! No way to know. I imagine she merely experiences it in the moment, and so probably doesn’t have a sense of progress. And you can’t experience the buildup & release of suspense if you don’t have an expectation. Instead, the sea comes as a surprise. “Oh! OK, it’s Sea Time I guess. Cool.”

Barley, a dog, sniffs about along the base of a weather-scarred wooden wall, its paint flaking off in large chunks after years of neglect. There’s an aesthetic conceit that is often explored in photography, that humanity’s creations are doomed to wither and decay, allowing nature, indefatigable, to reclaim its rightful place. It’s hard not to dwell on entropy when Barley pauses in front of some shed or garage that’s been deemed a sacrifice by its owner. In this instance, I can surmise that this garage is both too small for modern cars and too difficult to access, making its upkeep pointless. The truth is, of course, that we, and nature, are not special in entropy’s eyes. That which is neglected will decay, and it is only by a laborious uphill battle that anything is maintained. Nature merely seems robust because it is a fully decentralized effort, wherein each individual arc of creation and destruction is subsumed by the roiling wave of all those around it. Humanity’s works feel fragile because their upkeep is someone’s job, and too often, someone else’s job. So keep making. Keep building. Chip in. Bring in a load from the car. Don’t wait for someone else to fix it. You don’t need to give everything you’ve got if we’re all, as a wave, doing what we can.

Barley, a dog, stands in an unreasonably lush expanse of grass that extends to the edge of the frame on all sides. Small white flowers are scattered throughout, helping to give a sense of perspective. As much as suburbanites yearn for the lushest, dankest lawns that year-round sprinklers can buy, I think they’re far from Barley’s ideal. She’s not a fan of having so much mud between her toes that it starts to cake in, and a lawn this moist grows from soil that’s never fully dry. Laws on this scale present a further problem: With no obvious landmarks, she gets a kind of restlessness, sniffing at the ground less and less and favoring instead targets on the far horizon. In her perfect park, she’s never more than 100 feet from a tree, never more than 50 feet from a shrub. Like the cautious sailors before the Age of the Sail, she sticks close to the scented coastline, and hesitates to venture into the open ocean.

Barley, a dog, extends a pay past the edge of a throw pillow as she rests on a sofa, and her toe gently folds the corner of a magazine over on itself. I think Barley is probably a little frustrated by the amount of time I spend in office chairs. Like many dogs, she wants to be close. Not necessarily touching, but near enough that any small movements of your body will register. When I visit my parents, she will capitalize on the popularity of the living room couch as a venue, both for reading the paper and watching the news. Couches can mean snuggles, of course, but Barley’s quite happy simply to be quite near. She may stare at you for long periods of time, but don’t worry. That’s just because she loves you.

Juniper, a dog, nestles into a large throw cushion such that her front and back paws are bundled together on the cushion, while her butt pokes past its edge and rests on the couch directly. Unlike Barley, whose main rest posts are to bend into a face-covering croissant or to flop her body flat and sideways, Juniper prefers an approach that lets her paws touch. She’s he’s snuggling against you, she’s prone to putting multiple paws (sometimes all of her paws) on you to gently monitor your proximity, but on her own, she’ll just touch her own paws together instead. I’m just glad she can tell when she’s near to herself.

Barley, a dog, stands tall trying to see a little bit higher over the top of a wall made of concrete pavers where it joins an embankment built from loose stone. One of Barley’s signature moves is “I don’t understand that countertops exist.” It’s genuinely a blessing: I’ll be cooking up a tasty steak on the stove and she’ll wander into the kitchen in pursuit of that scent and then just look around like it’s a complete mystery where I’ve hidden a whole savory meal. So imagine my surprise when Barley clambered her way up this wall and started actively scanning back and forth (her head is a bit blurry because it was in motion) as if trying to see over this wall. My best guess is that there must have been some powerfully compelling scent, such as that of a cat, that was made very recently at this particular junction, and Barley’s just gotta know which way it went!

Barley, a dog, strikes a moody post as she lies comfortably in the dappled sunlight of a lazy late-summer afternoon. When relaxing with Barley indoors, her instinct is generally not only try to make eye contact, but to maintain it. Her appreciation of scritches is that much more evident when she locks eyes with you. When outdoors, however, her attention is always a bit more scattered. Often, I’ll speak to her while we’re, and as I do so, she’ll glance about, or scan the surroundings. She’s definitely not ignoring me, she’s taking in the info, but her sense of our team activity is a bit different from my sense of our conversation. The wind, I’m sure, carries a steady supply of New Clues compared to the bland steadiness of familiar indoor air, but more than that, I think it’s only on her home turf that Barley really fully relaxes.

Barley, a dog, rests on a sofa with her paws on the armrest, her head up, her ears forward, and her eyes alert. As much as Barley is a dog who lives in the moment, she certainly also lives with palpable concerns about the immediate future. Her concern when people leave is real, she can tell they are leaving, she’s knows what’s likely to happen next. Her hopes are similarly short-lived: A burst of enthusiasm when there’s a clue of looming good news. I don’t think she can project too much further into the future, though. I sometimes wish I could assure her that everything will be OK, that life will find its balance. Instead, I have to trust that she is resilient, that she’s already bounced back from so much, that she will survive.