When the conversation at home turned to getting our then nine-year-old daughter, Keira, a puppy, I wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. At the time, I was commuting four hours a day from Miller Place on Long Island to my office in Lower Manhattan, getting home well after dinner, and didn’t feel like forfeiting what little energy I had left to replacing puppy potty pads. But, I reasoned, having a dog would mean routine walks, and maybe that would be the linchpin to getting our whole family outside more often.
As my wife, Erica, and I looked into the attributes we wanted in a dog, like size, demeanor, and, maybe most important of all, low shedability, a labradoodle checked all the boxes. We brought Chloe home and, not long after, my commute went from four hours to four minutes, as I started working remotely. With more time for walks together, it wasn’t long before Chloe could handle a few miles around town, even on days when deadlines loomed (walking the dog, as any writer will tell you, is a highly effective form of procrastination). My daily walks with Chloe became family ones on weekends, which evolved into off-road hikes.
As a surprise to no one, hiking with your parents wasn’t high on any sort of list for Keira, by now a tween. Still, we’d all pile into the Subaru Outback, like the families in the commercials, and set out for our favorite local trail, which meanders through the woods before emptying onto the shore of the Long Island Sound. Once that felt redundant, I turned to AllTrails to find harder and longer dog- friendly options from Montauk to the grounds of the Gold Coast Mansions. Chloe, of course, loved every second, especially slurping water from her portable bowl. More surprising was that Keira was warming up to our outdoor excursions, too.
For all of her kvetching, Keira would usually ask for one of our smartphones to snap photos of the landscapes: a lighthouse here, white caps on the Atlantic Ocean there, or a delicate cairn. As time passed, spending hours out exploring even became part of our Chloe-free vacations, be it on wooded trails in the Adirondacks or along the rugged Maine coast.
Slowly, an appreciation of landscapes that didn’t look like home, spaces that instantly made you feel tiny, became important to Keira. I saw it on her face as we gazed across the craggy peaks of Grand Teton National Park and while we took in the awe-inspiring scale of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone River. On the flight back, Keira thanked us for that trip, but I knew much of the credit belonged with the fluffy dog back home, eagerly awaiting our next walk together.
—Sal Vaglica is a freelance writer.
