Garth Stein - The Art of Racing in the Rain

I remember the heat on the day I left the farm. Every day was hot in Spangle, and I thought the world was just a hot place because I never knew what cold was about. I had never seen rain, didn’t know much about water. Water was the stuff in the buckets that the older dogs drank, and it was the stuff the alpha man sprayed out of the hose and into the faces of dogs who might want to pick a fight. But the day Denny arrived was exceptionally hot. My littermates and I were tussling around like we always did, and a hand reached into the pile and found my scruff and suddenly I was dangling high in the air.

“This one,” a man said.

It was my first glimpse of the rest of my life. He was slender, with long and lean muscles. Not a large man, but assertive. He had keen, icy blue eyes. His choppy hair and short, scruffy beard were dark and wiry, like an Irish terrier.

“The pick of the litter,” the lady said. She was nice; I always liked it when she cuddled us in her soft lap. “The sweetest. The best.”

“We were thinkin’ a keepin’ ’im,” the alpha man said, stepping up with his big boots caked with mud from the creek where he was patching a fence. That was the line he always used. Hell, I was a pup only a dozen weeks old, and I’d already heard that line a bunch of times. He used it to get more money.

“Will you let him go?”

“Fur a price,” the alpha man said, squinting at the sky, bleached a pale blue by the sun. “Fur a price.”

3

“Very gently. Like there are eggshells on your pedals,” Denny always says, “and you don’t want to break them. That’s how you drive in the rain.”

When we watch videos together—which we’ve done ever since the very first day I met him—he explains these things to me. (To me!) Balance, anticipation, patience. These are all vital. Peripheral vision, seeing things you’ve never seen before. Kinesthetic sensation, driving by the seat of the pants. But what I’ve always liked best is when he talks about having no memory. No memory of things he’d done just a second before. Good or bad. Because memory is time folding back on itself. To remember is to disengage from the present. In order to reach any kind of success in automobile racing, a driver must never remember.

Which is why drivers compulsively record their every move, their every race, with cockpit cameras, in-car video, data mapping; a driver cannot be a witness to his own greatness. This is what Denny says. He says racing is doing. It is being a part of a moment and being aware of nothing else but that moment. Reflection must come at a later time. The great champion Julian SabellaRosa has said, “When I am racing, my mind and my body are working so quickly and so well together, I must be sure not to think, or else I will definitely make a mistake.”

4

Denny moved me far from the farm in Spangle, to a Seattle neighborhood called Leschi where he lived in a little apartment he rented on Lake Washington. I didn’t enjoy apartment living much, as I was used to wide-open spaces and I was very much a puppy; still, we had a balcony that overlooked the lake, which gave me pleasure since I am part water dog, on my mother’s side

I grew quickly, and during that first year, Denny and I forged a deep fondness for each other as well as a feeling of trust. Which is why I was surprised when he fell in love with Eve so quickly.

He brought her home and she was sweet smelling, like him. Full of fermented drinks that made them both act funny, they were hanging on each other like they had too many clothes between them, and they were pulling at each other, tugging, biting lips and jabbing fingers and yanking at hair, all elbows and toes and saliva. They fell onto the bed and he mounted her and she said, “The field is fertile—beware!” And he said, “I embrace the fertility.” And he plowed the field until it grasped the sheets in its fists, arched its back, and cried out with joy.

When he got up to splash in the bathroom, she patted my head, which hovered low to the floor, me still being immature at just over a year old, and a little bit intimidated by all the screaming. She said, “You don’t mind if I love him, too, do you? I won’t come between you.”

I respected her for asking, but I knew that she would come between us, and I found her preemptive denial to be disingenuous.

I tried not to act off-putting because I knew how infatuated Denny was with her. But I admit I was less than embracing of her presence. And because of that, she was less than embracing of me. We were both satellites orbiting Denny’s sun, struggling for gravitational supremacy. Of course, she had the advantage of her tongue and her thumbs, and when I watched her kiss and fondle him sometimes she would glance at me and wink as if to gloat: Look at my thumbs! See what they can do!

5

Monkeys have thumbs.

Practically the dumbest species on the planet, next to the duck-billed platypus, who make their dens underwater even though they breathe the air. The platypus is horribly stupid, but is only slightly dumber than a monkey. Yet monkeys have thumbs. Those monkey-thumbs were meant for dogs. Give me my thumbs, you fucking monkeys! (I love the Al Pacino remake of Scarface , very much, though it doesn’t compare to the Godfather movies, which are excellent.)

I watch too much TV. When Denny goes away in the mornings, he turns it on for me, and it’s become a habit. He warned me not to watch all day, but I do. Fortunately, he knows I love cars, so he lets me watch a lot of Speed Channel. The classic races are the best, and I especially like Formula One. I like NASCAR, too, but I prefer it when they race on the road circuits. While racing is my favorite, Denny told me it was good for me to have variety in my life, so he often puts on other channels, which I enjoy very much as well.

Sometimes if I’m watching the History Channel or the Discovery Channel or PBS or even one of the kids’ channels—when Zoë was little I’d end up spending half the day trying to pry goofy jingles out of my brain—I learn about other cultures and other ways of life, and then I start thinking about my own place in the world and what makes sense and what doesn’t.

They talk a lot about Darwin; pretty much every educational channel has some kind of show about evolution at some point, and it’s usually really well thought out and researched. However, I don’t understand why people insist on pitting the concepts of evolution and creation against each other. Why can’t they see that spiritualism and science are one? That bodies evolve and souls evolve and the universe is a fluid place that marries them both in a wonderful package called a human being. What’s wrong with that idea?

The scientific theorists go on and on about how monkeys are the closest evolutionary relative of people. But that’s speculation. Based on what? Based on the fact that certain ancient craniums have been found to be similar to modern man’s? What does that prove? Based on the fact that some primates walk on two feet? Being bipedal isn’t even an advantage. Look at the human foot, full of bent toes and calcium deposits and pus draining from ingrown claws that aren’t even hard enough to scratch at the earth. (And yet, how I yearn for the moment my soul inhabits one of these poorly designed bipedal bodies and I, too, assume the health concerns of a man!) So what if man’s body evolved from the monkeys? Whether he came from monkeys or fish is unimportant. The important idea is that when the body became “human” enough, the first human soul slipped into it.

I’ll give you a theory: Man’s closest relative is not the chimpanzee, as the TV people believe, but is, in fact, the dog.

Witness my logic: