Amy Tan - Saving Fish From Drowning

When Wendy departed on the Burma Road trip, it wasn’t Phil who was with her but a lover of one month’s duration, Wyatt Fletcher. He was the adored only child of Dot Fletcher and her late husband, Billy, the Barley King of Mayville, North Dakota, a town whose motto flaunted: “The Way America Is Supposed to Be!” This was a town that fully came together when its native sons fell into trouble, particularly when the trouble was no fault of their own.

Wendy adored Wyatt’s style, for instance, the fact that he could not be coerced or co-opted. If something or someone disagreed with him, he simply “moved on,” as he put it. He was tall, slim-hipped, hairlessly muscled in the chest and back, towheaded and perpetually bronzed as those of Norwegian extraction can be. Wendy believed they were complements of each other. I, however, do not think opposites necessarily are. She was short and curvy, with a mass of curly strawberry-blond hair, skin that easily sunburned, and a sculpted nose, courtesy of a plastic surgeon when she was sixteen. Her mother had homes in San Francisco, Beaver Creek, and Oahu. Wendy assumed Wyatt was from a blue-collar family, since he did not talk much about his parents.

In one sense, Wyatt could be called homeless; his bed was whatever guest room of well-heeled friends he was bumming in for the month. What he did for a living depended entirely on where he was staying. In the winter, he found odd jobs in ski shops and snowboarded in his spare time, and for housing, he shared floor space with his ski patrol friends and a few indoor squirrels. He spent the previous summer bicycling on the fire roads of Mount Tamalpais, accompanied by two Scottish deerhounds that belonged to his ex-girlfriend’s parents, the absentee owners of a countrified wood-shingled mansion in Ross, which was where he house-sat and resided with the hounds, in the quaint pool house with its hammock, billiards table, and oversized rock fireplace. The spring before that, he crewed on a private luxury yacht that took ecotourists around the fjords of Alaska. Several of those well-heeled clients offered him future house-sitting employment, “gigs,” he called them. All in all, he was an easygoing charmer whose predictable rejoinder, “Like, whatever,” to any remark or question was synonymous with his lack of direction and encumbrances in life.

As vacuous as my descriptions may make him sound, I rather liked Wyatt. He had a good heart toward all, whether they were former teachers, girlfriends, or employers. He was not cynical about those of us who were wealthy, nor did he envy or take excessive advantage of us. He remained pleasant and respectful to everyone, even the meter maid who ticketed the car he had borrowed. He always paid the ticket, by the way. I would say he had one of the finest attributes a human being can have, in my opinion, and that is kindness without motives. Of course, his lack of motivation was another matter.

During the bus ride into Lijiang, Wyatt dozed, and Wendy gave everyone who was awake the benefit of her stream-of-consciousness observations. “Omigod, look at those people on the side of the road. They’re smashing rocks, turning them into gravel to pave the road.… Those faces! They look so beaten down. Does the government think people are machines? …” Though Wendy had only arrived in China, she was already sharpening her sensibilities about despotic rule.

LIKE ANY EXUBERANT PUP, Wendy needed to learn “shush.” That’s what Harry Bailley thought. He was sitting across the aisle from her and Wyatt. He had forgotten that he had once possessed the dedication of an activist. In his youth, now some twenty-plus years past, he, too, had wanted desperately to sink his teeth into important causes. He had vowed to resist complacency, abhor apathy, “to make positive, incremental change and leave an imprint after this tenure on earth.”

Years before, a much younger Harry had led the movement to abolish aversive dog-training methods, those that relied on leash-jerking, shock collars, and rubbing the dog’s face in its feces. When he finished veterinary training, he did doctoral studies in the behavioral sciences department at UC Berkeley, investigating pack behavior, how dogs instinctively learned from higher-ups and taught protocols to lower-downs. Dog temperament was not ingrained from birth, he noted. It could be shaped by interaction with other dogs and people and by tasty bribes. Anyone who understood basic Skinnerian principles could tell you that when given positive reinforcement, dogs respond more quickly and consistently to what humans want, and they learn new behaviors more quickly through luring, shaping, and capturing.

“If your doggie has your very expensive alligator purse in his mouth,” Harry would say in his seminars, “offer to trade him a piece of hot dog. Oh goodie, pant-pant, and he’ll drop the purse at your feet. What’s the lesson here? Put your overpriced purses and pumps where Pluto can’t get to them! Then go and get him a smelly old tennis ball. The game is simple: Ball in your hand, treat in his mouth. Even if he’s a basset hound, he’ll turn into an impressive retriever if you do enough trades.”

And through such commonsense advice, Dr. Harry Bailley became the Dog Trainer of Dog Trainers, the founder of the well-regarded International Society of Canine Behaviorists, the inventor of humane training devices (patents pending), the star of The Fido Files , and now the well-qualified owner of my dear, dear Poochini. I’m afraid I never did much training with him, and naughty Poochini had already chewed off the spines of some of Harry’s collection of first-edition books.

“You must inform your clients, gently but firmly,” he often told his disciples at lectures. “Dogs are not people in fur coats. No, indeed. They don’t speak in the future tense. They live in the moment. And unlike you and me, they’ll drink from a toilet. Lucky for us, they are perfect specimens of how operant conditioning and positive reinforcement work, and beautifully so if only we learn how to apply the principles properly. Their human handlers have got to be absolutely objective about what motivates their poochies—so quash their tendency to ascribe Muggum-wuggum’s barking, growling, and counter-surfing to anthropomorphic motives such as pride, revenge, sneakiness, or betrayal. That’s how we speak of our ex-wives, former lovers, and politicians. Remember that Canis lupus familiaris is driven by his own jollies, which are usually harmless to others but can be detrimental to white carpets and Italian shoes. The fact is, dogs mark territory and they masticate. And if dogs resemble Homo erectus in any respect, it is in those traits of the poorly socialized male. Both do what pleases them: they scratch their balls, sleep on the sofa, and sniff any crotch that comes their way. And you, the brilliant dog trainer, must train the owners —that’s right, those barely evolved humans holding those rolled-up newspapers in hand like cavemen’s cudgels—you must train the humans to show the dogs what lucky canines prefer to do other than nip and yowl, or use the leather sofa as a chew toy. Ah! ‘Prefer’ is the operative word, isn’t it? …”

Harry Bailley believed in training people early, before they could inflict any lasting damage upon the wee and impressionable pooches. “Puppy classes!” he would exhort on his television show. “A great equalizer, the perfect socializer, far better than those bore-and-snore book clubs that are all the rage on the other channel. Doggie classes, what a fantastic way for singles to meet. Strong, sensitive men. Woof! Loyal, long-limbed ladies. Woof-woof! And all those sweet, slurpy puppies. Picture their tails wagging—the doggies , you scalawags.” And as his TV clients and their dogs tangoed to “Sit,” “Down,” “Stay,” and “Come,” Harry would ham it up to make everyone feel successful, proud, and continually motivated. “Lure your dog. That’s right, dangle that cheese bit above his nose, now back until he sits. Steady, steady … Yessss! Bingo! Give him the jackpot right away. He’s got it. You’ve got it. Only five point two seconds that time. Good Lord, you two are fast! What a fantastic team!” The dogs panted. The humans, too.