Jim Goldsworthy, Columnist
The headline one of our editors placed on a recent animal doctor’s column read, “Storm scares dog.”
No fooling. I’ve seen dogs who display no dread of anything that walks, but absolutely go into a panic during thunderstorms. The size of the dog makes no difference.
My grandparents had an otherwise fearless Chihuahua named Pepi who freaked out with the first clap of thunder. We always knew where to find him during a storm — under my grandmother’s bed.
A friend of mine has an enormous Black Labrador Retriever who is usually content to stay on the floor or any unoccupied piece of furniture that is big enough to accommodate him.
When this dog experienced his first thunderstorm, he discovered to his dismay that he did not fit under the bed ... at which point he became a lap dog.
“Try removing from your lap a dog that weighs almost as much as you do and doesn’t want to get off,” she said.
The dog soon discovered he liked being a lap dog, so my friend took to keeping tennis balls in bowls next to her chair and her couch. When the Lab decides to become a lap dog, she takes one of them and tosses it across the room.
Seeing a chance to play, the dog jumps down and goes after the ball — at which time my friend rearranges herself so she cannot be sat upon.
There is a downside to this, and it is stated in Newton’s Third Law of Motion: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Anyone who has ever fired a deer rifle or a shotgun is familiar with it. So are football and hockey players.
When a 100-pound dog jumps energetically off your lap, it’s better to be sitting on on a big substantial couch instead of a straight-backed dinner table chair.
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It might be interesting to have a dog along when my friends and I go to Gettysburg. Dogs apparently can see, hear, smell or otherwise sense things that humans cannot.
We used to hunt rabbits with a chubby little short-legged beagle named Queenie, who was the sweetest, most amiable and even-tempered dog I’ve ever met.
Queenie and I began to climb up a little hillside toward a wide-open area where there was nothing but some scrubby bushes and a log.
All of a sudden, she reared back, bared her teeth and began to growl and snarl, and the hair on her back stood straight up.
I could see where she was looking, but nothing was there ... nothing I could see. Queenie had never acted like this before, and to my knowledge never did so again.
When the hair on the back of my neck began to bristle, I grabbed Queenie, tucked her under one arm and told her, “Let’s you and me get the hell out of here.” As soon as I picked her up, she licked my face — something else she never did.
Strangely enough, I was never able to find this place again on a 150-acre piece of property that Frank and Mary Calemine owned and was like my second home.
Even though I’ve not spent much time there in the last 30 years, you could still put me down blindfolded anywhere in the middle of the night, then take off the blindfold, and I’d know exactly where I was.
I remember what this piece of ground looked like, but — like an eastern American Indian grave I found my first night at Spangler’s Spring on the Gettysburg battlefield — it’s no longer there. As some Indians say, certain things are not here all of the time.
A lady called the other day to ask if I’d like to see some ghost pictures she took in Virginia. I said I would.
She said her routine was to go out at night with her digital camera, shoot it a bunch of times, then see what she captured.
One photo showed a tall, gray, hooded figure standing in the midst of several gravestones. The lady said it reminded her of a monk, and I agreed.
Another photo showed a Civil War soldier in a blue uniform. You could see his face and tell he was a young man, probably in his teens. Every detail of his uniform was clearly visible, and he was holding a rifle.
The striking thing about both the monk and the soldier was their relative transparency.
“Neither of them was there when I took these pictures,” the lady said. “People told us that soldiers still guard the place, and I guess this is one of them.”
Skeptics claim such things are only the result of an overactive imagination or an optical aberration in the camera, but they haven’t experienced them the way some of us have.
A fellow who said he used to be a skeptic told me he was doing some research at Gettysburg, sitting alone one evening on a rarely-traveled hillside, when someone behind him initiated a conversation.
“He kept talking to me, and I kept giving him short answers, hoping he’d take the hint and leave,” the man said.
“Finally, I turned around to tell him I was busy and didn’t want to talk. I saw him, just a few feet away, and he was wearing old, beat-up clothes like someone would have worn back during the Civil War.
“I could see right through him,” he said. “That’s when I got up and got out of there.”
The fellow said he’d never told anyone about that until he started reading about of the adventures my buddies and I have at Gettysburg. He didn’t want people to think he was crazy.
And he said he never went back to that place again.
Time was, I’d have reacted the same way. If I were by myself, maybe I still would ... but the idea of being able to talk with someone from an era long vanished is fascinating. There are many questions I’d like to ask him. I had relatives at Gettysburg, and he could even be one of them.
Still, you know what they say: Be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it.
