"Honey, I'm going down to the beach to check on Penny," I said, oh, about a thousand times during the two years we lived above Pools Beach, the prettiest little cove in Rinc¿n, a string of beaches on the west coast of Puerto Rico. Penny, our Irish setter, was hopelessly enthralled by minnows, the gaily colored tropicals that darted about the coral pools of Pools Beach. If you've been to a lot of beaches, you've probably seen one or two of those specially touched dogs, sun-burnished as old club tennis pros, but with a look of gaga joy in their eyes, pouncing and wagging, biting mouthfuls of sea, wading, wagging, pouncing, all day long.
At first it worried me a little that Penny was unsupervised down there, though she didn't have to cross any streets to get to the sand; and it worried me a lot that I was up in the house working instead of on the beach, with its pools and its fish and its happy bathers, whose laughter floated up to me the whole day long like a siren's song crying, "Come play with me! Come play!" So I made about a dozen trips a day, descending 14 steep and wobbly concrete-block steps, passing under the banana trees, then leaping onto the deep sand of the beach - ah, there!
"Penny! Hey, Penny!" I'd call. "Where's the fish?" And she'd look up as if pleased at last to find another believer: "Don't you see? There they are! They are everywhere!"
Usually, along with the tiny fish in the pools, there'd be a few of the beautiful people down there, young "trustafarians," sometimes with their little tanned naked babies crawling around on big beach towels. And sometimes there'd be our neighbor Myrna, and guests from her guest house, and their kids, employed at making fortresses out of the rough sand and the ever-available driftwood that the creek deposited onto Pools Beach after the biggest rains.
Always Myrna's speedy dog, Johnny, would be down there cavorting from beach blanket to beach blanket; and our neighbors David and Wendy and their dog, Suerte; and maybe a few other surfers and their dogs; and maybe a couple of characters from town with a bottle of rum and a dog or two; and in the winter high season a volleyball net and a beery day-long match that would conclude with a bonfire and a lobster roast; and during the summer lots of Puerto Rican families having picnic meals of many foil-wrapped courses. And always there was music and laughter and voices whose apparent joy and mysterious import were only magnified by distance. How could I stay away?
I was a surfer, and Heather was a Boogie boarder, and that was a big part of why we'd rented a house at Pools Beach. So another perfectly legitimate reason to go down to the beach was to check the surf ("Hey, Honey, I'm going down to check the surf"), and, if while standing on Surf Check Rock, any hope arose that it might be better around the bend, to scout farther down the coast. That meant a stroll along old Spanish Wall, where the beach steepened and the water deepened and the surf often disappeared entirely, only to reappear at Crab Rock, surging and crashing over the lava mesa where crustaceans scuttled in the intermittent waterfalls.
Nobody surfed Crab Rock, but you could clamber from it onto the rubbly limestone coast road and, after a few hundred yards, arrive at Domes, the defunct nuclear plant overlooking a broad, perfect crescent of sand. Now, Domes was an excellent surfing spot, but it was local turf, often muy occupado with adolescent Boogie boardistos. And anyway, just beyond Domes, past the lighthouse - El Faro - was The Point itself, the real-deal break that put Rinc¿n on the beach sports map.
Frequently a thorough surf check ended at The Point - in typical conditions it was hands-down the best wave - but plenty of times The Point would be too crowded, and then it was prudent to drift a little farther south, down to Dogman's. When the surf got serious, overhead or bigger, and the waves started breaking boards, then The Point crowd tolerated only high-performance, pedal-to-the-metal surfing. But even at those times, when the swell was spinning gorgeous green translucent tubes, Dogman's was just for fun, and the crowd there was just fooling around. Frankly, it was kind of an underachiever's break, and there was something, well, doglike about surfing there, hanging on at the margins of the action, picking up scraps. After a while, out of sheer lack of seriousness, I just naturally gravitated to Dogman's, and it became my regular break.
After whom was Dogman's named? I asked that question myself a few times when we first moved to Rinc¿n. And got vague-enough answers. Nobody quite remembered, except that he was a gringo surfer back in the '60s - or was it the '70s? - who had a lot of dogs. Who knew, really? Well, I found out before too long, when I picked up a pack of my own. I came to understand Dogman, how he had spent his days, how his mind had worked, what his weaknesses had been, and just how he had acquired all those dogs. After a while, I knew all there was to know.
I figured the original Dogman, if he had ever actually existed and wasn't simply a composite of all Rincón's previous gringo flaneurs with a soft spot for curs, had been a lot like Penny, really, our minnow-mad Irish setter. I imagined the sun had bleached his hair yellow and spun it into curls, as it had done to Penny's red locks; and that like Penny's, his muzzle had been grizzled and his eyes wild. He had hunted that same flash of quickening life at the water's edge, seeing it always receding ahead of him in the shine on the wet sand, the light shattering under the pressure of each footfall. He was a beach-walking fool, was Dogman, in no hurry but toting up the daily miles all the same. He was a surfer, fer sher, but after a few years the game just grew to be the sea itself, and the whole of the shore and the way it was born every second, was always new after each wave; and he came to feel an urgency to be there always, present at the drama of its birth, scrolling the scene underneath him with his feet. Because he moved at predictable times, when the light was most delightful and the air cool, the dogs moved with him.
Dogs, of course, are banned from many mainland beaches. This is a shame, because all the canids are great players in the sand, great loungers on it and bounders over it and great burrowers into it in pursuit of crabs. They appreciate a cooling dip every bit as much as we do, and alternating wet and dry, hot and cool, they can beguile a whole beach day in idleness, even without the benefit of novels. On islands like Puerto Rico, where the people don't fret about poop or what might possibly happen to somebody's kid in some worst-case scenario, and all the ensuing medical and legal horrors, the dogs are always on the beach, and always on the lookout for someone to lead them in a caravan to the next oasis.
"Honey, I'm going down to the beach to check on Penny," I'd say, and there would always be a couple of the faithful waiting right at the bottom of the 14 steps - a brindled bitch with prominent teats we labeled Mama Dog, and a golden retrieverish mutt named Goldie. (The ever-changing cast of the platoon called for the simplest provisional names.) Rebel, our bearded collie, though a cautious old fart on the steps, would never miss a walk. And, of course, I soon had Faro, our own adopted sato (as the local mix is known) pup with me. Part rottweiler, part doberman, part pit bull, part buddha, she was always a great recruiter, a wriggling, otterish advertisement for the fun of the jaunt. Johnny, Myrna's whippetlike sato, would join up, and a couple of wretched, tiny-headed sausages known as the monkey dogs would come tumbling down from their casita, barking like fools, ready to sign on for half a mile or so. Penny, seeing the sheer weight of numbers milling in anticipation, would cast a last wistful look at her fish and come bounding out of the pools. And then we'd move off, en masse, the whole damn pack of us.
And so it was that, for a season or two, because I could never stay indoors while the beach was right there, with every sunny minute of the day a provocation to play, I was Dogman. I was the eccentric gringo surfer with all the dogs trailing behind or racing ahead to chase the crabs of Crab Rock. Not the original, not the best, and surely not the last Dogman of Rinc¿n, but merely an incarnation, destined to move on, as ephemeral as the fish at Pools Beach.
Then, eventually, it was time for us to go. But how could I leave my troops? I did so with teary-eyed salutes and a 50-pound bag of Alpo, which I poured out to form little honorific mounds at several canine strongholds along the shore. We packed our own dogs into crates and left Puerto Rico and Pools Beach before I became so idle that we had to move out of our beach rental and onto the sand, into one of the palm-thatch lean-tos built by camping surfers - though that was probably what the dogs had been hoping for all along.
