The Day my Dog Flew

If you were to go to the sleepy neighborhood in Bartow, Florida, you would see little evidence that I had lived there. You might find a baseball rotting on top of a neighbor's patio roof, and if you were to dig deeply enough--you sick fiend--you might find a dead dog buried in the backyard of my former house. But in the summer of 1987, that dog was very much alive and was more often than not chasing after baseballs that I hit in a field that was situated in the middle of our block. All houses backed up to this field that was maybe 200 feet long by 100 feet wide. In general, this was a quiet block in a sleepy, Southern town, but there were exceptions.

One notorious exception involved a sunbathing woman, a baseball, and a "flying" dog. Dusty was my 3-year-old black lab whose favorite activity was to fetch baseballs that I would hit onto this field. One sunny afternoon, I hit a ball that sailed majestically through the air and landed 40-feet deep into a neighbor's back yard. Enter Dusty, my dog, running at full speed to fetch the ball. We're talking about a flying fury of focused animal energy.

Now, these neighbors had a log "fence" that stood about 2 feet high--short enough for a person to step over, but tall enough to keep a dog from seeing what was on the other side. And what happened to be on the other side--as I saw to my horror only as Dusty was at full speed and beyond the point of distraction--was the woman of the house wearing a purple bikini and sunbathing on a reclining lawn chair only feet from the other side of the fence. To make matters worse, she represented an exact point on the quickly shrinking line running from dog to ball.

The dog is now fully airborne, so let's pause the action Dukes of Hazard style.

It all really comes down to physics--the speed, the weight, and the angle of liftoff. As I was assessing the situation, I guessed that Dusty likely had the speed to make it over both the fence and the woman. It was a Mrs. Adams, I believe. I had previously timed her on this field to see how fast she was (my dog, not the woman), and I did this by hitting a baseball through two walls of flags placed a precisely measured distances. I would hit the ball to the other side of the flags and then measure the time between Dusty hitting the first and second row of flags. Dusty's best time in the 30 meters was 2.54, which ironically is the number of centimeters in an inch. "Coming up on Dateline: The hidden connection between animals and the metric system. What you need to know." The bottom line on speed is that we have a very focused dog traveling at 26.6 miles per hour. She also weighed in at about 60 pounds. That doesn't sound like much, but we're talking about 60 pounds at 26.6 MPH and aimed claws first at an unsuspecting and scantily-clad Mrs. Adams. So it all really came down to the angle of liftoff.

And, in fact, that is exactly what happened.

Since then, seasons have come and gone, and with the passing of time came also the passing of my baseball fetching buddy. But memories live on, and I'm confident there is one woman will never fully erase the memory of a black lab performing a bikini-clearing jump that would rival any you'll see in the Winter Olympics, just without the skis.