This story was originally written by Hal Gunardson and posted on a Rescue Dog Site, which no longer exists. It is dated 25 Mar 2010. Annie passed away in April 2022. She lived a long and happy life. We missed her terribly.
Annie’s Story
Hal Gunardson offered to share his adoption experience with Breed Rescue. This is Hal’s unique story with Annie aboard his sailing vessel “Free Radical”.
People are frequently asking me, “What kind of dog is that?” The answer is, I really don’t know. Annie is reputed to be a two and half year old half Shepherd half Smooth Collie mix but nobody knows for sure. She is a rescue dog and her early history is shrouded in mystery. I adopted Annie from an animal shelter just three days before her termination date and so Annie, who was formerly a rescue dog, is now a “rescued” dog. All I can say for certain is she is a good-looking animal, bright, healthy, alert, and curious about everything around her. In short, she is everything that you could want a dog to be.
Ever since I was a kid I’ve always had a dog and it is hard to imagine life without a canine companion. But after my black Lab, Calgary, passed away three years ago, changes in lifestyle made it hard to see how I would deal with the responsibility of another dog. My lifestyle changes involved, among other things, living full-time aboard a sailboat and sailing up and down the east coast of the US and the Caribbean. For the past three years, I’ve become, as many call us, “snowbirds” sailing south in the winter and north in the summer. It was hard enough for me to adjust to this lifestyle without considering what it would be like having a dog aboard. I couldn’t have been more mistaken. Dogs are remarkably adaptable creatures and we can learn a lot from them about always making the best of any situation.
At First Sight
So how did Annie go from being a landlubber to a seasoned “sea dog” in a couple of weeks? It was, to say the least, an interesting transformation. I was in port in South Florida when I finally made the decision to find a dog to live aboard. On a Sunday afternoon, I went over to the local shelter to look around. There were two lab puppies posted on the shelter’s website and I thought one of these might be the one. I inquired about the puppies and was told they were three and a half months old. Miley was already adopted but they believed the five-month-old pup was still available. I walked through the kennel to take a look and sure enough, the five-month-old lab was there, but somehow Annie, the two-year-old Shepherd-Collie mix got my eye. I think at first it was the ear action. She always has one ear up and the other down and switches from one to the other from time to time. It’s kind of her signature idiosyncrasy.
Anyway, the shelter’s procedure is first you write down up to three dog’s names, then enter a small room with a chair, desk, and a very large dispenser of paper towels, then they bring the dogs you are interested in, one at a time, into the room. You spend about 15 to 20 minutes alone with each dog to see if you are simpatico. The five-month-old lab puppy came in first. Nice dog but the puppy personality and all of the basic training involved gave me second thoughts. The puppies are apparently very popular and there were already three families interested in adopting her. So if I was interested, I could go to the bottom of the list. I said no, best to let one of the families adopt her. Then they brought Annie in.
She jumped, yanked, and pulled all the way down the hall. When she entered they told me to beware of two things. First, “This dog is totally out of control” and second, “she was abandoned because she chases livestock.” OK.
As soon as the handler left the room Annie laid down at my feet. I petted her for maybe 10 minutes. She then got up and paced about the room, each time stopping and staring at the crack in the door. She was telling me she had to go out to take care of her business but of course, I couldn’t let her out. Next, she squatted in the middle of the room and made a pretty good-sized puddle. So, that’s why there was such a large towel dispenser on the wall. After the clean-up, she laid back at my feet for the remainder of our time. When the handler returned I said, yes we definitely bonded and I would like to adopt her. Seemed to me she was only out of control when she was trying to get out of the kennel and concerning the livestock, well there wasn’t going to be any livestock to chase where she’d be living. Two problems already solved.
Her Name
I asked if there was a list of adopters for Annie and they said, “No, it’s generally more difficult to place the older dogs.” For a brief moment, I thought about renaming Annie, perhaps to something more nautical. But then it then hit me, Little Orphan Annie, the perfect name for her. As I thought more about it I realized that the karma actually went much deeper.
The Sailing Sloop Annie
Being a lifelong sailor I remembered a famous sailing sloop named “Annie” built in 1880 that’s permanently moored in the Mystic Seaport museum. It seemed apropos that Little Orphan Annie, the rescued dog, would be living aboard a sailboat herself.
Annie’s Song
Next John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” which he wrote for his first wife came to mind. Particularly the second stanza which was a love song for his wife but any dog lover can immediately connect the lyrics to their relationship with their dog;
Come let me love you,
let me give my life to you
let me drown in your laughter,
let me die in your arms
Pretty heavy-duty stuff to be sure, but exactly what I had in mind as I left the shelter with Annie by my side.
The Interview
The next step in the process was for the handler to interview me. I understood they are cautious as I’m sure the folks at the shelter really didn’t want to see the dog back again in a few days or a few weeks.
During the interview, the biggest concern about my qualifications for adopting Annie seemed to be the fact that I am a full-time live aboard on a sailboat. I can’t imagine that I was the first one who lived aboard a boat to come in to adopt a dog. Nevertheless, it seemed to generate a great deal of concern. But I apparently passed muster and off we went. Despite my nervousness about the dire warning “out of control”, she walked alongside me as if she had been doing it all her life. I felt she somehow knew she was going home.
Only home turned out to be a lot different than she expected.
The Boat
She rode in the car sitting up in the passenger seat like an old pro and got out when we stopped without any doggy drama. However, the trouble started when we approached the dock. In her former life, she apparently had never seen anything like this.
There is an aluminum ramp leading from the land to the floating dock which moves up and down with the changes in the tide. When I tried to take her down the ramp you would think she was walking across a bed of hot coals. At first, she balked and finally, she literally pranced down to the concrete dock as fast as she could. When we got to the boat she was completely perplexed. She didn’t want any part of it. There is about a two-foot difference in height between the dock and the boat and she could have easily jumped the gap but it scared the hell out of her and she was determined to stay on the dock. I tried to gently lift her aboard but she wouldn’t have it. For the next four and a half hours she lay on the concrete dock and stared at the boat as it gently swayed back and forth.
Annie at the Dock Staring at the Boat for the First Time
Suddenly another song with an Annie connection slowly entered my consciousness, “Sweet Dreams (are made of this)”, by Annie Lennox and the Eurythmics. Somehow I imagined that Annie, the rescued dog, might be having these thoughts as we approached the edge of the land, the Marina, the dock with the boat gently rocking in its berth.
Sweet dreams are made of this
Who am I to disagree?
Travel the world and the seven seas
As I looked at her expression, I imagined she must be thinking, “You want me to do what?”
Finally, she fell asleep on the dock. I left her tied with a fresh bowl of water and went down below in the cabin to sleep.
I woke about midnight and went to check on Annie. There she was fast asleep on the dock but the temperature had dropped and I worried about her catching cold on the concrete. Especially since, like most shelter dogs, she already had a case of kennel cough. While she was still asleep I lifted her aboard and put her in the cockpit of the boat. She was not particularly happy about it but grudgingly submitted and saw that all things considered, it was a better deal than the concrete dock. She fell asleep in the cockpit and I did the same down below in the cabin.
Annie Oakley, another Orphan Annie
I believe that orphans, both human and canine, have a special internal drive to adapt and excel in whatever situation they’re thrust into. Perhaps because of their humble and often difficult start in life, there is a strong tendency to overcompensate and overachieve. This was certainly true with Annie Oakley.
Annie Oakley was born a poor back country girl from, believe it or not, Darke County, in western Ohio. When she was nine her father died and her mother gave her up to the care of the county’s poor farm. Afterward, she was placed into indentured servitude with a local family where she reportedly suffered both physical and mental abuse. Despite her difficult start, she became an extraordinary shooter and her amazing talent got her a starring role in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show making her the first American female superstar.
Taking Care of Business Aboard
About a month after Annie had been aboard, the kennel cough cleared up, she had learned to jump on and off the boat, climb up and down the ladder from the cockpit to the cabin, and experienced her first offshore sail. She was genuinely relaxed and seemed to be really enjoying her sailing lifestyle.
Annie Oakley, another orphan, and yet another Annie connection, is for me just another part of the Annie karma. I don’t think Annie the rescued dog will become a canine superstar but it didn’t take long for her to get accustomed to her new and, at least for a dog, unusual surroundings. She adapted extremely fast and within about a week had the basics down pat and was taking the whole experience in her stride.
Annie on Alert Aboard s/v “Free Radical”
And she is also extremely serious about her new and critically important duties as First Mate in charge of security. (NOTE from Jill – Anyone, I mean anyone, who knew my dad and Annie knows this to be true. You could not step foot on the dock the sailboat was located without hearing Annie “telling” my dad, “Alert! Alert! Someone comes this way.” She took this job extremely seriously. After my dad passed away, it took her a while, but she does the same thing when anyone arrives at the house!”)
Taking Care of her other “Business” Aboard
A major issue with a dog living aboard a boat is how to deal with their daily bodily functions, especially when sailing offshore for days at a time. It would be great if they could be trained to back up to the starboard rail and hang their hindquarters overboard but I think that is probably easier said than done. There is a sailor, who has posted on the internet that claims he has actually trained his dog to do this, but the old saying is “seeing is believing” and I haven’t seen it yet.
So, I bought a 2 by 4-foot piece of Astroturf and placed it in an out-of-the-way place in the cockpit. It took her about two days to figure it out and then, no more mistakes. As I said dogs are very adaptable. Of course, when we go ashore I’m among the blue plastic bag brigade following close behind her cleaning up as necessary.
Rescue Annie
Once I had exhausted all of my immediate thoughts about Annie’s name, I did a bit of further research and found some fascinating connections that only reinforced my decision to not change her name.
There is a training mannequin used for teaching CPR known as Rescue Anne, (also known as Resusci Annie or CPR Annie). It was developed by a Norwegian toymaker around 1960 and the distinctive face was based on L’Inconnue de la Seine (the unknown woman of the Seine), the death mask of an unidentified young Parisian woman who died in the late 1880s.
Mystery surrounds the origin of the death mask. According to one legend, she was a young woman who drowned in the Seine River, and a pathologist at the Paris morgue was so taken by her beauty that he had a plaster death mask made of her face. Another legend claims that the face was modeled after the daughter of a German mask maker. But in any case, the term L’ Inconnue de la Seine has survived to describe her face. The origin of the Inconnue is uncertain, veiled in mystery, just like Annie’s past.
Bohemian Lifestyle
After the L’Inconnue mask was made public, copies quickly became popular in Parisian Bohemian society. Bohemians are known for practicing an unconventional lifestyle in the company of like-minded people with few permanent ties. They are societies’ wanderers, adventurers, and vagabonds which also pretty well describes offshore sailors, the so-called “snowbirds”. Seems like a pretty apt description of Annie’s new life as well.
The L’ Inconnue de la Seine has also been the subject of many artistic and literary works over the past century. Albert Camus compared her enigmatic smile to the Mona Lisa, inviting speculations as to what clues the eerily happy expression in her face could offer about her life, her death, and her place in society.
And so I thought, how could I possibly consider changing her name with all these incredible coincidences going for it.
Annie, it is – and so Annie it shall be!
Barefoot Annie – Barefoot Annie’s Coffee Shop, South Carolina
Finally, as to the compelling appeal of Annie’s name, I think of Barefoot Annie of Barefoot Annie’s coffee shop in Simpsonville, SC. Coincidently, the sailboat “Free Radical” originally came from Charleston, SC. (check out Barefoot Annie on YouTube where she sings “Amazing Grace” acapella, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWrU6ImndyI).
And the very first verse, I can imagine in Annie’s thoughts:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
With all due respect for the late John Denver, for both Annie and me, this is the real “Annie’s Song”.
Postscript
I hope you enjoyed this saga about Annie the rescued dog and her adventures aboard s/v “Free Radical”. I work alone on board and I really don’t have anyone to review my writing. So I read it aloud to Annie a couple of times and she seemed to think it was OK. She even panted a bit from time to time when I got to the parts that complemented her. So, I’m taking that as positive feedback. I hope you find it inspiring and my message is if you’re thinking about adopting a rescue dog, don’t sweat your circumstances, just go for it! Dogs are incredibly adaptable and the rewards are immeasurable both for you and the dog!
So long, good luck and have a nice day!
Long Story Short: A Collection of Stories by Hal Gunardson 