The First Week

Day 1 – Wed. 2/4/09

    I got the call in the late afternoon, while at work.  The landlord had people in the apartment, and when they were leaving, Lucy squeezed past, out the door, and took off down the street.  They gave chase, but Lucy is very fast, even by dog standards; two-legged mammals stand no chance.  She was last glimpsed running up Lamont, then taking a left down 18th Street, (just a couple blocks from home), in Mt. Pleasant.

    Sarah and I came home from work early and immediately began walking the neighborhood calling her name.  What’s funny in retrospect is how sure I was that we’d just find her that evening.  She’d be sniffing a dumpster in one of the alleys or wandering through someone’s yard, she’d hear us from hundreds of feet away and come running.

    It was a little late in the evening when I started to think this might stretch into a second day.  I made 15 or 20 posters and hung them on my block, and just around the corner.  She couldn’t have gone much farther than that, really, right?  My main concern was the cold.  It got down to about 15 degrees that night.

 

Day 2 – Thurs. 2/5/09

    Luckily, we had been planning a trip for the weekend, and were scheduled to be off from work Thursday and Friday.  So we just spent Thursday hanging some more fliers and walking around calling Lucy’s name.  We searched the woods behind the neighborhood, the alleyways, and every street in the neighborhood.  Then repeated again and again.

    We had given up for the night and were trying to rest when we got a call at 10:40 or so from someone who had seen Lucy around the intersection of 16th and Harvard streets, at around 9:30.  She was running (you’re going to find this is a pattern with Lucy sightings) down Harvard, toward the National Zoo, way too fast to catch.

    So off we went to put in another few hours in the cold (temps in the low 20s), walking all over creation, driving too, calling her name.  No luck.  Called it a day around 2:00 AM.

 

Day 3 – Fri. 2/6/09

    After the previous night’s experience I finally realized that Lucy could, and probably did, leave the immediate neighborhood.  We revamped our fliers, got color copies, then began posting them more prolifically around our neighborhood, and around the Harvard St. area.

    A contractor working on a house in our neighborhood had seen a white dog in the alley across the street.  He didn’t get a great look at the dog, but this sounded promising.  No luck.  We’re beginning to sense the pattern of always being a few steps behind Lucy.

    Phone tips started rolling in, but they were mainly regarding sightings from the previous two days.  Sarah tried barbecuing the heck out of some smelly meat in the back yard, in an attempt to attract Lucy with the smell.  No luck.  We cooked the meat well past inedibility.  I ate it anyway (do not judge me).

    Another of Lucy’s favorite people came into town that afternoon with her boyfriend expressly to help us search for Lucy.  We had just gotten a phone tip from someone at the Zoo.  So we converged there.  Again, no luck.

    We did learn, though, that Lucy had been in the Zoo at least briefly on Wednesday, not too long after she got out.  This day, she had been seen around noon, and ran away toward the Connecticut Ave. entrance when some zookeepers tried to approach her.  Terrific.  Now she might be in a whole new neighborhood (Woodley Park or Cleveland Park), one with which she is wholly unfamiliar, and one which we had not even considered exploring to hang fliers.

 

Day 4 – Sat. 2/7/09

    We started the day checking out the Zoo, in case Lucy hadn’t actually left, and had been gated inside all night.  No luck.  Our friends, following a potential tip, walked through Rock Creek Park north of the Zoo, plastering fliers and talking to people.  They also hit quite a few neighborhoods around the Zoo, and in the end, hung about 200 fliers that day.

    In the mid-afternoon I got a phone call that once again forced me to adjust everything I thought I had figured out about Lucy’s movements.  A woman sounded very confident that she had seen Lucy, next to a big mosque on Massachusetts Ave., at Belmont Rd.  Still thinking like a human, I thought, “Good lord, that’s way too far south of our neighborhood, that can’t really be Lucy.”  But the woman sounded sure, so off we went to check it out.  Of course, we discovered just how plausible it was that Lucy had been there.  The area straddles Rock Creek, and there are several convenient entry points from the park.  A couple trails lead up to the streets from there, and if she had been traveling within the park, Lucy would only have had to go about half a mile south from the Zoo to reach here.

    Crap.

    This blew all previous theories of her whereabouts, and forced us to look at a really large swath of territory to search:  the whole of Rock Creek Park.  We looked, we shouted her name, we postered.  No luck.

 

Day 5 – Sun. 2/8/09

    Sarah and I decided to head down early, and start hanging posters all along both sides of Rock Creek Park, down to the Potomac.  If she pokes her head up long enough, hopefully someone will spot her and see a poster.  That’s the hypothesis.

    More (probably wrong) tips, more fliers, more walking, more talking to people, more walking, more shouting her name, and more walking.  At the end of this day, I estimated (conservatively) that we had walked 40 miles since Lucy disappeared.

Day 6 – Mon. 2/9/09

   This day we were fortunate to work with Laura Totis and her wonderful tracking dog Chewie.  We started down by Massachusetts Ave., and began what for an out of shape guy like me was an arduous 7 hours of hiking through (and over and around and up and down) Rock Creek Park.

    Toward the end of the day I got a call from the Rock Creek Park Police, notifying me that we had about three hours (until 6:00 PM) to remove all the signs that we had hung in the park, or the RCP Police would have to take them down then fine us PER SIGN.  Fun.  Thanks guys.  I know you’re just doing your jobs, but come on, give a heartbroken guy a break, will ya?

    So I had to go undo a lot of the hard work that we and our friends (mostly Steph and Rich) had done.  I had no way of knowing how much the fine would be, nor how many signs had been posted between the four of us.  If we had a hundred signs and got fined $20/sign… *shudder*

    So after all that, and while Laura, Chewie, and Sarah ran down a possible Lucy sighting, at the end of the day, we had nothing remotely conclusive about where Lucy might currently be.

 

Day 7 – Tues. 2/10/09

    Back to work.  It’s pretty frustrating to go back to work after all this.  It’s hard enough to be productive and not spend all your day thinking about your dog, but the whole mess is compounded by having dragged your sorry fat butt (okay, going to only speak for myself here, MY sorry fat butt) for probably almost two marathons’ worth of miles and not had a sound night’s sleep in a week.

    No solid sightings reported today.  No one tells you how hard it is to just sit around, waiting for someone to call with a sighting.  Actually, that’s not true, I think someone told me.  But you don’t really understand until you’re sitting at a desk in a suit thinking, “I should be out there looking or doing something.  I should be out there.  I should be out there…”