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Description and reviews:
By Chris Clarke
Paperback, 220 pages
2008 Creek Running North Publishing
Walking With Zeke is my journal about my aging dog, those of us who loved him, and the wildlife-filled neighborhood in which he spent his last months. As novelist Elizabeth Eslami says, in her discussion of the book:
Walking With Zeke is a story about a man who loved a dog, and the dog who loved him back. It is about love, but, as Clarke warns us, it is not hagiography. It is not sentimental… If that’s what you’re looking for, shop someplace else. This is the fierce and abiding love of a dog that has used a rubber duck as a digestive aid, and the kind of man who could not bear to throw away the duck. It’s quit your job to be there, love. It’s love at the end of life, love. Face against the floor, love. “The problem with dogs,” Clarke writes, “is that they live long enough that one day you can no longer remember your life without them.” .
Ultimately, Walking With Zeke is more about Chris Clarke than it is about his dog, Zeke. A man who can tell you everything about miner’s lettuce and cholla, who can walk you through the lifespan of a tree, Clarke comes off as the wise and fascinating friend everyone wishes they had. A guy who “listens to ravens and raves at the listless,” who prays to the paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. He’s a less prickly Ed Abbey, a tougher Rick Bass, a Barry Lopez with humor. The kind of writer who observes, without a hint of pretension, that “a long life is a landscape of holes where things once grew.”
But at the heart of Clarke is Zeke. Zeke is an actual character in this story. Adventurous and occasionally misunderstood (no, he’s not part wolf), he’s the canine comic relief and the tragic figure combined, stubborn and smart and decent. “If I leak tears of grief, Zeke nudges my nose with his until I hold him. If my tears are of rage or frustration, he hides under my desk in the farthest room. He anchors our family. He lives to… shove us off the bed at night by increments, to help us eat our sandwiches. He is one damn fine dog.”
Natural History and desert writer Lawrence Hogue observes:
Chris Clarke calls “Walking with Zeke” an edited compilation of “several years of writing about my best friend’s life and death.” It’s pretty safe to say that “Walking with Zeke” is the best self-published book of the year, and the best “book that grew from a blog” of all time. Lifted straight from the author’s acclaimed Creek Running North web log (blog seems too coarse a word for the fine writing he’s done here) with only a little reworking, it’s surprising how well the story coheres, told in the original journal entry format.
This is a great animal book, but also much more than an animal book. It’s filled with the author’s love for his companion, deft characterizations of Zeke, and moving accounts of the author’s near-heroic efforts to care for him until the end. As an old writing instructor once said, “If you’re not risking sentimentality, you’re not even in the ballpark.” Treading on inherently sentimental ground, Clarke rises above sentimentality to deliver honest and often gripping emotion.
But beyond the central core of Zeke’s story, this is also a book filled with careful observations of nature in the author’s Bay Area community of Pinole, in the Sierra, in the Mojave, and elsewhere. There are also odd moments of humor, fascinating meditations on the convergent evolution of humans and dogs, and thoughts on the intersection of wild and tamed nature.
Walking with Zeke achieves what all good nature writing should: it reminds us simply to pay attention.
