Why Collies?

I suppose one might consider going back a level and exploring why dogs in general?  There's a lot of psychology to why people develop the passions they do.  But, for me, growing up in suburban Bozeman, Mt., the only child of older parents, it's relatively easy to see: dogs, I learned early on, accept you if you accept them, and they'll be loyal and love you without question, whereas other children can be often fickle and occasionally cruel.  But I didn't grow up with collies.  Far from it.  My mother loved dachshunds, and I spent my formative years with a wiener dog named Hans in the house.  My best dog friend from the neighborhood was a German short hair named Shan who belonged to the widower who lived behind us.  My street was surrounded on both sides by horse pastures, and you could walk up to the fence with a carrot and coax them to come over and see you.  So you'd think, if anything, I'd have grown up wanting hunting dogs and horses in my life.  And I would, and do.  If it's on four legs, it's a safe bet that I would probably welcome it unconditionally.  But there was something else that influenced a shy, bookish girl growing up and planted a seed that took hold somewhere deep inside.

And that something was Lassie.

Lassie, 1954-1974

I wasn't alone in my generation.  Lassie, as Rin Tin Tin had been a couple decades before, was the super hero of the day.  Yeah, sure, there was Superman and a bit later a psychedelic Batman, but how could a middle aged man in tights possibly measure up to a warm, lovable, fluffy intelligent creature that could save you from a well during the day and curl up at your feet at night.  Well, he couldn't to answer my own question.  Lassie was the queen.  Wonder Woman before there was Lynda Carter and long, long before Gal Gadot.  Never mind that "Lassie" was a male dog - I didn't know that for many years but might not have cared if I did - the hero on the screen was still a stunning display of a creature, soft breezes catching her (his) hair against a crystal clear sky.  Every Sunday I was glued to my parent's television first watching the old black and white re-runs and then later the "new" adventures that were in color!

And Lassie wasn't confined to Timmy and his well.  There was Lassie Come Home, which I read, along with Black Beauty, repeatedly.  And then saw the movie.  Like later generations would swoon over boy bands, I was not alone in being entirely smitten by animals on the big screen.  National Velvet, 101 Dalmations, and Lassie Come Home to name a few.  None were new by the time I was old enough to go to the movies, but sometimes the advantages to growing up in a small town is the old never really fades, and they would cycle back through from time to time, and Mom was game to go - I think seeing Roddy McDowell as a boy and Elizabeth Taylor with her violet eyes still untouched by a wild life took her back to a time when she was young and carefree herself.  So I would sit through a Saturday matinee in the old Ellen Theatre, which I loved in its own right, and watch the big dog on the big screen being so painfully loyal to her boy.

The author and Gray Dawn

Then I'd come home and curl up to Albert Payson Terhune's books to lose myself in life with his collies on Sunnybank farm.  And probably more than anything, that's what sealed the deal.  I had this vision of life on a pastoral farm, overseen by a kindly lord, not at all unlike Hugh Bonneville's Lordship in Downton Abbey (when in point of fact Terhune was rather gruff looking with a large square face that might have frightened me as a young girl) and surrounded by the loyal, intelligent collies he described.  And I just knew that's what I wanted my life to be like.

I don't know if anyone born a generation later can even tell you who Albert Payson Terhune was, let alone have read Lad: a Dog.  Today's children are served a harsher offering of young adult fiction in the likes of Hunger Games and Divergent, but I harken to a more romantic age for children (it covered up the actual turmoil of the times adults were grappling with when the Cold War raged, racism was still accepted as the social norm, and the Vietnam War was building).  But Lad and Lassie kept me safe from all of that.

And the dream was born.

...OR IS IT?