When I get up at five in the morning, I normally don’t like to conclude that day by driving to the airport at midnight to fly myself to Martha’s Vineyard. But that’s how it worked out last Friday. I made another mistake in evaluating the weather. I’d been debating whether to fly out on Friday evening or waiting to fly Saturday morning, when I’d have more sleep but the weather was reported to be worse. Well, a friend who was trying to convince me not to fly on Friday evening told me that the weather was going to be coming in on Saturday afternoon, so I should get some sleep on Friday night and fly out early Saturday morning. Trusting that friend’s weather report (but not heeding his advice to get a good night’s sleep before flying), I didn’t even check the weather update before leaving late Friday night (although I should have had some indication that it was going to be poor since it was raining when I got to the airport). I took off and flew straight into horrendous weather that I was not expecting at all. I’m instrument rated, so I was able to handle the situation, but it was not my finest hour on Air Doug. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I have two tiers of air safety on Air Doug: one safety tier for when I’m flying passengers, and the other for when Air Doug is flying alone.

The flip side of my (foolish) decision was that it was my fastest trip ever to the Vineyard because the bad weather delivered ferocious tailwinds, so that a trip that I normally take in 45 to 50 minutes, I did in 40 minutes.

The next day I flew to upstate New York to a farm where I keep three sheep that I bought for my dog, Jackson, on his tenth birthday (he’s a sheep-herding dog) . I know it’s ridiculous, but my dog was kidnapped for three and a half years (I’ll tell you about that some other time), so I feel he deserves all the love, treats, and sheep I can muster for him. When I first got the sheep, Jackson was immediately attracted to them. Other dogs barely paid any attention to them, but Jackson seemed to be hard-wired to chase the sheep; he could not wait to get into the pasture with them. So we let him loose in the pasture, and as soon as we did, he ran straight to the sheep, and the biggest one turned on him and rammed him into the electrical fence, where he yelped as he got shocked. He went tearing out of the pasture and ran all the way back to the house and would not go anywhere near the sheep or the pasture. He was like, “I hate sheep, Doug. Enough with the sheep already.” I should have known better: He’s a city dog who spent most of his live in New York. I couldn’t just bring him to the country and stick him in the pasture with sheep and think it’s gonna work out OK. He’d never had any training.

But I eventually coaxed Jackson back into the pasture, and he’s gotten better. Even though he does not really know any of the commands, we have our own systems for herding the sheep. And they no longer bully him around. It took a while (at some point I’ll post a video of the sheep head-butting), but now he’s in control, and after he chases them around the pasture they run into the shed. It’s really pretty useful.

What’s not useful is that if they get out of the pasture, and he begins chasing after them, which is what happened this past weekend. When they got out, I was chasing them and trying to get Jackson to stop chasing them because the only thing sheep want to do is run, run, run. I can’t leave the sheep out because they’ll get eaten by wild animals, so it requires one of the bolder moves (which I’m pretty good at now): the running leap to grab on to the legs or the neck of a galloping sheep in the middle of the woods. It’s a crazy move, because you know that if you do successfully grab hold, you’re going to be dragged over tree stumps, through streams, and bashed against branches for at least 100 feet before you can get the sheep to stop. You just basically close your eyes so you’re not blinded by the branches whipping you in the face. When you get close to the sheep you just have to dive. And then hang on for dear life. If you let go, you probably will not get the sheep back. So you really have to hold on. It’s like a lot of things in life: You’ve got to commit. You can’t give a half-ass dive after a sheep. Of all the things I do in my life, it’s probably the closest thing to a move a character in one of my action movies would do, only when I do it, it looks pretty silly and makes me sound very strange. I really have to install a better fence.

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