A Year in Oaxaca: Part 4 — A New Dog
We were in Oaxaca for less than a week before we met Tigre.
Author’s Note: Today’s entry is part of a recurring series excerpted from the book proposal I am working on. The same type and variety of other posts I’ve been writing will also continue to appear. The previous entry is linked below. A different entry about adopting dogs was also published shortly after we moved to Oaxaca and today’s installment excerpts from that while reworking that writing. Thank you for reading!
Moving is the sort of thing you try to do as infrequently as possible if you can help it, and moving internationally takes the expense, challenge, and discomfort of that experience and amplifies them a hundredfold. But while those first days in Oaxaca were uncomfortable and emotionally fraught we were buoyed by the thoughts of better days to come and unfulfilled wishes finally being brought to life. One of the most significant was our desire for a dog.
New York is a busy, dense, and dirty city and most people’s apartments are fairly small and with limited amenities, but that doesn’t stop New Yorkers from owning dogs. There are pet stores galore, both large and small, and any visit to a park will put you face-to-face with a kaleidoscope of dogs, large and small, friendly and terrible. We were some of those urban dog lovers but our longstanding wish to own our own, our fifth-floor walkup apartment with its spiral staircase leading to our bedroom, and our penchant for traveling multiple times per year, made us realize that pet ownership wasn’t something that would work. It didn’t feel like the right fit for our lifestyle and it didn’t seem as if it would be fair to a dog.
The circumstances of our life in Oaxaca solved all of those problems. The house was more than spacious enough for a dog, the gardens offered a variety of places to sniff and explore (and pee and poop), and compared to the United States vet services here are incredibly affordable. And, unlike in the United States, there’s no formal adoption process when it comes to dogs. I only know of two shelters in Oaxaca and both are run by kind-hearted women who routinely get boxes of puppies dropped off at their gate without either a thank you or a warning that the dogs are even being dropped off. People here also generally either can’t afford to spay or neuter, and some just can’t be bothered.
Penny and Victor knew about how much we wanted a dog based on how much love we lavished on their own two rescues the first time we visited. When we asked Penny during our second trip to Oaxaca how we, too, might go about picking a dog that felt right for us, she laughed. “Dogs have a way of finding you,” she said, explaining that both of their dogs came to them by luck and chance.
“Maggie just wandered into the compound one day not too long after we moved in. We didn’t have a gate yet and she showed up and made herself at home.” The arrival of their dog Molly, in her own way, was even more of a surprise. “One of the workers we had hired showed up one day with a puppy and handed her to us, saying, “Here you go!” I suppose he thought it was a nice housewarming gift.”
As Penny explained this to us we eyeballed the large, locked metal gate that now prevents stray dogs from wandering from the dirt camino up into the property. While having a dog select us felt like a much more romantic option than having one suddenly foisted upon us, for our very first dog we wanted to find one we felt some sort of real bond with. It was a romantic idea and I should have known myself better. The problem wasn’t finding a dog to bond with, it was finding one I didn’t immediately love.
My dog-related mania was hardly a secret. During our second trip to Oaxaca, which we took to make sure we weren’t completely insane and that our desire to move here wasn’t just a carryover fever dream from a particularly great vacation, we encountered a dog lying in the shade of our car in the village of San Sebastián Etla. She weighed probably about 15 pounds or so and was tan-colored and adorable, and she immediately flipped over for belly rubs when I showed her the slightest bit of attention. It took all of five seconds for me to be completely smitten and I immediately named her Pepita—Pumpkin Seed—all while knowing it was pointless to get attached. We were returning to New York the next day and knew it would be at least a year before we moved to Mexico. We had no way of rescuing her, and there was no way we could get someone to care for a dog we’d just met for a year or longer.
A day or two after moving to San Agustín Etla I went looking for Pepita but, as expected, she was long gone. I like to think she was adopted and now spends her days sprawled on someone’s couch, or maybe on the cool tile floor of someone’s sun-washed home, but most likely she’s gone from this world, the victim of a car accident, heartworms, fights with other animals, or any of the many other ways a dog here can meet their end.
It was heartbreaking in its way, but, as Penny predicted, dogs have a way of finding you here. We’d been in Oaxaca for two days when we met Tigre, a stray being sheltered at what would become our favorite neighborhood restaurant, Frida Libre.
We didn’t move to Oaxaca exclusively because of the food, but it was an existentially important draw for us. Our lives in New York predominantly were guided by which restaurants we were going to visit and when, which stores I would spend hours of my week traveling to in order to buy ingredients, and where in our cramped walk-up apartment I would even store the things I planned to cook. Vacations outside of the U.S. took on more or less the same framework, just in a different location. While normal, presumably less deranged people come home from a trip to Italy with a bottle or two of wine or maybe some nice cookies, our suitcases would be stuffed with jars of salt-packed anchovies, gorgeous sun-dried tomatoes, and, once, a chitarra, which is a wooden frame strung with guitar wire that’s used to cut fresh pasta into long, spaghetti-like strands. Where we should eat in Oaxaca and which restaurants we would want to become regulars at were looming questions for us.
“We’d like to take you out for dinner,” we said to Penny the day after we moved in. “Where would you like to go?”
“Well, that’s easy,” said Penny. “We should go to Frida Libre.”
While most restaurants in San Agustín Etla and the surrounding area are fairly traditional, Frida Libre (named for the head chef and owner, Frida) has a more international bent. Frida had spent time cooking in the United States, Penny described, and her menu manifested her experiences there. While most restaurants in the area serve tacos, memelitas, chicken with mole, and other types of traditional Oaxacan cuisine, depending on her mood and what ingredients she could source Frida might have beer-battered fish and chips, a Black Angus burger with bleu cheese and bacon, a Jamaican-inspired curry, or even Vietnamese summer rolls. We were excited to be eating Mexican food as a part of our daily lives but since food is so central to our identities we had been genuinely worried about what it would be like to lose access to the cuisines we cherished. We happily agreed to Penny’s suggestion and made plans to see her and Victor a day or two later.
Frida Libre sat on Avenida de La Industria, the twisting main road leading into San Agustín from nearby San Sebastián. The restaurant had on-site parking, a rarity in Oaxaca, with space for about six vehicles, and the dining area was a concrete patio set underneath a large, almost industrial-like sheet metal canopy. The bathrooms sat in a small outbuilding made from concrete blocks next to a ramp that led up to a concrete platform set with about eight or nine tables with chairs, and the kitchen was in a small, square concrete room in the back corner of the property. Based on the configuration of the property, which was surrounded by a chainlink fence, it seemed likely that in a past life it had been a small lumber yard, or some other type of industrial business.
Within moments of being seated, we were enthusiastically greeted three times. The first welcome was from, Sherie, an American expat from Wisconsin who in addition to being a part-time server and ersatz business adviser to Frida was also her girlfriend. The second greeting came from Frida herself, a cheerful, baby-faced Oaxacan woman who knew Penny and Victor as regulars. And the third greeting came from a slightly emaciated and furry dog with the markings of a German Shepherd but the indeterminate body type of a mutt. Her name, Sherie told us, was Tigre.
Adopting a dog in Mexico is easy: just pick one. If you choose a dog off the street there are no questions. Dogs aren’t registered and aren’t tracked. There’s no microchipping system, or at least not in Oaxaca. Often dogs owned by people are allowed to roam free, the only sign they belong to anyone being that either they have a collar on or are particularly well-groomed. Unless you pick a dog that seems like it has a home, it’s unlikely anyone will even notice if a stray dog goes missing.
People will also abandon dogs without much of a second thought. Penny told us that in years past the canal that runs through our town was known as a spot where people would leave puppies they didn’t want and that it wasn’t unusual to be walking along the road only to encounter some scared puppies sniffing around in the underbrush. People in Oaxaca also hugely prefer dogs that are fierce and seem to regard their animals more as home security systems than as pets. This means that, curiously, often the dogs sitting behind people’s gates and fences are violent and aggressive, while the stray dogs roaming the streets, who survive mostly because of the kindness of strangers, tend to be sweet and loving.
If my 14-year relationship with Andrea could be summed up in three sentences, those would be, 1) “We don’t have the money to buy that right now;” 2) “When are you going to cook with those ingredients?”, and; 3) “Don’t pet that stray dog.” Here in Oaxaca, though, rule number 3 ceased to carry any weight. Even the most flea-bitten and desperate of strays seemed to have the disposition of an angel, and when confronted by stray dogs practically everywhere we went I was unable to suppress my desire to give them a pat on the head or, if they flopped over invitingly, a nice belly rub. And now, in front of us in the best restaurant in our village, was a dog that had recently been rescued by Frida from the famed rug-weaving village of Teotitlán del Valle and which both Frida and Sherie enthusiastically described as being immediately available for adoption.
Adopting a callejero—a street dog—isn’t without its risks. Often in Oaxaca these dogs already have some degree of house training because many of them have been abandoned after already having had a home, but that’s not a guarantee. There’s a chance you might end up with a dog that’s hard to house train, that isn’t good with children, that might be unpredictably badly behaved, that might have serious and expensive-to-fix health problems, or any number of other problems. But unless you buy a purebred puppy, which given the number of strays in the area felt almost unconscionable, you just have to be willing to accept a certain degree of risk.
We spent our entire first meal at Frida Libre with Tigre either sitting underneath our table or trying to jump up onto the bench seating either to get some pets or to try to steal food from the table. Even though we would learn over the coming weeks that Frida fed her prodigiously, she would gobble down any food presented to her and she particularly loved tostadas.
“She’s really great, isn’t she?” said Sherie as she came to clear away our plates at the end of the meal. “You could take her home tonight if you wanted.”
We could see that Sherie’s suggestion was born both from a desire to find a home for Tigre and because the restaurant wasn’t the right home for a ravenous stray. But I think Sherie could also immediately see that we were emotionally primed for adoption. It did feel like a dog had found us.
It took us about three days to decide that yes, we wanted to adopt Tigre, but by the time I decided to take her home, Andrea had already left for her two-week work trip back to the United States. It wasn’t the right time for me to take Tigre, especially given that I had no practical dog ownership experience, but she needed a home. Besides, if we were already standing underneath a waterfall of change and disruption, how much more damage could one additional change cause?
It rained on the night I adopted Tigre, and the water streamed down around us we sat next to the pool under the palapa. Tigre put her head on my lap and let me stroke her fur as the temperature dropped and lightning flashed in the distance. For those first few nights, she slept outside on a bed under the palapa, and it took her days to feel safe enough to enter the house. But once she was invited onto the couch she seemed to sense that she’d found her forever home.
Aw Tigre! I also hope Pepita is well cared for...
In Costa Rica, many many gringos fostered and adopted street dogs...be careful or you may end up with more than just Tigre! In our little town in Costa Rica, there was also a non-profit group that would hold monthly spay/neuter clinics for locals to bring their dogs.
Tigre found you! Right place, right time.
And having an angus-burger chef nearby never hurts I'll say. Again, serendipity!