If you live down here on Fort Morgan Road, your house must not only have a name, but it must have a totemic symbol. Most of these symbols, but not all of them, have a beach or nautical theme. Anybody who has driven down Fort Morgan Road has probably noticed all the seagulls, lighthouses, anchors and palm trees on signs with house names.
For instance, my neighbor, Byron Thornhill, has a pink pelican atop a sign shaped like a “T.” Frank, across the street, has a mermaid. Tom Gordon’s house, Cloud 9, has a sign shaped like a cloud with the numeral 9 in the middle. I have a wiener dog. We call our place Dachs-and-Dunes.
A dachshund might not sound very beachy to some folks, but for me, the connection between dachshunds and the beach goes back almost 50 years. And my wife says that wiener dogs are at the root of why we live here.
It started with Zipper. He was supposed to be a miniature dachshund but wound up weighing a husky 24 pounds. I had been saying that I wanted a dachshund ever since I saw the Disney movie, “The Ugly Dachshund.” There has never been a remake, probably because nobody wants to work with dachshunds because of their stubbornness and general bad temper.
It was the late 1960s and Poly, the family dog, had passed away to many tears at a ripe old age. My birthday was approaching, and we were on our way back from our family vacation in Gulf Shores when we saw the sign.
Those familiar with Alabama Highway 59 between Gulf Shores and Interstate 10 know it as a virtually uninterrupted strip of commercial development. The intersection of County Road 20 and 59 is right in the middle of it these days with Lowe’s and a bunch of restaurants and shops on one corner and Home Depot and Lambert’s Café on the other. The Tanger Outlet Center is about a block away.
But back in the late 1960s, from the Intracoastal Waterway in Gulf Shores to the Ace Hardware store on the outskirts of Foley, there was nothing but a smattering of farm houses and a patchwork of agricultural fields. The tall, August corn grew right up to the road on either side of County Road 20, which was red dirt back then. A hand-painted, plywood sign advertised miniature schnauzers and dachshunds with an arrow pointing up the road.
My father tried to drive on, but my mother and I fussed until he turned around. The sign took us to a brick house with a couple of pine trees in the yard that sat in the middle of a very large cornfield. Upon inquiring, the owner revealed that they currently had no puppies ready for sale but a relative up in Loxley did.
We headed that way. I couldn’t tell you where it was except that it was well off the beaten path. It seemed like we wandered around in the countryside for a long time. Our destination was a comfortable looking old farm house where we found a friendly female dachshund with two pups.
The owner had made a mistake and sprayed pesticide around the kennel to relieve a mosquito problem. The pesticide had burned the pups and left them scarred. One poor little pup had scars all over it. I chose the other with a scar like a lightning bolt down its side. I remember feeling guilt at rejecting the more heavily scarred pup. And I remembered feeling guilty about taking the momma dog’s puppy away.
Those were the last regrets I ever had about choosing Zipper, who was named after my mother’s legendary childhood pet. He immediately got on my good side by vomiting twice on my sister on the way home. But Jeanne, who loves animals more than any person probably should, was so enamored with him that she didn’t care.
Zipper became a member of the family who watched the evening news with my father, rode in my bicycle basket and rested his long muzzle on my father’s hunting boot after spending a long day in the field with us. As a family member, naturally, he returned with us to his home county when we went on vacation and stayed with us on at the Teh-Lou Motel in Gulf Shores. Like most dachshunds, he didn’t care much for the water. He tolerated me making him ride on our inflatable rafts. But he loved digging in the sand.
We lost Zipper when a car ran over him in front of our house, and I learned a bitter lesson about letting a dog run free. We mourned for two years in which we had no dog. But for my 17th Birthday, we returned to the little house in the cornfield just north of Gulf Shores and brought home, Fritz.
Fritz never got to go on vacation with us during his long 14-year life. By the time we got him, my family had fallen on hard times and couldn’t afford beach vacations.
But in 1985, my wife and I got a little red dachshund puppy named Benson (after the television show character). We bred him to a friend’s black and tan female and ended up with two of the puppies. Benson, Brittany and Pan formed what we now call “the original trio.”
Benson, Brittany, and Pan were such a part of our lives that we couldn’t imagine going on vacation without them. There aren’t a lot of pet-friendly vacation spots. But Reed Real Estate in Fort Morgan rented pet-friendly beach houses, and there was no law against taking dogs on the beach there.
Year after year, we returned to watch them romp on the sand and dig for sand crabs. Pan was a ferocious hunter who braved the big crabs’ pinchers to grab the sand crabs and shake them. The beaches were so sparsely populated that we rarely had conflicts with other people or dogs.
The original trio made many trips south. But dogs’ lives, like vacations, are not long enough. None of them lived long enough to see the house we built at Fort Morgan in 2007. A picture of the three together on the beach, Benson’s nose covered in sand, adorns one of its walls.
A black and tan rescue named Rambo and my son’s 11th birthday present, a chocolate and tan named Bama, were the first to vacation there. Rambo passed on at the ripe old age of 15 just before we moved here from Northport. Bama lives with us now as my son attends college, along with a little long-haired Isabella (a silvery color) named Remington after my favorite shotguns.
They don’t go to the beach as much as their predecessors. There are too many people, and too many bring large, unpredictable dogs like pit bulls with them. We take our dogs in the cooler months when fewer people are here to romp with our grandson, Hansen.
It’s hard, sometimes, to imagine the influence pets have over your lives. Maybe we would’ve wound up in Fort Morgan without owning dachshunds. Maybe not.
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