A Dog Life Well Lived: Outdoor Adventures with a Lifetime of Canine Friends
Rob Phillips ’78 Comm.
Latah Books: 2022
In this heartwarming and highly approachable memoir, avid outdoorsman and outdoors writer Rob Phillips tells his life story through vignettes about the dogs with whom he’s shared his path.
Phillips is an affable narrator, memorializing the dogs he’s owned, hunted with, or simply been around with humor and compassion. “All my dogs … have been good ones,” he writes, recalling adventures and mishaps. Heading into a freezing lake to rescue his dog, whose back legs had become tangled in a decoy cord during a hunting trip. Rescuing a different one of his dogs who had become impaled on heavy wire during another hunting trip. Trying to find a veterinarian on a Sunday afternoon to help a six-month-old puppy who had ingested an inch-long piece of willow branch. (Don’t worry: Each of these scenarios ends happily.)
The book starts in boyhood when Phillips is contending with the neighborhood menace: a “ferocious black dog,” also referred to as “that hound from Hell.” Then, there are the family dogs. Scamper, his family’s first, was a Brittany spaniel. Tara, a black Lab, was a “bundle of energy” who was “born and bred to hunt.”
Phillips has had one or two dogs ever since he got out of college and was living in a place where he could keep one. A yellow Lab named Zeb. A black Lab named Sam. A German long-haired pointer named Meika. Cassie, another black Lab. Sierra and Tessa, also yellow Labs. A black Lab named Bailey, his current companion.
Almost all of Phillips’s dogs “have been sporting dogs. Some were of questionable heritage, while others had pedigrees as long as Mohamed Shehata’s world-record wingspan.”
The book also contains odes to a black Lab named Dakota, who was not a hunter—and who was rehomed to his mother-in-law—as well as a Havanese named Molly, the last dog his mother ever owned, and Cali, a black Lab and “chowhound,” who belonged to his son Kyle. (Phillips has two; Kevin is the youngest.)
Each of the 17 chapters opens with a photo of one of Phillips’s dogs, plus a quote about dogs from a famous person, such as this one from Edith Wharton: “My little dog—a heartbeat at my feet.”
You don’t have to be a dog owner, hunter, or angler to appreciate this heartfelt look back at a life with man’s best friend. It’s a love story. And with it comes heartbreak. Phillips writes, “No matter how many times you have to do it, saying goodbye to a good dog is among the toughest things a person ever has to do.”
Now retired, he sets his clock by and takes numerous walks with Bailey. He’s still writing his weekly outdoors column for the Yakima Herald-Republic, something he’s done since 1991. In all, he’s written more than 1,500 columns for his hometown newspaper. They often feature his dogs, and some of those columns are included in the back of the book.
“Having a dog in the house makes it more alive, warmer,” Phillips writes. “A dog makes it a home.”