Hank would not get out of the car.
Everybody else was already down at the water. Nine dogs were supposed to be there and eight of them were, and the ninth was a seven-year-old basset sitting in the back of a Corolla with the hatch open, staring at the sand like it had personally insulted him. Ray, his person, stood at the bumper with the leash hanging slack. "He does this." Then he sat down on the bumper too. They stayed there for forty minutes.
Six years of writing this site and I had never met a single reader in person. In June I stuck two sentences at the bottom of the newsletter asking if anyone in western North Carolina wanted to bring their dog to a lake on a Saturday. Twenty-two said yes. Eleven came.
The spot is a scrap of sand at the north end of a small lake out past Weaverville. Not a nice beach. There's a concrete ramp, a picnic table with one leg set in a bucket of dried cement, and geese. A lot of geese.
Roll call
Mine were in the water first. Junie and Otis, the labs, who have no dignity and never did. Franklin, the terrier mix, got in to his ankles and reconsidered, then spent the rest of the day supervising from a towel that belonged to somebody else.
Then Dot, a heeler mix with one blue eye, who spent two solid hours herding the swimmers into a tight group and got no thanks for it. Marzi, a corgi in a purple life vest, paddling like she was late for something. Sasha, a shepherd mix who barked at the lake for ten minutes and then swam better than any dog there.
Peaches, a pit mix. Bo, a golden. Those two get their own sections.
Deb carried Sasha down the ramp because the wet slope did the same thing to her back end that our kitchen floor does to Junie. We stood in the shallows trading notes about rug placement while our dogs ignored us. Two people told me they'd started doing the sniffing-only walk and their dogs were sleeping harder at night.
The sandwich
Around one o'clock a woman named Danae unwrapped a turkey sandwich and set it on the paper bag next to her hip. Then she turned her head maybe fifteen degrees to answer a question.
Peaches took the entire thing in one motion. Folded once, gone, with a small hop at the end.
Danae laughed so hard she sat down in the water with her phone still in her pocket. Somebody's husband drove to the gas station and came back with $23.60 of what I would generously call lunch, most of it Combos. We ate the Combos. She called her vet Monday about the red onion on it and was told the amount wasn't worth worrying about. She is never setting food down near a dog again as long as she lives.
Bo
Bo is four, and he had to be pulled out of that lake three separate times.
He went in at 11:15 and did not come out until 1:07, and only then because Priya waded to her waist in jeans and towed him in by the handle on his harness. He kept looking back at a stick he was still on his way to.
Twenty minutes later he was back in. She pulled him out again at 2:30 and shut him in the car with the AC running, and he screamed. The high wronged-golden noise. Eleven adults stood on a beach and pretended very hard not to hear it.
Things that went into the lake:
- One flip-flop, size 11, never recovered
- My sunglasses, same
- A tennis ball, which is where tennis balls go
- Somebody's phone, for about four seconds, and it lived
At 3:20, Hank got out of the car.
Nobody made him. Ray had given up hours earlier and was sitting on the sand with the rest of us, sunburned in one clean stripe across the back of his neck. Hank came down the ramp at basset speed, walked past six dogs without acknowledging any of them, went into the water up to his elbows, and stopped. He stood there for eleven minutes. Then he turned around and got back in the car.
We're doing it again in September. Towels this time.
On the drive home Franklin fell asleep on a stranger's gray fleece that had somehow ended up in my back seat and that I still have. Junie smelled like pond for three days.
Kelsey Moran
Founder & editor · Asheville, NC
Started this site in 2019 after her third foster failure. Lives with two labs and a very opinionated terrier mix in Asheville, NC.
Comments
5 commentsRay Bledsoe · Marshall, NC · Jul 23, 2026
For the record he got out of the car at the park yesterday in twenty minutes. Cut it nearly in half. I'm counting it.
Kelsey Moran · Jul 23, 2026
twenty is basically sprinting for him. tell hank i said hello and that i respect the process
Tomás Reyes · Greer, SC · Jul 22, 2026
Peaches is a legend.
Marcy Kohl · Greenville, SC · Jul 28, 2026
I'll be the grump. My trainer won't run group swim days with dogs that don't already know each other. Her thing is water and toys and food and nine strangers is a lot stacked in one place, and most people can't read a stressed dog once everybody is soaked and wound up. Sounds like yours went fine. I still wouldn't do it with my girl.
Kelsey Moran · Jul 29, 2026
fair, and i should have put that in the piece. every dog there was one i'd already talked to the owner about, and two people wrote back in June saying theirs wasn't a fit and stayed home. small and boring on purpose.
Danae W. · Asheville, NC · Jul 22, 2026
You left out that I paid $9 for that sandwich. Otherwise accurate. Peaches sends her regards and would like the September date.
Loretta Simms · Johnson City, TN · Aug 4, 2026
Reading this made me a little sad in a good way. My Winnie hasn't gone near open water since 2019, when my brother-in-law thought it would be funny to take her out in a kayak on Boone Lake and then stood up. She went in, he went in, the kayak went sideways, and she swam all the way to the bank without looking back once. She was fine, physically. But she was eight then and she's fifteen now and she still walks a wide arc around anything bigger than a puddle, including the drainage ditch behind our church. I take her to the shallow creek at the end of our road instead and she'll put two feet in and that's the deal. Anyway. Nine dogs at a lake sounds like heaven and I'd have loved to watch it from a folding chair.
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