The Lost Dogs of Abbo’s Alley

First of all, no dogs are going to die in this story.  I might mention a dog or two that died or got killed over the years this story takes place, but it won’t be something that I witnessed, so I won’t write a scene about it.  Keep in mind, though, that this story takes place 50 years ago.  I was ten-years-old at the time, so all the dogs mentioned in this story have probably died.  If that bothers you, then don’t read any further.

If it’s any consolation, a lot of the people that I will mention in this story have died too, so, I mean, it’s not just the dogs. 

Anyway, in August (I think) of 1975, my family moved to Sewanee, Tennessee, a small college town that’s home of The University of the South on the edge of the Cumberland Plateau. A lot of people have never heard of Sewanee but are more familiar with nearby Monteagle, which is about halfway between Nashville and Chattanooga. My dad had just retired after twenty years in the United States Air Force and had decided to become an Episcopal priest, so he was attending seminary school in Sewanee.  It was a weird transition, seeing my dad go from a military guy to a priest guy, but that’s not what this story is about.  People aren’t interested in that.  People are usually more interested in the dogs.

And Sewanee had a lot of dogs.  Many of those dogs were strays, and the two dogs that my family eventually adopted hung out in a place called Abbo’s Alley.  

Abbo’s Alley was a wooded area next to some of the dorms (I think).  A creek separated the two sections, and a stone bridge was the best way to cross it unless you wanted to take a risk jumping from one side of the creek to the other on a dry day.  For a while, a large tree trunk hung over the creek, and kids (along with an occasional adult) would walk or crawl across it, just to do it.  I’m sure somebody fell off that trunk at some point, but I never saw it happen.  It probably wasn’t that far of a drop anyway.  

I’m not sure how long Abbo’s Alley was.  For a fifth grader, it felt like maybe a mile or two.  It was probably just 100 yards with a few minor turns.  As far as width goes, it only took a few minutes to go from the dorms to the bridge to the first set of regular houses on the opposite side.  That’s why it was called an alley.  I don’t know who Abbo was.  The internet didn’t exist back then (well, maybe the military had it, but I didn’t).  I could probably look it up now.

The story was that students in the dorms would adopt or feed a lot of the strays during the school semesters, so the dogs would hang around Abbo’s Alley.  Since most of the strays were being fed by humans, these dogs were generally friendly to anybody who passed by.  The problem was that in the summer, the students would leave, and the dogs would go hungry and then forage into the town’s trash bins or wander the mountainside or get killed on the highway leading into town.  The highway was almost always littered with dog bodies.

‘Littered’ might be a strong word, but dead dogs were a common sight on the highway.  You’d see the smart dogs looking both ways before crossing the highway and some of the busy streets (well… busy for Sewanee).  The non-smart dogs probably didn’t last long during the summer. Mentioning the highway doesn’t count as a scene where a dog dies in this story.

Since my family arrived in August before the college students returned, the neighborhood where we lived was a common hangout for these emaciated strays.  We lived maybe a quarter mile from one end of Abbo’s Alley (the end that was near the football field), and it was natural for the dogs to wander down a paved street into our neighborhood.  I said ‘paved’ street for a reason, and I’ll get to that later.

My new neighborhood had a bunch of kids my age, and one of the first rules I learned was that you didn’t feed the strays.  If you fed the strays, they said, the strays would get attached to you and never leave you alone.  You didn’t feed the stray(s) unless you intended to adopt the dog(s).

Well… of course, I fed some strays.  But I’ll get to that in the next episode.

For more of my childhood stories that took place in Sewanee (though the setting will be more ambiguous), see the following:

The Tale of the Almost-Expired Milk 

Childhood Ghost Story- The Prologue  (This one mentions one of the dogs that will be introduced later.)

4th of July Story: The Box of M-80s

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No dogs were harmed in the writing of my one novel The Sunset Rises: A 1990s Romantic Comedy. And no dogs are harmed in the novel either. Of course, you can find The Sunset Rises, A 1990s Romantic Comedy  here on Amazon!!

Or you can buy it below from the ‘trunk of my car.’