Short Update: Explaining Our Brief Hiatus

0:00:00 - (Chris Clarke): Hi, folks, this is Chris. We didn't have an episode last week, and aside from this short update, we're not going to have one this week. I expect… I expect to be back in the saddle by next week, and I'm going to explain why. But I want to start with this tail end of a conversation I had with NPR journalist A Martinez in September 2020. We were talking about Joshua trees, but then he added something kind of surprising and wonderful at the end that it's just kind of the note I want to start on.

0:00:33 - (Chris Clarke): So here's me talking to A Martinez: [fade in] Trees, even if they're on protected land. It just means that we can't afford to sacrifice Joshua tree habitat.

0:00:44 - (A Martínez): All right, that's Chris Clarke and his dog in the background. You heard there. Chris is the California Desert associate director for the National Parks Conservation Association. Chris, thank you very much for joining us.

0:00:54 - (Chris Clarke): Thanks for having me.

0:00:56 - (A Martínez): By the way, Chris's dog is a pitbull mix that he named Heart that. Great, great name for a dog. Heart. H E A R T. All right.

0:01:06 - (Chris Clarke): Heart is a great name for a dog. I can't argue with that. I have never met another dog with that name. She had it at first because she had a great big black splotch on one side that if she was standing up straight, looked like a Valentine's heart. It was a geometrically perfect Valentine's heart. That's why I named her that. Well, we'd been having worries about her health for quite some time, a couple of years, in fact, when she started developing skin cancers on her belly. She's a white dog in the Mojave Desert, so that was not a surprise.

0:01:45 - (Chris Clarke): One of the kinds of cancer she got was a hemangiosarcoma, which is a cancer of the blood vessels that causes when it's cutaneous, it causes little blood blister looking things to form on the skin. And they sit there and they turn purple and they grow slowly. Sometimes they need to be removed surgically most of the time, but sometimes they just dry up on their own. Some of hers did that. She had a couple others, too. She had a soft tissue sarcoma.

0:02:13 - (Chris Clarke): She had a basal cell carcinoma, which doctors removed along with a couple of hemangiosarcomas. And she also revealed to us in October that she for 11 years had been hiding the fact that she had bad hip dysplasia. So there's a whole bunch of reasons we were paying attention to her health really closely. For certainly the last six months, we've been giving her painkillers and she has never been an easy dog to pill, so I've been feeding her food with gabapentin stirred into it.

0:02:46 - (Chris Clarke): It's really bitter, so we've had to use things like stinky canned dog food which we otherwise wouldn't be feeding to her. Sometimes she got wise to the fact that the food was adulterated, sometimes she didn't. Sometimes she was just too hungry to care. Over the last couple of weeks, in fact, I had been hand feeding her, letting her eat out of my hand. I guess you know it's love when you're willing to take a scoop of canned dog food with your fingers and hold it up to your dog so she can eat it out of your hand.

0:03:19 - (Chris Clarke): Anyway, she had a bad couple of nights last week. Kept me up all night. I think I got four hours of sleep total between Tuesday morning and Thursday morning. Decided that there was no way I could put out an episode of the podcast. With that little sleep on Friday, her condition took a sharp turn for the worse. I'm not an expert, but it turns out that all the symptoms she had over the last week were consistent with her having a large hemangiosarcoma somewhere inside her body. And inside the body they are much more problematic.

0:04:01 - (Chris Clarke): She got nauseated, she started refusing food, she wouldn't even let me open her mouth to pill her. She never liked it. But last week she started actually biting my hand. I'm surprised I didn't lose a finger in the last couple of weeks. In addition, her gait was very unsteady, she was weak, her legs trembled, she would fall over. And I won't go into too much detail, but her stool revealed that she had really bad internal bleeding, like lots and lots of blood.

0:04:41 - (Chris Clarke): So yesterday, as I record this 23 hours ago, on Tuesday, May 26, 2026, on a sunlit patio in the hills above Joshua Tree, California, I sat with my wife Lara, and our other dog, Jack and Heart's rescuer Taura, and a really wonderful home visit veterinarian as Heart, peacefully and more or less painlessly came to the end of her life. Now that scenario is everything I had wanted for her to have at the end of her life.

0:05:32 - (Chris Clarke): I wanted her to last a lot longer, but I had really hoped that when she had to go, it would be like how it was yesterday. Taura saved her life in 2014 before I adopted her, and none of us have been the same since… Here's the thing. Recording a podcast can be a lonely pursuit, sitting here in the studio by myself, you know? It's part of why I like to have interviews. Because it's not just me sitting here in the studio, but it never was just me sitting here in the studio. Because for every single episode out of close to 150 we've done during recording or during editing, Heart was right here next to me in the studio.

0:06:28 - (Chris Clarke): And I am finding it really hard to go for more than a few minutes with, without, without losing it as I sit here. It's the first time I've been in the studio since she died and. And it's hard. So like I said, I am expecting to be back in the saddle for our first episode in June, on June 5th. And a lot of you have reached out to me and said really kind things and I feel held up by you. A lot of the people that have communicated with me on social media or sent emails or texts, I know a lot of you have been through this exact thing.

0:07:19 - (Chris Clarke): My friend Tad said to me last night that adopting your first dog is not necessarily an act of bravery, but adopting your second dog is absolutely an act of bravery. And I. I knew I was signing up for this. You know, I knew. And it doesn't make it any easier, and I won't belabor the point, but just out of a sense of duty, I will say it would be great to try and get some folks in here that can pick up the slack when some bad things happen that distract me. But if you donate to our fellowship for desert reporting at 90milesfromneedles.com/fellowship, we could get there. That's sort of a pro forma thing to say, but here's the from the Heart. If you've ever had a dog who connected with your soul the way Heart connected with mine, send me a note. Let me know. Send me a picture. I could really use it. Chris@90milesfromneedles.com. Heart got named in 2014 for a pattern she had in the colors of her fur. But she grew into that name and she earned that name in so many other ways as we work together.

0:08:53 - (Chris Clarke): And… and now I'm heartbroken. So thanks for listening. Thanks for supporting the work we do here, and we'll get back to it as soon as we can.