Transcript - Mirrors of Life w/ Ben Moon

Below is a transcript of the Ben Moon episode of Dog Save The People.

Intro

Welcome to Dog Save The People, a podcast about how dogs make our lives better. My name is Sharon Holland, and I'm your host for this episode. I'm an author and professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

I teach a course on animal studies and have written about the human-animal distinction, and I hope to bring this perspective to these conversations. In this episode, I speak with the fascinating and resilient Ben Moon, a filmmaker and photographer. Many people know Ben from the 2015 short film, as told in the voice of his dog, Denali, a husky and pit mix, who helped him through a battle with colon cancer in his late 20s.

He also released a memoir in 2020 entitled Denali, A Man, a Dog, and the Friendship of a Lifetime. Now Ben lives on the Oregon Coast with his current dog, Norrie, who is an Australian shepherd husky mix Ben rescued eight years ago. In this episode, I speak with Ben about learning to trust his intuition like his dog's.

Now, let's get into the conversation.


Interview

Sharon Holland: Welcome to Dog Save The People. I am so honored to be able to have this conversation with you today.

Ben Moon: Thank you, Sharon. It's great to meet you and honor to be here as well.

There is so much to talk about. I don't even know where to start, but I always start pretty much in the same place, and that is with your journey with canines. When did it start? How did it start? Talk to us about that.

I grew up in a pretty rural area, Michigan, and we had a dog when I was growing up. That's where it all started. Then we had a few more throughout my childhood, a black lab that I was pretty close to, and then I went to college and didn't have a dog during that time.

Soon after that, I moved out to Oregon. I was living in Portland at the time, and I didn't feel like it was fair to have a dog in the city, but got convinced by my partner at the time to go to a shelter. I was a little resistant, but this one pup really spoke to me.

This little pit husky next to me, just sitting there quietly staring at me. I tried to ignore him as I walked down the aisle of the shelter, just heartbreaking because you want to adopt them all and I came back and adopted him the next day. I just knew I had no choice in the matter. He became my dog, he became Denali.

Oh my gosh. I love that story.

Tell me a little bit about your first adventures together, especially in regard to your outdoor life. I know you lived in the back of a wagon for a while, and then you upgraded to a camper van, off-grid living with him. What was that like?

Yeah. My first year with him was still living in Portland. I was working construction at the time.

I couldn't find a job in my field of sports medicine, and so I fell back to what I had done with my dad in summers, building houses, and so I could bring him to the job site, and I had a Subaru wagon, and he would hang out in the back at a bed set up in the lead, and he could hang out with me there, and I could eat lunch and take breaks with him, and take him for walks. (Denali) really had that combo, and I was starting to really climb a lot at this area, the state park called Smith Rock, and he would always go there with me ever since he was a puppy. It was a really special spot, and then the other place was the beach where I live now.

There was a lot of adventures just outside, especially around rock climbing because that was my main focus at the time. I wasn't taking pictures yet. I was just trying to figure out life.

I was married super young and tried to make it work, and then when that relationship ended, it was one of those things where I just felt like I was placed in a belief system that was like marriage was for life. I just felt like I had failed and dealing with a lot of confusing emotions, conflicting emotions around that, and trying to process that. So I put all my energy in just getting outside and trying to rebuild and figure out where I wanted to go.

I moved to Bend (Oregon), which is much more of an outdoor focused town. It was a very dog-friendly place. I was working for a climbing manufacturer called Metolius and I had that Subaru wagon. And I was like, I'll just make a bed for the back of it and I'll live here and save money for a couple of months, just through the summer. Then that summer became Fall and I was like, ‘Well, it's still pretty nice. I'm not spending any money and I wasn't making a lot.’

So I was just trying to figure out what was next. I had a few friends telling me like, “Oh, you'll never gonna make it through a Bend winter. It's really cold. It gets down in the single digits.” And so I was like, well, challenge accepted. Denali, because he was part pit and part husky, more of the pit, like his underbelly was very thin, so he would get cold easy. So he would just burrow under the covers with me and just sleep under there. I'd be scraping ice out at the inside of the windows. And we became close to that.

Fortunately, I'd picked up a camera and then I started documenting the journey and the trips. And having my time with Denali and then also having a creative outlet were two things that really helped me rebuild to who I am today.

Not everyone who picks up a camera to document becomes the kind of photographer that you've become. At what point did you learn, hey, I'm really good at this?

I found in life whenever there's this twist or turn, something appears that really is the path. And it's hard for me to explain because it's like I just had a deep feeling that I need to keep following that little glowing light and I don't know why yet. And I tend to get really passionate about things and study them really deeply and incessantly until I understand them.

I never thought I was going to be a photographer. I didn't go to art classes. I was good at them. I was always good at drawing, but I never took a photography course because we didn't have much money growing up. And so I didn't want to burden my parents with the lab fees and things like that.

One person who's still my friend today, he was a photographer. He went to photography school. He had photographed some climbers and he took me for a photo walk and just explained how to use this camera. For the film nerds out there, it was a Nikon N90S. And learning on film, let me tell you, it was challenging. But I just started taking pictures on my trips.

It was one trip in particular to Bishop, California, which is the Sierra East side. Galen Raul, the landscape photographer, called it “the range of light.” It was full of beauty and color. And I remember waking up and seeing the Sierra bathed in snow and just being like, how is there somewhere that's beautiful? That's the trip that started taking pictures where I was like, whoa, these are incredible.

My dear friend, Brook Sandall, he's a climber that was the VP of Metolius Climbing at the time, but he was a marketing director and a light table in his office. He just gave me the time to put those photos on his light table and just at least entertain me as a beginner photographer.

And I found out that Patagonia took submissions in ignorance is bliss, and I just submitted a couple sheets of slides and somehow Jane Sievert, the photo editor, she saw something in my work. Without her and Brook and their encouragement, I wouldn't be a photographer or a creative or filmmaker.

And Denali was with you, right?

He was with me on that trip, yeah. He was with me through that all and I was still living in the back of my Subaru.

I'm thinking also about what you said about living intuitively. You're not sure where you're being directed, but you're just going to follow that light. I really feel that dogs move us toward our intuition. You're going down the sidewalk and the next thing you know, your dog finds a path through the woods and you're not really sure you're supposed to be on it, but boy, you're having fun investigating it together. And then you meet a new friend or maybe you don't and you have some moment of solitude in a very large city.

Yeah, I think there's so much truth in that. At the beginning of that journey with Denali, he wandered over to a campsite, probably looking for food or saying hi to their dogs, and introduced me to two friends who became climbing partners. Also just people who really encouraged me, and also were in a lot of my photographs.

Dogs are so present. They're not feeling the stress and, oh, I shouldn't talk to that person. I'm not feeling awesome right now. I don't feel very confident. They set all that aside and was like, hey, this is a good person. I'm going to hang out with them.

So Denali was alongside you during this time of finding your creative eye, meeting new people, and going on these adventures, which all sounds totally amazing. But I know that you mentioned Denali also helped you through many challenges too, like with your health. Can you tell me about that?

Yeah. So I was starting to become an adventure photographer, living that life, going on rock climbing trips, and some surf trips, and just trying to get my career going with Patagonia and trying to decide where that should lead.

(At one point) I was in Joshua Tree and I had seen some blood in my stool, and it was just weird. That same day, I was at the campfire and I stood up too fast and passed out fully. I woke up to Denali look at my face. All my friends are like, “Something is wrong with you.:

And I asked a few friends and they're like, “Oh, you could have colon cancer.” I looked up the symptoms and it said “Are you over 50?” I was 27 at the time. Because there really wasn't any literature online about anybody younger having it. I just didn't know that it could happen to someone younger.

Then fast forward two years later, things were getting really bad. The symptoms were getting horrible. Thankfully, a woman who I was seeing, she saw what I was going through and made me go in and get checked and her and the nurse practitioner who checked me out, both those women saved my life. I didn't realize how serious it was until I lost several friends after that to the disease that were under 40. And since then, I've known a lot of people who have lost their parent or level one to colon cancer.

The treatment was really harsh. I had to have a permanent colostomy and that version of the surgery they did, it was a long incision in my abdomen, so I couldn't really sit up or walk yet. My body felt so foreign to me and I had already gone through radiation. It was intense. So Denali just gently stepped up into the bed and laid down next to me. And when I was laid out from chemo, he was always there.

One of my favorite images is a view in Denali in the hospital bed. And Denali reminds me so much of my dog, Sula, she was like that. She was my first dog. And it's just a beautiful image. If a picture says a thousand words, it's the look in his eye, the pain on your face, and also gratitude for that relationship.

I was so glad when those photos came to light, captured how that felt and that friendship. I was not feeling that great about things in general. When you're laid out from chemo and radiation, you don't want to talk to anybody. And he was next to me through all of it.

I am inspired by your relationship with Denali and all of your adventures. And I know you lost him, I think, was he 14 or 15? Yeah, he's 14 and a half. So he lived a really full life, had some ups and downs. He bounced back from mast cell cancer when he was around 10 years old. And it was really amazing to see him come back from that. It slowed him down a little bit, but he was still fully there.

Later, he had laryngeal paralysis, where their vocal cords don't get out of the way when they're breathing. I didn't want to put him through another surgery, but eventually I took a hike with him and realized he could barely breathe sometimes. And so I realized I had to do that, or he was going to just be a house dog, which he was not a house dog.

Not at all.

He was my adventure buddy.

(Denali) got another two and a half years after that and really was able to live to the fullest. But it really was older age that took him ultimately.

You even ended up creating a short film called Denali, a tribute to man's best friend. And it's still on YouTube. And for people who haven't seen it, it's basically told from Denali's perspective as a dog. And it shows footage of you both together at the beach and other flashback photos over the years, like the one in the hospital bed that we talked about. Can you tell me a little bit more?

When I made the short film to honor him, it was at the very end of his life. And it was more of just a passion project. I knew there was something relatable in there and there's something that was universal. So when the film had the success it did, which was unexpected, people were writing me thousands of messages from all over the world. And they were just like, this spoke to me. And everybody from Today Show to Oprah was sharing it. It was wild to have so many people watch it.

So the short film was released in 2015. And a few years later, you started writing a memoir about Denali as well. Tell me a little bit about that process.

During the kind of aftermath of the short film, I had several people in the publishing world reach out. And I just was like, I don't even know where to start. I have no idea.

I never had an intention of writing a book. I needed some guidance. I didn't know how to write or how to put that together.

And so I thought of the only person who was published in a non-fiction sense was Jon Krakauer, who'd written several books that I was really into. And I think by then, like Into The Wild was out and Under The Banner of Heaven and many of the other books he wrote. But thankfully, I knew him through the climbing world. And we had a 45-minute conversation and he said, “Hey, if you have any desire whatsoever to write a book, this is an opportunity that very few people have, that people are interested in your story. And so if you have any interest, I would definitely take it.”

Then when Penguin ended up being the publisher, my editor there, he thought of my story as dog medicine, deep stories about hardship, about mental health. And I knew that in writing the book, I had to go even deeper, otherwise there was no point. And I had to make something relatable. It was challenging. And honestly, I doubted, was that relationship with Denali really that special?

But then I adopted Nori. Someone sent me the link to her PetFinder. I was at a rescue that was a foster that normally only took adult dogs or dogs that were like low chance of being adopted. But there was a whole batch of puppies that were all from Central Valley, California, that were all strays that needed homes, fosters. To having a dog starting to form that relationship while I was writing the proposal for the book, reminded me and made me realize, yes, this relationship is deep.

How did that writing process or mindset change after you rescued Nori?

Nori just came into my life at the right time. Her entire life from her first day on were spent out here at the beach, where Denali spent his last days. So it's full circle.

When adopting Nori, I moved out to the coast thinking it would just be temporary. I was living in my van again because the housing situation I was in fell through. I had just built out this van with my dad. It was means to an end. But I had bought a lot here in town, and I would go down to the beach and just park in front of the rock, and then Denali filmed the same rock, and I would just park there and write.

I would procrastinate for hours, go surf and walk with Nori and go play on the beach. I met a lot of friends during that time, just park there.

As a writer, believe me, that's the process.

Procrastinate for 12 hours and write for 30 minutes.

There you go.

I learned over that process not to beat myself up over that.

I kept going back to that thing where only reason there's a point to this is if it can help others in some way to see themselves. It can help one person that's worth talking about this stuff, whether it's battling depression and anxiety or going through cancer or trying to recover and like survivor guilt of living after cancer, especially when you lose friends to the same disease.

There is a long journey and a lot of life and essentially it was about the same thing as the film, overcoming hardships with the help of a friend.

It dropped in 2020, right? Sometime in that first pandemic year.

When it came out, I was pretty nervous about it, but I was excited. I did a few bookstores on the West Coast and then a string of Patagonia stores because they were just a built-in audience there from the work I'd done with Patagonia over the years, and those events were amazing. I came home thinking I was going to be home for a week break and then COVID hit, and what a weird time to release a book.

It slowly found its footing, which is how everything else in my life is. I feel like it finds the people it needs to, and I was building my home at the time and hoping that I could just finish that because of all the challenges, and it was an interesting time.

I love the connection that you make, actually the connection that Nori makes with Denali through the writing of that book, and also being in the same space. How is she showing up, if at all, in that new project or guiding that new project?

I'm still in the proposal phase of my new book, but in the same light that the first book was about Denali, but it was about so much more. Some people expect the pure dog book. That's about life and what dogs can teach us.

And so the new book is really an exploration of utilizing the house build as the rough framework for the book, but then it's so much deeper. Just really study about home and belonging and where we find that, the spaces we find ourselves in. That's the culmination of many years of observing and knowing what I want out of a space and also a place I can give back and share with others and foster creativity and community.

But Nori is very much a part of that.

This goes to my next question, and that is about the similarities and our differences between Denali and Nori, right? Because no matter how our dogs are living in that moment and teaching us, every dog is different.

My current dog, Nori, she's been with me through a whole different phase of my life.

This phase has been about learning how to be a full human, and she has led me through that.

I feel like dogs are mirrors of where we are in life.

In a lot of ways, Denali was stubborn, adventurous, just needed to wander. He loved his friends, but he also just liked to go meet new people all the time, because he had that husky instinct, and he would just be hanging out at some barbecue with a bunch of people, because he followed his nose. I always dreamt of having the Fi collars and the tracking collars that we have now, because he would be like four miles away, but I would have loved to know where he was, and Nori has one of those now.

But I think Nori is much more grounded. I feel like I'm much more grounded as a person, and I have a sense of home now, and I think that she's more like that. She still will wander occasionally, but she loves her home base, and she's outside hanging out right now. And I feel like that's where I'm at now too. I love having a home base. I still love to travel, but I'm also at a different phase in my life where I don't need to be on the road all the time.

I value what a sense of place and community can do. I realized that was one thing I was lacking when I was just chasing the rush of a new experience. And there is something with that slow build that comes with time if you've done the work and sat with yourself and gotten comfortable with yourself.

I have been doing a lot of inner work over the last 10 to 15 years, and it's not been easy. And the layers, as they peel back, sometimes you find more challenging things deeper underneath the other old ones. And I feel like this year was one where I thought I had it all figured out, and then everything turned upside down.

And it feels like this year's another big transition year for a lot of people. And it's been one of the more challenging years of my life, but I also appreciate that time to dig in a little bit deeper too. And so when you have that feeling where all these things are, irons are in the fire, but nothing's a flame yet.

I know.

That's how this has felt this year.

Being a creative, it's a slow burn. It's a slow, steady burn, and you have to believe where the project takes you, right? Or you have to be willing to abandon the project that you thought you were doing for the one that has just appeared. Or, as they say in writing, know the difference. Know that thing that just appeared is actually the distraction, not the core. But I find that I feel like right now I'm the most patient I've ever been in my life. And I have not learned that through human beings. I've learned that from the dogs and, of course, my sweet horse Annie in my life. So, I hear you on that.

It's a time for great transition on this planet.

It is.

It feels universal. There's a lot going on. I feel a lot of hope now, though. And I think that there are amazing things on the horizon. Stay with the dogs and push those themes of empathy and caring for others. And selfishness doesn't get us anywhere.

Absolutely. Is there anything that you wanted to say that you didn't get to say?

I guess the one thing being this is a dog podcast that one thing I'm grateful for and one thing that I often have to remind myself of is just spend that time with Noreen and just give her some love. If you can just give your dog even a minute, five minutes, it's the most beautiful form of meditation. Life issues fall away.

The same can be said for when they want to go out for a walk. I never ever regret going for that walk. That's one thing I'm just so grateful for with dogs is they teach us to be present and to leave all the BS of life behind.

Yeah, it has its impact. Absolutely.
Where can we find your work online and on social media?

I guess I'm the most active on Instagram. I'm @ben_moon. My website's benmoon.com.

I will be updating that. But also my book is called Denali, A Man, A Dog, A Friendship of A Lifetime. It's on Penguin Books. I read the audio book as well, which it's been fun to see that get out there.

I'm really excited about developing this Denali book into a feature and we're early in the development on this round. It was optioned before, but the writer and the producer and everybody involved right now are just people. I absolutely just resonate so deeply with. They all are dog lovers and dog owners, and all our meetings are all just taking the dogs for walks.

Sounds perfect.

Yeah, it just feels like it's on the right trail, but that industry is in a real state of flux right now too. So, just taking the slow burn and knowing that story is timeless. I feel like the themes of dogs and cancer and friendship and loss and love and life, we all go through that.

I've been trying to think about that as I work on this new book too, just making sure that it has that relatable theme because that's the only way you can really connect with others. We make it about ourselves, it's just, what's that for?

I can't wait to see both of them find the light of day. This has been a pleasure, Ben. Thank you for such gorgeous work, for reconnecting us to the stories in our lives that mean something not only to us, but to others.

Thank you, Sharon. It's been lovely to have this conversation with you.


Outro

I learned so many things during my conversation with Ben Moon. Chief among them, his sense that dogs teach us to follow our intuition. They also teach us the meaning of friendship.

As Ben discussed his growing artistic practice and personal growth, I was reminded that so many of the best journeys in life are taken on that road less traveled. When Ben got hold of a camera for the first time, his curiosity seemed to mirror that of our canine companions, and the world opened up through his vision and brought us an array of stunning work.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Dog Save The People, a podcast about how dogs make our lives better. I'm Sharon Holland, your host for this episode. This show is made by As It Should Be Productions, a production company and content studio.

It is made with support of Scott Benaglio, executive producer, and Jack Sommer, our producer and editor. Special thanks to Daniel Lamport for creating the music for the show. You can follow Dog Save The People on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you like the show, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow our show on Instagram, Facebook, and X. To sign up for our monthly email newsletter, you can go to dogsavethepeople.com.

On the website, you'll also find show merch in our online gift shop. If you have any questions or submissions, please drop a note to the email address bark@dogsavethepeople.com. And remember, enjoy a walk with your dog outside.

Please avoid the heat and make it a great day for both of you.

Jack Sommer