Anderson: Here’s a New Year’s resolution: Stay out of jail. And always trust a dog

I keep my New Year’s resolutions simple. Stay out of jail at Christmas. And trust dogs to do the right thing.

Some years ago, in Tennessee, early on Christmas Eve, I was coming off the East Coast in a White Freightliner, loaded for Tulsa.

Which was when, rising over a hill, with another 18-wheeler passing me, I whisked alongside a highway patrolman who had a car pulled over.

Not long afterward, the same officer’s flashing lights beamed in my rearview mirrors.

“You blew my hat off!’’

“I couldn’t pull over,” I said. ”A guy was passing me."

He wrote me up anyway, on what I considered a technicality, something about my logbook saying I was still in Maryland.

The lesson I learned was not to avoid Tennessee, whose rockabilly music can be a toe tapper even when piped through a truck’s cheap speakers.

Instead it was to always trust your dog.

“Boogie,” a golden retriever, was my codriver at the time.

By day, he curled up on the Freightliner’s dummy seat, and by night he stretched out in the sleeper.

Arriving at the small town’s hoosegow, Boogie jumped down from the truck and pranced alongside me, tail wagging, unaware he might soon be doing hard time for a crime to which he was only an accessory, and an unwitting one.

Saving us from either option, Boogie cozied up to the town jailor, begging for attention, then slobbering his face.

The jailor enjoyed Boogie’s antics for a good long while.

Then he said, “Except for you and Rin Tin Tin here, the jail’s empty. I got kids. It’s Christmas. I don’t want to be here.’’

“I’ll get the money,” I said.

Reached by phone, my boss seemed to weigh for an extraordinarily long time the possibility that cooling my heels for a couple of days might teach me a lesson — an unlikely outcome, I assured him.

In Ely some years back, I edited a stalwart broadsheet, The Miner, founded in 1895.

A onetime fire-breather, The Miner had for many years cash-flowed its meager operation trading in recipes and short stories about people visiting other people. When Finlanders traveled from Ely to Babbitt or Virginia, or Italians from Hibbing or Cook to Ely, we were all over it, Iron Rangers on the move.

My partner at The Miner, Bob Whitten, was an advertising guy, and he and I had been charged by the paper’s owner, Columbia Childers, an Ely native, to snazz up the paper’s reporting and also its bottom line.

Like me, Bob owned a retriever, in his case a black Labrador, Nemo, a good dog.

Bob and I and others on our meager staff often burned the midnight oil preparing The Miner’s weekly paste-ups for shuttling to Chisholm, where the paper was printed.

On one cold winter’s night, easily below zero, I noticed on the sidewalk in front of The Miner a gathering of eight or maybe 10 people.

Through the newspaper’s frosty windows, the group beckoned me, as if wanting to honor my new Ely residency and maybe even wish me well in my budding but obviously dead-end job as a small-town scribe.

Returning the smiles and waving, and quite puffed up by the attention, I walked toward the well-wishers, prepared at least to welcome them inside to warm up.

I imagined even having a thermos of hot chocolate or a decanter of brandy to share with my new friends on this frigid night.

Instead, as I approached the small crowd, quite lost now in their hilarity, I saw Nemo, previously hidden to me by Columbia’s desk, doing his business on The Miner’s floor.

Then there was Jake, my friend Willy Smith’s Labrador, whose principled stand for his honor — and for Willy’s and mine — was worthy of a statue.

This was at The Pas, in northern Manitoba, where Willy and I were hunting diving ducks, mostly bluebills.

Minimally equipped, we cavorted in a Grumman Sportboat with a 3-horsepower Evinrude, a slow-moving rig that necessitated still-dark wake-ups to reach our desired hunting spots.

We had done just that on this morning, traveling by moonlight, and had set our decoys, when, just before shooting time, an airboat full of Illinois guys — Ill-i-noise! — vroomed to within 50 yards of us and set up their decoys.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

With nothing left to shoot, Willy, Jake and I pulled up stakes and headed to the landing. Which is where we found the big shots with the airboat, talking loud.

Seeing us, one of them sprinted in our direction.

“Control your dog,” the guy said. “My dog cost $10,000. I don’t want some mongrel tearing him up.”

“You don’t have to worry about that!” Willy said. “Jake here has never fought in his life!”

This was about 10 seconds before Jake made a beeline for the guy’s fancy retriever, grabbed him by the throat and threw him on his back.

Jake headed in our direction, but he wasn’t done.

Seeing waders and other equipment the men had stacked in a pile, Jake cocked his leg on the gear as final payback for our interrupted hunt.

As we drove away, Willy gave Jake a treat.

“Don’t know what got into him,” he said.

In the Freightliner on that Christmas night, I fine-tuned the rabbit ears of an 11-inch black-and-white TV, searching for a faint signal that never arrived.

Boogie was already in the sleeper when I climbed in.

He and I would unload in the morning, and leave out for L.A. in a few days.