Rescue Road

by Peter Zheutlin

  “Dad sold the bar and bought a building with plans to open a package store,” Greg continues. “He didn’t realize the building was too close to a nearby school to get a liquor license. The building had been abandoned and wasn’t being used as a school, but the school district still owned it and he couldn’t get the license.”

  So Raymond Mahle needed another plan and opened a small ice cream shop with a soda fountain in his would-be liquor store. Greg was in his early teens.

  “He started offering a sandwich or two, and then another and another, and the next thing you know, you have a kitchen and you’re in the restaurant business,” says Greg. The first restaurant was located at the edge of the Brighton historic district in Zanesville on Brighton Boulevard, from which it took its name. The restaurant was a success, a testament to his parents’ prodigious work ethic—a work ethic he inherited.

  “I remember coming into the restaurant back in the early days,” Greg recalls, “and there was my dad in the kitchen, sitting on a bucket, with a potato in one hand and a knife in the other, and he was sound asleep.”

  Shortly after the fifth restaurant opened, Raymond Mahle died. He was only in his midfifties. Greg, now in his early fifties, dropped out of Ohio University after two years and found himself in the restaurant business with his mother, Mary. Never much of a student, Greg figured he was going to end up working in the family restaurants anyway, so he cut his college education short.

  Greg is very fond of his mother and they have a good relationship; he credits her with teaching him everything he knows about work and life.

  “My mother and I worked together day in and day out for many years,” he says. “I was lucky. We had disagreements, like what should be on the menu; she’d never take anything off even as we added new items. She was always sure there’d be one customer who might still want a particular sandwich, so we couldn’t take it off!

  “The restaurants taught me how to go to work each day,” Greg tells me. “There was never a sick day and you worked long, long hours, sometimes fourteen or fifteen hours a day. It was hard labor day after day after day. I worked for years without a single day off. It prepared me for Rescue Road Trips, where I work twenty-hour days on the road. There are no sick days. And I learned to do it without bitching about it. I unload my complaints on Adella, and only on Adella,” he says as she nods her head in agreement. But he describes dropping out of college as a poor decision. “When you’re young, you think you have all the answers,” he says.

  For the better part of two decades, Greg and Mary ran the restaurants, working a grinding schedule, but Zanesville’s decline continued, the national economy faltered, and tastes changed. The Mahles, by Greg’s admission, failed to change with the times.

  “Ten years ago, I hated the restaurant business. I hated everything,” Greg tells me. “In the earlier days, when business was better, I was younger and stronger.”

  The restaurants started closing one by one, and Greg moved into an apartment he created in the sole surviving location. He and Adella had gone out together over the years, but it was nothing Greg considered a formal date. When the last of the restaurants closed, Greg moved back into the home where Raymond and Mary had lived since Greg was eleven, in Mount Perry, a little hamlet west of Zanesville.

  “I had just enough to pay my bills,” Greg tells me. “What more do you need? You can be close to broke and still be happy. I was dating lots of girls and hadn’t seen Adella in about a year. Then I got a letter from her and I asked her out on a date.”

  Greg and Adella agree that she had been pursuing him ever since they’d met when she first came to work in one of the restaurants. Other than a little to pay the bills, he had no money, just a large jar of change, mostly pennies.

  “So, to take Adella out on a date, I had to wrap the pennies and get dollars,” he tells me. It was enough to take her to a Smith & Wollensky steakhouse at a mall near Columbus, and then to German Village, the old German section of Columbus where, incongruously, they drank tequila. To this day, Greg has several large containers spread around his home office filled with loose change.

  Greg and Adella were together for about thirteen years before she finally persuaded him, in 2012, to get married. They had moved in together two years earlier.

  “If I hadn’t been very persistent, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” says Adella, who is petite, pretty, and sports shoulder-length hair dyed a brilliant red. Greg agrees. On the day they married, in July 2012, Greg returned from a week on the road at about three in the afternoon. The wedding was at six.

  It’s a relationship of genuine tenderness and mutual respect. Greg was well into his life transporting rescue dogs before they married, and though the bimonthly separations are hard, both are deeply committed to each other and the work. Adella helps Greg with countless Rescue Road Trips tasks and always sends Greg and Tommy off with a couple dozen turkey, ham, and cheese sandwiches to sustain them for the first few days on the road.

  “I had been resisting Adella for years,” says Greg, who’d been married once before. That marriage lasted about five years. There were no children. “I wasn’t sure about the idea of marrying again and settling down in a family life.”

  Several years before they became a couple, Adella had Connor. When they married a few years later, he took his new responsibility as a stepdad very seriously.

  “It meant buying a house, and now I’m going to be a stepdad and I’m going to have to step up to the plate for both of them,” he tells me, his voice cracking slightly. “I needed to be good enough for both of them. I had known Adella wanted to marry me for at least ten years before we got married. Deciding to get married made me the happiest man in the world. I’m so happy being with this family and with what Adella and Connor give me. Sometimes we make each other madder than hell, but this is the greatest part of my life. It makes it much harder to leave every other Monday. I get a bit out of sorts on Sundays, but I also love my life on the road with dogs. Adella and Friday nights in the trailer with the dogs [the night before Greg unites the dogs with their forever families] are the two best things in my life. I love the life I have created.”

  “I hate it when he leaves,” Adella says. “I’ve always hated it. But Rescue Road Trips is our life. Except for the very beginning, it’s all we’ve known since we’ve been together.”

  • • •

  Greg has no children of his own, but when he talks about Connor and his hopes for Connor’s future, you’d be hard-pressed to tell Connor isn’t his own son.

  “I want Connor to go to college and get out of Zanesville,” Greg told me as we drove from Columbus, where he’d met me at the airport a few days before we set off on a rescue road trip. “I don’t have a college degree. I want him to work with his head, not his back.”

  When I met Connor a couple of days later—he had been spending the weekend with his dad—that wasn’t hard to imagine. He’s preternaturally bright and articulate and offered a stiff challenge when we settled down to a game of chess.

  “I want him to have choices,” Greg added, “and he won’t have them in Zanesville.” Adella wants Connor to grow up in Zanesville, where the cost of living is, fortunately, very low. Zanesville, says Greg, is “okay for now.” Maybe that should be the town motto, we joke. Put up signs on the roads leading into town saying, “Zanesville: It’s Okay for Now.”

  But once Connor’s off to college, Greg fantasizes about where he might like to live. His thoughts are, quite literally, all over the map. He likes the idea of living in Manhattan, of being able to walk everywhere and not having a car. And he yearns for the anonymity of living in a big city, not surprising, perhaps, when you’ve spent your whole life in a small town where everyone knows you.

  “Being with a thousand people on a street and being invisible, that appeals to me,” he says. “I’d consider Alaska. I’ve never been to France, but I fantasize about living there.” But Greg also intends to stay on the road, rescuing dogs as long as he i
s physically able, so those dreams will remain just that for the foreseeable future.

  • • •

  Greg is the second child of Raymond and Mary Mahle. He has two younger brothers who still live in Mount Perry: Scott, who works in a local factory but is training to be a minister, and Todd, a detective with the Muskingum County Sheriff’s Office. His older sister, Cathy, the founder of Labs4rescue, works in pharmaceutical publishing and lives in Connecticut. Labs4rescue is one of the rescue groups that rely heavily on Greg to transport southern dogs to their new homes in the Northeast.

  Before Raymond and Mary moved the family to Mount Perry, they lived in a single-story ranch home in the nearby village of Fultonham. Greg would walk a short distance to a bridge that crosses Jonathan Creek and fish for chubs using wadded up balls of white bread. Many days he would venture further, on foot or bicycle, to Lake Isabella, a man-made lake created in 1939 out of an old limestone quarry. The smoke stack of the now-defunct plant that used the limestone to make cement is visible from parts of the lake.

  We stop by the Mahle family home in Mount Perry before driving down to the lake. The setting is bucolic. Rolling hills dressed in spring green form a small glen where the modest two-story clapboard house sits on a little knoll. The field across the street, which is part of the eighty-eight-acre property, is used to grow grass for hay. There is a large, worn-down barn, a remnant of an old dairy farm that predated the Mahles occupancy, and a smaller barn beside it with an old tractor inside. A large brick cistern, used by the Mahles until they drilled their own well, sits on the hillside. There’s not another house in sight.

  Mary isn’t home, but her dog, Pork Chop, is tethered outside and greets Greg and Adella with enthusiasm as we get out. We walk through the ground floor of the house; the kitchen wallpaper’s design suggests it’s been there since the 1930s or 1940s. Little else has changed since Greg wandered these rooms as an eleven-year-old.

  We leave the house and drive a couple of miles down to Lake Isabella. For years, Greg spent almost every summer day here. There’s a small beach, created by the county with imported sand. There’s a recreation hall, a very basic free mini-golf course made from two-by-fours, a raft, a diving board, and a snack bar that serves up burgers, hot dogs, fries, and shakes. Greg’s mother, Mary, operates the snack bar. As we munch on hot dogs on a perfect late spring day, Greg talks about growing up in a tiny town in southeast Ohio.

  “There was only one kid my age anywhere near the house in Mount Perry,” he says. “Her name was Vesta. One day I watched as a mule tried to run out of its stall in their barn, and she just knocked it out with one punch. I chose not to play with her after that.”

  Greg attended nearby Maysville High School and graduated in 1981, in a class of about eighty students. “I was a B and C student,” he says. “I had the ability but not the ambition.” He wasn’t into cars and he was neither a popular kid nor an outcast. He had one particularly close friend in high school, also named Greg, and they remain friends today. “I didn’t really fit in,” he says with no trace of remorse. “I’ve always been my own best friend.” Beer and girls—“lots of girls”—became his primary preoccupations during his high school years. But he also loved dogs.

  When he was in third grade, a stray dog followed him home from school. As was common in that time and place, Poochie, as the mutt became known, lived outside the Mahles’ home.

  “My dad wasn’t happy,” says Greg. “Poochie had seizures that caused her to foam at the mouth. She stayed around for a couple of years and then just disappeared.” Poochie would become just the first of many strays to live in and around the Mahle household; by Greg’s reckoning, he and his brothers brought home at least a dozen, some smuggled in under towels, over the years.

  “We found them on the street and fed them, and they lived on our porch,” Greg tells me. “This was forty years ago and that’s how it was done.”

  In addition to the strays, the Mahles had many “official” dogs. Raymond Mahle liked to hunt birds and had many hunting dogs that also lived outside, Brittany spaniels, English setters, and Irish setters.

  “My affinity for Irish Setters,” he says, referring to his own, Murphy, “came from my dad.” But taking in the strays really made an impact. “It’s how I learned that taking care of dogs felt good,” he says.

  Pork Chop was also a stray Greg pulled from the Cambridge, Ohio, pound. At first, Mary wouldn’t even let the dog in her car. Years later, when Greg, with some trepidation, told her he was moving in with Adella, she was matter-of-fact: “You can live together, but the dog is staying.”

  When Greg talks about the feeling he gets from bringing rescue dogs to safety, he thinks back to Poochie, his first stray. “That’s the feeling I’m always trying to recapture,” he says.

  • • •

  On the Saturday before our departure for the Deep South, there’s a major chore to be done, and though it’s usually done earlier in the week, Greg has postponed it so I can see what goes into preparing for each rescue road trip. I knew from my brief ride with him the previous fall that there are no human passengers on his truck, only workers; if you’re there, you’re there to help with whatever needs to be done. And before I flew out to Ohio, I emailed to assure him I understood it was “all hands on deck” while I was riding along.

  During the week, I would learn the work never ends and the demands of transporting eighty dogs in a tractor-trailer is dirty, sometimes dangerous, exhausting, and unrelenting. Today would be my first taste of just how much backbreaking work goes into each trip well before a single dog gets on board.

  We hop into Greg’s white panel truck, the one Adella calls his “creepy stalker, rapist van” because other than Greg, she thinks that’s the only kind of person who would own such a wreck. Our first stop is Sam’s Club, the discount buyers’ club, where Greg picks up five one-gallon spray bottles of Clorox Clean-Up. From there we head for Mattingly’s parking lot, a local trucking concern where Greg rents a parking space for his rig for a hundred dollars a month. It’s gated and secure. We park the van and Greg fires up the tractor. It has to run for a few minutes before it can be driven, to allow pressure to build up in the brake lines. While the truck idles, Greg checks the three gas-powered generators strapped to the platform behind the cab, the generators that provide power to run the four air-conditioning units and heater in the trailer. Each costs $2,000 and is secured only by the straps, so parking the rig in a fenced and locked lot is a small insurance policy against theft. Mattingly’s also has a full-time mechanic who can fix Greg’s truck on the premises, a major convenience.

  Once the truck has warmed up, we drive about a quarter mile to a field adjacent to a service station. Greg pays them a hundred dollars a month too, to park in the field and to connect hoses to their water supply. This is where the trailer and all eighty kennels will be thoroughly disinfected and cleaned before we depart. This requires removing every kennel from the trailer—some, for smaller dogs, easily carried, others more cumbersome—and placing it in the field. The trailer is forty-eight feet long and “Rescue Road Trips: Saving Lives Four Paws at a Time” is emblazoned on both sides together with a large photograph of a young woman holding out her hand and looking tenderly at a black Lab.

  Fortunately, it’s a beautiful day—warm but not hot, with tolerable humidity. Still, the job will take four of us—Greg, Adella, me, and Adella’s mother, Debbie, who is one of Greg’s two salaried employees (Tommy is the other)—five and half hours to complete. That’s a lot of time in the sun, and as the work proceeds, I ponder the fact that this job has to be done in brutal heat and humidity in summer and on bitter winter days because Greg runs every other week without fail. In the winter, Greg tells me, a thin layer of ice will form in the buckets Debbie uses to wash out the kennels. He’s seen her reach down and crack the ice with her hands before she continues working with the frigid water.

  We quickly fall into our respective jobs. Greg, using a portable, hand-powered pump
, sprays Clorox Clean-Up to disinfect each kennel, and I rinse each with a hose. Inside the trailer, Debbie and Adella sweep the trailer clean. A lot of detritus builds up in the trailer during trips—soiled newspapers in trash bags, flat tires, and miscellaneous donations of dog food, toys, and other paraphernalia. All that is placed in the field, to be sorted out or discarded.

  Once the trailer is empty and swept, Greg sprays down the interior with the disinfectant, and then the entire inside of the trailer is hosed down from top to bottom. Once that’s done, Greg and I continue with the kennels, placing the clean ones at the trailer’s back door, where Debbie and Adella begin the process of putting them back in position and securing them, using bungee cords, to rails along the trailer walls.

  By the time we’re done, I have my first taste of the physical work involved in Rescue Road Trips. Then, I get a surprise. Greg tells me the job that just took four of us more than five hours to complete was often done solo by his mother-in-law, but she’s since hired a nephew to help her. I ask Greg if there aren’t laws in Ohio against mother-in-law abuse. I can’t imagine one woman in her sixties, with arthritis no less, doing this job alone.

  Greg says Debbie, who is also Greg’s go-to on-call person 24–7 when he’s on the road, is the hardest-working person he’s ever seen. Typically, she spreads the cleaning of the trailer out over several days; she is plodding and methodical and keeps at it a few hours at a time until she finishes. When he’s on the road, it’s Debbie who will call all the adopters if he’s running behind schedule, deal with any changes in the reservations, help him find the nearest roadside assistance in case of a breakdown, and do any other task Greg needs help with. She also manages all the office paperwork.