Travels with Casey

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

There’s a great YouTube video of a boxer puppy in Newcastle, England, meeting a group of curious cows. They take turns sniffing the dog’s face, and everyone involved seems delighted by the cross-species introduction. But that’s not how it worked with Casey and these cows. When a curious black cow approached the gate, my dog pierced the silence with three rapid-fire barks. The herd stopped eating. An irritated cow mooed with displeasure.

  Soon after, we came upon another first for our trip: a dog hanging out in the road. I saw him in plenty of time to slow the Chalet to a crawl. He was a black mutt, and I assumed he belonged to the owners of a farmhouse only a dozen yards removed from the road. The dog and I stared each other down for a few seconds before he bowed his head and shuffled toward the house. I wondered if this is how he spends his days—a kind of rural canine crossing guard. It didn’t strike me as the safest of jobs.

  Twenty minutes later Casey and I arrived in the village of Flint Hill, which is only two miles east of Shenandoah National Park. The Public House is easy to spot—it’s a two-story white building perched on a small hill overlooking the village’s main road. A former schoolhouse, it’s now an upscale restaurant and hotel owned by William Waybourn and Craig Spaulding.

  The expression “pet-friendly” gets tossed around liberally these days, but Craig and William take the promise seriously. Their restaurant’s extensive “Pet Menu” includes a pooch stew and a grilled steak, and at the time of my visit dogs were allowed to dine at the feet of their humans in the hotel’s upscale restaurant. So that’s what we did. I don’t think I’ve seen Casey happier than when the waiter brought him his “quarter hounder” at the same time as my strip steak. (The county health department has since put the kibosh on all that, though dogs can still get served on the patio.)

  Perhaps as a reward for feeding him so well, after dinner Casey cuddled up to me on the room’s king-size bed while I watched Family Guy. Brian Griffin, the animated show’s talking dog, might be my favorite character on television—and he would have certainly fit in at the Public House. Brian is probably the most human member of the Griffin family; he’s certainly the only one capable of true empathy. Maybe more than the human characters, Brian is multidimensional. He’s the show’s logical but troubled straight man, elevating the family’s otherwise asinine discourse.

  The dynamic between the Griffins—and much of the humor in Family Guy—depends on each member of the family demeaning the others. Brian is no exception. Though he’s often the only voice of reason, the dog’s more canine characteristics allow the human Griffins to bring him to their level. Brian may have attended Brown University, but he’s also afraid of the vacuum cleaner and can’t help rolling around in garbage.

  The fact that Brian is a flawed, alcoholic dog might be the only thing that makes his relationship with the Griffins believable.

  THE NEXT morning, Casey and I shared a hearty breakfast (eggs sunny-side up for me, scrambled for Casey) before setting off on a long day’s drive to North Carolina, where we were to be joined by a twenty-four-year-old college student named Sam. He’s the cousin of an ex-boyfriend of mine, and I’d invited him to come along as my research assistant—shoot some video, transcribe interviews—while we drove to Florida. I was looking forward to the human company.

  I took the scenic route toward North Carolina, down the 101-mile Skyline Drive through the Blue Ridge Mountains and Shenandoah National Park, home to one of the country’s densest population of black bears. I’d spent many years living on the East Coast, but I didn’t remember seeing a stretch of road like this one. There were some seventy overlooks, each more breathtaking than the next. From some you could see many miles into the valley below—from others, the Blue Ridge’s smoky peaks and the Alleghenies.

  The Appalachian Trail runs for 101 miles through Shenandoah, and it crosses Skyline Drive twenty-eight times. After stopping to eat a sandwich on a rock overlooking a river, I took Casey for a walk along a portion of the trail that hugs the mountainside. If we’d continued for 860 miles (or two million steps, as a sign informed us), we’d eventually come to the trail’s southern end on Springer Mountain in Georgia. A blind man, Bill Irwin, once walked the nearly 2,200-mile trail with the help of his German Shepherd seeing-eye dog named Orient.

  But though Casey and I didn’t make it more than a mile or two into the forest, I’ll never forget our walk on that clear, unseasonably warm February day in the shadow of the Blue Ridge Mountains. I was happy. Casey was deliriously happy. At one point I stopped to tie my shoe, and he raced back toward me with a thick stick in his mouth. He nearly decapitated me with it, so I bear-hugged him and we rolled around in the dirt. I laughed. He barked. I turned over on my back in the middle of the trail to catch my breath. I closed my eyes. When I opened them a few seconds later, I saw a red-tailed hawk dancing above us in the sky.

  4. In which I drive down Hillbilly Circle, up Wit’s End Way, and past Hell for Certain Road

  THE MORE I drove around America, the more I yearned for an expedited RV park check-in process.

  Was there not a line for motorhome travel VIPs? Must I really be subjected to another round of mindless banter about weather and road conditions? Did I really need to listen to another recitation of a park’s amenities in an RV park office with a wall of sewage hoses for sale?

  The Birchwood RV Park in Durham, North Carolina, didn’t bother with any of that. There were few amenities to highlight. There were no restrooms or showers. There was barely even a front office—it was a barren room with a telephone, a fax machine, and two milk crates for chairs. What Birchwood had instead was a short, eccentric Vietnamese manager named Pham.

  Not long after Sam and I arrived, Pham came peeling around a corner in a beat-up minivan, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He skidded to a stop next to the Chalet and practically leaped out of the driver’s seat to welcome us.

  “How it hanging?” he said cheerfully, a turquoise polo shirt hugging his potbelly.

  Eager to say hello, Casey ran toward Pham and nearly bowled him over. “What the hell!” Pham said, deftly rotating his hips to avoid impact. “Damn, dog, don’t make me throw you on grill!”

  Pham liked joking about tossing unruly dogs on grills. He liked joking about a lot of things he probably shouldn’t, but he buffered his inappropriateness with hospitality and unexpected charm.

  “I’m crazy motherfucka,” he explained, leaning against one of the park’s many tall, skinny birch trees. “I’m nice guy, but nobody messes with me. You never meet a nicer guy than me, but when you make me an asshole, you’ve never seen a bigger asshole.”

  Fortunately, Pham seemed to like Sam and me. He assumed, I think, that we were a couple, though I explained that Sam was my research assistant—and that I was driving around the country for a book about dogs. “Yeah, people crazy about dogs,” Pham said, nodding in agreement with himself. “We have a lot of dogs around here. Lotta small, yappy ones. They’re all right, but they can get kind of annoying sometimes.”

  “Ever want to throw one on a grill?” I asked.

  Pham laughed. “Hell, yes! But I don’t. I’m nice guy.”

  He was indeed a nice guy. He patiently explained to me how to fill the RV’s water tank (so we could have water on the road) and how to attach a water hose to the camper (so we could connect to a water source at RV parks). I’d planned to wait until Florida to bother with this, but the lack of restrooms and showers at Birchwood meant we needed running water in the RV. And the weather was warming up; no need to worry about freezing pipes.

  Though I didn’t think it possible, Sam would turn out to be even more useless than I when it came to hoses, spigots, and most other practicalities of Chalet living. Whenever something mildly unpleasant had to be done—emptying the toilet’s “black water tank,” for example—he would disappear with Casey.

  Pham quickly gave up trying to explain things to us. “I do it myself—you guys like Two Stooges,” he told me as he tested the water pressure inside the motorhome. I wa
s apparently missing a device designed to regulate water flow into the RV, and Pham hollered a series of expletives when water sprayed from the faucet and soaked his shirt. While he dried his belly with a paper towel, I tried to kill a mosquito with a rolled-up issue of Vanity Fair.

  “What, you afraid of bugs?” Pham said.

  “It’s a mosquito,” I explained. “I won’t be able to sleep with a mosquito buzzing around. I’ve managed to go three weeks without one in here.”

  “That’s not mosquito. Looks like one, but it’s not. Just bug.”

  “I think I know what a mosquito looks like,” I insisted. “I have nightmares about mosquitoes.”

  He laughed. “How you gonna survive when you sleep outside?”

  “I’m not sleeping outside—I’m sleeping in the RV.”

  I swatted at the bug again and missed.

  “You funny,” Pham said. “You spend all this energy trying to kill a mosquito that not even mosquito!”

  As I stalked the mystery bug through the motorhome, I couldn’t help but notice what a stellar cleaning job I’d done earlier in the day. I’d spent an hour tidying up before Sam’s arrival—I scrubbed the bathroom, folded my clothes, swept the floor for Casey hair, and made space in the cab for Sam to sleep. (He’s even taller than I am, and I was relieved when he fit up there.)

  I’d met Sam only twice before inviting him along for a week. He’d struck me as friendly and charming, but those who knew him better than I said he could also be moody and withdrawn. At twenty-four, he’d yet to marshal his deep intellect into conventional markings of success. He’d been in and out of college several times. Though I couldn’t relate to that specifically, I understood what Sam meant when he lamented being misunderstood, sometimes by his own design.

  “My default mode can be pretty melancholy,” he told me, “but I’m good at not showing it. I keep a pretty tight lid on myself most of the time; lots of people have described me as hard to know.”

  “Well, that makes two of us,” I replied. “We’ll be two hard-to-know guys driving around the country in an RV with a dog.”

  I told Sam that for long periods of my life I’ve felt like a phony. Though I crave true intimacy, the idea that I can reveal all of myself (warts and all) and still be loved sometimes strikes me as preposterous. For years, I rarely let friends, family, and lovers as close as they wanted to get. Because of that, any love they expressed felt fraudulent—worse yet, inaccurate. And though I wanted the love of those close to me, I didn’t always value it; I was sometimes more concerned with what complete strangers thought of me. Did they perceive me as smart, stable, put together? Were they attracted to me? Was my shiny, phony facade holding up? Was I admired from a distance?

  Though all of that has lessened with age (and therapy), I told Sam that I sometimes worry that Casey might be the only living creature that knows the truth about me.

  ON OUR first night at Birchwood, Sam announced that he would cook us dinner.

  He shook his head in disbelief at the frozen pizzas and TGI Friday–brand microwavable fajitas in the RV’s small freezer. “You shop like a fourteen-year-old whose parents left you $100 for groceries while they’re out of town,” he later told me.

  That characterization wasn’t entirely fair. I’d recently run out of iceberg lettuce, and there were carrots, yogurt, and several kinds of fancy cheeses in the fridge. But I did see his point. “We’ll go shopping tomorrow,” I assured him.

  As we ate microwavable fajitas and drank wine that night, the motorhome’s gas leak detector went off, blaring an ear-splitting warning that sent Casey scrambling for the Chalet’s door. I’d accidentally spilled a bottle of ethanol-based cleaning solution next to the detector back in Virginia, and every few days the alarm would pierce the quiet.

  After dinner, I emailed the media relations department of ThunderShirt, the makers of a dog antianxiety compression wrap of the same name. (It fits around the dog’s midsection like a sweater.) A number of my Facebook followers had recommended it to me after the failure of the homeopathic “calm down” medicine. In my email, I explained Casey’s predicament and asked if they might overnight a ThunderShirt to the RV Park. Should it work, I hinted, I might write about it in the book.

  Two hours later, the company’s CEO, Phil Blizzard, wrote back in the affirmative. “And if you’re ever in the Durham, North Carolina, area, please stop by.”

  I couldn’t believe my eyes. “Wow, I am actually in Durham right now,” I wrote back. “What are the odds?”

  The next day we drove to ThunderShirt’s headquarters, located in what used to be a car dealership near the home field of the Durham Bulls, a Triple-A baseball team made famous by one of my favorite movies of all time, the 1988 sports classic Bull Durham.

  In a conference room, Phil insisted that his own dog—a Golden/Poodle mix named Dosi—inspired his invention. Dosi, he told us, would shake and pant during thunderstorms and fireworks. “I would wake up in the middle of the night with her standing on my chest, vibrating and staring into my face.”

  Phil tried sedatives, but they’re expensive and made Dosi a danger to herself. (Her legs would crumple under her when she jumped off the couch.) Phil played recordings of thunderstorms on his home stereo system—softly at first, then louder—hoping to desensitize Dosi to the scary sound, but she knew the difference between a fake storm and a real one. Finally, a friend of Phil’s suggested he tie a T-shirt with tape around Dosi’s torso during a storm, as a way of applying calming pressure.

  “I’m an engineer by training, and I thought it was one of the stupidest ideas I’d ever heard,” Phil told us.

  But he was desperate enough to try it during the next storm, and to his surprise it worked. “It was like flipping a switch with her,” Phil said. He launched ThunderShirt a year later, and the company has quickly grown into a pet industry success story.

  According to a survey of American dog owners commissioned by ThunderShirt, 41 percent report having a dog with anxiety problems, most commonly due to loud noises (thunderstorms, fireworks) and separation anxiety. Dog trainer Cesar Millan, whom I would be visiting later in my journey, has famously said that America’s neurotic and anxious dogs are a reflection of their neurotic and anxious owners. So, was I to blame for Casey’s fear of fireworks and moving motorhomes? I wasn’t convinced. Besides, it seemed like just another thing for me to feel guilty about.

  “I’m really only focused on making Casey comfortable in the RV,” I told Phil. “You can’t imagine how stressful it is to drive around the country with a dog who hates driving around the country.”

  But I was skeptical that pressure was the solution to Casey’s anxiety. Before I’d even heard of ThunderShirt, I would instinctively hold Casey tight during thunderstorms, hoping the close touch would calm him down. But it never did—it was like I wasn’t even there. Phil said this didn’t automatically mean Casey wouldn’t respond to the ThunderShirt, but it lessened the chance.

  “ThunderShirt doesn’t work for every dog,” he cautioned us. “We don’t know why some dogs don’t seem to respond to it.”

  “Maybe the nonresponders are the smart ones,” I said, half-joking. “Maybe they’re the ones who realize that a shirt isn’t going to save them from fireworks, or a loud, moving motorhome.”

  Before we left, Phil gave us two free ThunderShirts—one gray, one blue—and wished us well. “Do you think this is going to work?” I asked Sam in the parking lot as we huddled over Casey and eventually figured out how to secure the ThunderShirt to his torso.

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “But he looks damn sharp in it.”

  TWO DAYS later, high in the hills of Maggie Valley, North Carolina, six Huskies led us up a steep climb to Hemphill Bald, a meadow that starts 5,500 feet above sea level and borders the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.

  Like so much of Appalachia, Maggie Valley stuns visitors with its breathtaking beauty—and extreme poverty. When we’d rolled into town that morning, the landsca
pe was littered with rusted tractors and slanted, skeletal timber houses and barns. The tourist traps along the town’s main drag—kitschy shops, putt-putt courses, a solitary snow tubing store—were shuttered or barely hanging on. The zoo was empty. Even the area’s iconic Wild West–themed amusement park, Ghost Town in the Sky, sat unused at the top of a mountain, a literal ghost town in the sky.

  Maggie Valley was once the heart of moonshine country (famed moonshiner Marvin “Popcorn” Sutton grew up here), but these days meth labs have replaced some stillhouses. We drove by abandoned labs dotting the hillsides, their roofs charred black.

  At the top of Hemphill Bald, though, it was easy to forget about all that. To the north and northwest stretched the Cataloochee Valley, an isolated area once favored by Cherokee hunters. To the south we could see the Plott Balsams, a mountain range with five summits of more than 6,000 feet. The state dog of North Carolina is the Plott Hound, a fearless and deeply revered hunting dog. In a glowing article about the breed, Richard Woodward called Plott Hounds “the ninja warriors of dogdom” because of their willingness to “grapple with a baying 500-pound bear eight times its size.”

  A few yards to my right, Casey rolled on his back in the sun-stained grass, his neck stretched like a goose’s. Behind me, Sam kneeled next to the leader of the Husky pack we were climbing with, a headstrong female nicknamed Queen Natasha the Evil. She belongs to Kirk Wall and Todd Fulbright, who spend every free minute they have hiking in these mountains with their six “misbehaving” Huskies they call the Thundering Herd.

  Dogs aren’t allowed on most trails in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, so Kirk and Todd instead took us through the hills of the adjoining Cataloochee Ranch. Casey loves hiking, but he gave us all a scare as we made it down from Hemphill Bald. Normally he’s cautious around things he hasn’t seen before, but he surprised me by doing the dog version of “Oh, to hell with it” and leaping straight onto a cattle guard. All four of his legs crashed through the rails, his knees banging against the steel. I gasped. He yelped. Then he panicked. He tried to lift himself up, only to fall through again. As I lifted Casey in my arms, his body stiffened—he was in shock. I carried him across the guard and placed him gently on the soft dirt. He hardly left my side for the rest of the hike.