Travels with Casey

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

  “Everything changed the day we offered him a piece of cheese,” Nick told me with a laugh. “He was like, ‘They have cheese, they love me, I’m staying.’ He broke up with his girlfriend and stopped jumping the fence. And we stopped worrying that he needed to be in Alaska. He would shed his coat at the right time, and he would find places in the shade to keep himself cool. He’s a Southwestern dog, born and bred.”

  In 2011 the couple founded the Dersu Collective, a group of Marfa artists who work to raise funds for community projects aimed at helping area youth. They showed me their first successful fundraising effort—a playground near their house, where Dersu gently leaned in to Casey to get a good sniff of his face. I noticed a bald spot on Dersu’s left side; Nick told me he’d been bitten by a brown recluse spider, necessitating a “blitzkrieg” of medication.

  “Dersu has such a high tolerance for pain, but he’s also such a gentle giant,” Maryam said. “His gentleness and friendliness, and simply the way he looks, helped break the ice between us and the neighborhood kids. People just gravitate toward his energy. The neighborhood kids look at him as their mascot.”

  Even Nick’s mom, a purebred dog lover who’d warned her son not to adopt Dersu, ended up falling in love with the animal. “My whole life my mom would tell me, ‘Never get a stray dog—they’re a disaster,’ ” Nick said. “But when we went to visit my folks in California, Dersu was perfectly charming and well behaved, while my mom’s precious purebreds were completely unwelcoming and really rude. She was mortified. It was a small victory for mixed breeds and mutts the world over.”

  AFTER ENJOYING lunch next to train tracks at Food Shark, a Marfa staple widely considered one of the best food trucks in the country, I drove the RV to the west end of town to meet Alex Leos, Marfa’s eighty-one-year-old former dogcatcher.

  It had taken some legwork to find him. Though practically everyone in town knew of Alex, no one seemed to have his telephone number. Finally, a woman suggested I call or drop by City Hall and “speak to Lori,” who apparently was the keeper of the town’s telephone numbers.

  When I arrived at Alex’s modest red house on a corner, he was standing next to his two little dogs—a Chihuahua and a Jack Russell mix—in his cluttered, half-paved front yard. A late-afternoon storm was fast approaching, and the dogs paced nervously while wind gusts flung Alex’s wind chimes practically horizontal. Alex, who has bright gray hair and thick laugh lines, wore gray dress pants and a short-sleeved collared mechanic’s shirt, a vestige from his many years running a convenience store and gas station in town. He’d retired in his late sixties but then took a part-time job as the town’s dogcatcher, puttering around in a 1970 Ford pickup.

  “That clunker made so much noise, the dogs would hear me from blocks away and would go and hide!” Alex told me with a hearty laugh. Still, Alex caught plenty of roaming dogs in his eight years as Marfa’s dogcatcher. “A lot of folks in town would let their dogs roam, which you’re not supposed to do because there’s a leash law. They’d say things like, ‘Here comes that damn dogcatcher!’ But other times they were happy to hear that I’d picked up their dog, because they were worried that it had run away. Or they’d call me to help get rid of a pesky skunk, or raccoon.”

  “You catch any feral cats?” I asked.

  “Yes, and they were mean,” he said. “If you got a mean cat, you had better watch yourself.”

  The town didn’t have an actual shelter when Alex took the job, so instead he used a small shed that could accommodate only a handful of dogs. On Saturdays, volunteers would set up shop outside the courthouse and post office and try to get the dogs adopted quickly. If no one wanted a particular animal (or if it was “sick or mean,” Alex said), it would be euthanized. “It just had to be done,” he told me.

  Soon after, the town built an actual shelter near the Marfa Municipal Golf Course, the highest golf course in the state. And it was in that shelter that Alex, a lifelong lottery player, initially stashed his winning Texas Two Step ticket for $1.1 million. (His wife, Lola, then put it under their mattress at home before they moved it to a safety deposit box.) When Alex called the state Lottery Commission, they told him not to tell anyone that he’d won until he could fly to their Austin office.

  “So I had to keep it a secret,” he said, “and that was hard because everyone knew the ticket had been sold in town. People kept asking, ‘Who won? Who won?’ I just went about my business.” Some townspeople suspected Alex, but he had an effective rejoinder. “I’d say, ‘Do you think I’d still be driving this truck around catching dogs and raccoons if I’d won the lottery?’ ” Two reporters from the local paper still weren’t convinced, and they tried to trick Alex into coming to their office so they could grill him by claiming there was a loose dog out front.

  Winning the lottery could not have come at a better time for Alex and Lola. They’d been in debt, and Lola’s health took a turn for the worse soon after. “Right after I won, she got sick,” Alex told me. “She’s diabetic, and her kidneys are gone. The good Lord was good enough to give me the money to take care of her until now. I kept saying to her, ‘Now I can take care of you!’ ”

  As we spoke in the living room, Lola sat in the adjoining kitchen without making a sound. She looked tired and ill; I couldn’t tell if she was listening, or if she was lost in another world.

  “What would have happened if you hadn’t won the lottery?” I asked Alex.

  He looked at me with his gentle, affecting eyes. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think about that a lot. Medicare doesn’t cover everything, and without this money sometimes I think we would both be dead now.”

  Before leaving, Alex asked me if I’d bought a ticket for that night’s Mega Millions Lottery drawing. I told him I hadn’t. “If you want to win,” he said, “you’ve got to buy the ticket.”

  “You still play the lottery?”

  “Of course,” he told me. “Who knows? I might even win big again!”

  THE NEXT morning, I packed up the Chalet and headed north toward Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. On the way, I busied myself the same way I had for many long stretches of southern highway: I called Marc.

  This time, though, I had some embarrassing news to share. “I think there’s bed bugs in this RV,” I said, mortified. I’d woken up each morning the previous week with itchy red bumps on my thighs. At first I’d assumed they were spider or mosquito bites, but they kept multiplying—and getting itchier.

  On a late night at an RV park in Texas, I’d made the mistake of Googling “bed bugs in motorhome,” which had pointed me to an article (titled “Bed Bugs: Old Problem Resurfaces in RV Parks”) published on rvbusiness.com only two weeks after I’d begun my journey.

  Marc was in his second year of medical school at the time, and he proposed several alternate theories for my symptoms. The first was scabies, contagious tiny mites that burrow into a person’s skin. The second, and more preferable, possibility was folliculitis, a condition where hair follicles get inflamed and cause itchiness. I looked it up and learned that there’s a variation of the ailment called “hot-tub folliculitis,” caused by sitting in an unclean hot tub.

  “I’ve been in hot tubs lately!” I told Marc, recalling late-night dips in several RV park tubs.

  Still, I convinced myself the culprit was bed bugs. Though I’d found nothing when inspecting the mattress, there was plenty of dark, cavernous space I couldn’t reach under the sleeping area. I figured they were hiding down there. I thought about all the people who’d slept on this mattress before me; an RV isn’t quite a New York City hotel room, but it gets its fair share of traffic.

  Wouldn’t I have started itching sooner, though, if the bugs had been in the motorhome when I’d selected it in New Jersey? I wondered if I’d picked them up at an RV park along the way, or if Sam—or, worse yet, Marc—had inadvertently brought them into the Chalet in their luggage. And what about Casey? Could some bed bugs have hitched a ride on his fur into the motorhome? Can dogs t
ransmit bed bugs to humans? I Googled the question and learned that I “shouldn’t disregard the possibility.”

  All I knew for sure was that the whole thing was stressing me out. I had another seven weeks to go in this RV, and in three days my friend Garrett was supposed to join me on the road for a week, to film parts of my journey. Would he still come if he knew he might be taking bed bugs home with him? And what about Marc? We’d agreed that he would come visit again once I arrived in San Francisco. Would he change his mind? Would the second half of my journey turn into an itchy, traumatic nightmare?

  CASEY AND I rolled into Truth or Consequences on a Thursday afternoon. Long known for its mineral-rich waters, this small city between Las Cruces and Albuquerque got its unconventional name in 1950 when the host of the popular quiz show Truth or Consequences promised to air the program from the first town that took its name. Hoping for a boost in tourism, the city of Hot Springs became the city of Truth or Consequences.

  To that point on my journey, I’d fallen hard for two places—Savannah and Austin. I’d added each to the short list of American cities where I might want to live before I die. To my surprise, I was equally taken with Truth or Consequences (locals call it T or C). It had a sleepy, laid-back, mystical vibe—the Southwest at its best. Best of all, despite its attention-grabbing name, Truth or Consequences wasn’t overrun with tourists. The few I did meet were as enchanted with the place as I was.

  During a long, meditative walk with Casey at sunset along the Rio Grande, I bumped into three people—all locals who’d moved to T or C from big cities—walking their dogs in a group. They were curious about what I was up to, so naturally I told them about the trip, the book, the Facebook page. One woman said that she and her husband had also driven around the country in a motorhome with their dog.

  “Of all the places we saw,” she said, “we decided to move here. It’s the most magical place.”

  Later that night, I took a soak in the Riverbend Hot Springs, an open-air spa perched along the Rio Grande. Three friendly college girls from New Mexico State University joined me in one of the pools. They’d brought wine, cheese, and grapes, and for the next hour we laughed together, mist rising from the bubbling water toward the exquisite, black night sky.

  Day or night, the New Mexico sky can make poets of illiterates. Willa Cather described it in her novel Death Comes for the Archbishop: “The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still—and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. . . . Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky . . . the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!”

  It’s a testament to New Mexico’s beauty that I practically forgot about the parasitic insects likely multiplying in my motorhome. But I remembered them the next day when I woke up itchy—and with a hangover. I looked online for bed bug extermination companies, found one in Santa Fe, and made an appointment for that afternoon. I grudgingly said good-bye to T or C and drove north, past the small cities of Socorro and Belen and the village of Los Lunas (former home of rock ’n’ roll legend Bo Diddley). In Albuquerque I connected to the Turquoise Trail National Scenic Byway, which took me to Santa Fe through rolling hills and old mining towns.

  At the Santa Fe KOA, I spent three hours feeding quarters to the park’s washing machines and dryers. Before meeting the exterminator, every linen and piece of clothing in the RV had to be washed and dried on high heat to kill the bugs. I stuffed items that weren’t supposed to be dried in garbage bags and left them to bake in the sun outside the motorhome.

  With my clothes clean (and sealed in bags), I drove across town to the exterminator’s office in a nondescript office park. I’d considered having the exterminator come to me, but I worried about setting off a panic in the RV park.

  My exterminator turned out to be tall, slow-moving, and chatty. To my dismay, he didn’t arrive with a bed-bud-sniffing dog (dogs have been used to sniff out infestations, especially in New York City) and seemed to want to talk about everything—sports, politics, dogs, writing—except bed bugs. Eventually, he began nonchalantly spraying the cabinets and mattress with a powdery white substance. I hovered around him, poking my head into every nook and cranny of the RV, hinting that he should talk less and spray more.

  He never did find any bugs, or even any evidence of bugs. And though he didn’t tell me that I was an idiot for hiring him, I got the sense that’s what he was thinking. By the time I handed him a check, I was pretty sure I’d overreacted.

  THE NEXT morning, as I walked Casey through the KOA, we came upon a young woman in a purple robe cradling a bulging toiletry bag and listening to music on her headphones. I assumed she was on her way to the campground’s shower facility. I didn’t have Casey on his leash, and for whatever reason he found the woman worthy of further inspection. He galloped toward her, his head held high. The woman didn’t see or hear Casey approaching, and he made it all the way to her side before she let out a horrified shriek. Her toiletry bag hit the dirt with a thud.

  “Get that dog away from me!” she screamed, pivoting stiffly to locate me, the irresponsible dog owner.

  I called Casey back to me and apologized profusely. “I’m so sorry,” I said, as she fumbled to remove her headphones. “He’s friendly and just wanted to say hello.”

  “You need to learn to control your dog,” she said, wagging her finger at me. “Dogs bite.”

  “Casey doesn’t bite,” I assured her. “He might lick you to death. But he doesn’t bite.”

  She shook her head dismissively. “All dogs bite.”

  I wondered if she really believed that. After all, Casey hadn’t bitten her—even as she’d screamed and nearly dropped her toiletry bag on his head. He’d simply backed away, his head down and his tail between his legs. As the woman picked up her bag and walked off in a huff, I was sorry that we’d met this way. I would have liked to have a chance to speak with her about her cynophobia—her fear of dogs.

  Those who study animal phobias have found that while more people are afraid of spiders or snakes than dogs, living with cynophobia is considerably more challenging—especially today, as dog-wielding humans appropriate more and more public places.

  When I’d spoken to friends (and friends of friends) about living with a fear of dogs, they described a debilitating phobia that affects where they go and who they see. “For the longest time, I would never go to the park because I might come in contact with a dog there,” Margo, a school nurse, told me. “I’d question everywhere I was invited. If there were a chance I’d meet a dog, I wouldn’t leave the house.”

  Margo decided to face her fear only when she noticed her daughter mirroring it. “I didn’t want her to have to live like that,” she said. Margo and her husband decided to get a puppy (they named it Casey), and though Margo initially kept her distance, she warmed up to the dog after a week or two. Today, she’s much less fearful when she sees a dog in public. “But I’ll still never be a dog person,” she told me.

  Like many women who suffer from cynophobia (men are considerably less likely to be afraid of dogs), Margo can point to an early traumatic incident. When she was five, she fell and skinned her knees as a big dog chased her down a sidewalk. I heard similar chasing stories from others. Robyn, a law student, said a neighbor’s German Shepherd followed her for several blocks while she jogged as a young teenager.

  “But little dogs scare me now, too,” she said. “They can creep up on you and then start barking their heads off. You have no idea if they’re going to bite you or hump your leg!”

  Robyn worries that her cynophobia will hamper her future. What if she ends up marrying a dog person? What if she can’t go to a best friend’s baby shower because a dog is there? A fear of dogs can seriously impact a person’s social life—and good luck getting sympathy from friends or family.

  “Most people just tell me to get over it, as if it’s that easy,” said Sashana, a r
ecent college grad. She hates when coworkers bring their dogs to work. “No one bothers to ask if anyone’s bothered by it.”

  Sashana is black, and I asked her if she believed the commonly held stereotype that African Americans are more afraid of dogs than white people. “I wish that were true,” she replied, “because then I could go over to more of my friends’ houses.”

  But sociologist Elijah Anderson did find some evidence of racial differences, at least among working-class whites and blacks. In his book Streetwise, about a diverse urban neighborhood in Philadelphia, he noticed that “many working-class blacks are easily intimidated by strange dogs, either on or off the leash.” He found that “as a general rule, when blacks encounter whites with dogs in tow, they tense up and give them a wide berth, watching them closely.”

  Kevin Chapman, a clinical psychologist at the University of Louisville, noticed the same anxious behavior among many African Americans that Anderson found. Chapman also discovered that nobody had explicitly investigated the incidence of cynophobia in African American populations. So in 2008, he and several colleagues conducted the first of two studies looking at the prevalence of specific fears across racial groups.

  Compared to non-Hispanic whites, they found that “African Americans in particular may endorse more fears and have higher rates of specific phobias”—particularly, of strange dogs. When we spoke, Chapman offered two possible reasons. First, many dogs in low-income urban areas are trained to be what he calls “you-better-stay-away-from-our-property” guards. Being wary of those dogs makes sense—many of them are scary. In addition, Chapman told me, there’s “the historical notion of what dogs have represented for black folks in America.” In the antebellum South, dogs were frequently used to capture escaped slaves (often by brutally mauling them), and during the civil rights era police dogs often attacked African Americans during marches or gatherings.