Travels with Casey

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

  The complaints prompted Oregon officials to pass out posters and flyers to thousands of retail stores that sell food, reminding consumers that only service dogs were allowed inside. Still, the exception is easily abused. In recent years, a number of dog lovers without disabilities have taken to fraudulently passing off their pets as service animals, with some going so far as to purchase fake service vests.

  As Tara Palmeri discovered during an undercover investigation for the New York Post (she outfitted her mom’s dog with a fake service jacket), the “craziest, most badly behaved sons of bitches can run wild in the most elegant eateries in town—as long as they’re masquerading as service dogs.”

  I’d spent time with several people with service animals during my cross-country journey, including perhaps the most dog-obsessed woman I’d ever met—Beth Joy Knutsen. I had first become aware of Beth, a former Seinfeld Elaine impersonator and contestant on the short-lived reality show Greatest American Dog, at a 2009 pet industry event in Las Vegas. She was there hawking her dog clothing line and doting over her little ten-year-old rescue dog, Bella Starlet, who also goes by the names “Bella Bear,” “Cuddle Muffin,” “Puppy Monkey,” “Care Bear,” and “Baby Girl.”

  Beth considers herself a “stage mom/manager” for Bella, a fifteen-pound white mutt who has starred in commercials (including a Dr. Pepper Super Bowl ad), headlined the all-dog float in New York’s Village Halloween Parade, and inspired a Soulmates: Mom and Me! jewelry collection for dogs and their owners. On Bella’s web page, Beth makes clear that her celebrity pup appreciates the finer things in life: “She enjoys prancing down red carpets where she impresses the paparazzi with her jump-turns.”

  One doesn’t need an advanced degree in psychology to wonder if Beth, whose acting career never took off, is trying to become famous vicariously through her dog. But Beth relies on Bella for more than ego gratification. Beth told me that she suffers from gallstones, and that Bella, a registered service dog, will bark if Beth’s body temperature goes up—a sign that an attack could be imminent.

  “Bella is my doctor, my baby, my best friend, and my big celebrity all in one adorable little package!” Beth told me the first time we met. A few seconds later she added, “Isn’t this the most pawwwwwwwsome day?”

  In addition to Bella, Beth has two other dogs, including a therapy animal named Riff. Beth often takes Riff and Bella to classrooms at a local elementary school as part of the school’s therapy dog program. She shows the kids episodes of Bella’s cartoon, Pup American Idol, which teaches life lessons ranging from treating animals kindly to avoiding peer pressure and being yourself.

  Therapy dogs like Riff are used in practically every therapeutic setting one can imagine in this country, including nursing homes, hospitals, prisons, and schools. Specially trained dogs help relax veterans with PTSD, comfort kids testifying in court, teach prisoners responsibility and empathy, distract Alzheimer’s patients during periods of agitation, and help autistic children develop social and motor skills. (In Phoenix, I’d shadowed a Golden Retriever therapy dog named Tucker as he played with kids at an Early Head Start Program in a low-income neighborhood. Tucker was affiliated with Gabriel’s Angels, an organization that brings therapy dogs to some thirteen thousand kids and teenagers each year in Arizona.)

  The first therapy dog came upon her job by accident. At the height of World War II, an American soldier found a shivering, four-pound Yorkshire Terrier in a foxhole during a battle in a New Guinea jungle. He rescued the dog and sold her to Corporal William Wynne, who named her Smoky. When Wynne was hospitalized with dengue fever in 1944, his physician, Dr. Charles Mayo—namesake of the famed Mayo Clinic—allowed Smoky to visit him in the ward.

  “I was thrilled, naturally,” Wynne, who is now in his nineties, told me. “I said to the nurses, ‘I don’t feel sick anymore!’—and it was true.” Suspecting that Smoky might help other recovering soldiers, Wynne’s nurses asked permission to bring the Yorkie with them on rounds. They were on to something: according to Wynne, wounded veterans would argue across hospital beds about who was going to get to spend time with the lapdog.

  AFTER MY television interview in Bend, I drove the RV across town to Sage Veterinary Alternatives, where vets treat animals with acupuncture and Chinese herbs in addition to traditional Western techniques. (It wasn’t my first foray into alternative dog treatments. In Palm Bay, Florida, Casey had received an “energy treatment” from Reiki practioner Marie Conrad. Casey seemed to enjoy the attention, though only he knows if the session helped heal any physical or emotional doggie wounds.)

  I’d hoped to learn more about veterinary holistic medicine, which has been on the rise in the United States since the early 1990s, but I was mostly concerned about Rezzy. Her bum leg seemed to be getting worse. More immediately, I hoped for a solution to a new problem that had begun only days earlier: Rezzy wouldn’t stop itching her stomach and sides. I’d convinced myself that I’d given her whatever had ailed me.

  Vet Steven Blauvelt invited me into his bright, homey office, where a gigantic dog bed took up half the floor. He then quickly put my transmission fears to rest. Rezzy’s problem was a mild staph infection, probably caused by stress.

  “She was recently pregnant and then she got rescued and put in this new environment,” he said after taking a few minutes to examine her stomach. “Without getting too esoteric, her body’s going through a kind of detox right now.”

  Next, he turned his attention to Rezzy’s leg. He took his time, squeezing and prodding her knee. As he did, he told me that one of the ways he differentiates himself from traditional vets is by spending longer with his patients. “A typical vet’s appointment will be fifteen minutes, maybe thirty,” he said. “My appointments last an hour. I try to take the time to really understand the specifics of each dog’s situation and to understand the dog’s lifestyle and diet, as opposed to saying, ‘Oh, just another dog with arthritis.’ ”

  Steven was friendly and self-effacing, and he apologized several times during my visit for “boring me” with the details of his holistic practice. “I know I’m not nearly as exciting as some people you’ve met on your journey—I’m definitely no Cesar Millan,” he said.

  “Nonsense,” I told him. “If I lived in Bend, you would be my vet.” I couldn’t get over how welcoming and un-vet-like his office was. “It’s the kind of place where dogs—hell, even humans—would want to hang out.”

  “That’s the point,” he said. “A vet’s office doesn’t need to be an unwelcoming place.” (Since my visit, Steven opened up his own practice, Four Paws Wellness Center.)

  After a few minutes, he gave me his verdict about Rezzy’s leg. “I’m pretty sure she has a partial ACL tear,” he said. “This is kind of the bane of a vet’s existence. In the case of old dogs that come in with this kind of injury, we’ll do palliative care with acupuncture, laser, whatever we can besides surgery. But if I see this in younger or even middle-aged dogs, I’ll always try to refer them somewhere for surgery.”

  “How much will the surgery cost me?” I asked.

  “You’d better start selling some books,” he said.

  On my way out, he handed me a bag with several medications, including an antibiotic, a bottle of gentle shampoo, and fish oil—all to help Rezzy’s skin problems. To combat any inflammation in Rezzy’s knee, he gave me an herbal anti-inflammatory.

  “Is this like ibuprofen?” I asked.

  “Think of it as herbal ibuprofen,” he said.

  FOR MY final stop on the West Coast, I was fortunate to be offered a room at Seattle’s iconic and dog-friendly Sorrento Hotel.

  It was nice to get out of the Chalet for a few days. I hadn’t bothered to clean it since Marc left, and it was looking eerily reminiscent of the sleeping quarters in my college fraternity house. But the posh Sorrento, which was built in 1909 in Italian Renaissance style, felt like an odd backdrop for what I’d come to the area to explore: the lives of homeless people and their dogs.

>   Dogs, of course, are far less superficial than we are. They don’t care what we look like, how much money we make, or even whether anyone else seems to like us. According to the Odyssey, when Odysseus arrived home after twenty years disguised as a beggar, he was first recognized by his old dog, Argos. As Aldous Huxley once said, “To his dog, every man is Napoleon; hence, the constant popularity of dogs.”

  This is especially good news for the homeless, who rely on their dogs for companionship, protection, and human interaction (having a dog stimulates conversation with the public). What does the dog get in return? Virtually all his time spent outside with a human who never leaves to go to the office.

  Cesar Millan told me that the dogs of homeless people tend to be content and well socialized. Mark Wells, an investigator for the Oregon Humane Society, agrees. “These are some of the most loyal, best socialized, friendliest dogs I see,” he told Willamette Week.

  But don’t tell that to the many concerned dog owners who call animal control agencies demanding that the dog of a homeless person be “saved” from its circumstances. “It just goes to show you how much we don’t understand what a dog needs,” Cesar Millan told me. “I’d much rather save a spoiled dog in Beverly Hills who practically never touches the ground.”

  The unique relationship between homeless people and their dogs isn’t without its challenges, though. Few cities offer free vet care for homeless pets, and if a dog gets separated from its owner, there often isn’t a way to reunite them. More importantly, having a dog can actually prolong homelessness. Because most homeless shelters don’t accept pets, many homeless people choose to stay on the streets rather than give up their dogs. The same goes for more permanent housing. In one study, more than 90 percent of homeless people with dogs said they would turn down an apartment where pets weren’t allowed.

  The same study found that homeless pet owners were not markedly more depressed than dog owners with housing. That came as a surprise to the study’s authors. “Possibly,” they speculated, “animals buffered the stress of homelessness and increased contentment in the homeless state.”

  DURING MY second day in Seattle, I drove the RV to a park in Kent, an outlying suburb south of the city. There, on a patch of grass near the city’s library, I spent the afternoon with a homeless teenage couple—Dakota and Blueberry, both nineteen—and their eight-month-old black Lab/Pit Bull mixes, Marley and Calypso. I’d been introduced to them by Carey Fuller, a homeless woman who lives out of a car and writes about homeless issues. She’s a guardian and mother figure to many of the homeless youth in Kent.

  On the day of my visit, Dakota and Blueberry (her real name is Amanda, but everyone calls her Blueberry) had just come from their secluded homeless tent camp near a golf course in an unincorporated part of the city. A local church was delivering lunches that day to the homeless, and as we spoke dozen of teens and adults—some drunk or high—lounged shirtless in the sun near train tracks, paper plates strewn around them.

  Blueberry, who looked almost angelic with her pale skin and striking blue eyes, told me she’d been homeless since she was fourteen. “It was better than being around my mom, who’s a tweaker,” she said, meaning a meth addict.

  Blueberry lived on the streets of Seattle until the year before my visit, when she came to Kent and fell in love with Dakota. Though Dakota didn’t make the best impression during their first extended conversation (he was on a “robo-trip,” a high induced by purposely ingesting too much cough syrup), Blueberry said she could see through his drug-induced silliness.

  “I saw a lot more in him than what he was showing in that moment,” she told me.

  Dakota, who is tall and lanky and wore an oversized T-shirt and baggy jeans, has been homeless on and off since he was eight. (His parents are also drug addicts, Fuller told me.) Dakota used to get high all the time, too. His drugs of choice were meth, ecstasy, and cocaine, and he told me that a doctor once expressed surprise that Dakota was still “alive and walking around.” Dakota insisted he only smokes weed these days and is mostly concerned with spending time with Blueberry, looking after their dogs, and securing his GED.

  Both Blueberry and Dakota were outgoing and friendly with me, and they seemed excited by the prospect of someone writing about their dogs. “Aren’t they beautiful?” Blueberry said with a childlike wonder as the animals rolled around in the bright green grass, offering up their bellies. I couldn’t get over how young Blueberry looked—she could have passed for fifteen or sixteen.

  “Where did you get the dogs?” I asked her, while Dakota lit a cigarette.

  “We were hanging out with my mom and a bunch of tweakers, and some random Mexican just dropped the dogs off,” Blueberry said. “So we took ’em.”

  The dogs are brother and sister; Marley is especially attached to Dakota, while Calypso rarely leaves Blueberry’s side. “We’re trying to work on her separation anxiety,” Blueberry told me with a smile. “She’ll start to whine if I go too far. But she’s getting a lot better. I know that people can’t imagine that dogs living on the street are spoiled, but these two . . .”

  “They’re so spoiled!” Dakota interjected.

  “They get so much attention and love, it’s ridiculous,” she continued. “Everyone wants to pet them.”

  “And they always eat before we do,” Dakota was sure to say. “I can go a few days without eating, as long as I have water. Any money we get from spanging”—begging for change on the street—“goes to the dogs first.” (Many of the local churches that deliver food to the homeless also hand out dog food.)

  Blueberry and Dakota planned to make a trip to Seattle, to a church that offers free shots and dog licenses. Marley and Calypso also needed to be fixed. “The last thing we need are a bunch of little puppies running around,” Dakota said.

  It was warm during my visit, so to keep the dogs hydrated Blueberry and Dakota kept filling a plastic Starbucks cup with water from a jug. When the couple had to run to the library for a few minutes to check their email (both were hoping to hear from prospective employers), two homeless young people volunteered to watch the dogs. There’s never a shortage of dog-sitters for Marley and Calypso, who are friendly and only “bark at tweakers,” Blueberry told me.

  When they returned, Dakota and Blueberry explained that their dogs offer them a priceless commodity on the streets: protection. “The other night some people kept getting close to our tent, but the dogs scared them off,” Dakota told me. “No one messes with us when we have dogs.”

  (I was reminded of Lars Eighner’s memoir, Travels with Lizbeth, in which he credits his dog with helping to keep him safe during his three years of homelessness: “Anyone who has had to sleep by the side of the road in some wild place may appreciate that an extra pair of keen ears, a good nose, and sharp teeth on a loud, ferocious ally of unquestionable loyalty have a certain value that transcends mere sentiment.”)

  Some of the homeless youth in the Kent area are as young as twelve or thirteen, and Blueberry and Dakota told me they could all use a dog for security. “There are crazies and pedophiles out here that a dog can protect you from,” Dakota said.

  “But most kids that age aren’t responsible enough to take care of a dog,” Blueberry told me. “I know I wasn’t when I was their age.”

  It just so happened that on that day, seemingly everyone in this homeless community was on the lookout for a man who they said had raped a young homeless girl in the area.

  “A few people have seen him hanging around the last few days, trying to blend in,” Blueberry said. “Everyone’s looking for him.”

  Every once in a while, Dakota would wander off in a pack of other homeless youth in search of the man.

  LATER THAT afternoon, Dakota and Blueberry pointed out four homeless kids shuffling along the pavement next to the library. Each wore baggy clothes and backpacks; the youngest of the four couldn’t have been older than twelve.

  “Three of those kids are related—they just started coming around,�
� Dakota explained. “They kind of keep to themselves, which is normal for being new out here.”

  Earlier, Fuller had told me about a twelve-year-old who’d arrived the month prior after running away from a drug rehab facility. “We were all trying to get him back home,” she said. “If it’s not a violent situation, everyone will try to get those kids back with their families.”

  For Dakota and Blueberry, going home isn’t an option—it’s “better for our mental health” to be out here, Blueberry said. A homeless shelter isn’t a possibility, either. “They don’t take dogs,” Dakota explained, “and I got beat up and robbed at the one I did go to.”

  That’s not to say that Dakota and Blueberry like living in a tent. The stress can be unbearable. “For a while,” Blueberry told me, “Dakota and I were having a lot of problems with our relationship, in addition to all the other things we have to worry about out here. But the pups”—she looked down at Marley and Calypso, who relaxed at their feet in the grass—“helped us work it out. I’d take Calypso and go in one direction, and he’d storm off with Marley. They helped us communicate, because we would each talk to our dogs, and that helped us then come back and talk to each other.”

  Dakota nodded in agreement. “The dogs make us realize that we were just being dumb, that we loved each other and could always work it out.”

  Blueberry told me that she’s been diagnosed with several psychological conditions, including depression, insomnia, and ADHD. “The whole nine yards,” she said. “When I get really low, I don’t like who I am or what I do.”

  She recalled a recent incident when she visited her mother and felt suicidal. “Every time I was about to do something harmful to myself,” she told me, “Calypso would pop up out of nowhere and sit on my lap and kiss me and make me love her. It was the first time I was ever able to get instant relief like that. She saved my life.”

  Toward the end of my time in Kent, I overheard Dakota and Blueberry talking about saving up for a hotel room for the night. They wanted a soft bed and a shower. They hadn’t asked me for money all day, which was a change from when I’d spent time with homeless youth in San Francisco for an article a decade earlier. Those kids—many of whom were drug addicts—had never stopped asking me for cash, though I was hesitant to give them any when I knew what they’d spend it on.