Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure

by Rosenfelt, David

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This book is dedicated to Debbie Myers, on behalf of thousands of dogs.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Dread and More Dread …

  It Began with Tara

  A Really Long Year

  The Endless Planning

  Charlie

  Pong the Dalmatian

  Hanging Up the Tacos

  The Tara Foundation

  Princess

  Duchess

  Saint Cyndi

  Bumper

  Willie Boy

  “Do You Take Pets?”

  Hunter/Tudor—Tudor/Hunter

  “Poop” … Just This Once

  Solving the “How”

  Weasel

  Louis

  Sally and Jack

  The Team Comes Together

  Trapper

  The Smell

  Harley and Dinah

  I Hate Home Depot

  Crazy Sky and the Coyote

  Walking the Dogs

  Bernie

  Final Preparations

  Time to Let Go

  Evie

  Mamie and Coki

  The Gang Was All There

  Annie

  Idiots

  Bart

  You Know the Old Saying …

  Benji

  Wanda

  Otis

  Simon the Psycho

  Kaboom

  Big Sarah

  The Barking. My God, the Barking

  Noel and Kahlani

  Woofabago

  Frank

  My Career Went to the Dogs

  Jenny

  Disaster

  Tommy and the Snake

  Heathcliff

  That Lying Calendar

  Dogs Can Bring Us Together

  Little Sara

  Back to Basic

  Dogs and Ducks Don’t Mix

  A Moment of Weakness

  Feeding Time at Home

  Liza

  Go East, My Friends

  Please, Please, Don’t Kill the Dog

  Snickers

  Welcome to Maine

  Looks Can Be Deceiving

  Please, Not the RV Again

  Dorothy, We’re Not in California Anymore

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Also by David Rosenfelt

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Acknowledgments

  There are countless people to thank for supporting Debbie and me in our rescue efforts, and many of them are mentioned in this book. I apologize to those who are not.

  I did want to make special mention of the amazing veterinarians and their staffs that have cared for our dogs along the way. Believe me, we are excellent judges of vet care, and these people are as good as it gets.

  Lakeview Veterinary Clinic, Rockland, ME

  Dr. Daniel Dowling

  Christine Annis

  Sue Luce

  Debra Drake

  Patty Mulholland

  North Tustin Veterinary Clinic, Tustin, CA

  Dr. Karuppana Kali

  Terry Ryan

  Julie Pantoja

  Ardell McNay

  Bay Cities Veterinary Hospital, Marina Del Rey, CA

  Dr. Thomas Fitzpatrick

  Dr. Mary J. Brandt

  Dr. Sandy Milo

  I’d also like to thank the terrific people at St. Martin’s Press, including but not limited to Andy Martin, Daniela Rapp, Kelley Ragland, Hector Dejean, Joan Higgins, Paul Hochman, Lauren Hesse, Sarah Jae-Jones, Chesalon Piccione, and Elizabeth Lacks.

  And of course, nothing would happen without the amazing Robin Rue, my agent at Writer’s House.

  Prologue

  François de La Rochefoucauld wrote in 1650 that “the only thing constant in life is change.”

  I cite that quotation for two reasons. First, I believe it makes me the only author ever to begin a book with the words “François de La Rochefoucauld.”

  James Patterson, eat your heart out.

  Second, if the eloquent Frankie R. were still around today, he would point at me and say, “You may have overdone it.”

  I moved to Southern California from New York twenty years ago. I had spent my entire working life as a marketing executive in the movie business. Except for a few mediocre advertising copy lines, I had never written a word that was published, nor one ever spoken by an actor or actress.

  It wasn’t that my prose had been rejected; I basically hadn’t written anything, and I really didn’t have much interest in doing so.

  But if you’re reading this book, and I’m figuring that there’s a good chance you are, then you’re reading the seventeenth book I’ve had published in the last ten years. The previous sixteen have been novels, including eleven in the Andy Carpenter series.

  I’ve also had a bunch of my scripts produced as TV movies. Admittedly they are nothing that has changed American culture as we know it, but people have been able to turn on their televisions and watch my words attempt to entertain them.

  So careerwise, I’ve changed enough to make François de La Rochefoucauld proud.

  As the last decade of the twentieth century began, my life was set up as I liked it. I expended very little physical energy beyond the occasional game of racquetball, and I was happy to take it easy. I was writing, which should never be confused with manual labor, and doing so on my own schedule.

  I appreciated my life of relative leisure, and I was determined to maintain it in all areas. For instance, while I liked dogs, I didn’t have one and certainly had no plans to get one. I didn’t want to invest the time and effort necessary to care for an animal; as a newly single guy, I could barely care for myself.

  Fast-forward to now, and my wife, Debbie Myers, and I have twenty-five dogs. It’s a relatively low number when taken in context of the last seventeen years. It’s an extremely high number when taken in context of sane human behavior. It certainly represents a small percentage of the four thousand dogs we have saved.

  While I had ultimately made a conscious decision to become a writer, the dog rescue thing just seemed to happen. Not so for Debbie. When she sets her mind to something and focuses on a goal, she doesn’t rest until it’s accomplished.

  She’s a force of nature, and when she made it her mission to save as many dogs as possible, I was just sort of swept along in the draft.

  I’ve long resisted writing about our rescue work and our life with dogs, even though I’m always asked many questions about it at speaking engagements and book signings. Living it seemed sufficient.

  But one day we found ourselves about to embark on something that motivated me to put fingers to keyboard. We were heading back East, not to New York but to Maine, and the dogs were of course coming with us.

  So this is the story of our insane trip into dogland, and our equally insane trip to Maine. I have interspersed stories about special dogs that have touched our lives, and special situations that few humans are nutty enough to deal with.

  One other point, on which I ask your indulgence: in certain cases wh
en I don’t know whether a dog is male or female, I’ll use the word “it” when referring to that dog. This is not a sign of disrespect; I certainly don’t think of dogs as objects. It’s simply that it is cumbersome to always say “he or she.”

  With that out of the way, I present to you our unusual family.

  Our very unusual, very large, very hairy family.

  Dread and More Dread …

  We were going on a journey that I expected would end up somewhere between that of Lewis and Clark and that of the Donner Party. Someone once said that the difference between an ordeal and an adventure is attitude. That’s how I knew I was in for an ordeal.

  We were eleven mostly intrepid travelers, closing the traditional exploration circle by heading east from Southern California to Maine. No wagons, just three RVs. After all, this is the twenty-first century.

  Of course, we didn’t have many of the difficulties that the early pioneers had to endure. They were going through uncharted territory; we’d MapQuested the route and had three GPSs to make it foolproof. They had limited rations; we had refrigerators full of food, and stoves and microwaves with which to cook it. Not that we were without our refreshment challenges; for instance, we’d have to use a manual corkscrew for the wine.

  Their communications went as far as their voices could carry; we were loaded down with cell phones, BlackBerries, and iPads. One of our group said that we actually had more computer power on board than astronaut Alan Shepard did when he first went into space, but I have no idea if that’s true.

  One thing we shared with our predecessors was the presence of plenty of animals. Their animals were crucial to their trip, but ours were the very reason for our journey.

  Their animals represented the transportation itself; the horsepower behind the vehicles was alive and breathing. They probably also provided food, but I’d just as soon not go there. But if the pioneers hadn’t had the benefit of their horses, when we talk about going out west today, we’d mean Cleveland.

  In our case, three gas-fueled RV engines were our power source. The animals were the passengers; we were transporting our dogs, all twenty-five of them, to our—and their—new home. They were all rescue dogs, a small portion of the thousands that we have saved from the misery of the Los Angeles shelter system, but this trip was likely to make new demands on their endurance.

  Our group included nine other people that volunteered for the trip, which was pretty remarkable. Some were friends; others were readers of my novels whom I’d met only once or twice. Three of them I’d never met at all. Giving us their time and energy in this way was amazingly generous, and I planned to thank them four or five thousand times before we got to Maine.

  Of course, at the time I was thinking “if” we got to Maine.

  The truth was, this undertaking could have been even more daunting. Twenty-five is pretty much the fewest dogs Debbie and I have had in the last ten years. We’ve had as many as forty-two, but we feel that more than forty is slightly eccentric.

  The human members of our team, none of whom had known each other previously, had been corresponding by e-mail for weeks. They were totally enthusiastic. They seemed to regard this as an incredible adventure, destined to be a source of great memories for years to come.

  Not me.

  Since I’ve always been an “RV half empty” sort of guy, I expected it to be torturous at best, and a disaster at worst.

  Which brings me to the obvious question: how the hell did we get into this situation?

  It Began with Tara

  Well, more accurately with Tara’s mother, Debbie Myers. On September 26, 1992, we went out on a blind date to the movies, fixed up by a mutual friend, Cheryl Wlodinger. We saw Billy Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night, but, rebels that we are, we saw it in the late afternoon.

  At the end of the film I flashed my most winning smile and asked Debbie if she wanted to go to dinner. She declined, saying that she had to go home to administer eye medicine to her dog.

  Based on that response, I had a hunch that the heretofore irresistible Rosenfelt charm had not yet reached its full effectiveness. Fortunately, she saved me from an insecurity crisis by subsequently agreeing to go home and deal with the medicine, and then meet me at the restaurant.

  Her round-trip would take forty-five minutes, and though the dinner would have delayed the medicine-giving by only a couple of hours, she didn’t want to wait. Her dog had an eye infection; she needed the care, and she needed the care on time. It seemed strange, and a bit suspicious.

  As it turned out, the eye medicine story was real, and I was soon to find out that Debbie was simply a lover of animals to a rather abnormal level.

  Since we didn’t talk much during the movie and drove to the restaurant separately, we knew almost nothing about each other when we finally sat down to dinner. I barely had time to start displaying my killer personality when the waiter came over to tell us the specials. They began with a veal chop.

  Debbie cut him off with “We don’t eat veal,” and when he left, she launched into a spirited dissertation on the cruelty that goes into the preparation of that particular meat. I was so clueless that I didn’t even know what animal veal came from, so I silently figured she perhaps had a pet veal at home to go with her eye-sick dog.

  But her feelings about the matter were not the point. Who was she to decide what I would or wouldn’t eat? I could have whatever the hell I wanted. It turned out that I wanted pasta, and by an amazing coincidence, I haven’t wanted veal in the twenty years since we sat in that restaurant.

  Debbie and I hit it off pretty well and found we had plenty to talk about beyond our shared disdain for veal. It was on our third date that I met her golden retriever, Tara, whose eye infection by then was just a memory. This kicked off a series of dates on which we would take Tara for walks, to the park, to the beach. She would go pretty much wherever we went.

  That was the beginning of our love story, and things were also going well between Debbie and me. It wasn’t long before her adoration of Tara didn’t even seem so over the top; this truly had to be the best dog in the history of the world. And my insecurity about the delayed dinner was long gone; if Tara needed eye medicine, I would have left Heidi Klum to make sure that she received it.

  Tara possessed a sensitivity that most humans don’t even bother aspiring to. She had a built-in mood sensor, which enabled her to be sympathetic when Debbie or I was upset, playful when we were feeling good, affectionate when we needed it, and always—I mean always—ready to accept petting. She brightened up every room, park, or beach she visited.

  She had her quirks, but like everything else about her, they were adorable. She loved biscuits but would never give us the satisfaction of seeing her eat one. Instead she’d let it lay there, feigning indifference, until we left the room. When we came back it was invariably gone, with only a few telltale crumbs as evidence. And the smug look on her face said, “I won again.”

  We had a certain walk we’d take her on that was probably her favorite. But when we were passing a house where she knew a particular German shepherd lived, she would stop cold, refusing to take another step. This was true even when the other dog was nowhere to be found.

  We’d have to pick her up and carry all eighty-five pounds of her the fifty feet until we were past the house, at which point we’d put her down and she’d happily continue the walk. I don’t think she was afraid; I think it was just a game she was playing with us. A game she never lost.

  Tara was eight when I met her, and nine on the awful day that her nose started to bleed while we were taking a walk in Beverly Hills. We rushed her to the vet, who said it was either a foxtail caught in her sinus cavity or nasal carcinoma. If it was the latter, and that was what he suspected, it would “result in her demise.”

  He sent us to a surgeon, who confirmed the dire diagnosis. We authorized him to operate on her, even though we understood that there was no possibility it would save her life. We did it because he told us that it would
give her more time, and there was pretty much nothing we wouldn’t have done to get more time with Tara.

  She came through the operation well, even if we didn’t. Debbie told me that the night of the surgery was the first that Tara had ever spent out of the house. Debbie had once turned down a fantastic job opportunity in London because to have taken it would have meant that Tara would have been subject to that country’s six-month quarantine policy. Such a thing would have been incomprehensible.

  We brought Tara home two days after the operation. The surgeon admonished us not to let her get excited, or her nose would start to bleed. So when Debbie came home from work, she would park at the bottom of a three-block hill to prevent Tara from hearing her car. Then she’d sneak in and be in full petting mode before Tara even knew what hit her.

  Tara lived three months after that, a period in which she was never alone, not even once, not for a minute. Medically, and quasi-medically, we tried everything, including such things as acupuncture and sprinkling shark cartilage in her food. The literature cited as evidence of the latter’s effectiveness the fact that sharks never got cancer, a claim I was never able to confirm. But we tried it, because we would have done anything that had the slightest chance of success, so long as it did not affect the quality of whatever life Tara had left.

  We took her on vacation to Carmel and stayed in Doris Day’s dog-friendly hotel. We went to Zuma, Tara’s favorite beach in Malibu, three times a week. But she gradually started to slow down; walks were becoming shorter, and her breathing was becoming heavier and more labored. While both Debbie and I noticed it, neither of us would admit it, and Tara’s occasional good days provided sustenance to our denial mechanism.

  Tara’s appetite also diminished gradually until finally she was refusing food. We discovered that hot dogs were the one thing she could not resist, so we grilled them twice a day. It was foolish on our part, and we’ve gotten wiser since. Tara was telling us that it was time to go, and we were trying to create reasons for her to stay. Just for a little while longer.

  Debbie was having a lot of trouble dealing with her emotions during this time. Her vet recognized this and put her in touch with Marilyn Bergman, who, along with her husband, Alan, is an extraordinarily successful songwriter. They had been through the loss of their dog, and the vet thought that Marilyn could be helpful.