When this happens, I can only hope that the dogs understand, that they know we are protecting them, just as surely as we were protecting them when they were healthy. But there’s no way to know, and it really couldn’t change our decision even if we did.
If we had a “ring of honor” of dogs that were our absolute favorites, Reggie would certainly be included. Along with Tara and Charlie and Sophie and Joey and Rocky and Harry and Weasel and … let’s just say we’d need a really big ring.
The day after Reggie died, four years after we got him, the owner’s girlfriend called us. I don’t even know how she tracked us down, but she told us that what the guy did had bothered her for four years, and she had always wanted to know what had happened to Reggie.
I told her about the great four years Reggie had with us, and how much we loved him. I also told her the bad news from the day before, and she started crying. I never did ask her if she was still dating the loser.
Sometimes the idiots are anonymous. We got a call once from the Downey shelter about a fourteen-year-old golden in their possession. That is very old for a golden, and for it to be stuck in a shelter like that at that age was absolutely unacceptable.
When we got there, we heard the full story. The dog had been tied up in front of the shelter before they opened, and the morons who left her there had attached a note to her collar.
It said that her name was Tessie, that she was fourteen years old, and that she had been a great dog. But the people were going on vacation and didn’t want to pay to board her, so they were asking the shelter to put her down for them.
They don’t come lower than that.
So we took Tessie, who was in excellent health, and she immediately became the imperious Queen Mother of the house. She was cantankerous, as befitted her age, and was above interaction with the other dogs—the “commoners.” She wasn’t very large, but she ate like a horse, and she starting barking impatiently a half hour before each feeding time.
She lived for four years, to the grand old age of eighteen. We think that’s the oldest golden we’ve ever had, though it’s hard to know for sure. In her case we knew her age because of the note, but generally we had no such information on dogs we would rescue. Still, I doubt that any of them lived to eighteen.
But most of them had one thing in common with Tess and Reggie.
Their previous owners were dumb as dirt.
Bart
A rescue person contacted us once and told us about a golden retriever she had seen in the San Bernardino shelter. She was in a run with a black Lab mix, and when she was there, both dogs were coughing. Kennel cough is quite common in Los Angeles area shelters, and often it is a sign of much worse, so I got down there as soon as I could.
It wasn’t soon enough. The golden had died, and the black Lab mix, which the shelter had named Maverick, was quite ill. I rescued him and took him to our vet, who immediately put him on a regimen of powerful antibiotics and told me that it was fifty-fifty that he’d make it.
He made it, and after a month in the hospital came home. Debbie had renamed him Bart, and he fit right in with the gang. He sleeps in the middle of the living room, which along with my office is the area of highest dog density. But he really shows little interest in interacting with them; it’s more like he’s dogwatching.
All of our dogs except for Louis are frequent barkers, but Bart puts them to shame. He’ll start barking before six in the morning, with periodic outbursts throughout the day. If we pet him, even briefly, he will stop. If we didn’t, I don’t think he’d ever stop. He’s the only one of our dogs that doesn’t bark as a result of some event or visitor or noise or other dog doing it.
Bart barks because Bart barks.
He seems fine with that.
You Know the Old Saying …
… a trip hasn’t officially started until Weasel has thrown up.
Based on that maxim, it took about ten minutes for our trip to officially begin. I heard gagging and retching near the back of the RV, a sound that I was all too familiar with. It sounded like Weasel, but I couldn’t be sure.
We’d anticipated all kinds of dog accidents in the vehicles, and Debbie had brought along enough cleaning supplies to disinfect the Everglades. They were about to get their first test.
I was in the passenger seat, and with all the dogs lying everywhere it was not an easy place to navigate in and out of. Based on the maneuverability inside the vehicle, I expected to have my fifth back surgery by the time we reached Vegas.
“Someone threw up back there,” I said, stating the obvious and starting to get up. It would have been above and beyond the call of duty for me to expect Erik or Nick to jump up to clean it, and Emmit was driving, so he was off the hook.
“I got it,” Nick said, endearing himself to me for the rest of our natural lives. He grabbed a plastic bag and a towel and headed toward the back to deal with it. Maybe the trip wasn’t going to be so bad after all.
Our RV was leading the way, and Emmit started out by driving fairly slowly and cautiously. I think he just wanted to make sure that the drivers behind him were comfortable keeping up, and they seemed to be doing just fine. Within fifteen minutes we were on the 15 headed north, and we’d increased our speed. It seemed almost surreal that after all the planning, we were finally on the open road, heading to our destination.
The first leg of the trip was toward Vegas, a drive I had made many times in my normal role of gambling degenerate. Jean, Nevada, is not too far from Vegas. I actually know something about the place, since I used it as a scene in one of my books. In the book, someone was murdered in a Jean casino parking lot, but I decided not to point that out to my traveling companions.
There are actually no citizens of Jean. It’s simply a couple of casino hotels, positioned to attract gamblers who can’t wait to get to Vegas or want one last chance to break even on the way out. The hotels are much tackier than those in Vegas, and not even as nice as those in Primm, a similar town we had passed about fifteen minutes before.
Jean was going to be our experimental first stop. We pulled into a rest area, and Randy, Joe, and Emmit jumped out to figure out the best way to handle things. They had an air about them that said they knew what they were doing, which under the circumstances was comforting.
Randy decided we should pull the vehicles nose to rear, so that they were lined up with almost no space between them.
Then we got the fencing out from the storage area under one of the vehicles and started to unfurl it. It began at the front of the lead RV, and we made a half-circle, ending at the rear of the last one. However, Randy then realized that the dogs might still go under the RVs and could then run off through the back, without being confined by the fence. So we extended the perimeter behind the RVs to make a complete circle; I was glad we’d brought as much fence as we had.
Emmit and Joe walked the length of the fence, making sure that the stakes were driven solidly into the ground. Then a few people positioned themselves along the outside of the fence, confirming that it was secure and able to resist the potential onslaught of dogs, who would no doubt be energetic and very excited to get off their mobile homes. Then the rest of us started to help the dogs make their way out, one vehicle at a time.
It actually went fairly well, but it was a time-consuming process. Most of the dogs are old and if left to their own devices would have had difficulty navigating the steep steps, so they had to be helped or carried. Others bounded off eagerly, and they had to be held back and calmed down lest they plow through the fairly fragile fence.
I had fed the dogs at the house before we left, so we didn’t need to do that again this night. Instead we just gave out some biscuits, and let them wander around until they did their business.
Debbie led the “shit patrol” around the area; she is an efficient genius with a plastic bag. It was mostly the women who joined her in the task, and they armed themselves with plastic bags of their own to scavenge the area. If it had been up to me, I do
n’t know that I’d have been so neat about the whole thing, but they actually left the area in pretty much the same condition as we found it.
Then we started to load the dogs back on the RVs, and I quickly discovered that getting them up the steps was a little tougher than getting them down. I think it was a gravity thing.
We had lists as to who went where, and we did a double count to make sure that each dog was accounted for. There was no evidence that any had gotten outside the fence, but we wanted to be completely sure. I’m always a little neurotic about stuff like that, so even when the people on each RV reported that all their dogs were on board, I got on and did a quick count of my own.
Once that was accomplished, we rolled the fence back up and stored it away. The process had taken close to an hour, which was more than I would have liked. Hopefully we’d get faster as we did it more frequently. If not, a long trip had just gotten a lot longer.
We pulled into a gas station in Jean and got jolted by the fact that it cost about $150 to fill up each vehicle. This was not a good sign, since we’d barely left home. I’m good at math, but I opted not to do the calculations on what it was going to cost to get to Maine. I was depressed enough.
Even if we were able to buy enough gas to make it to Maine, we were not going to be a fitter group by the time we arrived. That became obvious when the non-canine members of our team made a beeline for the convenience store attached to the gas station.
Everybody came out of there with hot dogs, chips, nachos, and pretty much every unhealthy food item ever invented. Apparently, the cold cuts and fruit that I had purchased held very little appeal for the gang.
Debbie was a notable exception; she had lost a great deal of weight since she had retired, due to a combination of intense exercise and a membership in Weight Watchers. She had even checked out potential Weight Watchers meetings along our route, but she realized that attending any would slow us down way too much.
We left Jean and were back on the road at about ten thirty, and everybody was already tired. I think the adrenaline was wearing off, and the grind was setting in.
We started e-mailing back and forth to decide if we should stick to our plan of driving through the night or stop and get some sleep. We delayed a decision, but I had a feeling that sleep was going to win out, and it probably should have. The downside to traveling when exhausted outweighed the upside of sticking to our schedule, which had been arbitrarily created.
Pretty soon I found myself experiencing a first; I was seeing Vegas without stopping there. The skyline was off in the distance, like a mirage. I imagined that it was the first time that a mirage actually contained a hotel named after itself. I’d have given anything to march into that Mirage or the Wynn or the Mandalay Bay Hotel & Casino with Wanda the mastiff on my arm. But, alas, it was not to be.
We pulled over into a large field behind a Love’s rest stop just an hour past Vegas, set up the fencing, and unloaded the dogs again. It was only the second time we’d done it, but I was already pretty sick of it. Everybody else seemed to be in a permanent state of good cheer, and fortunately we were able to do it a little faster that time, probably because we were more familiar with the process.
A bunch of people went into Love’s to once again load up on junk food, and they reported that there were showers in there that we could rent in the morning. That was good to hear, because while there were showers on the RVs, they were small and it seemed inconceivable that anyone would use them. It would entail a risk of running out of water, and the way the vehicles shook, it would also present the possibility of being thrown naked and wet into the main cabin. I for one had little desire to see a naked, soaking Emmit flopping around the RV.
It was of course very dark, especially since the sky seemed cloudy, and I was worried about dogs getting away through the fence, unseen. But once we got them back on, we did another rigorous check, and everyone was accounted for.
There was a unanimity of feeling that we should stay there and get a few hours sleep, and I was certainly fine with that. It was becoming obvious to me that we were not going to make it on our schedule, but I hadn’t had much confidence in that schedule anyway. I’d wait a day or so to get a better idea, and then call ahead to advise the bed-and-breakfast waiting for the team on the other end.
So we all found beds and couches in the vehicles, most already occupied by dogs, and settled in for at least part of the night. It was a little after one in the morning, and I set my alarm for five o’clock, at which point I’d get everyone up. At home the dogs usually wake us at five thirty, but there was no telling what they’d do in this situation.
On my RV, Erik and Nick decided to go for a walk before going to sleep, and they left as Emmit and I were dozing off.
And then the sky exploded.
Benji
I was at our vet in Orange County for what seemed like a daily visit when the office manager, Julie, approached me. She told me that a dog had been abandoned there by an owner who no longer wanted him. The dog was a four-year-old Bernese mountain dog named Benji, and since she knew how much Debbie and I loved that breed, she was wondering if we would be interested in taking him.
She confided in me that while he had been there six weeks, the vet who owned the place, Dr. Kali, had instructed her not to tell me about him. He didn’t want to take advantage of us or make us feel obligated. She finally couldn’t take it anymore and told me.
I went into the back to see Benji, who was about as far from a Bernese mountain dog as it’s possible to be. I have no idea what he is—probably a mixture of shepherd, Lab, and Rottweiler—but he is absolutely beautiful.
He was lying in a dog run, actually more like cowering, when I went in to see him. I leaned over to pet him, and he urinated all over the floor and himself. This was one scared dog.
I went back out to the reception area, where Julie was waiting. She was also laughing. She had lied about the Bernese mountain dog part, as I had already discovered, because she knew that once I saw Benji I would not be able to refuse him. Within fifteen minutes he was in my car, not an easy trick to manage, because he was so fearful.
I would say it took forty-eight hours for Benji to become a completely new dog. He absolutely loved our house and bonded with a shepherd mix named Otis. They are both on the young side for our group, so they are energetic wrestlers with each other. If Benji goes to the groomer’s, Otis cries until he comes home.
Benji remained slightly skittish for a couple of months, but now he is as affectionate, loving, and all-around terrific as a dog can be. He has adjusted extraordinarily well to Maine, and he loves running in the woods in the snow.
I talked to him recently about the strides he’s made since that day at the vet’s office, but he pretended not to have any recollection of it.
Wanda
As I mentioned before, one of my favorite places to do book signings is Houston. The local golden rescue group is the gold standard, and the local mystery bookstore, Murder By The Book, is absolutely terrific. They always combine to put on a great event when I’m there.
When I’m traveling on tour, I can’t help but feel a little guilty about leaving Debbie at home to take care of the dogs by herself. Feeding them, cleaning up, petting them, going to the vet … it is definitely a minimum-two-person job.
I check in with her repeatedly, so frequently that it drives her crazy, and I ask her to call me if there are any problems. There is never anything she can’t handle, but I still want to know what’s going on.
On this particular trip to Houston, I was leaving the hotel to drive to the event when I got an ominous e-mail from her. The East Valley shelter had called; there was a ten-year-old golden that was going to be put down that afternoon if Debbie didn’t come and get it.
On its face that was no problem. We were always talking about cutting back on the number of dogs in our house, but we never seemed to follow through on it. And we were not about to say no to a senior golden.
The reason
it was so frightening was that Debbie was going to a shelter.
A bad shelter.
By herself, without me to rein her in.
In my mind’s eye I could see her walking through the shelter, pointing to the dogs, saying, “I’ll take you and you and you and you … aw, what the heck, you too.”
I had just arrived at the event when I got the next e-mail. The golden, she said, was terribly matted but beautiful. She was also already spayed, which meant that Debbie would be able to take her right away and bring her to our vet to get checked out and bathed. Debbie had named her Mamie.
She went on to say that there was an eleven-year-old border collie mix “to die for.” She didn’t say that she was taking this second dog, but I figured there was approximately a 100 percent chance that she would. Or maybe a little higher.
The next e-mail came ten minutes later. There was a twelve-year-old Lab mix who looked “just like Waldo.” Waldo was a black Lab that had died a short time before. He was a great dog whose most distinguishing trait was a snore that could be heard for miles. Again, no mention of whether she was taking this other dog, but no doubt either.
“We really don’t need any more dogs,” I wrote back, and her reply was “I completely agree. Just these three.”
I was about to start my speech when I got what would be the last e-mail of the afternoon. It was short and to the point. “There is a 105-pound, emaciated mastiff that is amazing. I’ve named her Wanda.”
Debbie didn’t say that she was taking her, but it was fairly hard to picture her leaving behind an “emaciated, amazing” dog, especially since we had always wanted a mastiff. And it would have been downright silly to name a dog that was staying in the shelter.
So it was that Wanda and all the rest joined our little group. If Debbie felt any embarrassment or regret about gorging herself on rescue dogs, she hid it well. Her reason for taking Wanda, she explained when we spoke on the phone later, was that not to do so would have resulted in Wanda’s being put down or perhaps taken by someone who would keep her outside all day.
Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure Page 12
