More significant, my view was shared by the people above me, the ones who made the important decisions. So our financial support for the film was not overwhelming. We didn’t completely abandon it, but we didn’t treat it like anything close to a potential blockbuster.
Therefore, the relationship that Ken Johnson and I had was fairly contentious. He wanted me to do more, but it was outside my power to do so, even if I had thought that would have been the right thing. Marketing people are definitely limited in their ability to exercise influence and make important decisions, which explains the joke that was told with annoying frequency: “Did you hear about the idiot actress trying to make it in the business? She slept with the head of marketing.”
The combination of a less-than-inspired movie and the tepid support we gave it resulted in a very weak box-office performance. The film was quickly out of the theaters, and Ken was openly resentful about what he felt was the short shrift given to his work. He had done as well as he could with a weak script and an average cast, but it hadn’t been enough. So I didn’t blame him for being upset, even if I didn’t agree with him.
Nine years later, the Tara Foundation, which meant Debbie and me, got a call from a woman named Susan Johnson, who was looking to adopt one of our golden retrievers. As I always did, I spoke with her at length over the phone, to tentatively determine whether she would provide the kind of home we would allow one of our dogs to go to.
She sounded terrific, and we made a plan for her to come to the vet facility with her husband that Saturday. They would meet the dog, a four-year-old named Parker, take him for a walk, fill out an application, and hopefully fall in love.
As I’m certain you realize by now, Susan’s husband was Ken Johnson, whom I hadn’t seen or spoken to in almost ten years. He was as surprised as I was, and it felt more than a little awkward. Our only prior experience together was my viewing him as a thorn in my side and his viewing me as someone who potentially damaged his career.
So we talked very little about the movie and a great deal about dogs. And what Debbie and I discovered was that Ken and Susan Johnson were wonderful people who shared our love for dogs in general, and golden retrievers in particular. Theirs was as great a “dog home” as any we’d ever encountered, and we encountered a lot of them.
Parker, the dog they adopted, was a phenomenal golden, and it was love at first sight for the Johnsons. They took him without hesitation, and for a couple of years they would send us pictures of him lying on their couch, swimming in their pool, et cetera. It was the perfect adoption; the kind of matching of dog with humans that makes us feel completely and totally rewarded for our efforts.
Then we got the horrible phone call: Parker had contracted cancer, and he’d died. The Johnsons had had him for only two years; he had passed away at the ridiculously young age of six. I know there are many people who believe that everything happens for a reason, but there is no reason for golden retrievers to die so young.
The Johnsons got another dog, because that’s what people like that do. And I’m sure they loved him, maybe even as much as they loved Parker. If there were more people like Ken and Susan Johnson around, rescue groups would be unnecessary.
But I tell the story because Parker, just by being Parker, had the power to get Ken and me past whatever problems we’d had in the past. Speaking for myself, I looked at him in an entirely different light, one I wish I had the benefit of all those years before.
Thanks, Parker.
Little Sara
Debbie and I were in Phoenix visiting friends one day when we got a call from a rescue person in Orange County asking if we could take a chocolate Lab that was in the Orange County shelter. His name was Hershey, and he was ten years old.
Hershey had been found as a stray and brought in by animal control. Amazingly, despite his advanced years, he was successfully adopted out, but he’d been returned. The people reported that he barked constantly and they just couldn’t handle it, or at least didn’t want to. Of course, he could bark constantly in our house and we probably wouldn’t notice.
If there is one thing that guarantees demise in one of these shelters, it’s being placed and returned. Because Hershey now had that big strike against him, and considering his advanced age, the rescue person keeping an eye on him was sure that his time was about up. So she called us.
We drove back from Phoenix, and what I should have done was drop Debbie off at home before heading to the shelter. But I wasn’t thinking, so I brought her with me.
When we got to the shelter, we went into the office to tell them that we wanted to take Hershey. At least I thought we went into the office together; when I turned toward Debbie, she was nowhere to be found. As ominous developments go, that was a beauty.
I realized at that point that she had gone to the kennels to check for other dogs that might catch her eye. This was at a time when we were no longer actively placing dogs in homes, so any she came up with were by definition going to join our clan.
She came up with only one additional dog, a ten-year-old beagle named Sara that had been turned in by her owners. She had already been at the shelter for three weeks, an inordinately long time, and she sat in her dog run like the queen of England. Other dogs come to the edge of the cage to lick hands and otherwise try to curry favor with potential adopters, but not Sara. Her look let us know that if we were going to take her, it would be on her terms.
So we went home with Hershey and “Little Sara,” thus dubbed because we already had a Bernese mountain dog named Sarah. At that point we had approximately thirty dogs at an average weight of maybe eighty-five pounds, so we are talking about well over a ton of dogs. Yet Little Sara, all thirty-five pounds of her, immediately dominated them all, and does to this day.
The house was her private kingdom. If another dog was on a particular chair, Sara walked over and proceeded to bark and stare them down. I was included in her general disdain; if I tried to get her off the chair so I could sit down, I got a threatening growl.
Only Debbie escaped her wrath, and Sara’s favorite place was on the back of the couch just behind Debbie’s neck. I think she also liked that spot because the height gave her a chance to look down upon her subjects.
Sara had a craving for chicken soup that bordered on the maniacal. I swear, she went nuts if she so much as saw a can of it. If we ever cooked any, she would simply not let us alone until we gave her a bowl of it. And then another.
Sara is the only dog ever to get off our property in Orange County. Debbie noticed she was missing on a Memorial Day morning, and when I walked around the property looking for her, I noticed that the gardener had left a gate slightly ajar. Sara was the only dog we had—one of the few dogs we’ve ever had—that could have fit through it.
We lived in the canyons on the top of a hill, which is to say we lived in the middle of nowhere. Very often at night we would hear coyotes cackling, which I’m told meant that they were in the process of making a kill.
The idea that Little Sara was out there, fending for herself, was driving Debbie and me crazy. We searched for hours, with no luck. To make matters worse, the shelters were closed because of the holiday, so there was no way to determine if perhaps she had been found and taken there.
It was starting to get toward evening, and we were panicked. Finally Debbie came up with an idea that would have seemed insane to anyone but me. I went to the market and bought at least a dozen cans of chicken soup and brought them home.
Debbie poured the soup into two containers, and we drove off in our car, each of us holding the soup out the window. We would drive a hundred feet or so, and then stop, giving the aroma a chance to spread out. It seemed ridiculous, but there were no neighbors around to watch us, and we knew enough about Sara to apply the Field of Dreams line to the situation: “If she smells it, she will come.”
And she did.
I almost still can’t believe it to this day, but she came walking out of the brush—sauntering, really—as if she didn’t have a care
in the world.
Debbie got in the backseat with her container of soup, and I lifted Sara in. She didn’t need any coaxing, and within moments she was slurping away.
We got her home, and she took some water, then headed straight for her favorite chair. She didn’t stop to chat with any of her friends, who I’m sure must have been at least a little curious about her adventure. Within a very short time she was asleep, and so were we.
I think we had a much rougher day than she did.
As I’m writing this, Little Sara is almost fifteen years old, as obnoxious and adorable as ever. She likes the chairs and chicken soup in Maine a lot.
Back to Basic
I was in college during the Vietnam War and faced the very real possibility that I would be drafted when I graduated. My patriotism was so strong that I wanted to protect my nation’s army from having me be a part of it, so I joined the reserves. Unlike now, reservists at this time were rarely called up to active duty, so my joining effectively ensured I would not be shot at.
Reservists have to go through basic training, and they do so with members of the regular army. I took basic at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, in the winter, and it was so cold that one day when my unit went out for target practice at the rifle range, the first guy to shoot had his skin stick to the trigger. I spent those eight weeks frozen and miserable, complaining constantly to anyone dumb enough to listen.
I was a barrel of laughs even in those days.
The worst part of all, and there were plenty of bad parts, was going out on bivouac, which is essentially camping with sergeants yelling at you. Camping under the best of circumstances is not really my thing; showers and indoor plumbing have always held more of an appeal for me. So I can vividly recall, even all these years later, the nights spent on bivouac, and how awful it felt.
And there, outside Iowa City, those memories all came flooding back to me. It was five o’clock in the morning, and I felt like I was back in the army. I was lying in the upper bed in the RV, wearing underwear and covered by just a thin sheet. It was freezing; according to weather.com on my phone it was twenty-five degrees, but it felt even colder. Actually, it didn’t feel colder in my extremities, because I was so cold I couldn’t feel my extremities.
I’d left the heat running overnight, as Emmit had instructed, but either it had stopped or it was the worst heater in the history of heaters. I considered getting up to look at it, except there was no possibility I could fix it, and I might wake the dogs.
The dogs were sound asleep and therefore very quiet. The only sound I could hear was a rattling noise, but I figured that was my teeth.
It’s fascinating how times like that can put things into perspective. Here I had thought I was miserable the previous night, but this was teaching me that I’d had no idea what true misery really was. It was comforting in a way, knowing that I had finally reached a sort of nirvana of wretchedness. I was at the bottom of the hill of depression, and the only way out was to follow the dusty dirt road up.
I was not only freezing but cringing. Any minute the dogs were going to start to bark, and I would have to get up in the frigid air and deal with them. I dreaded putting on my jeans, because the insides of the legs were going to feel like ice.
We were parked in the rear end of the hotel parking lot, and I was going to have to walk over and wake up the eight members of our group who were in the hotel, warm and comfortable. At that moment I hated those eight people with all my heart.
Once that was accomplished, we would have to feed and walk the dogs. But none of that was going to be necessary until they started to bark, and maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they were as frozen as I was and had just as little desire to face the day. Maybe they’d sleep in until noon, when the warm sun would be shining.
And then it happened. Otis was the traitor that barked first, just once, but in our RV, as in our house, there is no such thing as a lone bark in the night.
I waited ten or fifteen seconds, as the barking built to a crescendo, and then I got up. I couldn’t get to my suitcase in the back to get warmer clothing to wear; it was dark and I couldn’t see. Besides, we needed to get the dogs to quiet down before the police showed up.
I walked across the parking lot to the hotel. I’ve had warmer parking-lot moments tailgating at Giants Stadium before January play-off games. It probably took me half an hour, but eventually everybody was up and walking the dogs. I managed to borrow a sweatshirt from Emmit, which provided some relief. Since he was the one who’d set the heater, I briefly considered strangling him with the sweatshirt.
Debbie and Emmit were actually surprised by my discomfort; the heaters worked fine in their RVs, and they’d both had relatively comfortable nights. Because of that, I added them to the list of people that I hated.
I was getting a little worried that I was running out of Pill Pockets. Pill Pockets are small, cylindrical items that have a hole carved out of the middle so that pills can be inserted in them. They look like chocolate, though they are obviously not, since chocolate can be very dangerous for dogs.
But dogs love these things, and they make pill-giving far easier than it otherwise would be. And in our house that’s not an insignificant matter. We’ve got more arthritis sufferers than the average Florida retirement community, and between them and the epileptics, I give out in excess of sixty pills a day. I thought I might have misjudged the amount of Pill Pockets we had to bring along, and if that turned out to be the case, it might require a time-consuming stop at a PetSmart.
But I am nothing if not quick on my feet, so for dogs that were taking multiple pills, I just doubled up and put two pills in each pocket. If the Donner party had shown that kind of resourcefulness, they’d be chowing down at Smith & Wollensky right now.
We’d figured that we were about two days away, which in dog-trip time meant another year and a half. But we were close enough to calculate when we would make it to Maine, and after consulting with the others, I estimated we could be there by late Friday afternoon.
I made sure the bed-and-breakfast was confirmed for Friday night, and did the same for the Saturday plane reservations. Everything was as it should be, at least for the moment.
Randy, Joe, and Emmit figured out why I had no heat in the RV. It had less than a quarter of a tank of fuel, and the heater automatically shuts off at that point to conserve the remainder. It was good that they knew that, because if it had happened again the next night, the coroner would have been able to put the cause on my death certificate.
So within a few minutes we were back on the road. Yippee-skippee.
Dogs and Ducks Don’t Mix
The previous owner of our house in Orange County was an animal lover. Not a maniac like us, but he was right up there, and he certainly surrounded himself with a substantial collection of nonhumans. He had four dogs, three cats, and six ducks. The ducks were housed in an open-air sanctuary, fenced in, with a man-made pond in the center that emptied and refilled automatically.
He explained to us that while he was taking the dogs and cats with him to his new residence, there was simply no place there for the ducks to live. His request was that we keep and take care of them.
Debbie was, of course, fine with it. She would have been fine if he were offering us a herd of pet giraffes. But I’m not really a duck guy, and I had enough “stuff” to clean up. My view changed when the guy told us that various people had offered to take the ducks off his hands, but they all planned to eat them.
It is no fun cleaning up a duck area. Believe me when I tell you that a dustpan and broom will not do the trick. You know what bird droppings are like? Well, this was as if the birds were a squadron of B-52s.
But I did it. Not as often as I should have, but I did it. My weapon of choice was a high-powered hose, and the ducks were smart enough to move out of the way when I got to work.
Then, one day, one of the ducks didn’t get out of the way. He just sat there, which worried me. I could not get him to move. He also did no
t look good, and I decided that he was sick.
I couldn’t call our vet; it was Sunday and the office was closed. I found another vet in Anaheim, and I had to cajole the receptionist to fit me and the duck in. I may have exaggerated the ailment; I said the poor thing could not move, though it’s possible that was true. It certainly wouldn’t move for me. But the receptionist said they were very busy, so I wanted to make sure we got in.
I folded a blanket and put it at the bottom of a carton. I went out to get the duck, which didn’t please me. I don’t like touching animals other than dogs and cats. And I don’t think I had actually ever touched a duck in my life whose first name wasn’t Peking.
But I got him in the carton, carried it to the car, and set off. We didn’t talk much on the way to the vet, which was fine. As man-duck relationships went, ours had never been particularly close, and I was a little bitter, because there were NFL games on that I was missing.
I pulled up in front of the vet hospital and went into the office, holding the carton with the duck in front of me, its head over the rim as he checked out the surroundings. There was a roomful of people in the reception area, all of whom looked up at us as we came in. It’s not often that you see a duck enter a room. I put the carton on the floor; ducks are heavier than you might think.
For some reason the vet was behind the reception desk, and when she saw me, she said, “Is that the duck that can’t move?” I said that it was, and she said, “Let’s take a look.”
She came over, kneeled down to the carton, and took the duck out, placing him on the reception area floor. The poor, paralyzed duck then uttered a single quack and proceeded to run across the room to the reception desk, leaving a trail of diarrhea along the entire route.
“Say hallelujah,” I said. “It’s a miracle.”
That was a fun duck day compared to one time when I got home from the supermarket. As always, the dogs greeted me with a modest level of enthusiasm when I arrived. Debbie got mobbed whenever she came home; I was always greeted somewhat more cordially.
Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure Page 17
