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

by Rosenfelt, David

  We pulled the RVs into a park, walked the dogs, and settled in for some sleep. It made me a little nervous when we did this; if local police decided to check out three strange RVs, there was no telling how they’d react to what they found inside. We weren’t doing anything wrong or breaking any laws, but it was conceivable they would have had us committed and institutionalized.

  But there were no incidents, and when I woke everybody up at six A.M., for the last time, they were all raring to go. We walked and fed the dogs, and pulled out.

  I couldn’t believe it myself, but this was the final leg. Even I was feeling invigorated.

  Slightly.

  Please, Please Don’t Kill the Dog

  There are certain consistent themes, questions, and reactions I get in my e-mails from readers providing feedback for my books. One of them is “I saw your picture on the book jacket. How did you get so tall and handsome?” Another is “You make Shakespeare look like a hack.”

  These are, of course, all part of my elaborate fantasy life. But the actual comment I really get most frequently is “Please don’t ever kill Tara.”

  Readers tell me that they turn to the end of the book and scan it to make sure that they still see Tara’s name, which provides reassurance that she doesn’t die during the book. This fear extends to any other dog characters I include, and doesn’t deal only with death. No one, and I mean no one, wants a dog to suffer so much as a hangnail.

  Debbie and I are the same way. If we see a dog or other animal as part of a TV spot or trailer for a film, we seek reassurance from someone who has already seen it to make sure the animal emerges unscathed. Humans can die by the boatload, but if a dog is hurt or wounded, the film is off our list.

  I once got a manuscript from an agent asking me to read a client’s upcoming novel, in the hope that I would like it and give them a quote to use on the jacket. I agreed, and since it was the first time I had ever been asked, I was flattered.

  I actually flatter pretty easily, and in this case, even if the novel read like the Manhattan telephone directory, I would have praised it as a “taut and gripping winner.” So I started reading it, and on page twenty the bad guys were trying to get information from the protagonist.

  When he resisted, they didn’t torture him.

  They tortured his cat.

  There is almost nothing else that could have been in the book that would have prevented me from giving a favorable quote. But in this case I just couldn’t do something that might cause other people to read about cat torture. So I stopped reading, called the agent, and apologized.

  But when it comes to my own books, Tara’s existence and circumstances present a bit of a dilemma for me. The Andy Carpenter books are chronological; that just happened naturally, and it seems fair to the reader. So hopefully characters evolve, and they certainly get older.

  Except for Tara.

  In the first book, Open and Shut, Andy says that Tara is seven, and that he rescued her when she was two years old from a shelter. Seven is well into middle age for a golden, as ridiculously unfair and stupid as that might seem. Their average life expectancy is twelve, and that doesn’t take into consideration how cancer-prone they are.

  The books have come out once a year since then, and the current one, Unleashed, is the eleventh. In that book, Andy mentions that Tara is nine.

  Perhaps you notice some mathematical problems with all of this. Tara should be seventeen.

  But she’s not, and she’s never going to be. Andy’s Tara is going to be nine for as many books as I write. Andy could be in a home sucking oatmeal through a straw, and a nine-year-old Tara will be by his side. He’ll take nine-year-old Tara to AARP meetings. I may even move her back to seven, if the mood strikes me.

  Debbie and I decided long ago that we were going to keep the memory of the original Tara alive for at least as long as we were around. I feel that we certainly did that with the Tara Foundation, and we’re doing it to a lesser degree in my books.

  So when readers write to me, I tell them the absolute truth. They don’t have to skim ahead in the book to see if Andy’s Tara gets hurt or gets sick or dies.

  Because in this instance I am all-powerful, and I have decreed that a happy and healthy Tara will live forever.

  Snickers

  If there is such a thing as a well-intentioned, caring scam, then that’s how we got Snickers.

  A young woman called us one day about eight years ago, tearful about a situation she was facing. She was in college at Cal State Long Beach, and spent her free hours rescuing dogs and finding them homes. It’s a very difficult thing for someone without an established organization to do, and she was unhappily discovering that.

  The bottom line was that she had rescued a dog, Pandy, from certain death, and had nowhere to put her. She was out of options, and the only one remaining, to bring Pandy back to that shelter, was too horrible for her to contemplate. Would we take her?

  I said that we would, and I arranged to meet the woman in a parking lot in Anaheim. When I arrived, I saw Pandy in the back of her SUV, along with Charlie and Tiger and Coco and Snickers. The woman told me that she couldn’t bring herself to tell me over the phone that there were five dogs, because she knew I would turn her down.

  She got that right.

  But they were all seniors, and all were targeted for euthanasia, and she just couldn’t bear to see it happen. None were purebreds; they were all dyed-in-the-wool mutts, and all adorable.

  I have no idea why, but I took all five. I also gave her a lecture on how full we were in our house, and said that we would not be taking any more dogs from her. She seemed fine with that; maybe she had other suckers lined up.

  Of course, as always happens in situations like this, the dogs turned out to be great. I am aware that I describe every dog as great or wonderful, but that’s because dogs are great and wonderful.

  All of them lived for at least three years, but none made it to five, except for Snickers, who is still going strong. There’s a look about him that makes it impossible to tell his age; he doesn’t look much older than he did when we got him. But obviously, back then he wasn’t a senior.

  So Snickers made it to Maine, and his thick coat makes this the perfect place for him. He joins Bernie outside when it starts to snow.

  “Welcome to Maine”

  That’s what the sign said, and within seconds Cindy Spodek Dickey had a picture of it up on the Web. It meant that we were just a little more than two hours away, or at least two hours in driving time. In dog hours, that’s about a month.

  The truth was we were making good time, and the only negative thing to happen that morning was a tray of blueberries and strawberries fell out of one of the refrigerators and onto Snickers. Mary Lynn cleaned him up as best she could, and we didn’t miss a beat.

  We stopped near Kennebunkport to set up our dog park one final time. Neither George nor Barbara Bush was there to greet us, which obviously meant that Charlton Heston hadn’t put in a good word for me after he adopted Willie, the chow mix.

  It was an uneventful stop, unless you viewed the first meal the dogs would ever eat in Maine sentimentally. I didn’t, nor did I tear up over the fact that it was the first time they would ever use Maine as a bathroom.

  Our next stop was the Portland airport, to drop off Erik and Nick. They were actually renting a car and driving back to California; I think it was going to be a sightseeing, father-son bonding trip. I could have been imagining this, but when they got off, I think it was with some disappointment that they wouldn’t get to be there when we arrived at our destination.

  I thanked them profusely; they were very helpful and enjoyable to be with, excellent members of the team.

  Pulling up to the airport curb with three RVs is a tricky maneuver, as the Portland airport is small and the road is narrow. I couldn’t even imagine what airport security must have been thinking as they observed us, but nobody stopped us.

  The best way to our house is to get off th
e highway in Brunswick and take Route 1 north. It takes us through towns like Topsham, Bath, and Wiscasset, and I had to admit that I was getting excited. Driving through these towns helped to hit home just how much I love it up there.

  With the RVs, it was more difficult to navigate roads like these than highways, so I let Emmit stay behind the wheel. He’d probably driven 70 percent of the way, but amazingly seemed fresh and had maintained his cheerfulness.

  Debbie and I exchanged text messages about how great it felt to finally be there, and how much we were looking forward to seeing how the house had turned out. We hadn’t been there in over a month, and back then it still looked like a construction site. I trusted that the contractors had done a great job, but it was going to be nice to “trust and verify.”

  We hit some traffic just before getting onto the Wiscasset Bridge. It’s not uncommon, because there is always a crowd of people at a place called Red’s Eats, which sells lobster rolls from a small shack. It is amazing, but there is never a time when the place is not mobbed, and the lines have always discouraged us from trying it. It reminds me of the old Yogi Berra line about a restaurant, “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.”

  But then we were about fifteen minutes away, passing through the wonderful town of Damariscotta. I spread the word through text messages to the rest of the team that when we all pulled up in front of the house, Debbie and I wanted to go inside to see the place first, when it was in relatively pristine condition.

  It would be the only time that we would ever see it without its being filled with dogs and dog hair, and we wanted a chance to savor the few moments of solitude and cleanliness. We also wanted to see everything before it was destroyed by the house’s canine residents.

  We came to a dirt road, and Emmit commented on how rural the area seemed. I assured him that the next road we would take made that one look like Route 80. We made the turn onto that road, and then into the long unpaved driveway that leads to our house.

  We are in an incredibly beautiful area, ten acres of wooded land on a lake. Living there was going to be like waking up every morning in a Folgers commercial. It seemed amazingly serene and quiet as we pulled up, the last time that would ever be the case.

  There are no neighbors within barking distance, which was a requirement during our house hunt. We didn’t want to have to spread borax in the forest, or create beaches outside, or worry that the noise was bothering neighbors.

  Debbie and I got out of the RV, as did Emmit, Cindy Spodek Dickey, and a couple of others. We went into the house, and it was everything we could have hoped for. Hervochon Construction did a great job; all that we asked for had been accomplished, and then some.

  I’m a huge Giants fan, a fact that I pointed out to the contractors in great detail while torturing them about the Super Bowl victory over their beloved and previously undefeated Patriots. So they’d responded by filling the place with Patriots paraphernalia; there was a Patriots schedule on the refrigerator, a Patriots toothbrush in the bathroom, a Patriots jersey hanging in the closet. Mainers are apparently very bitter people.

  We went back outside and I shared the plan; we would bring the dogs to the outside, fenced-in area that the doggie door leads to. It would be the easiest way to do it from the RVs, with the least chance that dogs would get away.

  We started to shuttle them in, and the process took about forty-five minutes. Once we did, we opened the door and they were able to go into the house. It was fun to watch them experience their new surroundings; less so to watch a couple of them “mark” the occasion. But a house isn’t a house until it’s been pissed in.

  Emmit’s wife, Deb, had flown up from Atlanta to meet him, and they would be staying with us for a day and then exploring Maine a bit. I left them in the house with Debbie and the dogs, and then I took our car and led the RV caravan to the bed-and-breakfast, Damariscotta Lake Farm. As we were learning, everybody knows everyone else in these small towns, and we had heard about the place from our electrician, who is the owner’s brother.

  Once again we were the beneficiaries of terrific hospitality, and there were signs welcoming “Woofabago.” I told everyone that Debbie and I would be back in an hour for a group dinner, and I headed home, although I was not yet thinking of it as “home.” This time when I pulled up there was somewhat less quiet and serenity; the barking was so loud that I was sure our California neighbors could hear it.

  We got ready for dinner and headed back over to Damariscotta Lake Farm to meet the group. We were a little nervous leaving all the dogs in a strange house; by the time we got home they might have dismantled the place and sold it for scrap.

  It turned out that there was a full restaurant at the hotel, and we had a table for ten in the center of it. It was a quiet, very comfortable place, and I’m sure all the other patrons could hear every word of Debbie’s very moving toast.

  “You didn’t just help us get here,” Debbie said. “You did it with a smile, and you made it fun.” She talked about what we’d been through, and how amazing each and every one of these people was to have put their lives and sanity on hold to help us.

  Then she stood up, held her glass in the air, and announced to everyone in the place, “Please toast the greatest people on the planet.” And everyone in the restaurant applauded, raised their glasses, and drank.

  The food and atmosphere in the restaurant was wonderful, and I was sure we would be coming here a lot. Even the check was wonderful, half of what it would be for a New York or Los Angeles restaurant, with the food every bit as good.

  I was going to like it here.

  Looks Can Be Deceiving

  I got an e-mail from a reader in Maryland once, asking me if by any chance I knew of a golden retriever rescue organization in Orange County, California. She had heard about a golden in the Orange County shelter that was in terrible physical shape and facing euthanasia.

  She sent me a link to the shelter’s Web site, with a picture of the dog, which the shelter had named Junior. It was a tiny, grainy photo, and it was impossible to tell what the dog looked like. But I could see enough to know that the poor thing was miserable.

  I have no idea if the reader really knew where I lived and was being disingenuous or if it was a coincidence, but it didn’t matter. We lived about a half hour from the shelter, and Debbie and I went down there to take a look and get the dog.

  Unfortunately, even the taking a look part wasn’t going to be easy. Junior was not in an area that the general public had access to; he was in the medical ward. So we went to the counter and told the woman behind the desk that we wanted to adopt Junior, and we gave her his impound number.

  She looked him up on the computer and then conferred with an associate. Then she went in the back and didn’t reappear for at least ten minutes. There was clearly an issue with Junior.

  When she came back, she told us that Junior was ill, and that it was their recommendation that he not be adopted out. Debbie told her that we appreciated their recommendation, but that we wanted him anyway. That sent her into the back again, for a shorter time, and when she returned she said that their medical officer would speak to us.

  Sure enough, he came out a few minutes later and repeated the mantra that Junior was ill and not a candidate for adoption.

  “Is he dead?” I asked.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Then we want him.”

  He continued to try and talk us out of it, and I asked what was wrong with Junior. He told me that he had tumors all over his body and a horrible skin condition that could never be cured.

  “What’s the condition?” Debbie asked.

  “We haven’t determined that.”

  “Then how do you know it can’t be cured?”

  The truth was that they were never going to determine it, and certainly they would never try to cure it. They were going to keep Junior as a stray for the required five days, and then put him down. And those five days were up.

  Debbie laid ou
t the situation for the medical guy as clearly as she could. We would adopt Junior and take him to our vet. If our vet determined that Junior could not be made to have a good quality of life, then we would put him down, holding and petting him during the process. If he could fix what was ailing Junior, then we would have him do so, whatever the cost.

  Either way, we were not walking out of the shelter without Junior.

  They brought him out, and I don’t think I have ever seen a dog look worse. He had at least four obvious tumors on his body, including one hanging off his leg that was the size of a grapefruit. He had almost no hair, and his skin was red and irritated. He must have been absolutely miserable.

  Of course, if Junior was a golden retriever, then I’m Brad Pitt. He was probably a shepherd mix; we’d have a better idea of that when and if his hair grew back. But a golden he was not.

  We took Junior to Dr. Kali at the North Tustin Veterinary Clinic, who is as good as it gets. He took him in the back and spent at least a half hour examining him before coming back with the verdict.

  Most of the tumors were just fatty tissue, except the one on his leg. Dr. Kali thought he could remove that fairly easily, and doubted it was malignant. There would be a little difficulty in the healing process, because there would be very little skin to cover the incision. But it would be manageable.

  As far as the skin condition was concerned, Junior had the mange. So he would get treated for it, and soon he would not have the mange. He would feel relief almost immediately, and Dr. Kali saw no reason that his hair would not grow back.

  Junior, the dog that could not be cured, was going to be fine.

  And in fact he was. He was an old dog, but he lived for two years in our house, and I don’t think he ever had an uncomfortable day.

  The point is, he was going to be discarded simply because of how he looked. The idiots who let him get in that condition in the first place were being unintentionally aided and abetted by people who didn’t take the time to find out what was wrong, although the system would not have been prepared to fix it anyway.