Rescue Road

by Peter Zheutlin

  “To people adopting dogs, Debbie is invisible,” says Greg, “but what she does is essential.” Indeed, this will become a theme Greg returns to often during our trip: the countless people who play a vital role in securing the life and the freedom of each and every rescue dog, people who, unlike Greg, won’t get any credit, whose names will never be known, and whose work will never be seen. Part of my goal on this trip, and others to come, is to make them visible, to show just how many people and how much work play a role in saving the lives of the dogs Greg drives north.

  • • •

  On Sunday, the day before we are to leave Ohio for the long drive to the Gulf Coast, Greg makes waffles and link sausages for breakfast. When you’re a guest in the home of a man who once ran five family restaurants, you can count on hearty food. Greg doesn’t believe in opening a package and saving some for later. If he opens a package of sausages, he’s going to cook them all. I wonder if I can afford the calories given that I suspect our diet for the next week isn’t going to win any awards from Weight Watchers.

  The TV in the kitchen is tuned to CNN, but it’s mere background noise. Greg and Adella aren’t watching and neither am I—nor are any of the dogs. Greg has his laptop at the table and is preoccupied checking reservations for the upcoming trip. Rescue groups make reservations online for each dog being transported, much as you might book an airline ticket. Invariably there are last minute changes: dogs come down with an illness that delays their travel, someone has a last-minute addition, an adopter backs out, etc. The final passenger list will be in flux even as we are on the road.

  It’s quiet in the house, save for the TV and the sound of an occasional passing train on the tracks down the hill from the Mahles’ house. As if Zanesville didn’t already seem like a town from America’s industrial past, Greg tells me those are coal trains coming from the mines in southeast Ohio, near the West Virginia border, headed for a coal-fired electric plant to the north. Zanesville is neither a mining town nor a farming town. Though there are farms about, it straddles a space between Ohio’s coalfields to the south and east and its corn fields to the west.

  Treasure lies on the bench at the kitchen table, a long, wooden table salvaged from an old donut shop. It still has an industrial-grade cast-iron can opener bolted to one end. Harry is curled at Greg’s feet. Beans and Murphy are occupying themselves in the backyard.

  Beans is a relentless ball hound. One evening, after dinner on the patio, I tossed him the ball and he went at it in a frenzy, retrieved it, and, with a quick upward flick of his muzzle, tossed the slobber-covered ball directly into my lap. Then he backed up with rapid stutter steps, growing more and more agitated with every passing second, waiting for me to toss the ball again. By the time I picked the ball up out of my increasingly damp lap, he was quivering with anticipation so intense I thought he might explode. We repeated the process dozens of times, and had I been willing, it seemed as though he could have gone on all night.

  When Greg takes a break from his laptop, I ask him what the Sundays before he leaves are like for him.

  “I don’t dread or look forward to the Mondays when I leave,” he says. “I’m stressed. Have I taken care of all the details, so that nothing blows up on the road? The week between trips is actually more stressful for me than the week on the road. When I’m home, I feel like I have to do everything people ask of me. On the road I can say no.”

  Even on the off weeks, Greg spends anywhere between sixty to eighty hours on rescue road trips. And I’m partly to blame for a recent increase in the pressures on him. After the Parade piece was published in March 2014, Greg started getting a barrage of phone calls and emails. It seemed everyone and his brother had something they wanted from him: ideas for a reality TV show, business plans, get-rich schemes, even marriage proposals. “From women and men,” Greg wrote to me that spring. “My email has been interesting to say the least.”

  Then the Parade piece spawned a spot on The Today Show, and months later Greg was still busy trying to be polite by responding to everyone—even those he thought were just eating up his time. But he knows the publicity helps spread the word about rescue, and Greg is nothing if not the Elmer Gantry of dog rescue, preaching his gospel to anyone and everyone who wanders by his truck while he’s on road, greeting each with a hearty, “Hi, I’m Greg,” even if he’s in the middle of changing a tire or working with Tommy to get eighty dogs out one or two at a time for walks. When we were cleaning the trailer, half a dozen curious passersby wandered over, and each received a hearty Greg Mahle greeting and some words about rescue dogs. Then, he’d patiently answered their questions until their curiosity was satisfied.

  “Now that Adella isn’t working and is home, she can do more to support me,” Greg tells me, “so it’s made Mondays easier. But I don’t like leaving Adella, Connor, and the dogs. And I know, come next Saturday night, I am going to hate the lifeless feeling of the trailer after all the dogs have been dropped off.”

  • • •

  After breakfast, Greg and Adella and I attend Sunday services at their church. Greg was raised a Methodist, Adella a Catholic. They belong to the Grace Methodist Church in downtown Zanesville, a five-minute drive from their house.

  For many years, Greg stopped attending church, partly because of the seven-day workweeks he was putting in at the restaurants. But when he and Adella married, and he became a stepfather, faith once again became a priority.

  “I wanted Connor to have the childhood I had, and church was a part of that. Going together as a family brought my family closer together, and I wanted that for him. The family ritual and the memories it creates are big parts of going to church for me.

  “So I felt the need to return to the church,” Greg tells me. “I didn’t want to go back to the church I went to as a kid, and one day I was driving by Grace and saw a sign out front that they were having an early morning service the next day. The early morning services are held in the basement, because they aren’t as well attended as the later service, and Adella and Connor and I started to go.

  “I felt God was calling me home to the church,” he adds. “I needed to add religion and faith to my family. Having and practicing faith gives me comfort. And having a church to call home does too. It makes me feel good right now, today, and it makes me want to strive to be more of what God wants me to be. Practicing faith helps me to be a better person. Just like baseball practice makes you better at the game, practicing faith helps me to be better at life.”

  Greg’s dog-saving mission isn’t a religious one, but it’s informed by his Methodist faith with its tradition of helping the less fortunate.

  “God wants good things for all people and animals,” he says. “Helping a dog is God’s work, but I don’t see my work in religious terms. If I see a person who has fallen, I should help him stand up. If I see a dog that needs help standing up, I should help that dog stand up. Rescue Road Trips isn’t a religious mission; it’s just rooted in my religion—you help those in need.”

  I ask Greg: With so many children in need in this country and around the world, why dogs?

  “That’s a tough question,” he admits. “There are lots of people in need and lots of problems in the world. But you do what you can do, what you are capable of doing, and I can help dogs. And I’m helping the people who adopt them, but really it’s the dogs I’m helping. I may not be changing the world, but for each dog I help save, I’ve changed the world for that dog.

  “I try hard to be a better person,” he says. “To have more faith, to do more of what God wants me to do. There’s always room for improvement. With me, there’s a lot of room for improvement.”

  • • •

  On the eve of our departure, Adella makes spaghetti with meat sauce and the four of us—Greg, Adella, Connor, and I—eat at the kitchen table. These are really good, hardworking people, I think to myself, who value each other, hard work, and the food on their table. The life they’ve chosen, one that requires repeated separations
and reunions, isn’t an easy one, but there’s no complaining. Tomorrow will bring another separation. But now, it’s time for another helping of comfort food.

  4.“Tommy” is a pseudonym for the actual person, who requested his real name not be used.

  5.The Angels meet Greg at the Comfort Inn, but he spends the night in another motel parking lot a short distance away.

  6.The majority of rescue dogs are mixed breeds to some degree. Unless you have a DNA test done, determining breed(s) is typically an educated guess. Often the predominant breed is obvious, but since lineage is unknown, veterinary certificates for rescue dogs will often indicate “LabX” or “beagleX” and so forth, the “X” indicating a mix to some degree or other. Unlike carefully bred dogs that often have nearly identical DNA, in rescue circles there’s pride that every dog is truly unique. The motto of Mutts4rescue, a Rhode Island–based rescue organization that matches southern dogs with northern families, is “Love Knows No Pedigree.”

  2

  ON THE ROAD AGAIN

  WHEN I COME DOWNSTAIRS THE NEXT morning, Greg is standing with his fists resting on the kitchen counter. He has Popeye-like forearms and a sturdy build; he looks like a guy who could lift an ox and carry it into the next field if he had to. Of average height, about five feet nine inches, he has a round, welcoming face with cherubic pinch-me cheeks, and a full head of tousled brown hair worn relatively short. He uses drugstore reading glasses Adella buys in bulk because he’s always losing them. Today he’s wearing his warmer weather road uniform: cargo shorts, sandals, a blue “Rescue Road Trips: Saving Lives 4 Paws at a Time” T-shirt, and a tattered, beige baseball cap, adorned with the same words as his T-shirt. At the counter, he appears to be deeply contemplating a cup of coffee.

  “Usually I throw up the morning I have to leave,” he tells me. “It’s the stress. I’m usually yelling to Adella to do this and that. But today I feel unusually calm. Maybe it’s because you’re here.”

  I don’t take this as a compliment; maybe I’ve just been enough of a distraction to keep him from dwelling on what I surmise is the real source of this anxiety: leaving Adella and home yet again. Though they’ve made this separation hundreds of times, it doesn’t get easier.

  Greg’s goal is to get to the truck about 2:30 p.m., leaving several hours to attend to last-minute preparations. But this being the Mahle household, it begins with another important ritual first: a substantial breakfast of muffins, cereal, and a pound of pepper-crusted bacon. Murphy makes ten quick circles before settling into a spot on the floor; Harry makes less of a production of it, but he too has chosen a spot. Beans, as usual, is in a ball frenzy, repeatedly dropping his slobbery ball into my lap. I’ve been here three days and I’m almost out of clean shorts thanks to Beans. I don’t know where Treasure is hiding.

  After breakfast, Greg runs out to the drugstore to pick up some medications, and I watch Adella pack his bag for the week. I think I’ve packed frugally, but Adella puts me to shame. She packs three T-shirts, one pair of jeans, one pair of shorts, one towel, three pairs of reading glasses, and a couple pairs each of underwear and socks. There’s not even a change of shoes.

  It’s a warm, sunny day with a nearly cloudless sky. At midday, Adella makes a pasta salad for lunch; I rarely eat so well at home. Greg typically doesn’t eat lunch on departure days; he’s too nervous and his stomach can’t handle it. But today he feels calm enough to enjoy his wife’s cooking.

  After we cleaned the trailer on Saturday, we put about a dozen trash bags and a couple of broken-beyond-repair kennels into Greg’s white van. Today, while Greg is attending to email, Adella and I haul this trash to the curb for pick up. The last chore is the making of the sandwiches, the two-dozen (with a few extra because I am coming along this time) ham, turkey, and cheese on pita rounds sealed individually and put in a cooler to sustain Greg and Tommy for the first couple of days on the road.

  I throw my bag into the van, which we’ll drive to Mattingly’s, and say my good-byes to Connor, who is home because it’s a school holiday. I’m convinced he still isn’t happy about losing to me in chess, but to my surprise, he asks when I can come visit again.

  • • •

  The drive to Mattingly’s where the truck is parked takes less than five minutes, and we’re there around two. Adella follows us in her Subaru. As Greg checks the generators, the running lights and the tires, Adella climbs up into the small bunk at the front of the trailer and puts clean sheets and blankets on Greg’s mattress. The bunk is no place for a claustrophobe; you can’t sit up in the space and there isn’t a single window in the entire trailer. Back in the fall, Greg insisted I sleep there while he slept on the floor. There’ll be no such luck this time; after my trip to Allentown, I’m now a veteran of sorts and will be down on the floor in a sleeping bag between the kennels at night.

  While we wait for Tommy to arrive, Greg checks to make sure each kennel is tightly secured to the walls of the trailer. He asks me to put one piece of yellow duct tape and one piece of purple on each kennel; the yellow will be used to write the name of the dog in that kennel and the purple to number each kennel. Greg hasn’t fired up the generators yet, so it’s warm inside. By three fifteen, Tommy has arrived and we’re still preparing for departure. Already I need to shower which, Greg informs me, I can do when we reach Virginia on Friday, four days from now. Greg and Adella embrace and say goodbye yet again. Finally, just before three thirty, with Tommy at the wheel, we ease through the gates of Mattingly’s and jump onto Interstate 70 West, heading toward Columbus.

  The goal is to reach Bowling Green, Kentucky, this first night, but we’ll drive farther if traffic is light and we’re making good time. A mile driven today is one less mile to drive tomorrow, and it’s a long way to Alexandria, Louisiana, over a thousand miles from Zanesville. Not even a hundred yards out and Greg gets the first of the countless phone calls he receives on the road. It’s about picking up a dog slightly off our route. Greg usually tries to be accommodating and will, if he has time, make small detours to help a dog escape the South, but this trip, for the first time in months, he’s fully booked.

  For half an hour, Greg and Tommy compare notes on the respective relics that serve as their main means of transportation when they’re not in the truck, but Greg’s van seems assured of the top spot when it comes to derelict vehicles still capable of movement. Tommy extols the virtues of Walmart pork chops fried up on the stove, and then we pull off the highway in Newark, Ohio, just twenty-six miles from Zanesville, to fill up with diesel.

  When he gets back to the cab, Greg shows me the receipt. He’s taken on 146 gallons of fuel. The cost is $590 and we’ll travel about a thousand miles before we need to refuel. That’s about a dollar in diesel for every two miles, not to mention gasoline for the generators. I assume the generators are needed to keep the trailer cool in summer and warm in winter, but only the first part is completely true. Greg tells me when the outside temperature is four below zero, the body heat and breath of seventy dogs will keep the trailer at a comfortable seventy degrees. The challenge is keeping the trailer cool when they’re driving through the scorching heat of a southern summer; then, all four air-conditioning units have to be run full blast around the clock.

  When we were driving from the airport in Columbus to Zanesville a few days earlier, and Greg mentioned how broke he was when he first took Adella on a formal date, he also told me, “I could care less about money. Do I have enough food for today? If so, then I’m OK. I just want to do things that make me feel good. I get happiness from picking up the dogs and from my family. That’s all I want. I don’t give a shit about money.”

  Of course, a lot of people will profess not to care about money, even when they do. Since he’s shown me the fuel receipt, it seems as good a time as any to broach a subject I’ve been unsure how to open. Just how much money can a guy make doing this job?

  As I soon discover, the math is pretty daunting. As we roll on toward Cincinnati, I begin to get a s
ense of how expensive it is to run the rig. Greg bought the tractor used a few years ago for $20,000, sight unseen, from a man in Vermont, and he and Tommy flew to New England and drove it back. It had about 450,000 miles on it, but these trucks, he explains, can go a million miles or more before the engine needs to be rebuilt. The odometer now reads close to 800,000 miles. But he’s driving over 8,000 miles a month and the oil needs to be changed after every two to three trips. That’s over $200 a pop right there. In summer, when sizzling hot roads take their toll on the trailer tires (the tractor tires are nearly invincible), Greg averages about four tire changes per trip; an average of one tire change (which he can do in seven minutes) in cooler weather. That’s $800 in tires on every summer trip or $1,600 a month. Just after Christmas 2013, the clutch failed near Hattiesburg, Mississippi. With a trailer full of dogs, Greg was forced to idle for two days. As word spread via social media (Greg posted the news on Facebook), volunteers started to materialize to help Greg take care of the dogs. But the clutch was still a $7,000 repair. And there’s insurance of course, Tommy’s salary, Debbie’s salary, taxes, fees paid to every state the rig passes through, and dog food, though that is sometimes donated. To break even, Greg needs to transport about fifty-five dogs on a run, and there are times when he has a light load and makes the entire trip without a dollar in profit to show for it.

  How exactly does it all work? Rescue organizations make reservations online, though there are always last-minute additions and subtractions managed by phone. Debbie prints out a passenger manifest that, in a few days, will look like a line-up card created by a particularly indecisive baseball manager. Greg charges a flat fee of $185 regardless of where the dog is being picked up or dropped off, and whether it’s a five-pound Chihuahua or a hundred-pound Lab. The transport fee is part of the fee adopters pay for their dog to a rescue group such as Labs4rescue, Mutts4rescue, or Houston Shaggy Dog Rescue, the three groups that account for the lion’s share of Greg’s business. It’s slightly higher than some other dog transporters charge, but as Greg says, “When you use Rescue Road Trips, you get me. I am with your dog 24–7.”