I’ve gotten pictures and know a little about some of the dogs who, in the next two days, will begin a journey that will change their lives—and the lives of their adopting families—forever. There’s Tennessee, a three-year-old yellow Lab mix who lived with a homeless man under a highway overpass for two years before his owner surrendered him to a shelter, hoping he’d find a way to a better life. (Ages are estimates based on overall appearance and indicators such as tooth wear and tartar buildup.) There’s Trudy, a deaf and blind Catahoula mix, and her close companion, Popcorn, a Hound mix, both pulled from a high-kill shelter in Alexandria, and Bijou, a two-year-old beagle mix, a stray pulled from the Saint Martin Parish Animal Services shelter, also in Louisiana. And there’s Willis, described to me by his foster mom and Kathy Wetmore, his rescuer in Houston, as the world’s happiest little dog. The day after tomorrow, we’ll start picking up these and about seventy-five others, and the trailer will spring to life. But right now, it has the feel of a theater set waiting to be populated by the actors.
All day I’ve been focused on learning as much as I can from Greg about operating Rescue Road Trips and getting a sense of the rhythms of his bifurcated life. Now I’m starting to imagine the trailer filling up with dogs, each with a story to tell, most of which will remain a mystery. Every stray dog has a past; maybe it even included a family. But if no one claims her, no one will ever know. A dog left tied to a fence or dropped in a Dumpster had a life, but one no one will ever know the details. If dogs could talk, oh the stories they’d tell. It takes a while but around one in morning, a couple of hours after Greg has fallen quickly into a deep sleep, I finally drift off myself.
• • •
At six the next morning, Tuesday, I wake up and crack the side door to the trailer. It’s light out, so I grab my shaving kit and wander through canyons of tractor-trailers to the truck stop’s main building which houses a large convenience store, a TV room, laundry facilities, a Denny’s restaurant, and thankfully, restrooms.
As I walk in past guys with beer bellies testing the limits of their T-shirts; scrawny guys with greasy NASCAR caps, sunglasses, and tattoos; and a surprising number of women truckers, I feel like a foreigner in my own country. I’m sure it’s obvious to everyone that I’ve never been to a truck stop in my life, especially because my Teva sneakers, shorts, and Ithaca College T-shirt, all betray the fact that I’m in unfamiliar territory. From the looks of it, I may also be the only one who has ever carried a shaving kit to a truck stop restroom.
Greg and Tommy are being so generous letting me tag along that I’m determined not to cause them a minute’s delay if I can help it. So I quickly take my medications and brush my teeth. On my way out to the truck, I pass Greg on the way in. I’m relieved. The last thing I want to see is him behind the wheel, Tommy in the passenger seat, both looking at their watches saying, “Where the hell is that guy?”
By six thirty, Greg is back behind the wheel, and we’re driving west on Interstate 40 toward Memphis.
• • •
When Greg is driving, Tommy is usually glued to his droid, playing video games on the tiny screen. Sometimes, Greg tells him to stop, get in the bunk, and rest up so he can drive safely when Greg tires. When Tommy drives and Greg isn’t taking calls or posting to Facebook, he spends much of the time gazing out the window, lost in his thoughts until I interrupt his peace with yet another question, which he generally tolerates well. In fact, he seems happy for some relief from the boredom; it’s not as if he’s admiring scenery he’s never seen before. I ask him about the dangers of driving so many miles.
“I’ve had a lot of close calls on the road,” he says. “Been cut off many times. One time, coming west on 84 in Connecticut, there was a crash in the eastbound lane and I suddenly saw a tire hurtling through the air, coming right at me, and it just missed.”
Obviously he can’t control what other drivers do, but he can control how safely he operates. He can sleep or catnap while Tommy drives and makes sure Tommy gets the rest he needs. Though he is dubious about its effectiveness at preventing sleepiness, he drinks lots of coffee and at night sleeps soundly. If both men are too tired, they pull off the road and sleep; they know their limits.
But of all the hazards beyond their control, weather is the most worrisome. “I’ve seen it rain sideways in Texas and snow in Louisiana,” he tells me. “Interstate 10 was shut down. People were so excited, they were making snowmen on the median strip.”
It can be especially bad in the winter in the South because road crews are ill prepared for snow and ice. Greg was stuck in northern Alabama for twelve hours once when the roads iced over. And a Virginia blizzard once stopped him for three full days on Interstate 81.
Greg didn’t have the large trailer then, so he was driving a box truck with thirty-six dogs, all Labs. He thought he could get ahead of the storm, but near Staunton he was forced off the road and into a truck stop; it was too dangerous to go on.
“My first concern was safety and staying alive,” he tells me about the harrowing conditions on the highway. “So at first I was relieved when we got into the truck stop. But I had no idea we’d be stuck for three days.” The storm was so bad, the highway was closed.
Greg always has about a week’s worth of food on board, so that wasn’t a concern, and the body heat and breath of the dogs kept the truck warm enough for him to sleep in a T-shirt. But the snow was hip deep and getting the dogs out to pee and poop was arduous. Eventually, they wore narrow trails through the snow, just wide enough to walk the dogs one at a time. But his only pair of boots got waterlogged and then froze solid when he left them near the door.
The other worry, of course, is the health and safety of the dogs. Greg has transported well over thirty thousand dogs from the South. Only once did a dog have to go to a vet. When he reached Allentown on a trip about six years ago, he noticed one of the dogs seemed lethargic. It could barely stand up and walked as if it were drunk. One of the Allentown Angels who worked as a veterinary technician took the dog to the vet, where it was diagnosed with diabetic shock.
Inevitably, dogs have died on transport too, but of the thirty thousand plus dogs he’s transported over the years, only five didn’t make it. Even dogs that meet all legal health requirements for transport, and Greg’s higher standards, can have undiagnosed ailments that don’t manifest until they’re on transport. And Greg believes good screening by the rescue groups he works with and his own attention to the dogs’ comfort and happiness contribute to the extremely low mortality rate.9
As we roll on toward Memphis, we pass signs advertising Loretta Lynn’s Ranch and Kitchen and the Bucksnort Trout Ranch. By 10:00 a.m., we’ve passed Memphis and less than half an hour later, cross the Mississippi border on Interstate 55 South headed for Jackson. It’s an overcast day, a blessing for Greg and Tommy, since it’s much easier than driving with the sun beating through the large windshield.
• • •
Late in the morning, Greg gets an email from Kathy Wetmore of Houston Shaggy Dog Rescue, the woman who once saved Greg and Adella from bankruptcy by paying for a very expensive new clutch for his truck. Marvin, a three-year-old dachshund mix, has a slight cough and can’t travel this week. Kathy is, rightly so, an absolute stickler about such things. I know this means a single young woman in New York City, Anna Wright, is going to be deeply disappointed. A few days earlier, I’d spoken with Anna by phone. She made her decision to rescue a dog after seeing the piece about Greg on The Today Show.
“It just tugged at my heartstrings,” she told me. When she saw a picture of Marvin online, she thought his “little face was the sweetest thing I ever saw.” Marvin was a day or two away from being euthanized when Kathy pulled him from the shelter operated by Houston’s Bureau of Animal Regulation and Care, or BARC. Marvin’s owner surrendered him, perhaps because he had contracted a severe case of heartworm, which, though thoroughly preventable, can be difficult and costly to treat. Kathy assumed that responsibility and the expe
nse before she put Marvin up for adoption.
“Marvin will make my apartment my home,” Anna told me, “not just the place I go to at night. He’ll be my family. He’ll be my partner in crime.”
Late cancellations are par for the course, and Greg takes the news in stride. But once again, it’s the uncertainty surrounding how many dogs Keri wants on this transport that’s causing Greg to worry. In addition to about a half-dozen Labs4rescue dogs, Keri calls Greg and says she now needs an additional thirty slots for dogs bound for a big adoption event to be held the coming Sunday in Warwick, Rhode Island. Keri adopts out a lot of dogs through Mutts4rescue, which is based in the state.
“You just never know exactly how many dogs you’re going to have until you get there,” Greg says to me, “there” meaning the pick-up points in the South. “We always make it work somehow, but I’m very stressed out about it. Some weeks I’m stressed because we have a light load, which means we may not break even. Other weeks, we have a heavy load, like this week, and I’m stressed about how we’re going to manage it. It’s very hard to hit the sweet spot in between.”
In a pinch, there are a few extra kennels holding supplies that can be pressed into service, and some larger kennels can accommodate two dogs, but at the moment, it appears there are going to be nearly ninety dogs on this trip, including the thirty Keri wants to send to Rhode Island. Greg knows Marvin won’t be the only last-minute cancellation, but right now he’s like a man possessed with a Rubik’s Cube, trying to solve the puzzle of ninety dogs and about eighty kennels in his head, a puzzle made more complex because he hasn’t seen the dogs and won’t know how many of the passengers will be large breeds, such as Labs, small breeds such as dachshunds, or medium-size breeds such as griffons. There will also be a mix of older dogs and puppies. It’s like three-dimensional chess.
“Ideally, I want one dog in one right-sized kennel, but some weeks you just have to improvise,” he says. Siblings, and there are usually several, can typically share a larger crate without difficulty, but there are no hard-and-fast rules if some dogs need to share a kennel. They may even be switched around en route, to give those riding in pairs more room for part of the journey. “I will not just put a couple of dogs in a kennel,” Greg tells me. “I will make sure each one is comfortable.”
People picking up their dogs in the Northeast often expect to see a sparkling clean trailer, an equally fluffy and clean dog, and perhaps even a clean-shaven and freshly showered Greg Mahle. That’s simply impossible with sixty to eighty dogs on the road for three to four days. And some think having dogs share a kennel is cruel. But every dog you can get on transport makes room in a foster home or a no-kill shelter for another dog that might otherwise die. However, Greg is not trying to squeeze on every dog he can, and he won’t transport a dog if he doesn’t think it can be made comfortable. There are just some weeks, and this in one of them, when the load is a bit heavy and he has people pleading with him to take one more. So if it means that some dogs have to bunk up for a couple days to ensure that others can live and hopefully make it to forever families too, Greg is willing to do it.
“You just have to live with uncertainty,” he says, “and have faith on each run it will work out.” Although it “somehow always works out in the end,” it isn’t helping Greg’s high blood pressure at the moment. He tries to focus on Friday night, three days away, when his bonding with the dogs will be complete and he will have reached Allentown with Gotcha Day just hours away.
• • •
At midday, the overcast Mississippi sky of the morning gives way to clear skies and fluffy white clouds. Kathy Wetmore texts that Houston, where we are headed tomorrow after the first pickups in Alexandria, has been hit by severe weather that caused extensive flooding and some road closures. That weather is now headed east into Louisiana, where we will be in just a few hours.
“It’s rain, not a hurricane,” says Greg, “so I assume the interstate [Interstate 10, which runs east-west across southern Louisiana and into Texas] hasn’t been closed.” But Greg knows severe weather can mean heavy wind gusts: if they are coming straight on, it’s not a big problem; if they are coming sideways, it’s manageable; but winds gusting at an angle to the rig “will have you hanging on to the wheel,” he tells me.
By the time we reach the tiny town of Waterproof, Louisiana, the skies have grown eerily black and the rain is pounding down. Waterproof is getting drenched. The view out the windshield, the wipers flapping madly, looks like something out of Storm Chasers. Fortunately, the predicted winds and hail fail to materialize and the rain eventually relents, but it’s a reminder that Greg is very much at the mercy of the elements, whether it’s the heat and severe weather of the sultry South in summer, or the ice and snow of the Northeast in winter.
Right around 6:00 p.m., we reach the truck stop outside Alexandria where we’ll spend the night. Greg has done all the driving today, 586 miles, and he’s beat. He takes a call from Keri, who still can’t give him a final count even though we start loading first thing in the morning. But, she assures him, most are puppies and can share kennels. Even without the final count, Greg knows every kennel will be full this run, only his second full load in the past five months.
Before bed, we shoot the breeze for a little while. He tells me if it weren’t for Adella and Connor, he could happily live his life on the road full-time. And I discover he finds many of my questions, designed to help me understand and organize the opaque world of canine rescue, miss the point. It’s a community so diffuse, so random, and so chaotic, and rescue work is done in so many different ways by so many different people and organizations, it’s impossible to generalize about.
Shortly after nine thirty, Greg climbs into his bunk. Tommy’s been asleep for two hours in the cab. For the second night, I lay my sleeping bag on the hard floor wedged into the twenty-eight-inch-wide aisle running down the middle of the trailer between the two rows of kennels stacked two and three high. When I turn my head to the side, my nose is about three inches from one of the kennels. It’s not nearly as comfortable as it sounds.
By this time tomorrow night this cocoon, infused with the hum of the air-conditioners and the thrum of the generators, will be alive with dozens of barking, whining, and crying dogs. But, if the one night I spent on the road with Greg the previous fall was any indication, all will settle down soon enough, and we’ll fall together into a peaceful sleep.
7.Since my travels with Greg, his route and some of the stops have changed, as they do from time to time, to respond to increasing or decreasing demand.
8.More and more states are banning the use of gas chambers to euthanize dogs.
9.Assuming 30,000 dogs and five fatalities, that’s a mortality rate of .00002 percent. To look at it the other way, it means Greg has safely delivered more than 99.98 percent of the dogs he has transported.
3
ALL ABOARD
WE’RE UP AT SIX THIRTY THE NEXT MORNing and make the short drive from Alexandria to Pineville to pick up Keri Toth’s dogs.10 It’s warm and humid; the skies are heavy and threatening. The exact number of dogs Keri will have on transport is still unknown and Greg is in high dudgeon. He loves Keri and admires her deep commitment to saving dogs, but she doesn’t make his life easy.
The problem is that there are a fixed number of kennels and many dogs to be picked up down the road. Keri’s indecision means Greg has no idea how many dogs she plans to board, how many he’ll have all told, and how he’s going to get them all on board and in circumstances that will be comfortable for them and for the other dogs he’s picking up. Experience tells him he’ll figure it out, but it’s still stressful each time he has to go through this. He also knows from experience that Keri will be organizing the necessary paperwork at the last minute. He’s concerned it’s all going to add up to a delay that will cause him to run late all day and there will be people and dogs waiting in Baytown, Texas, our next stop.
Shortly after 7:00 a.m., we pull into a Pizza Hut
parking lot across from the Haas Animal Hospital, the staging area for loading the truck. After two nights on the road with an empty trailer, I’m excited to start meeting the dogs and seeing how Greg manages the morning’s chaos with Keri. The predictability of traveling with two human beings is about to be irrevocably altered by the exhilarating unpredictability of traveling with dozens of dogs. The ride south has given me a chance to ask Greg countless questions about his work, but now the action is about to begin.
Some of the dogs have been staying at the clinic for several days, some have been brought from foster homes, and others collected the day before from the public animal shelter in Alexandria, where they’d been given a reprieve pending adoption.
The first dog to board is Tippi, a tiny two-year-old shih tzu. Greta Jones, a local volunteer with the Humane Society of Central Louisiana (HSCL), of which Keri is president, brings her to the side door of the trailer.11
Greta hands me her iPhone and asks me to take a picture of her and Tippi. Tippi has lived with Greta for a year, and Greta’s eyes fill with tears as she hands the dog up to Greg. I’m sorry for her. Tippi, on the other hand, seems unfazed and doesn’t resist or squirm. This parting is far harder on Greta than on the dog she fostered.
It’s my first hint of the emotional investment people like Greta make in this work. Greta fosters several dogs at a time, and like many who foster, she clearly faces the pain of this separation repeatedly. But it’s what they endure to save the lives of these dogs. The good news is that Greta knows Tippi is headed to a forever family in Rhode Island who will love her deeply. When Greg puts her in one of the small kennels at the front of the trailer, she scratches at the metal mesh door, the first sign that she’s upset. Does she know she’s saying good-bye to Greta? Can she sense her grief? Or does she just want out of the kennel? I have no idea, but the scene is heartbreaking and inspiring at the same time.
Rescue Road Page 6