Travels with Casey

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

  Winston Churchill famously referred to his bouts with depression as his “black dog,” a constant lurking companion that he could neither master nor rid himself of. Even the color black itself carries a negative symbolic association, which some argue could subconsciously prompt potential adopters to pass on black dogs.

  AFTER OUR morning walk through the Cherry Hill Road Recreation Center, I led Casey back to the Chalet and prepared the cabin for departure. We had three stops to make that day in Virginia. Or, I should say, we had three stops to make that day in northern Virginia. The state’s northern and southern populations make for strange bedfellows.

  First on the agenda was a meeting in Fairfax with Kimberly Zakrzewski, a stay-at-home mom who was dragged to court for allegedly breaking her county’s pooper-scooper law. From there we’d continue west and treat ourselves to an afternoon at Barrel Oak, one of an increasing number of dog-friendly wineries in America. We’d finish the day at the Flint Hill Public House and Country Inn, a pet-friendly hotel in Flint Hill, Virginia. The owners had heard about my journey and offered a free night’s stay.

  After two weeks in the Northeast with very little actual driving, Casey and I were now embarking on what felt like a real road trip. This was not good news for him. The next few weeks would test my dog’s tolerance for life on the road—we’d be rolling through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. To my credit, I tried to remedy the situation at The Big Bad Woof, a cleverly named pet store in Hyattsville, Maryland, that boasts “essentials for the socially conscious pet.” When I explained Casey’s predicament to the woman behind the counter, she suggested a frozen lamb shank and some homeopathic “calm down” medicine for dogs.

  She pointed to a shelf with bottles of drops and chewable tablets with names like Tranquility Blend, Travel Calm, Pet Calm, and Emotional Balance. I picked one at random (Travel Calm, by Vet’s Best) and noted that one of its ingredients, tryptophan, has long been associated with post–Thanksgiving turkey comas. Another ingredient, valerian root, is “purported to possess sedative and anxiolytic effects,” according to my quick iPhone Google search in the store. I’d never heard the word “anxiolytic” before, but I assumed it was a close cousin to anxiety. And Casey had plenty of that in the RV.

  Still, I was skeptical that Travel Calm would solve the issue. “I don’t suppose you sell dog tranquilizer guns?” I joked.

  Back at the motorhome, I fed Casey two chewable Travel Calm tablets, as instructed. To pass the time while I waited for the “sedative and anxiolytic effects” to kick in, I did pushups and biceps curls on the grass outside the RV. I’d been concerned about nearly four months away from the gym, so I’d purchased adjustable dumbbells and asked my trainer to develop an “RV Workout plan.”

  Though my trainer spoke romantically about my outdoor workouts at the foot of the Rockies, his plan was weighted heavily toward lunges and other laborious leg exercises. Those weren’t going to happen; the only reason I do them during our normal training sessions is because he’s there to berate me. Minus kidnapping my trainer for this journey, there was little chance I’d follow his recommendations. In fact, I’d already misplaced the paper on which he’d outlined them.

  After some painless biceps curls, I noticed that I’d missed a call from Dr. Gold, the therapist I’d visited in New York City. On my voicemail he asked me how the trip was going and added that I should feel free to call him.

  “I know our meeting brought up some feelings for you,” he said. “I’m here if you want to process anything.”

  I smiled at the sound of his voice. Though I’d thought a lot about our time together in the day or two after it, the stress and excitement of my first two weeks on the road mostly crowded out any introspection. But hearing him that morning made me stop and take stock. How was the journey going so far? How did I feel about my relationship to Casey? Had anything changed?

  The answers were muddled. On one hand, I’d felt something begin to shift almost immediately after leaving Dr. Gold’s office: I started personalizing Casey’s behavior less. He’s a dog, after all, and it’s not his job to care for my emotional needs. As I began to accept that, I was able to notice—and, occasionally, laugh at myself—when I caught myself interpreting his aloofness as proof of my unlovability.

  I also started paying more attention to what he might need. There’s a time most days (usually in the evening) when Casey wants to be petted, wants a minute of closeness and quiet time. But he doesn’t just shove his head in your lap like some dogs. Instead, he’ll stand or sit a few feet away from me, his face relaxed and content, and wait for me to read his mind.

  It’s one of the only subtle things Casey does, and if my mind is elsewhere I’m guaranteed to miss it. Other times—if I’m too busy resenting Casey for not being “the dog of my dreams”—I’ll pretend to miss it. I’d confessed this to Dr. Gold during a shame-spiral in his office.

  “What kind of terrible person acts passive-aggressively toward his dog?” I’d said. “What kind of person withholds love from a pet?”

  During our session, Dr. Gold had helped me make a connection between my behavior toward Casey and my mother’s behavior toward me. My mother was a master of withholding affection, of not picking up on my cries for attention. Even my dad, who eagerly expressed his love, wasn’t aware of the extraordinary sadness and loneliness I felt as a kid.

  With the RV ready for the road, I looked at Casey. If anything, he seemed more awake than before chewing the Travel Calm tablets. Even the lamb shank didn’t do the trick. My food-obsessed dog forgot all about it ten minutes into our drive, when a gust of wind pushed the RV onto the rumble strip. He dropped the shank and walked—head low, shoulders slumped—from under the dinette to the small space between the driver and passenger seats.

  “At least he wants to be close to you,” a friend said when I called him from the road.

  “That’s not the reason he moved,” I assured him. “This is just the smallest, most secure spot in the RV.”

  I laughed as I heard myself. “I think I might need more therapy.”

  KIM ZAKRZEWSKI was recovering from the flu when I arrived in Fairfax, and she joked—not all that inaccurately—that she looked near death. She’s also a chain-smoker, which only added to her aura of gloom.

  Soon after we arrived at Kim’s modest condo community, Casey squatted on some grass to poop. Before I could retrieve a doggie bag from my coat pocket, Kim, who wore a black jacket with a faux fur hood, handed me one from hers.

  “Wow, you’re quick,” I said.

  “Honey, I’ve got poop bags coming out of my ears!” she cackled.

  Kim retrieved Baxter, a white Westie/Bichon Frise mix, from her apartment. (The dog isn’t hers, but she walks it most days for a friend who lives in the same complex.) It was Baxter’s poop—and Kim’s alleged failure to dispose of it—that made her a household name in Fairfax.

  “All the papers and television stations covered my trial, so now I go to the bank and the teller says, ‘Oh my God, you’re the poop lady!’ ” Kim told me as we walked our dogs around her complex. It was a cold, poopy day, and Casey’s tail wagged crazily as he came upon remnants of what appeared to be a long-dead squirrel.

  (Belgian-born poet Henri Michaux correctly remarked that dogs never stop to smell a rose. “Who understands the menu of stink better?” he wondered in his 1950 book, Passages. “These innocents come back to our sides without skipping a beat, full of affection and radiating a clear conscience.”)

  Kim pointed to a second-floor window next door to her unit. “That’s where they live,” she whispered. By they, Kim meant sisters Virginia and Christine Cornell, who in 2011 snapped photographs from that very window in an attempt to prove that Kim had failed to pick up Baxter’s droppings, as mandated by Fairfax County’s pooper-scooper law.

  The case ended up in court, where a jury of Kim’s peers listened as the sisters accused her of numerous indignities. According to an interview they
gave to The Washington Post, Kim would let “the dog poop on purpose because she knew it annoyed us” and had “no respect or regard for anyone else and views herself as above the law.”

  The sisters produced photographs of Kim walking Baxter, as well as images of the allegedly offending poops, which they’d taken while surreptitiously tailing Kim and Baxter from the cover of trees and bushes. Christine testified that during their surveillance, “not once during these three days did [Kim] bend down or did she produce a doggie bag,” adding that “every time she has the white dog, poop appears around our building.”

  The defense countered that while the prosecution had photographs of Kim walking the dog, as well as pictures of unidentified dog poop, they had no pictures of Baxter actually pooping. (The words “poop” and “pooping” were bandied about in court. “Will it offend you if I use the word ‘poop’?” the commonwealth’s attorney asked the jury early in the day.)

  During cross-examination, Kim’s lawyer pressed Christine about whether she had “any pictures of the dog going to the restroom.”

  “Do dogs really use the bathroom?” the judge interjected, causing snickering in the courtroom.

  The attorney soldiered on. “How do you know the pile of poop you took pictures of was the one [Baxter produced]?”

  “You can tell fresh dog poop,” Christine insisted. “It’s that simple. Old poop dries. There was a moist appearance to it.”

  There was considerable testimony about Baxter’s diet, with the defense contending that the droppings in the photographs were much too large to have been produced by a nineteen-pound dog.

  “Looks like a horse’s poop,” Baxter’s owner, Michelle Berman, testified. “There’s no way that came out of my dog.”

  Michelle offered to present a sample of Baxter’s droppings for comparison (she had some in her car), but the judge quipped that Michelle probably wouldn’t get it past security.

  As the day went on, the jury learned that this poop-related dispute wasn’t really about poop at all. Kim and the sisters had been feuding for years. Police had been called to the complex a handful of times over accusations of slashed tires and damaged doormats, and in 2008 the sisters had filed an unsuccessful complaint charging Kim with reckless driving. They claimed she had tried to run them over.

  In the end, the jury in the poop case took only twenty minutes to side with Kim. “I joke about what’s happened,” Kim told me, “but I still get panic attacks about living here. People tell me that I should just move, but this is my home, and why should I let them run me out?”

  As we spoke, two women scurried across the complex parking lot to their car. “Oh my God, that’s them,” Kim whispered again. Casey pulled at the leash; he wanted to say hello to the sisters.

  “Trust me, they don’t like your kind,” Kim told Casey with a laugh. She turned to face me as the sisters ducked into their car. “They’ll probably drive really slow to check you out.”

  Kim was right—the sisters craned their necks to get a good look at us as they rolled through the lot. I would have liked to get their side of the story, but they hadn’t responded to my requests for comment.

  Kim’s apartment complex isn’t the only one in Virginia with poop issues. In its coverage of the case, The Washington Post pointed out that two other area properties had taken a hard line against scoop-defiant dog owners. PooPrints, a service of BioPet Vet Lab in Tennessee, allows building property managers to take a DNA swab of each dog living in a complex. When droppings are found on property grounds, they’re sent to the lab and matched to the offending dog.

  According to BioPet (which, to be sure, has a dog in this fight), 38 percent of canine waste in America is waiting to be stepped on, or absorbed into the atmosphere. One study of air quality in Midwestern cities like Cleveland and Detroit found that “fecal matter, most likely dog feces, often represents an unexpected source of bacteria in the atmosphere at more urbanized locations during the winter.”

  But irresponsible dog owners aren’t confined to the Upper Midwest. Even John Zeaman, the New Jersey writer who authored Dog Walks Man, admits to being part of the problem. “I don’t always pick up,” he bravely confesses in print. “I know this raises character questions. My wife will be horrified that I am making such a public admission.”

  AFTER ALL that poop talk, I needed a drink. Fortunately, we weren’t far from Delaplane, Virginia, which claims to have more wineries than any other zip code on the East Coast.

  I was skeptical of Virginia wine. Truth be told, I’d never heard of Virginia wine. Raised in San Francisco by a French mother, I grew up on imports from Bordeaux and the Rhône and Loire Valleys, and local reds from nearby Sonoma and Napa.

  I pulled the RV into Barrel Oak’s 270-acre property, on which sits the boyhood home of former chief justice John Marshall. On a gravel road, we passed a sign that set the tone for our afternoon: Slow Please—Dogs, Kids & Winemakers at Play.

  Casey and I bounded out of the motorhome and were met by a friendly eleven-year-old Hungarian Vizsla named Birch. The slender brown and white dog “just showed up one day,” according to Sharon Roeder, who opened Barrel Oak in 2008 with her husband, Brian, a big bearded man who looks just like actor Bruce McGill. (McGill is best known for playing the role of Jack Dalton in MacGyver—and, when he was younger, D-Day in Animal House.)

  “We think Birch was a farm dog from around here who was used to fending for himself,” Sharon shouted in the winery’s tank room over the roar of a power washer used to clean empty wine barrels. “He would come over and hang out on the patio and play with the dogs and mooch people’s picnics, though I haven’t found his snout in a wineglass yet.”

  Brian and Sharon used to shoo Birch out at night, but at one point he just stopped leaving. “He totally adopted us,” Sharon said.

  In Barrel Oak’s spacious tasting room, Brian poured me a glass of the winery’s 2010 Chardonnay Reserve, which only months earlier had received the highest prize at the San Francisco Chronicle International Wine Competition. From my spot at the tasting bar, I could see a black Lab lounging by the fire and a Beagle pitter-pattering around his owner’s booted feet near the patio. Across the room, Casey and Birch jockeyed for position on a leather couch near a wooden beam with signs that read, Dogs have many friends because they wag their tails instead of their tongues, and If Cats could talk, they wouldn’t.

  “The amazing thing about welcoming dogs is how they fundamentally shift the energy,” Brian explained. “When dogs are here, people just open up more and talk to each other. We’ve really tried to reach out to dog lovers, because they bring the energy we want.”

  Some five thousand dogs have come through Barrel Oak’s doors since 2008. The winery specifically targets dog organizations and has hosted fundraisers for breed rescue groups. Brian told me about the day the winery hosted eighty Golden Retrievers and twenty Great Danes—at the same time.

  “The owners of the two breeds were so different,” he said, smiling as he recounted the story. “The Great Dane people”—he tensed his body and widened his eyes—“were all very austere, serious, kind of freaked-out personalities.” To imitate the Golden owners, he waved his arms and wagged his tongue like a hyper ten-year-old.

  Just then, Birch, who’d been balancing precariously with his front legs on a coffeetable and his back legs on the couch, tumbled over and crashed to the floor with a thud. He bounced up quickly, but not before a visitor joked, “How much has he had to drink?”

  A decade ago, dogs in a tasting room would have been unthinkable. But an increasing number of new wineries, many of them targeting young professionals, have quite literally gone to the dogs. In California alone, there’s Punk Dog, Dog House, Weener’s Leap, and Mutt Lynch, which features whimsical illustrations of dogs on its wines, and names like “Unleashed” and “Canis Major.”

  Though there’s always a risk of alienating wine enthusiasts who dislike dogs, Brian and others says it’s one worth taking. “I can pretty confident
ly say that if we weren’t as dog-friendly as we are, we’d have a failed business here,” he said. “Yes, our wine speaks for itself. But you need to get people through the door. By reaching out to dog lovers, we’ve been able to do that.”

  Later that afternoon, as Casey and I prepared to hit the road again, Brian offered me one last glass. It would have been my third, and if I wasn’t such a lightweight I might have accepted it.

  “It’s a kind gesture,” I told him. “But I have enough trouble driving the RV when I’m sober.”

  “OH LA vache!” I screamed a few minutes later on a quiet country road, as we drove past the first cows of our journey.

  I’m unusually drawn to cows. During my summer travels around France as a kid, I would scream “Oh la vache!” every time we passed some in the countryside. Usually I’d demand that we stop to say hello. This proved impossible if we were in a train, but my mom would sometimes humor me if we were traveling by car.

  “Oh la vache!” means “Oh the cow!,” but the French use the expression to convey surprise. “Oh la vache!” essentially means “Holy shit!” As a ten-year-old, saying “Oh la vache!” allowed me to cuss without technically cussing. It was the one upside I could see at the time to my rigorous bilingual education.

  Casey and I pulled over and crossed the two-lane road to get a better look at the herd. The black, brown, and white cows were busy eating from a trough in the shade at the bottom of a sloped field. The trough was only a few yards from the road, and as we approached a chipped orange stock gate that separated them from us, the smell of manure overpowered us. Or, I should say, overpowered me. It probably didn’t bother Casey.