Travels with Casey

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

  I pulled off Route 90 into Marfa’s Tumble In RV Park, which was deserted except for an orange and white 1962 Mobile Scout trailer that served as its unmanned office. A sign explained that guests were to leave cash, a check, or credit card information in an envelope and drop it in the payment box. Call it the Far West Texas honor system.

  I took Casey for a walk toward nearby train tracks, but we couldn’t get far without stepping on goathead thorns, or what some locals call Texas sandburs. I pulled two of the small, prickly white thorns from Casey’s paws (and dozens from the bottom of my shoes) before cursing the plant, cutting our walk short, and returning to the RV.

  The sun was about to set, so I drove us a few miles east of town to the Marfa Lights Viewing Area, which is centered around a clay-colored circular structure and a large patio facing southwest, toward the Chinati Mountains. I parked the Chalet on the side of the road, some thirty yards behind the only other vehicle there, an absurdly long motorhome occupied by a couple from New Jersey (and their cat).

  I introduced myself by asking for a favor. “Might you have a bottle opener I can borrow?” I said, standing on the pavement by their driver-side window with a chilled Corona in my right hand. I’d somehow managed to lose two bottle openers during my journey, but I was hellbent on drinking a beer while watching this sunset—and, with any luck, spotting the Marfa Lights—from the roof of the RV. (During his time on the road with me, Sam had made a habit of climbing up the motorhome’s back ladder and drinking up there with his shirt off.)

  “I’m not sure I can, in good conscience, lend my bottle opener to a Corona drinker,” said the jokester from New Jersey, as his cat stared blankly at me from her sprawled-out position on the dashboard. “Corona’s not real beer.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” his wife interjected, playfully swatting her husband on the shoulder from the passenger seat. She disappeared for a few seconds before returning with an opener.

  “Have you guys ever seen the lights?” I asked.

  “Never,” the man said. “We’ve been to this part of Texas a lot—we love how peaceful it is. We’ve spent a few nights here over the years and never had any luck.”

  He leaned out the window and pointed toward the southwest horizon, in the direction of Mitchell Flat and Route 67. “They’ll be over there, if we see them tonight,” he went on, cracking open a dark beer of his own. “You’ll also see car lights, and sometimes people think those are the Marfa Lights—but those aren’t them.”

  “When do they usually appear?”

  “I’ve heard some people say that if you don’t see them an hour or two after dark, then you won’t,” he said. “Other people say you should stick around until eleven. But I’m usually passed out drunk by then.”

  The lights have been a source of intrigue since at least the late 1800s, when settlers wondered if they might be caused by Apache campfires. In the years since, as the lights have drawn tourists from all over the world, dozens of theories have been proposed to explain the mystery—“from scientific to science fiction,” according to a plaque in the viewing area. “Some believe the lights are an electrostatic discharge, swamp gases, moonlight shining on veins of mica, or ghosts of conquistadors searching for gold,” the plaque goes on to explain.

  Armed with two Coronas and a hastily arranged cheese plate, I climbed up the Chalet’s back ladder to do my own Marfa Lights investigating. First, though, I was struck by less mysterious natural wonders—a rainbow to the southeast, and, minutes later, what writer Michael Hall once described as “one of those alarming West Texas sunsets, the kind that looks like somewhere the world is coming to a fiery end.” Through distant electrical lines, the horizon looked bright orange, red, and, further up in the night sky, dark purple.

  I spent the next two hours on top of the RV, staring out into the quiet, starry night. It was chilly now that the sun had set, so I pulled my sweatshirt hood over my head and stuffed my hands in my jean pockets. Every once in a while I would see what I presumed to be car headlights in the distance on Route 67, but I didn’t see any lights dancing, breaking apart, or melting together, as those who have spotted the mysterious sight report.

  WHAT I did see while sitting in silence on the roof of my motorhome, what kept flashing in my mind’s eye, were images from my visit two days earlier to San Antonio’s largest shelter, Animal Care Services. Though I’d somehow managed the drive to Marfa without tearing up at the memory of my time in the shelter’s euthanasia room, the honeymoon was over.

  Back in 2004, Animal Care Services had been named the country’s deadliest. “Simply entering virtually assures an animal’s doom,” the San Antonio Express-News wrote at the time.

  The shelter had made remarkable progress since then, working with outside rescue groups—including San Antonio Pets Alive! or SAPA!—to increase adoptions. The shelter hoped to get its euthanasia rate (30 percent at the time of my visit) down even further and join Austin as a no-kill community, one that euthanizes only vicious or severely ill animals.

  If it weren’t for the outdoor livestock area, Animal Care Services could be mistaken for a large, modern elementary school. There are ten one-story buildings spread over several acres, and the shelter has plenty of grass and open space. My tour guide for the afternoon was shelter spokeswoman Lisa Norwood, who pointed toward a big brown horse standing in an outdoor corral.

  “Welcome to Texas,” she said, “where we get calls about stray horses literally walking down a street.” Animal Care Services routinely rescues animals you might not expect: two weeks before my visit, it had taken in a stray potbelly pig.

  A colony of feral cats also lived on the property. “If you see kitties, don’t worry—they’re not escapees,” Lisa said with a smile. “They’re kind of all over the place, so I always have to point it out to visitors because they think the cats have just escaped.”

  Lisa saved the hardest part of the tour for last. When we entered the open-air euthanasia room (known as the EBI, for euthanasia by injection), a male employee was injecting a sedated white Pit Bull with sodium pentobarbital solution on one of three stainless steel injection tables. At the end of the row of tables, a conveyor belt led to the back of a dump truck. (Normally the shelter cremates dogs in an on-site crematory, but when the crematory needs maintenance, euthanized dogs are transported to a landfill instead.) Next to the conveyor belt, six dogs waited in crates on the epoxy-coated floor.

  Ellen Jefferson, the founder of SAPA! and Austin Pets Alive!, stood with her back to the injection tables cradling a tiny black puppy in her arms. The six-week-old dog had distemper and was having trouble breathing, and though one of his siblings seemed to be recovering from the illness in foster care, this dog wasn’t going to make it.

  “We’re going to have to put her down,” Ellen told me, unusual words from a woman who has devoted most of her adult life to keeping dogs and cats alive.

  I looked back at the Pit Bull, now dead. It had been friendly and healthy, I was told, but it had the misfortune of being a big dog—and a Pit Bull, no less—on a day when neither Animal Care Services nor SAPA! had space for her.

  “I don’t have room for any big dogs today,” SAPA!s Holly Livermore told me earlier in the group’s small shelter office, where fifteen dogs she’d already saved from that day’s euthanasia list waited to be transported to foster homes or off-site adoption sites. All the dogs weighed less than thirty-five pounds, including an adorable black and brown Shepherd mix I’d taken to the shelter play area.

  “You sure you don’t have room for one more in your RV?” Lisa said, noticing how much I liked the dog.

  Small dogs have two advantages when it comes to staying alive in America’s shelters: they take up less space, and they’re more likely to get adopted quickly. “There are so many great big dogs that we can’t save in San Antonio,” Holly told me. “I basically have to look at them and then look away, because if you look into their eyes too long, it’s too much to handle.”

  Like
many other Southern communities, San Antonio has a pet overpopulation problem. Lisa estimated that some 150,000 dogs roam the city at any one time. Despite their effectiveness in other areas, spay and neuter campaigns are sometimes met with resistance in some parts of the South, where, as writer Hal Herzog put it, people “don’t like restrictions on their dogs any more than they like zoning, gun control, or laws that keep you from carting little children around in the back of an open pickup truck.”

  Most adoptable dogs in Northern shelters, particularly in the Northeast, have been saved from Southern states and trucked or flown in by a vast and dedicated army of rescue groups. But those groups can’t save every adoptable animal, including the six crated dogs in the Animal Care Services EBI. They were big animals—Labs, Pit Bulls, mixed breeds. Most had been found roaming the streets of San Antonio.

  “They’re not what you’d consider hardened street dogs,” Lisa explained. “They’re just dogs who happen to roam the streets because their owners let them. When the dogs get picked up, no one comes to claim them. It’s sad, because most are sweet as can be.”

  I knelt down in front of their crates and made the mistake of looking into their eyes. Two wagged their tails at me. One, a skinny young Pit Bull mix with a cut on her face, lifted her left paw, as if to say “Hello? Good-bye? Please don’t let them kill me.” Two of the dogs were owner-surrenders, meaning their caretakers had dropped them off at the shelter. I’d watched a dozen people relinquish their dogs to Animal Care Services. They all had their reasons—lost jobs, impending moves, husbands who didn’t want the dog around anymore. Some cried as they handed over their pets. Others didn’t. One said she’d happened to find the dog on the street, that it was a stray. But the shelter staff suspected she was lying.

  SAPA! and other rescue groups do their best to convince folks not to leave their dogs at the shelter, offering everything from low-cost health care options to dog behavior resources. Many people who surrender their dogs don’t know the basics of what a dog needs to be happy and healthy; they’re ignorant about canine “health, behavior, and nutrition,” Michael Schaffer writes in One Nation Under Dog. In a summary of owner-surrender studies, Schaffer found that “people giving up their pets displayed a degree of ignorance about animal brains, like believing they misbehaved out of spite.”

  When a teary, middle-aged Hispanic woman had brought in a mange-ridden black mutt, I watched as Holly promised that SAPA! would help pay for the dog’s medical expenses if the woman would reconsider. She wouldn’t.

  “If we were in Austin, I would take this dog in a heartbeat,” Holly told me. “We have an awesome medical facility in Austin, an awesome foster base. Mangys are my favorite kinds because you can turn them around, you can get them healthy and feeling better. But I can’t save this dog today. I just can’t.”

  Holly turned toward the dog, who was lying on the porcelain tile floor, looking both pathetic and, somehow, proud. It had, after all, survived a family that had practically let it die. “I just can’t,” Holly said again, seemingly trying to convince herself that she would need to give up on this one.

  In the EBI, the next dog to die was a black Lab. A stray, he looked a bit like Blind of Arden, a slender and athletic retrieving marvel who appeared on the cover of Life back in 1938. Two shelter employees lifted the sedated animal onto the table, rolled him onto his side, and injected him with a dose of lethal serum. One of the men, reacting to an unrelated joke his colleague had uttered, laughed as he stuck the needle into the dog. The joke, the laughter—maybe they were necessary coping tools for those who kill healthy dogs for a living.

  I found it impossibly cruel that the crated dogs had perfect views of the conveyer belt. Every few minutes, a canine corpse in a garbage bag would roll past the Death Row dogs, slowly, like a roller coaster car climbing to its first peak.

  I spent a minute standing there, trying to figure out if the dogs understood their fate. Did they realize what was in those bags? Did they know they would be next? French philosopher Paul Valéry once wrote that “animals, which do nothing useless, don’t contemplate death.” I don’t know. I doubt they contemplate death, but maybe they know it when they see it?

  Somehow, I’d managed to keep it together until that moment, but I could only fake that I was okay for so long. I felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to vomit; I wanted to cry. I wasn’t sure which one—tears, vomit—might come out of my body first. Keep it together, I told myself. You’re a professional. I felt my knees buckle. Was I going to faint? Keep it together. Act like you’re in control of yourself.

  I took a deep breath. I looked at the dogs. I could save them all, I thought to myself. I could open their crates, and they could make a run for it. Or, better yet, I could pack these dogs with me in the RV. I could be their savior. I could throw myself in front of their crates and refuse to move, a one-man protest of the heartless killing of dogs whose only crime was weighing more than thirty-five pounds on that late March afternoon in San Antonio.

  But I didn’t know anything about these dogs. They looked harmless in their crates, waving their paws meekly at me. Would it be practical to take them with me? Could I just take one? If so, how would I choose? What if I picked the wrong dog? What if the dog didn’t get along with Casey? Would I then have to surrender the dog to another shelter? And how much time would Animal Care Services allow me to decide? They had a schedule to keep, more dogs to kill. What if I got Ellen’s and Lisa’s hopes up and then changed my mind, decided I couldn’t take a dog? After all, I had a trip to finish, a book to write, a dog of my own to love.

  I heard myself asking Lisa if we could leave. She said we could. I abandoned the dogs and staggered out of the EBI. I made my way toward the front, where the mangy owner-surrender was still resting on the floor. Holly and a coworker sat next to the dog, petting her. They couldn’t save her, could they? Could they make room? An exception? It was a big dog—more than thirty-five pounds—and if they saved her they wouldn’t be able to save another who was more likely to get adopted. “I don’t like playing God,” Holly had told me earlier. I’d believed her. I still did.

  The dog—beautiful, mangy, sick, tired, in a battered brown collar—turned her head toward Holly and her coworker. Neither of them could help it; they looked straight into the dog’s brown eyes. Holly’s coworker began to cry.

  “Okay,” Holly said. “We’ll take her.”

  ON OUR second day in Marfa, Casey and I met a dog that almost made me forget about San Antonio. His name was Dersu, and at first glance he seemed out of place in the high desert of West Texas. A Malamute/Husky, he had a heavy black and white coat, ears that stood straight up, and the kind of mystical, mismatched eyes—one brown, one blue—that seemed anything but accidental. The twelve-year-old dog was one of the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen.

  To my delight, Dersu was paired with humans who shared my reverence for him. Nick Terry and Maryam Amiryani—both attractive, dark-haired painters in their forties—had moved from New York City to Marfa a decade prior, in search of a quieter, simpler existence. They’d bought a three-acre property on the far east end of town, with a backyard that overlooks an abandoned pecan orchard.

  I’d learned of them through a woman at the Chinati Foundation (a contemporary art museum in Marfa) who had taken it upon herself to introduce me to some of Marfa’s many dog lovers. Thanks to her, I found myself drinking green tea on the shaded patio of Nick and Maryam’s wood-framed painting studios. As we spoke, Casey and Dersu napped on the grass.

  “I just feel really privileged to live every day with this creature,” Maryam told me.

  “Thanks,” Nick deadpanned, before breaking into a grin. “Oh, you meant the dog?”

  Nick shared Maryam’s admiration for what Dersu has added to their lives. “He tests my cynicism,” Nick explained. “We have this idyllic life here in so many ways, but because we’re human, we can get easily frustrated by things and lose a sense of what we have, of what the present moment
offers. But for Dersu, each walk is truly thrilling. It makes his day! He sniffs the same spots. He walks the same forty-minute route twice a day every day. And he finds the beauty in it, the magic in it. In some ways it’s absurd to compare a dog’s life to a human life, but in another way it isn’t. As humans, can we appreciate each moment, each day? I learn so much from him.”

  “Dersu teaches me patience,” Maryam added. “He has infinite patience.”

  Patience had served Dersu well in the years he spent tied to a tree outside a trailer in town. Nick and Maryam had first spotted the dog six years earlier, in the spot where Dersu’s previous owner would leave him every day with a bowl of water. He was underweight and his hair was matted, but Maryam and Nick noticed something else about him, too.

  “He had such a beautiful demeanor and spirit despite his obviously terrible circumstances,” Maryam recalled.

  When they heard that the owner wanted to sell the dog, Maryam lied and told him she’d always wanted a Malamute/Husky. Two hundred dollars later, the dog was theirs. But they weren’t sure what to do with him. “At first we didn’t even plan to keep Dersu—we mostly just wanted to free him,” Nick said. “We thought maybe we’d send him to Alaska. But we brought him home to see how things would go.”

  They went badly. Every chance he got, Dersu would jump their fence. “He was like a puma,” Nick told me. Dersu would visit a female dog he liked across town or make his way back to the trailer and the tree. “It was like he was in an abusive relationship, like he had Stockholm syndrome—he couldn’t stay away from this place where he was mistreated. When he was here, you could sense him trying to figure us out. He was like, ‘I don’t know about you guys.’ And we were thinking, ‘We don’t know about you.’ ”

  Nick worked at the Chinati Foundation back then, and when one of his interns planned to drive to Alaska, Nick offered to pay to send the dog with her. But one of the couple’s dog-loving friends in town—just about everyone they know in Marfa has a dog—urged them to reconsider. And, before long, Dersu had settled in.