But sometimes people have a good reason for not wanting their pets humped. Some dogs react aggressively to being mounted; others have bad hips. Casey, though, doesn’t seem to care whether I scold him or not. He loves to hump. And he was in rare form at Cesar’s.
“He’s not that dominant a dog—that’s what’s so weird about his humping,” I told Cesar as we walked back toward the center’s main administrative building, where he had a meeting.
“But because everyone else here is more submissive than him, it’s just natural,” Cesar said. “I just keep my dogs as submissive as possible, so that your dog will come out of here alive.”
I appreciated that.
Before saying good-bye, I asked Cesar if he had any advice for the remainder of my trip.
“Have fun!” he said. “If I wasn’t so busy, I’d come with you.”
THE BEST way to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco on Route 1 is probably in the passenger seat of a convertible.
The famed coastal road, which twists and turns as it connects Northern and Southern California, boasts brisk ocean air and some of the most idyllic scenery imaginable: forests of skyscraping redwoods, hidden-away beaches broken by stone cliffs, and gleaming sapphire water.
Route 1 also boasts what National Geographic rightly calls “hair-raising drop-offs” into the water, as well as the occasional landslide and falling rock. Near Big Sur, especially, the mountains don’t just appear to sag and drop off into the Pacific—sometimes, they actually do.
All of that is to say I was grateful to be driving north, meaning there was a lane of traffic between the chalet and an obituary that read, “Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a writer traveling around the country with his two dogs, died Thursday when his motorhome careened off a cliff into the Pacific Ocean.” Though I’d made the drive before, I’d somehow forgotten how easy it was to get distracted by the views around each sandstone cliff.
Casey and Rezzy slept for most of the drive on that beautiful mid-April afternoon. During the previous week, they had devised something of a system. If they both curled up just so, they could fit—barely—in the small space between the passenger and driver seats. Other times, they wouldn’t get it quite right. If Casey got there first and didn’t leave enough room for Rezzy, she would simply lay half of her body on top of his, causing him to sigh loudly and eventually stand up in frustration. If Rezzy snagged the space first, she’d spread out, leaving Casey to stare at me as if I needed to correct the injustice.
I wasn’t in the mood to play doggie musical chairs with Casey and Rezzy as I navigated the RV through the more treacherous turns on Route 1. In Big Sur, I pulled over at a turnout near the Bixby Bridge (one of the highest single-span concrete bridges in the world) and buckled Rezzy into a doggie seatbelt harness in the passenger seat. Sadly, she didn’t love it there. Like Casey, Rezzy coveted the small, secure floor space between the seats.
I called Marc from the turnout. He was at the Fort Lauderdale airport, waiting for his flight to San Francisco to spend a few days with me and the dogs. I was eager to see him again, show him where I grew up, and introduce him to Rezzy. I’d chosen to take the high road and not remind him that he’d hinted that I should leave her in Kaibeto.
IN THE Bay Area, I drove north of San Francisco to a KOA in Petaluma. We were further from the city than I would have liked, but the upside was that we were closer to Napa Valley’s wine country.
Marc had never been to San Francisco before, so for a few days I got to play tour guide. We drove around in a rental car, the dogs in the backseat. Casey, having finally gotten used to the RV, now seemed uncomfortable in a regular car.
In Sonoma, we got a private tour of the Saint Benoit Creamery, which gave us bottles of yogurt for the road. In San Francisco, we played with the dogs in Golden Gate Park, walked them through the neighborhoods where I grew up, and visited my former middle school English teacher, Roger, who now works part-time as a “dog masseur.”
As Roger massaged Casey, he told me that he came upon this line of work by accident. “I made the business cards as a kind of joke,” he said, “but there are so many crazy dog people in San Francisco that people took me seriously. And I do like petting dogs, so it works out nicely.” I asked Roger, a lifelong dog lover, why he didn’t have one of his own. “I’ve always chosen to live in buildings that don’t allow dogs,” he explained. “I know myself, and I know that if I had one, I wouldn’t bother hanging out with humans anymore. I would end up in a monogamous, nonsexual relationship with a dog.”
At the end of our first day in the city, we drove to the SOMA neighborhood and met pet photographer Amanda Jones, who’d photographed Casey early in my journey and who happened to be in San Francisco for a weekend shoot. I was looking forward to having her take pictures of Rezzy, but to everyone’s surprise my newest dog despised the attention. I wasn’t sure what terrified her more—the bright lights or the clicks of Amanda’s camera—but she wouldn’t stay still and kept trying to slink off the set. I managed to bear-hug Rezzy into submission for a few pictures with me and Casey, but soon I felt like a parent trying to force his tomboy daughter into a child beauty pageant.
Two days later, we all returned to San Francisco to spend time with one of the city’s greatest treasures—Armistead Maupin, author of the Tales of the City series. A dog lover, Armistead had heard about my journey and was following my progress on Facebook.
On a cool, cloudy, windy afternoon—the kind San Francisco should bottle and distribute under the name Sweater Weather—Marc and I drove the dogs to Crissy Field beach, not far from the Golden Gate Bridge, to meet Armistead and his husband, Chris. They were there with their hyperactive Labradoodle, Philo, named after Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of the television. (Philo appears in Armistead’s last two novels—Mary Ann in Autumn and The Days of Anna Madrigal—as a Labradoodle named Roman.)
After playing with the dogs at the beach, Marc and I followed Armistead and Chris to their home across town for a leisurely dinner. There, our conversation soon turned to gay men and their dogs. I told everyone that two of my favorite books—My Dog Tulip, by J. R. Ackerley, and Dog Years, by Mark Doty—happen to have been written by gay men. (Ackerley’s dog was actually named “Queenie,” but when the book was published in 1956, there was apparently little appetite for a book titled My Dog Queenie.)
I told Armistead, Chris, and Marc that I’d just finished reading Paws and Reflect, a collection of essays that “celebrates the special and powerful bond” between gay men and canines. For many of the Paws and Reflect contributors, a pet dog provided a much-needed respite from the secrecy, shame, and arduous self-analysis of growing up gay in a straight world. Alone with their dogs, the authors could let their guard down and be themselves. They didn’t need to keep secrets from their dogs, nor did they have to worry that their dogs would judge them—or, worse yet, reject them.
As adults, many gay men—whether single or partnered—seek out the company of dogs. For the many childless gay couples in America, canines can take on the role of surrogate children. And Donald Hardy spoke for many single, dog-loving gay men the world over (and probably single, heterosexual women the world over) when he wrote, “(Dogs) are a lot like boyfriends, actually, only nicer. And usually they stick around longer.”
That’s not to say that every gay man makes a quality dog companion. In Woof!: A Gay Man’s Guide to Dogs, Andrew DePrisco quips that some gay men “can’t commit to a color, much less a living creature.” And Armistead told me that his longtime friend, the late writer Christopher Isherwood, “maintained that a pet would deflect the love passing between partners.” Armistead told me it was one of the few times he ever disagreed with Isherwood.
Armistead has had four dogs in his adult life, including a Poodle named Willy about whom he penned a charming essay titled “Kiss Patrol.”
“Some dogs, I’m told, like to stick around when their owners are making love,” Armistead wrote. “They’ll sit stone still and watch the proc
eedings with deadpan intensity, as if collecting evidence for some evil congressional subcommittee. Not Willie. As soon as human passion rears its ugly head—and he has an uncanny eye for the precise moment—he flings himself off the bed and skulks away to another room. This is jealousy, I suppose, mingled with mortification, though I’d like to believe there’s an element of courtesy involved as well.”
Rezzy had exhibited no such restraint the previous night when Marc and I had enjoyed some private time in the Chalet. She’d watched the proceedings from the foot of the bed, seemingly mesmerized. She eventually hopped up on the mattress, nestled herself between Marc and me, and tried to plant kisses on both of our faces.
Though it was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen, I didn’t want to encourage the behavior. “Manners!” I protested, elbowing Rezzy toward the edge of the bed. I couldn’t help laughing, though, and she didn’t appear to take my admonishment seriously. (Her tail thumped up and down against the bed.) Seconds later she was back at it.
“Rezzy, no!” I said, more forcefully this time. I tried to knee her out of the way, but she made herself heavy and wouldn’t budge.
“Don’t make me put you in your crate,” I threatened, though Rezzy was unaffected by my tough talk. In fact, she almost seemed to be smiling as she stared at Marc.
“I guess this is when you realize you rescued a weird dog?” Marc said, amused by Rezzy’s apparent crush on him.
“I know! Casey usually just sleeps.”
“And I do love that about Casey.”
“I think Rezzy just senses that closeness and intimacy are happening, and she wants to be a part of that,” I said.
“Or maybe she’s into gay guys,” Marc joked.
The anthropomorphic possibilities were endless, and Rezzy took advantage of our momentary distraction to inch toward us on the bed.
“She’s a sly one,” Marc said.
“A sly one who’s getting a timeout,” I announced as I jumped out of bed, picked Rezzy up in my arms, and marched her to the front of the RV. On my way back to the bed, I pulled the privacy curtain separating the sleeping area from the rest of the motorhome.
“Now, where were we?” I said, with as much sexiness as I could muster.
AFTER A leisurely week in the Bay Area, I had to get back on the road. I didn’t want to see Marc go, but we’d made a plan to see each other a few weeks later in Chicago, one of my last stops on the trip.
First, though, I had dogs and humans to see in Oregon and Washington. On the last day in April—a clear, sunny afternoon in the Bay Area—I packed up the RV and drove through Mendocino, then along the Avenue of the Giants in Humboldt Redwoods State Park. I stopped to check out one of the scenic highway’s most famous sights—a 950-year-old, 250-foot-tall redwood that has survived logging, a flood, and a lightning strike, earning it the name the Immortal Tree. The park also boasts redwoods so large that visitors can drive cars through their trunks. None, though, seemed wide enough for the Chalet.
I spent that night at the Shoreline RV Park in Eureka, a coastal town favored by dog lovers, hippies, and dog-loving hippies. (At Shoreline, a sign on the front desk read, “Pets welcome. Humans must be on leash.”) The next morning, I took Casey and Rezzy for a walk through the RV park. Rezzy had learned to fetch tennis balls by watching Casey, and even with her slight limp, she was still faster than he was. To help Casey out, I would throw one ball for Rezzy, and while she was distracted chasing it, I would toss another one in the opposite direction for him.
Until then, I’d mostly let Rezzy off the leash only in enclosed areas—dog parks, parking lots, Little League baseball fields. (I’d lost count of the number of baseball diamonds I’d passed on my journey. And miniature-golf courses.) But I took a chance that morning, tossing balls for the dogs in an open grassy portion of the RV park. At one point, I noticed Rezzy peering through some bushes that separated us from an adjacent field of knee-high brown grass. Before I could say “Don’t you dare!” she made a run for it, dashing through the brush.
She ran so fast! As I chased after her through the field, angry at her and in awe of her at the same time, I tripped and face-planted into a shallow pool of mud. Rezzy probably thought this was a new fun game—slow human struggles to chase fast dog through muddy field!—but when she reached a waterway she had nowhere to go. So she sat down and looked back at me as I stumbled toward her, cursing her name.
Rezzy wagged her tail as I scolded her, which only made me angrier. For all my complaints about Casey, he had never run away from me. And, if he had, he’d certainly know to look guilty when I caught up to him. Speaking of Casey, where was he? I looked back across the field and saw him in the distance, staring out toward us. What a great dog he is, I thought to myself. In that moment he seemed like the most well-behaved animal in the world.
I hosed off Rezzy, took a shower, and got back on the road. Well after I’d crossed the state line into Oregon, dense redwood walls guarded the slow northeast curve of the aptly named Redwood Highway. By the time I stopped in Trail, an unincorporated community in the southwest part of the state, it seemed I’d seen the full spectrum of green—miles of grass, shrubs, and evergreens all came in different shades of the color.
I spent the late afternoon and evening at Trail’s Bear Mountain RV Park, across the road from the Rogue River, which flows westward from the Cascade Mountains to the Pacific Ocean. As I walked the dogs around the sleepy property, where dozens of motorhomes seemed to be in permanent residence, I noticed a neighboring yard with dogs, chickens, sheep, and llamas. I walked over and introduced myself to the proprietors, a retired military man named Merle and his younger wife, Robin, who wore a T-shirt that read, “I’ll try to be nice, if you try to be smart.”
Over drinks in their living room, I asked them how they’d ended up with so many animals in one yard.
“Well, that’s a funny story,” Merle said. “Originally we were just trying to get the grass cut, so we got the sheep. But then coyotes went after them, so I got llamas to protect the sheep. But then cougars started coming around, and llamas don’t protect against cougars, so then I got a couple guard dogs. There’s also a bear that comes around, but all he ever does is eat my grapes.”
Merle added that all his animals were rescues.
“Even the llamas?” I asked.
“Even the llamas,” he confirmed.
“What about the chickens?”
“Okay, so not the chickens,” he conceded.
Merle and Robin had five dogs, including a fourteen-year-old black Lab named Pal they’d found tied to a mailbox after Hurricane Katrina when they lived in New Orleans. Pal spends his senior years in Oregon digging for gophers, and a few days before my arrival he’d gotten a rude surprise when he pulled his nose out from a gopher hole.
“A gopher was hanging on to his face!” Merle said with an excited clap of his hands. “Pal’s been pissed ever since.”
The dogs—who range in age from one to fourteen—play with all the animals, including the chickens. “I try to keep the dogs from the chickens, because the chickens don’t like that so much,” Merle told me, adding that he has one “Alpha chicken” who thinks he’s a dog and is known to get away and scamper around the RV park. “He’s a mean, mean chicken! He’s always bossing around the other chickens and trying to get into the dog food.”
“He sounds like a nightmare,” I said.
Merle laughed. “A funny nightmare, though. I’m not sure what’s going on his brain, but that chicken provides us endless entertainment.”
THE NEXT MORNING I drove through Crater Lake National Park on my way to Bend, the largest city in central Oregon.
I had lunch in Bend with Kelly Ausland of freekibble.com, which has donated more than ten million meals to animal shelters and food banks across the country. We were joined by Lynne Ouchida, who’d brought along her three-legged disc dog, Maty, the first tri-pawed dog to qualify and compete in the Hyperflite Skyhoundz World Canine Disc Championship
. An Australian Shepherd mix, Maty had been abandoned in a hotel when she was only three weeks old. At eight weeks, an infection ravaged her body and caused her to lose her rear left leg.
After lunch, Lynne took us to a park so we could watch Maty in action. While Rezzy and Casey chased tennis balls, Maty leaped high into the air after a disc until a park employee showed up to ruin the fun. “I’m going to need you all to leash your dogs,” he said, seeming to enjoy being the bearer of bad news. It was, remarkably, the first such admonishment of my journey.
Lynne had alerted a local television station about my cross-country dog adventure, and to my surprise a camera crew showed up to interview me. I’d go on to receive more media attention two days later in Portland, when another local station came calling. I’m not sure what that says about Oregon; either nothing much happens there, or, more likely, the state really loves dogs.
Just about any Oregon city could make a “most dog-friendly place in America” list—Portland, in fact, routinely does. That city’s Pearl District, in particular, might just be the most dog-crazed neighborhood in the world, prompting backlash from those who prefer shopping for groceries without navigating their carts around four-legged animals.
Vance Bybee, head of the food safety division of the Oregon Department of Agriculture, told The New York Times in 2009 that customer complaints about dogs in supermarkets were increasing. “Usually they’ll hold off . . . until they’ve seen a dog urinate in the grocery store or jump up and try to swipe a pack of meat,” Bybee said. “Or they’ve seen dogs pooping in the aisle, that sort of thing.”
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