Even though Dakota and Blueberry didn’t ask me for a dime, I handed them $80 for a hotel room. They were good kids who were out here because their parents had failed them, because we as a country had failed them. My gift wouldn’t do much to alter the course of their lives, but it would give them one night of peace and quiet.
“Thank you so much!” they said over and over again as I climbed back in the RV.
“Where will you stay?” I asked them.
“There’s a dog-friendly hotel nearby,” Blueberry assured me.
“I’ll be in a dog-friendly hotel, too,” I told them.
Dakota looked confused and pointed toward the Chalet. “But don’t you sleep in there?”
“Normally, yes,” I said. “But I was offered a room for the night.”
“Anytime you get sick of your RV, you can bring it around here,” Dakota suggested. “We’ll pack a bunch of homeless kids in there. It’ll be a party.”
I laughed. Blueberry smiled. Then I wished them luck, hugged them goodbye, and watched as they shuffled down the street at sunset, their dogs prancing along at their sides.
9. In which we hightail it home, with some heartbreak along the way
IN IDAHO, I slept in the belly of a Beagle.
The Cottonwood Dog Bark Park Inn Bed & Breakfast, in the north-central part of the state, is a thirty-foot-tall wooden dog with fourteen-foot carpets for ears. Painted black, brown, and white, the Beagle goes by the name Sweet Willy and can be seen from U.S. 95, Idaho’s primary north–south highway. The inn harks back to a time when travelers would often fill their gas tanks or stay overnight in novelty structures: teakettles, seashells, airplanes, elephants.
I can’t remember where I’d first read about Sweet Willy, which its creators—the husband-and-wife team of Dennis Sullivan and Frances Conklin—built and lovingly call “a noble and absurd undertaking.” But I couldn’t pass up the chance to spend a night in the doghouse.
Frances wasn’t there when I rolled into town, so I found Dennis alone in his woodcarving studio across the yard from the giant dog. A self-taught chainsaw artist, Dennis, who had just turned seventy, makes folk-art-style wooden carvings of dozens of dog breeds. His big break came in 1995, when he and Frances sold 1,500 miniature dogs in a matter of minutes on QVC. In 2003, the couple won an Idaho tourism award for a carved exhibit about Seaman, a black Newfoundland that accompanied Lewis and Clark on their Corps of Discovery expedition. (Seaman was lucky to make it through that journey alive—the explorers ate more than 250 dogs during the trip.)
“Most people who do what I do carve bears, but I’ve always had a real connection to dogs,” Dennis told me as he gave me a tour of his three-acre yard, which was littered with his wooden canine carvings and other funny creations—including a four-foot-long wooden toaster with a removable piece of wooden toast, and a ten-foot-tall Corning-Ware coffeepot. The yard also boasts what Dennis called the “biggest fire hydrant in Idaho.” Hollow and made of concrete stucco, it was painted red and stood twice my size. During the summer months, Dennis and Frances place a portable toilet in the hydrant for the traveling public.
I didn’t dare let Rezzy off the leash (we were about seventy yards from the highway), but I hoped I might snap a picture of Casey peeing on the hydrant as he explored the yard after a long stint in the RV. Instead, he took an immediate liking to the branch of a spruce tree. Casey delights in ripping apart sticks with his teeth, and while he usually appears to ingest half of what he destroys, he’s somehow never had a stomach problem.
I take that back. He once had a stomach problem—but a stick didn’t cause it. When Casey was five, his midsection seemed to double in size over the course of a few days. Worried that he might bloat to death, I took him to the vet. “Has he had access to an unusually large amount of food?” she asked. I assured her he hadn’t. When I got home, I studied the enormous bag of dog food that I’d left carelessly leaning against a chair on my kitchen floor. I walked around to the rear of the bag and noticed a gaping hole where Casey had been surreptitiously helping himself to dinner throughout the day.
Though it was a warm and sunny afternoon in Idaho, Dennis wore a leather jacket over a long-sleeve collared shirt. He confessed that he wasn’t in the jolliest of moods. His eyes watered as he told me that his sixteen-year-old cat, Miss Tibbs, had passed away the night before. Fortunately, he and Frances still had Sprocket, a three-year-old Golden Retriever who likes hanging out in the woodcarving studio and retrieving letters from the mailbox.
“We’ve always had Goldens,” he told me.
“Why not build a giant Golden, then?” I was curious to know.
“Well,” he said, “I started by carving Beagles, so I thought it would be the surest bet. I knew I knew how to do Beagles.”
Dennis suggested we check out the inside of the dog, which is accessible by a wooden staircase near the Beagle’s rear end. We entered the animal through a bright red door off the deck, which looks north toward planted fields of wheat, canola, and hay. The main sleeping area is carpeted and cozy, with a queen-size bed and a breakfast table. There’s a loft in the head of the dog, and a reading alcove in the nose. The bathroom is in the dog’s rear.
Dennis told me that no one has ever stolen anything from the Beagle, which he credits to man’s inherent goodness. But that doesn’t mean he hasn’t had his fare share of taxing customers. He recalled one woman who insisted on bringing her ten Chihuahuas for a night’s stay.
“You know that line about the customer always being right?” Dennis said with a chuckle. “Seldom, if ever!”
There was no Wi-Fi or TV in the Beagle, so I spent two hours relaxing on the deck under the stars. I’d been on the road for three months, and though I’d loved my journey, I was starting to yearn for a normal life again. A friend had warned me that thirteen thousand miles in an RV was an exhausting proposition; exhausting didn’t come close to capturing it. I was dog-tired. I was glad to be heading east—toward home.
THIS WAS my first trip to the Potato State, and I was surprised that Idaho could compete with Oregon for greenery. Driving through the Clearwater National Forest, a verdant wilderness that stretches from the Oregon state line all the way to Montana, I passed rows and rows of towering firs as I followed the coursing Lochsa River.
Route 12, which used to be known as the Lewis and Clark Highway, stayed mostly flat, but the Idaho forest was surprisingly mountainous. (When Lewis and Clark visited the area in 1806, Clark proclaimed in his journal, “I could observe high rugged mountains in every direction as far as I could see.”) It wasn’t until I approached Missoula, Montana, that the horizon flattened. As I drove southeast toward Butte, the forest made way for prairie land, the road bounded by tall grass and rolling hills.
I stopped in Philipsburg, a silver-rich nineteenth-century mining town surrounded by tranquil lakes, grassy valleys, and snowcapped mountains. Philipsburg has fewer than a thousand residents, many of them cowboys and outdoorsmen who spend their downtime in one of the town’s handful of saloon-style bars. But Philipsburg’s most memorable building is probably its redbrick jail, where a noose hangs in clear view behind a second-story window.
I’d come to Philipsburg to meet David Riggs, a forty-five-year-old cowboy who trains Labs for a variety of roles—for example, as gun dogs and service animals for wounded veterans. We met at the Sunshine Station, a saloon/restaurant/country store/gas station where several patrons were enjoying their mid-morning shots of whiskey. David wore jeans and a cowboy hat and joked that Philipsburg is a “small drinking town with a big fishing problem.” To fit in, I ordered a beer—okay, a Corona—with my breakfast.
The bartender spoke in a monotone and looked as if she hadn’t stepped outside the dimly lit bar in years. She studied me disapprovingly, especially when David told her that I write for The New York Times.
“Why don’t you go back to New York, then?” she said when I suggested that Montana’s former lack of a speed limit might not have been the be
st idea.
“Be nice,” David told her. “Benoit’s a guest of mine.”
“Well, I’m tired of people from New York making our laws,” she said.
“I actually don’t live in New York,” I replied. “And isn’t it people in D.C. that make the laws?”
“Where do you live?” she asked.
“Massachusetts.”
“That’s not much better,” she said.
I smiled. “And I grew up in San Francisco.”
She shook her head, and I decided to stick the needle in further. “I’m also half-French.”
That seemed to send her over the edge, because she turned away and muttered something I couldn’t make out. “She’s been here longer than I have,” David told me when she was out of earshot, “so she has a reason to be cranky. But she’s a total sweetheart underneath it all.”
I got to see that for myself a few minutes later, when she returned bearing a sunny new attitude. “Do you want a lime for your Corona, honey?”
“What, now you like Benoit?” David asked her.
“He’s all right, I guess,” she said, softening before our eyes. “Poor boy can’t help where he was raised.”
After breakfast, I followed David to his ranch, which sits on 4,500 acres near a renowned blue-ribbon trout stream called Rock Creek. David lives there with his fiancée and ten adorable young Labs, eight of which he was training—using only positive techniques, he said—to work with wounded soldiers and children with autism. David is a service dog provider for the Wounded Warrior Project and is the founder of K9 Care of Montana, a charity providing customized outdoor activities with dogs for children with special needs.
That afternoon, we took Casey, Rezzy, and David’s four-year-old yellow Lab, Rocky, for a swim in the East Fork Reservoir. Rezzy had learned to swim in Oregon by following Casey’s lead as he bounded into several lakes; she loved racing him for a tennis ball far out into the water. Watching Rezzy was a reminder of just how much dogs learn by observing each other.
While the animals played, I asked David about some of the commands he teaches dogs that are eventually paired with injured vets. He told me about one, called “Watch Your Six,” which prompts a dog to stand or sit behind a veteran.
“There’s something about having an extra pair of eyes behind you that gives comfort to wounded vets with post-traumatic stress,” he explained. “So many of these guys come back from Afghanistan paranoid as hell, and having the dog behind them offers a real sense of security.”
David also told me about another directive, “Hold,” which he was teaching to a dog that would be paired with a 275-pound wounded vet with a spinal injury. Should the vet fall, the “Hold” command prompts the dog to position itself under the man’s armpit and push up, providing brace support and helping him off the ground.
Later that night, David and I sat outside his house by a roaring fire. It’s difficult not to get philosophical under the stars on a Montana ranch, and before long David and I were chatting like the oldest of friends.
“Man, I came here to get away from the world,” he said. “I’d had enough and wanted to be alone.”
(Montana is certainly a good place for that. In Travels with Charley, Steinbeck wrote that “the frantic bustle of America was not in Montana.” Steinbeck could not get enough of the state. “I am in love with Montana. For other states I have admiration, respect, recognition, even some affection, but with Montana it is love.”)
David continued: “Man, the dogs saved me. I wanted to be left to myself, but the dogs brought me back into society. Being a dog trainer got me out of myself and my head.”
I asked David about his previous yellow Lab, Hopper, who died a year before my visit. Hopper used to retrieve just about anything David asked him to. As a joke, David once had the dog snatch a bag of cash from a temporarily open safe behind the bar at the Sunshine Station.
“In a lot of ways I still haven’t gotten over losing him,” he told me. “Hopper was the best dog I’ve ever had. I got him at five weeks, and he would sleep on my chest from the beginning. At eight weeks, he was already retrieving birds. As an adult dog, he was shockingly smart. It was like he would think before he acted.”
Hopper’s father, Cropper, was the first yellow Lab in the history of the AKC to win the national title in Field, which tests hunting dogs on a variety of tasks. And while Hopper was a great hunting dog like his father, his utility to David went further. David walks with a heavy limp as a result of a spinal cord injury and numerous surgeries, and he relies on his primary dog to help him up when he falls.
David told me about the time he rolled his SUV over the side of a hill outside Philipsburg, ejecting Hopper from the vehicle. When the truck settled, the dog jumped back inside; David awoke to Hopper licking blood off his face. They climbed out of the truck together, and David crawled up a hill and collapsed in the middle of a road. When two women came upon the pair, Hopper was lying with his chest on top of David.
“He was hesitant to allow the girls close until he realized they were there to help,” David told me. While David was transported to Missoula with a broken hip, shoulder, and ribs, Hopper was taken to a local vet and received twelve stitches to the shoulder.
After thirty minutes by the fire, I asked David if Hopper was the dog of his dreams.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I think Hopper was so special because he was my service dog, my hunting retriever, and my companion. But a dog is really only as good as the experiences you put him through over time. Eventually the dog reflects your personality and your past, because he’s alongside you for a decade or more of your life.”
He looked down at Rezzy, who was seated at my feet at the end of a leash, peering intently into the darkness of a nearby field. “She’s always observing, listening, seeing what animal might be out there,” David said. “I have to say, Rezzy’s an amazing animal to me.”
“And to think I considered not taking her from that reservation,” I told him.
David struggled to stand up from his chair. “I believe things happen for a reason,” he said when he was firmly on his feet. “It’s evident to me that she was meant for you, at this time in your life.” He started hobbling back toward his front door, shuffling through the dirt. Then I heard him stop. After a few beats of silence, I turned around in my seat to see what he was up to. But I couldn’t place him in the dark.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m good,” he assured me. “I was just thinking whether you were meant to save Rezzy, or whether she was meant to save you and Casey. In the end, I guess that’s for you to figure out.”
THE DRIVE south from Philipsburg to Yellowstone the next morning was sufficiently stunning that I wondered if the famed national park would even faze me. Heading south on Montana Route 1, I passed the impressive Georgetown Lake, which was separated from the road by just a thin strip of grass and the occasional veil of trees. Further south, the Montana scenery wasn’t quite so green, but the miles of gold grass were still a striking contrast to the bright blue sky.
I was thankful to have a personal tour guide for my first trip to Yellowstone—a friendly and animated thirty-six-year-old park employee by the name of Kevin Franken. (A mutual friend had put me in touch with him.) Kevin had the day off and was kind enough to chauffeur me around the nearly 3,500-square-mile park in his civilian car, a blue metallic 1994 Buick Park Avenue.
Not long into our tour, I asked him how he became a park ranger. “Funny story about that,” he said. “Originally I was going to be a lawyer; I went to law school and everything. But then I took one of those online personality tests that tell you what career you should go into.”
“And it said you should be a park ranger?”
“It did! And I was, like, ‘Duh, why didn’t I think of that?’ I love nature, love interacting with people. And the rest is history. I’ve worked in four national parks since.”
Near Mammoth Hot Springs, a grouping of geysers nea
r one entrance to Yellowstone, Kevin pointed out a lone male bison in the distance. “Last year, we had a bunch of bison give birth right on the front lawn of our ranger office building,” he recalled. “Adult bison are brown, but their babies are an orange-red color and don’t really look like bison. So we had a few tourists come up to us and ask a very silly question: ‘What are those strange-looking orange dogs hanging out with the bison?’ ”
“They thought the baby bison were dogs?”
“They did. I guess they assumed they were a breed of dog specific to Yellowstone or something. We get all kinds of silly questions from tourists.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“One of my favorites is, ‘What time do the rangers make Old Faithful go off?’ As if we’re controlling it by remote control. There’s a whole book of ridiculous things tourists say to park rangers.”
Later, as we passed the Hoodoos rock formation, I complained that the park isn’t very dog-friendly. Dogs aren’t allowed—even leashed—in the backcountry or on trails or boardwalks. I’d grudgingly left Casey and Rezzy in the Chalet.
Some fifty years before my trip to Yellowstone, John Steinbeck also complained about the park’s then dog policy. When a park employee told Steinbeck that Charley would have to be leashed in the park on account of “the bears,” Steinbeck wrote that he told the ranger, “This is a dog of peace and tranquility. I suggest that the greatest danger to your bears will be pique at being ignored by Charley.”
I asked Kevin if many dog-loving visitors to Yellowstone complain about not being able to bring their dogs on trails. “We get some who do, but most people realize that this is a wild area—and they don’t want to see their dogs killed by bears, bison, or elk,” he said.
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