Travels with Casey

by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

  “I guess that makes sense,” I conceded. “And Rezzy does like to chase things.”

  “Many dogs do. It’s just safer for everyone this way. I’ve heard stories of eagles swooping down and snatching small dogs. And a coyote killed an off-leash dog a few years ago.”

  There’s another reason to outlaw dogs from much of the park: water-loving dogs sometimes end up in scalding geysers. The book Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park tells the tragic tale of a large dog, Moosie, who jumped into the park’s Celestine Pool (and its 202-degree water) on a summer day in 1981.

  As a friend of the dog’s owner prepared to leap in after the animal, someone screamed, “Don’t go in there!”

  “Like hell I won’t!” the man responded before diving headfirst into the hot spring. The story doesn’t end well. The man never did rescue Moosie, and when he made it back to land, he had third-degree burns over his entire body. He died the next day.

  “It’s a sad story, and I really don’t like to tell it—especially to dog lovers,” Kevin said.

  He was much more willing to talk about wolves, which were reintroduced to Yellowstone in 1995 and feed on young, old, or wounded elk. But I turned the conversation to bears. I’d never seen one outside a zoo, and I was intent on changing that.

  “People think they see grizzlies everywhere,” Kevin told me. “They’ll stop in the middle of the road, get out, point at a boulder in the distance, and say, ‘Oh my God, it’s a bear!’ And I’m, like, ‘Nope, that’s a rock.’ ”

  But there are plenty of bears in Yellowstone—some six hundred grizzlies alone, in fact. The summer before my visit, an adult female grizzly was killed by the National Park Service after DNA evidence placed the bear at the location of two fatal maulings of hikers. (The deaths were the first caused by a Yellowstone grizzly in twenty-five years.)

  Kevin had just finished telling me about the killings when, lo and behold, we spotted a grizzly in a grassy clearing not far from the Ranger Museum. Kevin pulled his Buick to the side of the road. We got out, and I started filming the bear with my iPhone. The animal appeared to be making its way toward us, and when it was about sixty yards away, Kevin surmised that it was hoping to cross the road at precisely our location.

  When it was within forty yards, Kevin suggested we get back in the car. He didn’t need to tell me twice; I’d already started backpedaling toward the passenger-side door. Safely in the Buick, I kept my iPhone video rolling as the medium-sized bear sauntered across the road, some ten yards from Kevin’s windshield.

  “That was so cool!” I said soon after, doing my best impression of an easily impressed ten-year-old.

  Still, part of me was sad that Casey and Rezzy missed out on the bear. My dogs were my travel companions; Casey, in particular, had been at my side for nearly every memorable experience of my journey. It felt wrong when my dog missed something—almost like it never even happened.

  ON MY way to Mount Rushmore the next day, I pulled over for gas on the North Cheyenne Reservation in Lame Deer, Montana.

  Since rescuing Rezzy, I’d made a habit of stopping on Indian reservations and counting the stray dogs hanging around gas stations and convenience stores. Most times, I would strike up conversations with locals about the dogs. Though some of the animals had owners who let them roam, most were strays.

  As I fed and played with the handful of dogs at the Cheyenne Depot gas station, Rezzy sat in the passenger seat of the Chalet and watched the action. I wondered what was going through her mind. Did gas stations have any special significance for her? Did she have a sense this was a reservation similar to the one where she’d lived? Where was a pet psychic when I needed one?

  It was never easy to leave rez dogs behind, but I got back on the road and drove for what felt like forever on U.S. 212 in southeastern Montana. Sometime after I crossed into South Dakota, the plains became hillier and pines once again lined either side of the road. As I approached Mount Rushmore, the highway sloped upward, guiding the motorhome up from the Badlands toward those four famous faces carved into rock.

  I’d never been to Mount Rushmore, and I was annoyed—for the second time in as many days—that dogs weren’t allowed where I wanted to go. I’d hoped to take a picture of Casey and Rezzy with the presidents in the background, but the closest I could get them to Abraham Lincoln was a small area near the parking lot. So I left the dogs in the RV and walked to the memorial by myself, navigating a few hundred of the nearly three million tourists who visit the monument each year. I made my way to the viewing area and gazed at the presidents, all of whom—except Jefferson—appear to be mildly irritated.

  I was mildly irritated, too. I wasn’t especially impressed by Mount Rushmore, and I had a daunting stretch of highway to complete over the next two days—some seven hundred miles to Kansas City. My rear had started hurting again in the mountain West, and after months on the road I was sick of every song on my iPhone. My Facebook followers had tried to help by suggesting dozens of new songs, from canine-themed country ballads (“Like My Dog” by Billy Currington) to classic rock (“Runnin’ Down a Dream” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers) to goofy, old-school hip-hop (“Summertime” by DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince).

  My mom called from France as I was walking back to the Chalet from the viewing area. “Where are you?” she wanted to know.

  “Mount Rushmore,” I said.

  “Oh, better you than me!”

  “I know. You’d hate it—so many tourists.”

  “Aren’t there better places you could go?” she asked.

  “I was in the area,” I told her. “And I wanted to get a picture of the dogs in front of the presidents, but dogs aren’t allowed. It’s not like France, where dogs can go just about everywhere.”

  “Oui, ça c’est vrai,” she said, switching mid-conversation—as she often does—to French.

  “But why don’t the French pick up after their dogs? I remember when you’d take me to Paris as a kid, there would be poop everywhere on the sidewalk.”

  “Tradition, I suppose,” she said. Then she changed the subject. “You sound tired.”

  I’d never followed through on my promise to meditate, and I was hoping she wouldn’t bring it up.

  “Driving this much is really hard,” I told her. “I’m not sure how much more I can take in this RV before I lose my mind.”

  “I’ve found that meditation really helps in stressful moments,” she said.

  I’d walked right into that one.

  Before letting my mom go, I decided to tell her about my trip to see Dr. Gold in Manhattan. I’m not sure why I chose to open up to her in the Mount Rushmore parking lot—maybe the fatigue was getting to me.

  “In New York City, I went to see a therapist who specializes in the human-animal bond,” I began, pacing around the RV as I spoke.

  “I didn’t know such a thing existed,” she said.

  “It does,” I confirmed. “I told him about some of my issues with Casey, stuff that I’ve already mentioned to you. But he had an interesting theory. He said that I was expecting Casey to make up for the love and nurturing you didn’t always show me as a child.”

  There was silence on the line. My mom and I had already had many emotional talks—both on the phone and in person—about my childhood, but bringing Casey into the mix was a new wrinkle. I could imagine her thinking, Oh, so you’re blaming me for your dog problems, too? Might there be something that’s not my fault?

  If she thought that, she didn’t let on. Instead, she asked me to elaborate. Specifically, she wanted to know if my feelings had changed. Had there been some resolution?

  “Yes, and it’s a good thing,” I said, before realizing that maybe she meant a resolution of my feelings toward her. But I wondered if she’d stumbled onto something; maybe fixing one problem (my insecurities around my dog) helped me fix the other (lingering anger toward my mom).

  I breathed deep and tried to access the wisdom sto
red in my gut, as Dr. Gold had suggested at the start of my journey. I couldn’t locate any insecurity or anger there. Maybe, I thought, I was just too tired. Or maybe I’d succeeded in killing two psychological birds with one long road trip.

  TO GET to Kansas City, I drove across South Dakota on Interstate 90, an interminable stretch of road that won’t win any highway beauty pageants. I passed the time by calling Marc and then Dylan, my friend who’d worried that I wouldn’t make it back to Provincetown in one piece.

  “I don’t want to jinx myself,” I told him, “but I haven’t crashed this thing yet!”

  After spending the night at the KOA in Sioux Falls, I picked up a hitchhiker and his dog on my way south on I-29 toward Omaha. I’d passed dozens of hitchhikers on my journey, most of whom looked like prison escapees. I’d hoped to get lucky and come upon film director John Waters, who was hitchhiking across the country for a book at the same time as I was driving across America. But no such luck.

  Instead, I stopped for a middle-aged man who looked remarkably like Harrison Ford, albeit after a few days without bathing. At first I thought it might actually be the actor, which is probably why I stopped. (That, and he had a dog.) It wasn’t, and the man’s fluffy little terrier mix turned out to be a nightmare. The dog—named Hyper—wouldn’t stop running around the inside of the Chalet and nipping at Casey and Rezzy, who stared at the animal as if it were some kind of insane canine space alien.

  The Harrison Ford look-alike, whose name was Jerry, proved to be equally strange, mostly mumbling one-word answers to my attempts at conversation. I gathered that he was on his way to Iowa, where he planned to meet a woman he’d fallen in love with on the Internet, and who had recently left her husband. Jerry said he’d spent the past year in North Dakota, working odd jobs and spending his free time on a public computer at a local library, sending love emails to the woman.

  During the nearly three hours we spent together before I dropped him off north of Omaha (so that he could catch I-80 toward Iowa), Jerry didn’t ask a single question of me. So I filled as much dead air as I could. When I asked about Hyper, he told me he’d found the stray peeing behind a snowbank, and that Hyper had interpreted his passing interest as an invitation never to leave his side.

  “I’m not really a dog person,” Jerry said, “but he wouldn’t let me be.”

  Hyper had followed Jerry back to his one-room basement apartment and then refused to be shooed away. “I closed the door and opened it three hours later, and he was still there!” Jerry told me in a momentary burst of personality. “I felt bad, so I let him inside.”

  The dog would sprint in circles around Jerry’s apartment for much of the day, finally collapsing on his bed at night and sleeping until about noon. When Jerry decided to follow his heart to Iowa, the woman he was going to meet insisted he bring Hyper with him.

  “She’s a dog person,” he said sheepishly.

  “Sounds like you’re stuck with Hyper for good,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he replied, staring straight ahead.

  We drove in silence for miles before I asked him if anyone had ever told him he looked like Harrison Ford.

  “All the time,” he said.

  I waited a few seconds to see if he might go into more depth. Nothing. “Does that ever get annoying?” I asked.

  “All the time,” he repeated.

  “Am I annoying you now by bringing it up?”

  “Not really,” he said.

  “Have you ever pretended to be him?”

  “Harrison Ford?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Once.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was shit-faced drunk. My friend bet me money that I couldn’t convince a girl that I was Harrison Ford.”

  “Who won the bet?” I asked.

  “My friend.”

  “Why? You weren’t convincing?”

  “I guess not.”

  Another few miles of silence.

  Then, unprovoked: “You should really clean your windshield,” he said.

  IN KANSAS City, I stayed overnight at the home of a woman who’d been following my journey on Facebook. She’d generously offered the dogs and me her family’s guest bedroom—to the chagrin of her husband, who wasn’t so sure about a stranger from the Internet squatting in their home.

  On my first full day in Kansas City, she drove me across town to Rose Brooks, a domestic violence shelter that was in the process of building an on-site kennel for dogs. There I met a woman named McKenzie and her 140-pound Great Dane, Hank. Though technically a dog, Hank looked more like a slender horse.

  McKenzie and Hank had stayed at Rose Brooks the previous year, after her ex-boyfriend threw her through a wall and tried to beat her with a hammer. Hank had saved McKenzie’s life by stretching out on top of her, but the ex-boyfriend then pushed Hank off the porch, breaking his hip and ribs. When McKenzie called Rose Brooks, the shelter initially said she couldn’t bring her dog.

  “I was like, ‘Nope, we’re a package deal,’ ” McKenzie recalled in a conference room at the shelter. Her abuser had gotten out on bail soon after the attack, and she worried that he would try to hurt Hank. “He knew that this dog means more to me than anything in the world.”

  Concerned that McKenzie’s ex would try to kill her, the shelter relented on its no-pets policy and made a space for the dog in a basement bathroom. Before long, everyone at Rose Brooks loved Hank, and the staff noticed that his presence brought smiles to the faces of the other women and children at the shelter. Combined with the knowledge that many battered women won’t go to a shelter if it means leaving their pets behind, Rose Brooks decided to build a kennel on its property.

  Frank Ascione, a developmental psychologist at the University of Denver who researches violence against animals, has found that 71 percent of domestic violence victims had their pets killed, harmed, or threatened by their abuser. “Abuse directed against animals is indisputably linked to child maltreatment and domestic violence,” Ascione and Phil Arkow write in Child Abuse, Domestic Violence, and Animal Abuse.

  Though men are more likely than women to abuse animals, there are exceptions. In an examination of thousands of cases reported to Pet-Abuse.com by Kathleen Gerbasi, she found that women are more likely to hoard pets (a form of abuse in many cases) and almost as likely as men to neglect or abandon them.

  Will kids and teenagers who abuse pets become violent adults? Though that link is often assumed, the connection between childhood animal cruelty and later criminality is tenuous. What’s clear is that many violent adults have no history of hurting animals. School shooters, for example, aren’t usually the vicious animal abusers the media can make them out to be. A 2002 task force organized by the Department of Education and the U.S. Secret Service found that of forty-one attackers in school shootings, only five had such a history.

  Nor is there any real evidence that youthful animal mistreatment is strongly correlated with adult violence. “The awkward fact is that most wanton animal cruelty is not perpetrated by inherently bad kids but by normal children who will eventually grow up to be good citizens,” Hal Herzog points out in Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat.

  Several studies of college students have found that roughly half admit to either perpetrating or witnessing acts of cruelty to animals. Even Charles Darwin admitted to once beating a puppy, “I believe simply from enjoying the power,” he wrote. “This act lay heavily on my conscience, as is shown by my remembering the exact spot where the crime was committed.”

  Though Gandhi is credited with saying that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated,” he must have forgotten about Nazi Germany, which in 1933 enacted extraordinary legislation to protect animals from suffering. Dogs at the time could not have their ears or tails docked without anesthesia, and no animals could be treated inhumanely in scientific experiments or in the production of films.

  “I will commit to concentration
camps those who still think that they can continue to treat animals as inanimate property,” Nazi Germany’s Hermann Göring said. “To the German, animals are not merely creatures in the organic sense, but creatures who lead their own lives and who are endowed with perceptive facilities, who feel pain and experience joy and prove to be faithful and attached.”

  Today, even as most states in this country have beefed up their animal cruelty laws, animal control officers struggle to define animal abuse. Anticruelty codes specify that animals shouldn’t be deliberately mistreated, but the general public—and even officers themselves—don’t always agree on what constitutes cruelty. Is a family in agrarian California that loves its dog but leaves it alone in the yard, sometimes for days at a time, abusing their dog? What about a debutante who buys her dog fancy sweaters and dog beds but takes the animal outside only for one brief walk each day?

  Further complicating efforts to prove cruelty to animals is the problem of gathering evidence. Often, the best—or only—witness to the abuse of a human is the victim. But animals obviously can’t report their abusers. Animal control officers routinely drop cruelty cases because of a lack of evidence, leaving helpless dogs with owners who the officers believe (but can’t prove) to be cruel.

  During my months on the road, I’d heard about Americans mistreating their dogs in gruesomely diverse ways. There was the Montana man who gave his twenty-pound Pomeranian a “to-go cup of Vodka” (the dog couldn’t stand up and was four times over the legal driving limit for humans), the North Carolina man who dragged his Labrador/Chow mix behind a moped, the New Jersey woman who attempted at-home surgery on her dog (she also gave the animal antidepressants meant for humans), the two California men who lit fireworks strapped to the back of a Dachshund, and the St. Louis man who photographed himself having sex with his dog.

  Next to killing a dog, bestiality may be the most reviled form of canine abuse. But because of its highly taboo nature, we don’t know much about its prevalence. The famous Kinsey Reports from the 1940s still provide the most comprehensive data: Kinsey found that 8 percent of men and 3.6 percent of women had engaged in sexual contact with an animal. (He estimated that the numbers were higher in rural communities.)