This was too good to be true; Cyndi Flores was heaven-sent. And if I had any doubt about that, she further informed me that she wanted to join us on the trip, and thought she could recruit some friends to come along as well.
I didn’t want to go overboard, so I offered her the position of Grand Exalted Empress of the Trip, and she accepted. My plan was that I would be the figurehead leader, the puppet, but she would be pulling the strings. It’s a position I’m comfortable with.
Thus began a lengthy back-and-forth, probably a hundred e-mails in all, in which we brainstormed possible ideas. The mode of transportation remained the biggest problem, and I decided to make as many calls as I could, to as many places as I could think of, to find out what our options really were. Cyndi was going to do the same.
My first idea was to use trucks, since they’re obviously large and would hold a lot of dogs. We could cover the floor with blankets and make it comfortable for them. I called Penske, Ryder, and every other truck company I could find, but none of them had trucks that were air-conditioned.
I politely declined, but they’re not really the types to take no for an answer. Once you contact these companies, they pretty much call you back every twenty minutes to try and get you to take the offer you declined in the first place.
Horse trailers were the next option. A reader who works at Hollywood Park racetrack in LA was nice enough to do some research for me and discovered that they are no longer air-conditioned. There are open-air windows to keep things cool, but they are high up, because horses are tall. Only our mastiff, Wanda, would be comfortable in those conditions.
Trains didn’t work for a bunch of reasons, but the main one was that there would be no way to walk the dogs. Twenty-five dogs in a closed car for five days could get a tad gamey.
I found some more companies that rented party buses, the kind that touring musicians might use. They were still way too expensive and wouldn’t allow dogs on them anyway. We considered buying an old school bus and tearing out the seats, but I worried about having us all in one vehicle. If it broke down, as an old school bus on that kind of long trip might do, we’d be history.
The idea I was most hopeful about was to use cargo vans. They are roomy, and three vans might comfortably house all the dogs. Most important, they are open between the passenger section and cargo section, so the air-conditioning would circulate throughout. They aren’t even that expensive to rent; we had used them on our relatively short move from Santa Monica to Orange County.
It seemed so perfect that there was of course no way it could work, and it didn’t. No one would rent a cargo van one way; I think they were obeying some sort of edict designed to make our lives miserable. Cargo vans are rented only for short moves, maybe taking furniture from one place to another, and there were no exceptions that we could get anyone to make.
Next on the list were RVs, and we looked into buying a couple. Based on the price, we quickly dismissed that as insane, especially since we didn’t want to have a driveway full of RVs at our house in Maine. Selling things like that privately is not our thing, and we didn’t want to have to deal with it. When the trip was over, we wanted the trip to be over.
In my case, even before the trip began, I wanted the trip to be over.
I looked into renting RVs, but I felt I should be up front about the cargo they would be carrying. It didn’t go over well with the one company I tried; they said that one dog would be fine, maybe two, but the number we were talking about was out of the question.
So Cyndi and I decided that we would keep digging and researching while simultaneously tackling another problem.
Regardless of what we were traveling in, where the hell would we sleep along the way?
Bumper
One of the best decisions I made when I started writing novels was to put my e-mail address in my books, openly inviting feedback. I quickly discovered that readers are basically nice and will write to an author only if they like the book.
The net result is that I have gotten almost exclusively positive responses, and when a new book comes out, I get thousands of e-mails from strangers, telling me how great I am.
As you might imagine, I have to fight off the desire to get up at three o’clock in the morning to check out the computer. One of the reasons I don’t do so is that when I get back, there is usually a Bernese mountain dog or a mastiff in my spot on the bed.
One day in the spring of 2004 I received an e-mail from a woman named Pat Fish. She told me that she had read one of my books and really liked it, but the main reason she was writing was to praise my work in dog rescue.
She described herself as a volunteer for a golden retriever rescue group, and went on to say that she was currently fostering a three-year-old golden that would never find a home. It seemed that he had grand mal seizures, and the clusters were so intense that it was unlikely anyone would take on the responsibility and expense of bringing him into their home. She attached a picture of a beautiful golden retriever, who she said was named Bumper.
Seizures in dogs, as in humans, can be very violent and frightening to watch. But they are rarely dangerous; there is no concern that the dog might swallow its tongue, and they usually run their course in a few minutes. Afterward, the dog might be disoriented for a short while, but he or she soon snaps out of it. The only real danger, as I understand it, is that the dog’s body temperature can get dangerously high if the seizure goes on for too long.
There is also no psychological component to epileptic seizures for canines; when it’s over, it’s over. Add to that the fact that drugs often control the problem quite well and it really is not that big a deal, as long as you know what to expect.
But in our experience, epilepsy is a major deterrent to prospective owners. And with seizures as frequent and violent as those Pat described in Bumper, I could imagine that placement would be extraordinarily difficult.
I was leaving the house right after I received the e-mail; I was picking Debbie up at her office and taking her to the airport. So I replied to Pat, giving her my cell number and asking her to call me.
She called a few minutes later, and I asked her where she lived. My thought was that if it was somewhere in or near California, we would offer to take Bumper into our home. We already had three epileptic dogs in the house; a fourth would not be a hardship. So long as he was not dog aggressive, we’d love to have him.
She said that she lived in Louisville, so I quickly told her I’d get back to her in five minutes. I picked up Debbie, who was preparing to fly to Louisville on the Taco Bell corporate jet. Taco Bell’s parent company, Yum! Brands, is based there. She told me what I knew she would: that if the rescue group could get Bumper ready, she would pull whatever strings necessary to enable Bumper to fly back to us the next day on the Taco Bell corporate jet.
I called Pat back and told her the news. She seemed excited at the prospect of it, and told me that she would immediately contact the powers that be within the rescue group and get back to me.
She did contact me later that night, but with bad news. She said that she just couldn’t get it organized in time, implying that the leaders of the group weren’t prepared to make that quick a decision. She was obviously disappointed that it wasn’t going to work out, but she was just a volunteer with the group and did not have the authority to make that kind of call.
It made sense to me. Rescue people take very seriously the well-being of dogs in their protection. To send this one to live with some lunatic stranger who already had thirty dogs in his house is something that I would not have done if I had been in their position.
There was no reason to press her on it, since she had little say in the matter. And it wasn’t a tragedy to us; we would have welcomed Bumper, but it’s not like he was now going to die in a shelter. I knew that Pat would take good care of him, so I wished her well, and I told Debbie that there would be no shedding on the corporate jet.
Three weeks later, as I was preparing to go on tour for my t
hird book, Bury the Lead, Pat called back. She told me that the rescue group had done an about-face and now really wanted to make this adoption happen. I suspect they had done some research on us and determined that we would be an acceptable home for Bumper.
However, they were loath to fly Bumper out to us, since in his condition they didn’t deem it safe for him to fly in the bottom of a commercial plane.
Albuquerque was going to be my last stop on the tour, and Pat said that she and her husband, Dick, would be willing to drive Bumper from Louisville to Albuquerque. It would be a very long trip for them, but the effort was typical of the kind of people I later found them to be. I told her that if they drove Bumper there, I’d cancel my flight, rent a car, and drive him back to California.
So they showed up at the bookstore signing with Bumper. I was glad they did for a couple of reasons, including the fact that had they not shown up, I would have been the only person at the signing. I would have had to sign a book to myself, maybe with the inscription, “To David, an extraordinary author and friend and a damned good-looking guy.”
Did Hemingway and Faulkner have to put up with such indignities?
The store was actually in the process of going out of business; half the shelves were empty, and boxes were everywhere. So Pat, Dick, and I spent the time talking about and petting Bumper, who was every bit as beautiful as his picture had shown him to be. And, Pat was pleased to report, perfectly house-trained.
We eventually said our good-byes, and Bumper and I set out in the rental car for Southern California. We didn’t hit any traffic leaving, because did I mention that not a single person showed up for the signing?
It’s a twelve-hour ride, so we started it by stopping at McDonald’s and getting Bumper a double hamburger. Then we drove for four hours and checked into a hotel for the night. Once we got our room, I took him outside for a walk. House-trained as he was, he hadn’t gone in a long while and must have been holding it in.
We walked for forty-five minutes, but he wasn’t inclined to do anything, so I took him back to the room. I figured that if I woke up during the night, I’d take him out for another chance.
It turned out that Bumper was house-trained; he just wasn’t hotel-trained. As soon as we got to the room, literally as soon as I closed the door, he pissed all over it. I yelled at him, but if he was intimidated or remorseful, he hid it very well. He smiled at me the whole time.
Today Bumper is twelve years old, and one of the best dogs we’ve ever had. For a while he had some difficult times with seizures, but he had his last one five years ago and hasn’t looked back. He’s slowing down but is in remarkably good shape, and I have grudgingly forgiven him for pissing in the hotel.
Bumper, I am happy to report, was one of the twenty-five on the trip to Maine. And fortunately, he is RV-trained.
Willie Boy
People have all kinds of reasons for giving up their pets. Some of them are justified, but the majority of them are stupid and uncaring. They also have all kinds of ways to do it, and one of the more annoying ones is when they board their dog somewhere, give a fake name, and never return to get it.
One day Debbie and I were approached by the receptionist at Bay Cities Veterinary Hospital, our vet in Marina del Rey, looking for a favor. People had dropped off for boarding their fourteen-year-old chow mix, Willie, and subsequently vanished. Willie had by then been stuck in a cage for four weeks, and they had no idea what to do with him.
Since our foundation was based at that vet, they wondered if we could somehow place Willie in a home. We said that we would try, but the likelihood of placing a fourteen-year-old chow mix is virtually nonexistent.
The headline Debbie wrote for Willie’s ad in the Los Angeles Times was “Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here,” and the copy went on to honestly and accurately explain the difficult circumstances that Willie found himself in.
The afternoon that the ad ran, I got a phone call from a man who simply said, “I’m interested in Willie.” The voice was simultaneously powerful and very familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
As with all prospective adopters, I asked the man a series of questions, mostly about why he was interested in Willie, what kind of home he had, whether he had other dogs, whether Willie would be an inside dog, that kind of thing.
He explained that he’d had two dogs, but one had recently died. The remaining dog was a female twelve-year-old chow mix, and it just seemed that Willie would likely make a good companion for her.
His answers were all perfect; there was little doubt that he would pass our screening process. The prospect for success improved even more when I asked him his name, and he said, “Chuck Heston.”
I was talking to Charlton Heston, and he wanted “Willie Boy.”
Now, it should be pointed out that Mr. Heston and I were on opposite ends of the political spectrum, and I was never really a big fan of most of his movies. Even though I’m a fanatic Giants fan, I probably prefer Ben Roethlisberger to Ben-Hur.
But Willie, as far as I could tell, was apolitical, and not much of a movie buff. And he and I agreed that anyone who would go out of his way to provide a home for an abandoned senior chow mix had a lot going for him. Besides, Willie was about to live out his life sucking down designer biscuits, so he was adamant that I not screw this up.
I had met Mr. Heston once, early in my movie marketing career. It was on a movie called Soylent Green, and our encounter was brief. That was nearly forty years ago, and the details are vague in my mind; it was probably in a meeting or maybe at a screening. Certainly he would never remember me.
In any event, we were not going to have a chance to get reacquainted. He sent an assistant to pick up Willie, a very nice lady who gave me all the proper assurances that he would be well taken care of. Willie drove off from the vet’s office as if he were the king of England.
The woman also brought with her a check for $2,500 from Mr. Heston as a donation to our foundation, and similar donations were made for each of the next three years.
I’m not sure how long Willie Boy lived, but I’m pretty sure of one thing: the old guy went out in style.
“Do You Take Pets?”
I bought a book on pet-friendly travel, which included a lengthy list of U.S. hotels and motels that accepted pets. I set out to learn what our options were, even though it was way too early to make any reservations. Not only did we not yet know how we would travel, but we also didn’t know our route. To complete the trifecta, even if we did decide on a route, we hadn’t yet figured out how far we could travel each day, so we wouldn’t know where to plan to stop.
To say we were at square one would be to give us way too much credit.
So at that point I was just trying to gauge how hotels would react to our request. I decided to be honest, not because that’s my natural instinct or because I thought there was any kind of moral imperative in play here.
Rather, my fear was that if I lied, we’d show up at a hotel and of course be unable to sneak the dogs in undetected, and we’d get turned away. And the only way we wouldn’t be detected was if the proprietor was in a coma. A very deep, kept-alive-by-machines coma.
So the first place I called was a motel outside of Salt Lake City. A woman cheerily told me that they were very dog-friendly, even providing water dishes and biscuits. Of course, a refundable cleaning deposit was required; fifty dollars for a dog under thirty pounds, and seventy-five dollars for one larger than that.
I hadn’t done the math, but I was pretty sure that we would be traveling with well over a ton of dog, so the cleaning deposit would probably be the GDP of a third-world country.
I told her the whole story, not because I wanted to stay in that hotel, but more to get her reaction and advice. She thought it was pretty much the funniest thing she had ever heard, but when she stopped laughing, she admitted that there was no way her manager would ever agree to it.
She wouldn’t even have the nerve to ask him, and she doubted there was a hotel manager on
the planet who would go for it. Other than that, she was really encouraging.
So at that point, three months before the trip, we had no way to travel, not enough people to travel with, and no places to stay or eat along the way.
Things were really cooking.
Emmit Luther and his wife, Deb, own a bunch of Taco Bells in Georgia and live on a farm outside Atlanta. Emmit is something of a character: a big, burly, very funny guy who would happily give you the shirt off his back, though it would almost always be an SEC football jersey.
We knew the Luthers through Debbie’s job at Taco Bell, and we had spent time with them at football games and had vacationed with them once. We considered them good friends, and when they heard about our predicament, they demonstrated that we were right to make that judgment.
Deb would have to be in the office, but Emmit wanted to go on the trip. I should just let him know when to be in California, and he was in.
Not only was he in, but he was perfect. He told me that when he was younger, he drove an eighteen-wheeler cross-country for a living. Because I’m an analytical guy, I figured that an eighteen-wheeler must be a vehicle with eighteen wheels. If we wound up using vehicles of some sort, I doubted they’d have more wheels than that, so it would likely be a piece of cake for Emmit.
He was also an animal lover, and on the lunacy scale lived a life that ranked right up there with Debbie’s and mine. He and Deb had a house- and farmful of various animals, including many dogs and goats.
Emmit would fit in on the trip very, very well.
* * *
One of my favorite places to do book signings is Houston. I generally do them as a benefit for Golden Beginnings rescue group, in conjunction with a terrific mystery bookstore called Murder By The Book.
As rescue groups go, Golden Beginnings is as good as there is. We’ve actually gotten two goldens from them, very old dogs that were hard to place. One was a sweet, smallish dog named Buddy, and the other was a one-eared dog they called Van Gogh. They were fantastic dogs, and though neither lived very long after we got them, we were lucky to have them in our home.
Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure Page 5