Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure

by Rosenfelt, David

  The woman had decided she couldn’t handle two dogs and didn’t want Ellie back. That was fine with us, since we wouldn’t have let her have her anyway. She was happy with Clark, and we felt that one dog was all she needed.

  Debbie felt like Ellie had been through too much to put her back in a cage, so we brought her home. It was a violation of our “only old or sick dog” pledge, but even back then, the pledge was not exactly an ironclad rule.

  We decided that the name Ellie hadn’t worked that well for her to that point, so we changed it. From then on she was Weasel.

  The day I brought Weasel home, Debbie was sick in bed. I put Weasel on the bed with her, but she was scared, and she proceeded to piss all over it.

  Not an auspicious debut.

  As all the dogs did, Weasel soon found a place where she was comfortable; in her case, it was under our bed. She stayed there all day every day, venturing out only to eat and go outside to the bathroom. Amazingly, despite the pissing-on-the-bed fiasco, she was house-trained.

  Gradually, over a period of months, she grew to trust us, and she would come out for long periods and hang out with us and the other dogs. But that’s where the trust ended. If we had a visitor in the house, you couldn’t pry her out from under the bed with a crowbar.

  There were no exceptions, and no time limits to this. My father came to stay with us for a week from his home in Florida. He hadn’t visited in a few years, so he’d never seen me up close as a dog maniac. He could not believe what our house was like, and he didn’t get to see all the dogs; he never once saw Weasel. She had lived with us for two years by that point, but while there was a stranger in the house, she stayed under the bed.

  When visitors weren’t around, she would go out on our property and display her eccentricities. She would climb trees; I swear that’s true. And she’d bring things back and leave them on our living room floor. One day it was a deflated football. Another day it was a dead lizard.

  I preferred the football.

  Weasel lived in our Santa Monica house for five years. When we moved our thirty-seven dogs to Orange County, the arrival of the movers sent her scurrying for cover under the bed. I will never forget the look on her face when they took the mattress and bed frame, leaving her exposed.

  When we left Orange County for Maine, eleven years after that, Weasel was the only one of the thirty-seven Santa Monica dogs still alive. Debbie and I had been hoping that she would make it to Maine, and she did.

  Weasel died four months after we arrived in Maine, at the grand old age of seventeen. I think she held on as long as she did because she knew how much we wanted her to.

  Saying good-bye to any one of our dogs is hard, but in Weasel’s case it was that much harder. She was the only dog we had that had spanned the years with us. She was there almost from the time we started in rescue, and she stayed with us until we completed our journey.

  I know for a fact that she spent almost sixteen of her seventeen years loved and doted on. Yet in her mind it never totally made up for the one year that had left her so wary and frightened.

  But she trusted us, totally and completely, and that was the greatest gift she could have given us.

  Weasel was a keeper.

  Louis

  I was contacted by the Pasadena animal shelter, which is about as good a shelter as you will find in Southern California. They had two goldens, which we would later name Louis and Gus, that had been found stray together. They properly would only place them both in the same home, and had done so, but the dogs had been returned.

  I was surprised that the shelter needed us, since they have a very good adoption rate. We had been called on by them only once before, to rescue a twelve-year-old epileptic golden named Yogi.

  Once I got there, the reason they’d called became obvious. Both dogs were beautiful, but while Louis was three years old, Gus was eleven. More significant, Gus had terrible separation anxiety. When the people who adopted them from Pasadena left them alone in the house, Gus had broken through a window to get out. The cuts on his face testified to the truth of the story.

  We got them home, and any separation anxiety disappeared. With all the other dogs around, there is no such thing as separation. Both dogs were fabulous, and we were thrilled to have them.

  Two days into their stay with us, the woman from the shelter called to say that a mistake had been made, and that Louis actually was wanted by the director of the shelter to be his family pet. The good news, she told us, was that we could keep Gus. In other words, they wouldn’t ordinarily split Louis and Gus up, but since it was the director who wanted Louis, they’d make an exception in this case.

  I briefly tried to picture Debbie’s reaction if I agreed to this. It’s too graphic to go into, but it’s fair to say that I would have been living in a shelter myself within the hour. But I was actually smart enough to figure this one out on my own even without the fear of Debbie to coerce me. I told the woman exactly what I thought of her plan, and what she could tell the director.

  Louis was staying.

  It was right up there with the finest moves I’ve ever made. The best way I can describe Louis is to say that Debbie considers him Tara’s direct descendant, and trust me, no higher praise can be offered.

  He is perfect in every respect, so much so that he has never barked.

  Not once. Ever.

  We could use a lot more like Louis.

  Sally and Jack

  Whenever a story comes on the news involving anything approaching animal cruelty, both Debbie and I rush to turn the television off. It’s not the most mature approach; it just bothers us to see animals in distress when we can’t do anything about it.

  Just such a story was highly publicized in Southern California a few years back, and it was awful. A woman living in the Mojave Desert had 250 animals on her property, 90 percent of which were dogs. They went uncared for and undernourished, living in horribly filthy conditions. The woman was arrested and convicted on multiple felony counts, which was the trigger that allowed rescue groups to go in.

  I got a call from a member of one of those groups; she told me that there were two purebred goldens among the dogs and asked if we would take them. I obviously agreed, and I drove to LA to meet the woman and the dogs, which she had just extricated from the scene.

  They weren’t remotely close to golden retrievers, though both had a small amount of gold in their coat. Sally is a smallish short-haired shepherd mix, and my best guess is that Jack has shepherd and Brittany spaniel in him.

  Sally had permanent cut marks on her face, probably the result of fighting for the little available food, and an ear hematoma that needed immediate surgery. Jack was emaciated—with his mellow disposition, he probably never even entered the food fights.

  Both are beyond sweet, and probably like petting as much as any two dogs we’ve ever had. We have a chaise up in our bedroom in Maine that Sally has appropriated as her own. Jack sits on a chair in my office, and as I walk by he leans his head down slightly, so as to be in the “petting-receiving” position.

  I hope the other Mojave dogs are doing close to as well as these two.

  They are what animal rescue is all about.

  The Team Comes Together

  We had six people signed on: Debbie and me, Cyndi Flores, Mary Lynn Dundas, Emmit Luther, and Randy Miller. Of those, Mary Lynn had said she would not be comfortable driving a vehicle that large. That was understandable; I wasn’t looking forward to it myself.

  But it meant that we had only five drivers. Unless Wanda and a few of the goldens could take shifts behind the wheel, we were way short.

  And then the human floodgates opened.

  I used to do book signings at a store called Mysteries to Die For, in Thousand Oaks, California. It was a great store that has recently and unfortunately had to close, a victim of declining sales at independent bookstores around the country.

  Terri Nigro is a woman who came to a number of the signings, and she had e-mailed me
saying she enjoyed the talks and liked the books. But because she was there, she had to hear my incessant, increasingly pathetic pleas for ideas about how to make the trip.

  She wrote to say that however we were going to do it, she and her husband, Joe, would like to join us on the trip. I didn’t remember meeting her at the signings and wasn’t sure who she was. Since I was only “talking” to her via e-mail, there was always the chance that she and her husband were ax murderers.

  Of course, it’s not that being ax murderers would have disqualified them in my eyes. We desperately needed help in the form of volunteers, and as long as they’d be willing to leave their axes at home, we’d welcome them with open paws.

  Terri told me that she owned a word-processing business, and also worked at a nonprofit satellite TV ad agency. More significant, she said that Joe owned an upholstery repair business, specializing in restaurants. What this meant was that Joe seemed like a good candidate to join Emmit and Randy in the “real man” section of the team. With three RVs, this would mean we’d have one real man for each vehicle.

  So Terri and Joe were in, and they even offered to drive one of the RVs back to Virginia at the end. I was thrilled, but a little wary. Could there really be people this nice?

  With Terri and Joe’s signing up, we had eight people, which included seven drivers. That might be enough to make it, but not comfortably. We definitely needed more, but we had no idea where to find them. Crazy people don’t grow on trees.

  Just two days later, Debbie was describing the situation to a friend of hers, Cindy Spodek Dickey, who lived in Seattle. She was one of the only people we had ever had over for dinner at our house in Orange County, a couple of years earlier. It was an evening that stamped her as both a dog lover and totally fearless.

  When someone enters our house, we instruct them not to pet or even acknowledge the dogs until they have calmed down. Best to ignore them, as difficult as that is while being mobbed. Petting only excites them and increases the energy and decibel level, if such a thing is possible.

  Cindy had disregarded our instructions and launched into full-scale two-handed petting as soon as she entered. She even bent down to do so.

  It wasn’t pretty; at one point I actually lost complete sight of her in the canine mosh pit. I was trying to figure out how I would explain the disaster to the police when she stood up, relatively unscathed, laughing.

  This was a woman to be reckoned with.

  Cindy apparently hadn’t gotten any saner since that evening. As Debbie was telling her about the trip, I could hear her screaming through the phone from the other room. She absolutely wanted in, and she couldn’t believe Debbie hadn’t asked her. She vowed that whenever we did it, however we did it, she was going to be a part of it.

  That made nine.

  Erik Kreider designs my Web site, a job that is as completely unsatisfying as any could be. I pay almost no attention to it and provide very little information for him to work with. He does a really good job of it, but he could do much better if I put in the effort.

  Erik heard about the trip when I solicited his help to get online suggestions for how we should do it. He immediately realized that we were going to have to drive, and he volunteered to come along.

  Actually, he pretty much insisted, though I wasn’t particularly resistant. He told me that he drives long distances quite often and loves doing it, especially the night-driving part. That made him absolutely perfect for us, since I really enjoy night sleeping. Best of all, he offered to drive the third RV back to Virginia, taking me off the hook.

  A side benefit, though none was needed, was that Erik is a very funny guy, and a terrific writer in his own right. His presence and commentary would brighten the trip, and in my eyes, it was a trip that needed considerable brightening.

  Erik wanted to bring his son, Nick, along. Nick is around twenty years old, which made him too young to drive the vehicles, since the rental company required that drivers be at least twenty-five. But he could help in other ways, and there would be plenty of other ways.

  I figured it was kind of a father-son bonding thing, which was fine with me. I only wished that Erik had more kids.

  The team seemed complete, but Cyndi Flores pointed out that we would need places to stop, mostly to walk the dogs, and they would have to be scouted out. You can’t just let twenty-five dogs out along the highway; we would need confined areas, like dog parks. Of course, we didn’t want to have to deal with the chaos involved with having our crew meet local dogs en route, so it was clear that planning would be required.

  Cyndi took on the task of mapping out our route and contacting local rescue groups along the way. Our hope was that they could be there to help when we stopped, both in getting us to an appropriate area and in walking the dogs. We would even offer them the opportunity to get some publicity for our arrival, and possibly to use it for their fund-raising. Maybe they could charge five dollars a person to meet the traveling lunatics.

  Cyndi started having some success, but I was worried about it. I worry about everything, but in this case it was justified.

  We really had no idea how fast we’d be able to travel, for a myriad of reasons. Anything could happen, from a dog’s getting sick and needing vet care to heavy traffic or a flat tire.

  We might not make it in time to where local people were waiting, or we might get there earlier than planned. We didn’t want to have to cut corners or drive more quickly and with less sleep simply because people were expecting us at a certain time. And we absolutely had no desire to have to sit in a town and hang around because we were ahead of schedule. The faster this trip was accomplished, the better.

  Cyndi agreed, and said that she could enlist her daughter and a friend to drive a couple of hours ahead of our caravan, in one of our cars. They could scout out locations and tell us where to stop.

  It seemed like a perfect solution, but then real life intervened and work prevented her daughter from coming along.

  And then I came up with a great idea, my first and last of the trip.

  We’d build our own dog parks.

  Trapper

  The Santa Monica shelter contacted us very rarely. It’s a small place with an incredible adoption rate, and they were almost never in need of outside rescue help.

  Enter Trapper, a beautiful two-year-old yellow Lab that had been taken in to the shelter badly injured, having reportedly been struck by a car.

  He had a terrible wound on his leg, which the shelter vet saw as evidence that the car accident story was a fabrication. He had no doubt about what had really happened: Trapper had gotten his leg caught in a coyote trap, likely in the Santa Monica mountains.

  The wound was clear around the leg, and bone could be seen from every direction. Additionally, there were bite marks just above it, as if the poor guy had tried to chew his leg off to escape the trap. It was horrible, and the shelter vet had real doubts that it would ever heal.

  We took Trapper, and our vet shared those doubts. He operated, but even after the surgery was performed, there was no assurance that the leg could be saved.

  Were I to call central casting and ask for the perfect dog adopters, they would send me Bruce and Kelly Green. A young couple living in Pasadena, they showed up one day looking for a yellow Lab. At the time, we didn’t consider Trapper ready to be placed, but after talking to Bruce and Kelly, I decided they should see him.

  To see Trapper was to fall in love with him, and they were certainly not immune to his charms. But they asked for time to think about it, since taking him home would represent a major commitment. Trapper was going to need ongoing and very difficult care for his injury.

  They called the next day to say that they wanted him, even though I had told them it would be three weeks before he would be ready to go. Our vet, dissatisfied with Trapper’s progress, was about to try a skin graft technique that he had never used before, in a desperate attempt to save the leg.

  It worked, but ultimate healing would still
take a very long time. Bruce and Kelly understood that, and when they got Trapper home, they were amazingly caring and attentive to his needs. Trapper bled frequently from the wound, though the vet said that this was good, because “only healthy cells bleed.”

  A turning point came when Kelly found a vinyl boot at a pet store that laced in the front and would stay on Trapper’s leg. It allowed for healing to take place, and Trapper wound up wearing the boot for three months.

  Today Bruce and Kelly describe Trapper as one of the great joys of their lives, and in fact the experience moved them to adopt and help many other special-needs dogs. And Trapper’s boot hangs above their fireplace mantel.

  Rescue can be an exhausting, draining “hobby,” but it always seemed that when we felt we had reached the end of our rope, people like Bruce and Kelly Green would come along.

  I wish there were more of them.

  The Smell

  We lived in a very nice neighborhood in Santa Monica, on Tenth Street between Montana and San Vicente Avenues. It was within easy walking distance of the shops and restaurants on Montana, the Third Street Promenade, and the beach.

  All in all, it was a terrific place to live.

  Unless you lived near us.

  The homes were on very little land, with modest backyards and no more than fifteen feet between houses on either side. So, neighbors fifteen feet away, thirty or forty dogs … you do the math.

  Our dogs were always house-trained, which in itself was remarkable. We rarely know the histories of the dogs we rescue, but certainly many must have been “outside dogs” before we got them. The law of averages says that it has to be the case, but there is also anecdotal evidence. Many times our dogs will have large calluses on their elbows, a sure sign that they’ve spent substantial time lying outside on hard, rough concrete.

  If a dog was going to live outside, then there was no reason, and really no opportunity, to house-train it. Yet once these dogs came into our home, an interesting process took place. The other dogs would teach them to go outside; the newcomers would simply follow the group at bathroom time. I can’t think of any other explanation for it.