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

by Rosenfelt, David

  But all those dogs doing their business in a backyard of maybe a thousand square feet presented some issues. It obviously had to be cleaned regularly, a task neither Debbie nor I relished, but which we did religiously. Unfortunately, urine cannot be swept up with a scooper.

  So the place smelled.

  And our neighbor complained.

  We tried a number of things to deal with it. We sodded the area, but the urine quickly killed the grass. So we sodded it again, this time with better sod, and the urine killed it again.

  If you’re ever in a game of “sod, urine, scissors,” you can be sure that urine beats sod.

  Then, I forget why exactly, I had the bright idea to bring in sand and cover the backyard with it. So we did. We trucked in sand and turned the entire area into a beach; it was like watching a canine Baywatch. You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen a blind Saint Bernard frolicking on the beach.

  It turned out to be an exquisitely stupid idea. The dogs hated it, probably because the sand was hot and annoying on their feet. They then tracked it into the house, destroying carpet and floor in a matter of days.

  And it didn’t stop the smell. Not even close.

  Debbie was a tad critical of my sand idea, so I left it to her to come up with a different solution. And she did … borax. We removed the sand and then sprayed borax over the entire side of the yard near the neighbor’s house. It was July, but it turned the place into what looked like a winter wonderland, as if pure snow was covering everything.

  Within twenty-four hours the snow was 25 percent yellow, as the dogs got to work. And that percentage increased daily, so we spread more borax to cover it up. The borax got so deep that the dogs could barely walk in it, but, ever resourceful, they still managed to piss on it.

  And still it smelled, so we decided to ditch the borax. Unfortunately, removing knee-deep borax is not the easiest thing in the world. There are no borax-plow operators in Santa Monica; it’s not even that easy to find a snow shovel.

  But we cleaned the stuff out, just in time to try our next trick. We got this perfumey, anti-smell stuff and sprayed it on the area at least five times a day. People driving by in their cars were gagging from the stench; it was like being trapped in a vat of cotton candy. Not surprisingly, the neighbor informed us that the new smell was far worse than the old one.

  We had pretty much run out of ideas, and based on the quality of the ideas we had run out of, that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. So in a desperate measure, we constructed two parallel chain-link fences leading from the back of the house to the rear of the backyard.

  This created a corridor about six feet wide for the dogs to use, a sort of bathroom bowling alley. It had the advantage of confining the origin of the offending odors to an area much farther from the neighbor, and it actually seemed to do the trick, at least as far as he was concerned.

  It was just another example of life in the fast lane.

  Because of our “open door” policy, flies were becoming particularly annoying, and Debbie came up with a way to deal with it. She bought a product called the Big Stinky, which was to be hung outside the room near the open door. It included a packet of some kind of solution, and to it we were supposed to add a quarter pound of raw fish.

  This would apparently keep flies away, since flies are not idiots. Why would they want to be around the most disgusting thing in the history of the world?

  Our experience with the Big Stinky lasted just one day. We never gave it a chance to see if it actually kept out the flies, because it’s fair to say that there has never been a product more aptly named.

  People often ask how we manage to keep the inside of our house clean. Of course I don’t want to quibble, but that assumes that the inside of our house is clean. It isn’t. In a perfect world, we try to minimize the level of dirty.

  Hair is the biggest problem; it is everywhere. I recently took a laser printer in to be repaired, and when the guy opened the back, there was enough hair in it to make a coat.

  It’s a myth that dogs shed when the weather goes from cold to hot so that they’ll be more comfortable in the summer. The truth is that they shed 365 days a year, twenty-four hours a day. I have no idea where all the hair comes from; maybe the groomer uses Rogaine on them. Otherwise they would be bald by now.

  So we do the best we can. We go through vacuum cleaners at an amazing clip; in our garage in California we had six broken Orecks lined up against the wall, looking like a vacuum-cleaner version of the Rockettes. We also groom the dogs on a rotating basis, two or three a week, in an effort to cut down on the shedding.

  Of course, hair is not the only problem; certain “incidents” take place with remarkable frequency, all with the capability of leaving stains. There are about 4 million products designed to clean up dog accidents, and trust me when I tell you that none of them works as advertised. Or maybe we just overwhelmed them.

  One day Debbie and I were in bed watching television. There was a commercial for a dog cleaning product, and it showed a woman cleaning up after her boxer made a mess. At the end she’s praising the product, and she holds it up and turns to the camera, a big smile on her face. “And I really need it,” she says. “I have six of them.”

  Then the camera cuts to her dogs at her feet. The implication is clear: this woman is hilariously eccentric for having six dogs.

  Of course, the camera didn’t cut to the bed that Debbie and I were in, which we were sharing at the time with seven dogs. Add in the ones in the bedroom but not on the bed, and it totaled twenty-one.

  If the lady in the commercial was nuts, what did that make us?

  Totally nuts.

  Harley and Dinah

  Nancy Sarnoff of Perfect Pet Rescue, the friend that introduced us to dog rescue, would call periodically about dogs that she had seen in the shelter but couldn’t take herself. She specialized in small dogs, so when she fell in love with large ones, we were her first call.

  Harley and Dinah were two goldens that she saw in the Downey animal shelter. Both had dirty and matted fur, and the fact that they were nine years old meant they had little prospect for adoption.

  As expected, both fit into our house immediately. Harley was completely friendly and easygoing, while Dinah was a slightly heavier lift. She didn’t like to be crowded by the other dogs, and a dislike for being crowded is not a great quality to have in our house. But she adapted, and there were no fights or major disagreements.

  People often ask me if I know the names of all our dogs. Not only can I always name them, but I can do so quickly. The way I do it is by thinking room by room, since each has his or her own place to hang out.

  Harley plants himself under my desk, and does so in Maine as he did in Orange County. Dinah, on the other hand, prefers the living room and a specific dog bed near the fireplace.

  Two months before we moved to Maine, Dinah was diagnosed with an incurable cancer. The vet felt that she could have a good quality of life for six months, and he turned out to be right on target. Dinah died four months after our arrival in Maine. But she made it, and she will be missed.

  Harley is fine, under my desk as I type this.

  I Hate Home Depot

  I hate Home Depot almost as much as I hate snakes, and even more than I hate the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Yankees. I hate it more than I hate broccoli and beets, and almost as much as I hate O. J. Simpson.

  Home Depot stores are way too big and way too intimidating, and they make me feel totally inadequate. When I’m shopping for something, the employees can direct me to the right aisle, to the right shelf in that aisle, and to the right place on the shelf, and I still have no idea what I’m looking at.

  Also, despite the fact that they have a large number of employees, there’s always one too few when I get there. Every helpful employee is already talking to a customer, and every customer has a helpful employee to talk to. So I always park myself on the periphery of one of these conversations and wait for it to end.


  Of course, I have no idea when that might be, because I cannot understand anything they’re saying. I recognize isolated words, like “rivets” or “caulking” or “voltage,” but when put into the context of a Home Depot sentence, their meaning is completely obscured. It’s like being in a foreign country, without any of the good vacation stuff.

  Did I mention that I hate the place?

  However, my pre-trip planning inevitably took me to the local Home Depot, to try to bring my big idea to fruition. I asked for the fencing department and was directed to an area about twelve miles from where I was standing. Walking from one end of that store to the other makes me feel like I’m going the wrong way on a people mover; I never seem to make progress getting there.

  But when I finally arrived, I was shocked to find an employee walking through the department, and he stopped, smiled, and asked if I needed help.

  I didn’t know whether to talk to him or hug him.

  I start every sentence I speak at Home Depot with the words “I have no idea what I’m talking about, but…” I say this even if I’m just asking where the restroom is. It places me in context, and insulates me from the subsequent and inevitable realization the salesperson would otherwise have that I have no idea what I’m talking about. My ignorance defines me, and I’m comfortable with that.

  I told the guy that we were traveling cross-country with twenty-five dogs, waited for the surprise and laughter to run its course, and then told him what I was hoping to do. “I want fencing that we can put up and take down in a few minutes, and that will be strong enough that the dogs won’t just run over it. We want to set up mini dog parks wherever we go.”

  “No problem,” he said, as if he got requests like that every day. He took me to an area that had rolled-up plastic fencing and recommended two hundred feet of it. He also had stakes that could be placed into the fencing at whatever intervals we chose, and that could then be easily driven into the ground.

  “So this can work?” I asked, since I’m not used to my ideas being feasible.

  He shrugged. “Don’t see why not. Is there anyone to stand around it and make sure the dogs don’t try to crash it?”

  I nodded. “We have eleven people.”

  He seemed surprised. “Friends of yours?”

  “For now. That should last until Utah at the latest.”

  In order to reduce the chance that I would screw things up, I asked him to show me exactly how to set up the fence, including and especially how to put the stakes in the ground. Of course he made it look easy.

  “You look like the kind of guy that would enjoy a trip like this,” I said.

  He laughed. “No chance.”

  “You sure? An opportunity to see the world … interact with wildlife … make new friends…”

  He was not to be convinced, so I thanked him, loaded the fencing into the car, and left. I felt like I had accomplished something physical, which is not a feeling I have very often. Maybe when I got home I could build a room onto the house or plow the lower thirty.

  But the fact was that we were actually finally getting close to ready. We had the vehicles lined up, the people set and willing to go, and a plan, such as it was, in place.

  Cyndi Flores was constantly evaluating what we were doing, and coming up with risk assessments on what could go wrong and how to cope with it if it did. Here’s a chart she sent me, and when you read it, please keep in mind that this is a person I had never met.

  Can you see why I named her Grand Exalted Empress of the Trip?

  Crazy Sky and the Coyote

  Wherever we live, we always make sure that we have a fence high enough and strong enough to keep the dogs from getting loose. They spend 99 percent of their time in the house, but if they were to see an animal outside the fence, they might try to go after it. We make sure that they can’t.

  At our home in Silverado, we had a decent-sized piece of property that was fenced in, and the dogs could roam wherever they wanted. Then there was a gated cement driveway, which the dogs were blocked from.

  It worked quite well, and in the ten years we lived there, we had only one dog make it off the property. I’ll talk about that later.

  One day I got a call from a woman named Lorie Armbruster, a terrific lady who was a dedicated rescue person in Orange County. Her husband, Chris, worked with Debbie at Taco Bell. We occasionally took in dogs from her to live in our house, and obviously they were only the ones that her group could not otherwise place.

  She was calling me with a special case. His name was Sky, and he was a magnificent three-year-old white shepherd, one of the most beautiful dogs I’ve ever seen.

  Sky had something of a checkered past. He was owned by a family in a residential neighborhood, but he was a bit of a psycho, and he would go nuts whenever strangers approached the house. One time he got out of the house, ran wildly across the street toward a bunch of people, and in the process nipped a little girl.

  There was no real damage, but the child was properly freaked out, and the neighbors decided that Sky was a menace. They demanded that the owners have him put down, but the owners loved Sky, and they wouldn’t do it. Instead they gave Sky to the rescue group that Lorie represented, hoping that he would be placed in a good home in a neighborhood that he hadn’t already terrorized.

  But that wasn’t good enough for the neighbors. They designated one of their crew to go to the rescue group, pretending to be a potential adopter of Sky. The plan was to adopt him and then have him put down. Fortunately, the rescue group somehow saw through the plan and held on to Sky, but they didn’t then feel comfortable placing him in a normal home.

  Which led Lorie to us, since we are anything but normal.

  I met her at the place where Sky was being boarded, and I listened as she and another woman gave a very lengthy dissertation on Sky’s rather delicate mental condition. He was unpredictable, had horrible separation anxiety, and had to be treated with kid gloves. They recommended that Sky not be left alone for at least a week, and then only for short periods, until we were sure that he would not go nuts.

  I tried to explain to them that there is no such thing as separation anxiety in our house. When we leave, dogs are surrounded by a houseful of friends. We’ve had dogs that before we adopted them had gone through doors and windows when their owners left, but they displayed no such tendencies in our house. It’s only humans that can be driven insane by being in our house; dogs find it perfectly appealing and comfortable.

  Sky fit the pattern. He got to his new home and immediately became the perfect dog, mellow and unstressed. He got along great with the other dogs, and when we left he just laid on the couch and hung out. If we returned two hours later, he was still in his spot on the couch.

  It was not atypical; dogs just behaved differently in our house than they did elsewhere. A number of trainers, at various times, had warned us that what we were doing could never work. They predicted fights and behaviors that we would not be able to handle.

  But none of that ever materialized. I’m not sure why; I think it might be that rescue dogs are somehow grateful. Maybe they know where they’ve been, so they know how good they have it with us. All I can say is that the dire predictions never came close to being accurate.

  One trait Sky unfortunately did not lose was his reaction when strangers approached. He’d start barking wildly at the gardener or the UPS driver or anyone else who tried to invade his territory. If the gardener or another worker was there for two hours, then Sky barked for two hours.

  The strange thing about Sky was that when he was out of the house and saw strangers, he was a pussycat. Sky twice tore his ACL, and each time we had to board him at the vet’s office while he healed, because he wasn’t allowed to be active. The people at the vet’s office loved him and thought he was gentle and harmless.

  Sky never bit anyone, though in truth we never gave him the opportunity to. But he certainly scared people.

  One night close to midnight I was in my office wr
iting, and I heard strange noises that seemed to come from the driveway. It was gated off, so there was no way that our dogs or any outside animals could have gotten in there. I went out to investigate.

  Anyone who’s read any of my Andy Carpenter books knows that Andy, my alter ego, is a physical coward. But compared to the real-life me, Andy is Davy Crockett.

  So I went out to the driveway, which was lit only by moonlight, with considerable trepidation. And the noises I continued to hear moved me toward full-fledged panic. It sounded like there was a fight going on near the end of the driveway, and it included barking and some screeching.

  I looked in that direction, and walking toward me was Sky. I had no idea how he could have gotten out there, but that wasn’t what I was focusing on.

  I was focusing on what was in his mouth.

  A dead coyote.

  It was maybe thirty-five pounds, so I assume it was a very young coyote. It was remarkable that Sky was able to carry it the way he did, but I really didn’t take much time to reflect on his coyote-hauling prowess.

  Instead, I screamed “SKY! SKY! SKY!,” because in tense situations I am quite the wordsmith. I followed with a few more screams, but Sky kept coming toward me, his prize still in his mouth. Finally, mercifully, he dropped the dead animal, which landed with a disgusting thud and then lay motionless on the ground, just outside our bedroom window.

  Sky sauntered the rest of the way toward me, a smile on his face, proud of his accomplishment. I took him into the house so he could brag to his friends, all of whom were barking at the commotion. Debbie was sleeping through the entire thing, but I woke her up and made her look outside the window. I’m not sure what I was trying to accomplish; maybe I just wanted her to share my pain.

  In any event, she took a look at it, asked a couple of pertinent questions, such as “How did a dead coyote get in our driveway?,” and then went back to sleep.