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

by Rosenfelt, David

  Sleep was no longer an option for me. Getting the dead coyote out of the driveway in relative darkness was also not an option. Killing myself was the only option I could think of that was still on the table.

  So I spent the night in my office, working and surfing the Web. “How to remove a dead coyote from a driveway without touching it” is not a fruitful search on Google.

  The other thing I spent the night doing was dreading the morning. It would inevitably become light out—it always did—and I would have to get the damn coyote out of the driveway. It would probably be stiff from rigor mortis, making the prospect even more disgusting.

  I was also annoyed. Wasn’t this a job for the man of the house? Why wasn’t he doing it? I wanted that fictitious person to get me off the hook, because they haven’t yet invented the house that I am the man of.

  By six A.M. I could no longer pretend that it was still dark. I took a large bath towel out with me and headed down the driveway. When I got within fifty feet of where I knew the coyote was, I turned sideways and inched my way toward it, without looking at it.

  My plan, such as it was, was to toss the towel on top of it, without actually seeing it. Then, however I decided to get it out of the driveway, at least I wouldn’t have to look at the dead animal.

  I admit that it was not a perfect plan, but it might have worked, had the coyote still been there. When I got close enough, I could tell out of the corner of my eye that I was going to be throwing the towel on empty driveway.

  This was a mixed blessing. On the positive side, I wouldn’t have to perform the dreaded removal operation. More negatively, there was a chance that I was trapped in a gated driveway with a wounded and probably pissed-off coyote … the kind of coyote you can’t reason with.

  Debbie, courageous from the safety of our bedroom window, advised me to look under our car, which was parked in the driveway. That seemed reasonable, so I got as far away from the car as I could, knelt down on the ground, and squinted toward it.

  No coyote.

  To this day I have no idea how the coyote and Sky got into the driveway in the first place, or how the coyote got out. Someone subsequently told me that coyotes tend to fake their death when they’re in danger, but if that was the case in this instance, we had the Robert De Niro of coyotes in our driveway.

  All I can say is, for the next six months, I ran to and from the car.

  Walking the Dogs

  One of our favorite rituals when we lived in Santa Monica was walking the dogs each morning. Of course I would have preferred that Debbie and I each take one and stroll casually along. She preferred that we each take four, and they would pull so much that I’d spend most of the time yelling “Mush!” When we had that many with us, I usually took the less powerful, slightly older ones, because Debbie seemed to have the ability to walk an army.

  We worked out a compromise. On days that we planned to stop at Starbucks for coffee and a bagel, we’d take only two dogs each, so that we could sit outside with them comfortably. When we didn’t plan to stop, it would be four each.

  When we walked the larger group, we attracted a bit of attention, and not only because I was desperately and comically trying to hang on. On at least a half-dozen occasions, cars stopped and the drivers asked for our business card; they assumed we were professional dog walkers. I assured them we were simply professional nutjobs.

  One walk in particular is etched in my mind. We took four dogs each, but I wanted to stop at Starbucks anyway. I didn’t want to sit there and eat bagels; I really just wanted to hear what the young woman behind the register, Donna, had to say.

  The previous night, the first TV movie I had ever written had been broadcast on ABC. It was called To Love, Honor and Deceive, and starred Vanessa Marcil. Not a work of art, but pretty good as TV movies go, and I was excited that it had been on.

  I was a regular at that Starbucks and had had conversations with Donna in the past. She was a self-described lover of TV movies, and she’d promised to watch mine. I was interested to know what she thought, so I asked Debbie to hang out outside with the eight dogs while I went in and bought muffins for us to take home.

  As soon as I came in, Donna started raving about how much she’d loved the movie, how she wanted to see it again, et cetera. The woman in front of me on line clearly had her interest piqued. She asked me what movie we were talking about, and I said, “To Love, Honor and Deceive.”

  “It was fantastic!” Donna enthused.

  “What’s it about?” the other woman asked.

  It was time for me to be self-deprecating. “It’s about two hours.”

  “No, really.”

  “Let’s put it this way,” I said. “You’ve got your Citizen Kane, your Gone With the Wind, and your To Love, Honor and Deceive.”

  Donna moaned, “Oh, I hated Citizen Kane,” thus somewhat compromising her position as a reviewer to be respected.

  But at least we had the headline for the review ad: “Better than Citizen Kane!”—Donna from Starbucks.

  I tell that story not because I’m proud of the movie or of Donna’s reaction, but because it is the reason I had a bag of muffins in my hand for the rest of our walk.

  We always cut across a small park, mainly because the dogs loved watching the squirrels. On this particular day, a squirrel ran in front of us toward a tree. I let the leashes go, which I had done on a few occasions before.

  I did that because I knew that the dogs would futilely chase the squirrel to the tree, and it would then run up the tree and peer down at its pursuers, mocking them from its safe perch. There was no possible way that our old dogs could catch the squirrel. Our dogs couldn’t catch me.

  And this time was no different. The squirrel ran comfortably ahead of the dogs and scurried up the tree. By the time the rest of us got there, the four that I had been walking were looking up at the elusive squirrel and barking like crazy, as if begging it to come down and give them a fighting chance.

  Then I heard a scurrying sound from above, and the horror of the next few moments is etched in my memory. The squirrel fell from the tree; it apparently had lost its grip, in a very un-squirrel-like maneuver. And it landed at the feet of the four dogs, none of which could believe their good fortune.

  They proceeded to attack it, and I tried to stop them. Debbie tells me that my efforts consisted of hitting the dogs with the bag of Starbucks muffins, all the while screaming “NO! NO! NO!” in a voice about a million octaves higher than my usual voice. She said I sounded like a female opera singer who had swallowed a bug.

  And when it was over, the squirrel lay there, wounded but alive. Debbie ran across the street and rang a doorbell, asking the people who lived there if they had an empty box that we could use. They did, so she ran back with it, scooped the squirrel up, and put it in the box.

  We were at Sixth Street, a block east of Wilshire Boulevard, and we knew of a vet on Twelfth and Wilshire. So we ran in a ridiculous procession, Debbie holding on to six dogs, and me with two dogs and a box containing the wounded squirrel.

  We barged into the vet’s office, and he came out into the reception area to see what the commotion was about. We explained what had happened, and Debbie said that it was important to us that he save the squirrel.

  But medical science, or at least that vet, was not up to the task, and he humanely euthanized the squirrel. I left there having learned a valuable lesson: never let four old dogs chase a squirrel, and if you do, make sure you have something a bit heftier than muffins to restore order if necessary.

  I have no idea what happened to those muffins, but now I get scones.

  They’re harder.

  Just in case.

  Bernie

  Bernie is the only Bernese mountain dog we’ve ever seen in an animal shelter. He was a puppy and didn’t have all his markings yet, so I doubt that people knew what he was. We weren’t sure ourselves, but we had already fallen in love with the breed when we got Sarah, so we violated our “no puppy” pledg
e and took him.

  He’s grown to be a very beautiful, and very large, dog, with a typically great Berner temperament. Debbie would never admit to having a favorite, but he’s right up there, just behind Louis.

  He tips the scales at an energetic 120 pounds, and sleeps on our bed at night next to Wanda, who dwarfs him at 165. Throw in Jenny and at least one or two others, and our bed can feel fairly crowded.

  We’ve had Bernie for four years as of this writing, and it’s in the last six months that he’s started to become much more receptive to petting. Prior to this he wouldn’t sit still long enough to allow it to happen.

  When I wake up during the night, as happens quite often in the asylum that we live in, I look over and Debbie is almost invariably scratching Bernie’s stomach. I think she sets her arm to “auto scratch” before she goes to sleep.

  When it snows here, Bernie could not be happier. He goes outside and is frequently joined by a bunch of his friends; they all love the cold.

  Bernie seemed to enjoy the RV trip, and he is absolutely loving Maine. It would be impossible to imagine a house that he would not brighten.

  Final Preparations

  For quite a while, Debbie had been mostly disengaged from the actual trip preparations. My best guess is that this was partially due to a misguided notion that I had things under control, and also probably because she was focused on the Maine end of things.

  It’s difficult to renovate a house from thousands of miles away. Fortunately, we had in Hervochon Construction, people who were extremely competent and totally trustworthy, and that made things easier. But I don’t think they, or anyone else we were dealing with there, fully understood the “family” that we were bringing with us, and the accommodations that had to be designed for them.

  The dog door was a significant challenge, and then we still had to plan the outside area that the dogs would use when they went through it. A ramp had to be designed to lead there, at an angle that our old, arthritic dogs could manage. And it had to be made of a material that they wouldn’t find too slippery in the winter, since we were told they actually had winters in Maine.

  Gates needed to be installed on the front porch and rear decks; if the dogs got through an open door, we had to be sure they couldn’t run out into the wilderness.

  The furniture was another significant issue. Most of our California furniture had been trashed over the years by the dogs, so we had to get new stuff. Debbie used a local store in Maine, Parker Interiors, whose owner, Carolyn Parker, served as a decorator as well.

  Debbie spent what seemed like endless hours going over patterns for the chairs and sofas, until finally I had to tell her that none of the material was ever going to be seen. It would all be obscured by slipcovers and sheets to protect it from the dogs; we could do the room in bright red polka dots, and no one would know the difference.

  Still, Debbie mostly picked out things that would be nice if ever seen, until we got to the coffee table. We were going to bring our beat-up table with us from California, and Carolyn tried to talk us out of it. Finally, we convinced her by showing her a picture of the table, with Wanda the mastiff and Bernie the Bernese mountain dog sitting on it. There is almost never a time when that table doesn’t have a dog on it.

  Most important, of course, was that the house be ready when we arrived. We were finding out that there is a different mind-set in Maine than in California; people there are far more mellow and less stressed. Deadlines don’t matter quite as much, and people are therefore more flexible and unapologetic about it.

  Chris McKenney, our contractor in Maine, called one day to find out if we knew exactly when we’d arrive. This was not a good sign; the house was supposed to be ready for us without question, and now it seemed he was trying to figure out if he had a few extra hours or minutes.

  When I expressed concern, he assured me that everything would definitely be ready, “except for a few things.” He said that it was nothing that would affect our being able to live there. A counter wouldn’t be installed in the laundry room, the exhaust hood wouldn’t be above the range, and the mantel wouldn’t yet be over the fireplace.

  None of that was a big deal, but I wasn’t pleased about the mantel, because it’s six hundred pounds and would take a number of people to install. With our dogs, the prospect of having a houseful of workmen was not at all pleasing. “Why won’t the mantel be there?” I asked, since it had been ordered a long time before.

  “The mantel guy is moose hunting.”

  I’d already learned that this is how people in Maine talk; they tell you the truth, without hesitation and without apparent embarrassment. In California, they would have fabricated a more legitimate-sounding excuse.

  For instance, they might have said, “The stone is coming from Italy, and the craftsmen there took longer to cut it. They’re perfectionists, and they’ll never change. But believe me, you’ll be glad they spent the extra time when you see it.” They would say this even if the mantel was being cut in Burbank and looked like it was designed by Mickey Mantle.

  Anyway, not to worry, Chris told me, everybody that comes into the house will be comfortable with dogs. And I supposed that was true, if they’re comfortable with moose. Or mooses. Or meese.

  So Debbie was mostly focused on the Maine end until I took her to examine the RVs we were going to use. That seemed to provide a dose of reality; within two weeks we were going to be boarding these things and living on them for five days.

  She started planning the menus for what food we would have onboard. That wasn’t great news for me, since she’s into eating healthy, while I’m just into eating. So where I would have preferred potato chips, she listed carrots. And my preference for chocolate chip cookies in her version became sugar snap peas. It was a clear difference in philosophy, but I wasn’t that worried, since I would be doing the grocery shopping.

  She also created the lists of which people and which dogs were going to go into each RV, which I then checked over and edited. Debbie and I would split up; I would be on one of the two large RVs, and she would be on the other. We did it that way so that most of the dogs would have one of us with them, which we knew would keep them calmer.

  Once assigned, the dogs would stay on the same RVs the entire trip. It would help us keep track of them; when we called out the roll after each stop, the same seven or nine dogs would bark “Here” on each vehicle.

  We agreed that Debbie would put the youngest, most difficult-to-handle dogs on my vehicle, and the easiest on the vehicle that neither of us would be on. Our dogs have very unique relationships with each other, so we knew which ones to split up and which ones to pair together. More thought went into the seating plan for this trip than for most White House state dinners.

  The distribution of the humans was easier, and it was based on willingness to drive and experience with a similar type of vehicle. We figured we might have to switch humans occasionally, depending on how tired individual people were, but we’d have flexibility. Not too many people knew each other, and we didn’t know everyone, so we didn’t let personality figure into our decisions.

  We had four real men: Emmit Luther, Randy Miller, Joe Nigro, and Erik Kreider—five if you counted Erik’s son, Nick. Emmit and Erik were placed together, and Randy and Joe each went into one of the other vehicles. These were the guys who might have to switch RVs if necessary.

  The plan was to drive straight through to Maine, no stopping to sleep. When people weren’t driving they could be sleeping or eating or showering or reading or petting or doing whatever they wanted.

  We had other rules. Wine and beer were OK to have onboard, but no one would drink any of it within four hours of taking the wheel, and it would only be consumed near the rear of the vehicle. We would always have two people up front; one driving and the other in the passenger seat, making sure that the driver was fresh and awake.

  If we got to a point where there weren’t six people alert enough to fill those roles, we would stop. No excepti
ons.

  It was all very civilized.

  We also went through a process of making sure all the dogs had their shots up-to-date and were taking heartworm medication. Our dogs had never taken heartworm medication before, because heartworm is not a problem in California, but it is to some degree in Maine. Unfortunately, before dogs can take the medication, they must have a blood test to make sure they don’t already have the disease. If a dog that already has heartworm takes a heartworm preventative, it will likely be fatal.

  So I had to transport twenty-five dogs to the vet, in shifts, to get their blood tests and shots. Trust me when I tell you that it is not a fun process. But by the time I was finished, we had all the paperwork and documents that we could possibly need if stopped by local authorities anywhere. There were no federal laws governing our situation, so we overprepared in case certain states were set up to be difficult.

  Finally we were ready. Or maybe not—I had absolutely no idea. The vehicles were huge, and not a single person on the trip had ever driven one. The dogs were great, but how were they going to handle five days on an RV, driving nonstop and surrounded mostly by strangers? The volunteers were enthusiastic; would they stay that way?

  For myself, I just wished it were over. Personal comfort is actually not that important to me; I generally don’t need to stay in top hotels or fly first class or any of that stuff. But what I do care about is avoiding severe discomfort, and there promised to be a bunch of that on the trip.

  E-mails among the group were being exchanged regularly. They were talking about what DVDs they planned to watch, what food they were going to eat, and even what our theme song for the trip should be. I decided that if they started holding hands and singing “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” I was going to jump off the RV and head for the airport.

  But the overriding view of everyone was that it was going to be a great adventure, successful and a hell of a lot of fun.