Of course, it was possible that I was making judgments about human generosity and caring based on my own views on the subject, which was not a very informed view. I resolved to spend some time on the trip observing the humans, to better understand the race.
The dinner was amazingly pleasant. No one was showing any trepidation at all, with the obvious exception of yours truly. All of them seemed very comfortable with one another, laughing and joking and all expressing eagerness to start on the adventure.
Mary Lynn was the only person in the group that I hadn’t ever spoken to; she had signed on through Cyndi Flores. Like everyone else, she seemed extraordinarily pleasant and accommodating, expressing a willingness to do whatever was necessary on the trip.
She described to me the night she and Cyndi were sitting on her porch and Cyndi told her about the trip. She had accurately pointed out that it was totally crazy and then asked to be included. She had been a lover of dogs her entire life, so she relished the prospect of being literally surrounded by them. She actually thought it was a great opportunity, and she thanked me for including her.
Maybe I was mistaken; maybe we had flown these people in from Mars.
Debbie gave a toast, welcoming everyone and expressing our extreme gratitude for all that they were doing. It was really quite remarkable and selfless, because by any standard, five days on the road without stopping can be arduous and tiring. Add twenty-five dogs to the mix, and I can say with total certainty that even if all went well, it would be exhausting. Everybody understood this, but no one seemed worried or put off by it.
I remember looking around the table and marveling at what was happening. In terms of time and energy, they were doing a more substantial favor for us than I had ever done for anyone in my life. And they barely knew us!
I’ve since asked them why they did it, and they’ve pretty much unanimously said that it wasn’t only for the dogs, it was also for us. But the reason they considered us worthy of it was because of what they knew we had done for dogs.
It was the “power of the paw.”
The plan was to all meet the next day at the RV place at two o’clock, the earliest the vehicles would be ready. We had hoped to get them earlier, but the people who were renting them didn’t have to have them back until noon.
Once we got them, we’d drive the thirty minutes to our house, where we’d load up the supplies first, and then the dogs. My hope was that we could be on the road to Maine by five o’clock.
I went a little nuts buying food … twenty-five pounds of cold cuts for sandwiches, many fruit platters, every kind of snack and drink imaginable. Mary Lynn’s son, a chef, had prepared two elaborate Italian dinners that we were going to take along and have the first and second nights.
We picked up the vehicles, a process that took about an hour longer than we had scheduled. The proprietor, not exactly a high-energy guy, gave a brief, listless run-through on how the RVs work. I didn’t even bother to listen, since our real men were on the case.
Emmit took the wheel of the first RV and led the procession as I directed us on the half-hour trip to our house. We quickly ran into our first difficulty. We lived at the top of a hill, on a small private road. There was no way to get the huge RVs up the hill, and even if there was, we’d never be able to turn around. The road near our house was simply too narrow.
So, with the help of our great neighbors, Diane and Ralph Lee and Mary Ellen and Laurie Park, we ran a shuttle of supplies down from the house to the RVs at the bottom of the hill. There was a lot of stuff; human food and dishes, dog food and dishes, pots and pans, coffeemakers, linens, fencing, and much more.
Debbie had bought so much toilet paper that I think we could have wiped each dog’s ass after they did their business throughout the trip.
After the supplies came the dogs, who had absolutely no idea what was going on or who these strangers were. But everybody started petting them, so the dogs calmed down and were fine with it. Not that I had any doubts before, but it became more dramatically clear what dog lovers our volunteers were. They were going to have to be.
The scene was very chaotic, made more so by the fact that local Orange County media people had found out about it and were there to take pictures and interview us.
The interviewer put a camera in my face and asked what we were going to do if the dogs drooled. “We’re used to it,” I said.
It was eight o’clock and dark out before we took off. I knew that could cause us a problem of sorts on the other end. We’d taken over a bed-and-breakfast place, Damariscotta Lake Farm, which is near our house in Maine, for the Thursday night when we arrived, but that was based on a very optimistic schedule. Being three hours behind before we even left was not a promising start toward keeping that schedule.
Emmit was driving the vehicle I was on, along with Erik and Nick Kreider. Debbie was accompanied by Cindy Spodek Dickey, as well as Joe and Terri Nigro, with Joe behind the wheel. On the smallest of the three vehicles were the remaining three humans: Cyndi Flores, Mary Lynn Dundas, and Randy Miller. Randy was doing the driving. We’d set it up so that for the first leg, we had “real men” in the driver’s seat, which meant I was in the passenger’s seat.
There were nine dogs in my RV, nine in Debbie’s, and seven in the smaller one. I couldn’t even imagine what was going through their minds; it was an amazing upheaval in their lives. They seemed to be handling it well, and, as they do in the house, quickly found comfortable places to sack out. The shaking and rattling of the vehicles, while disconcerting to me, seemed to have a soothing effect on them.
I tried to tune the radio to Monday Night Football. I don’t think I’d ever missed a Monday Night Football game in my life; it is vital for me in that it helps bridge the terrifying gap between the NFL on Sunday and a full college slate the following Saturday.
But the radio was awful; it was impossible to hear anything. Not an auspicious beginning, but I took comfort in the fact that by the next Monday I would be watching the game in front of a roaring fireplace in our house in Maine.
Or so I hoped.
In any event, we were off.
Annie
I was in the San Fernando Valley to pick up a golden retriever at the West Valley animal shelter. Shelters knew us, since we were there all the time, and after some training they were semi-programmed to call us whenever a golden came in. It was hit or miss, but it improved gradually over time.
While I was there, a kennel worker named Denise called me over. I knew her only to nod hello, and I don’t think we’d ever had a conversation more substantive than discussing what a dog’s age might be or whether it had the mange.
We went into a back office, and within moments she was sobbing. At that moment I would have rather been on Pluto than in that office. Her sobbing caused me to feel sympathy, as much for me as for her.
Nevertheless, I asked her what was wrong. I don’t know if she heard the question, but it didn’t matter, because she was going to tell me anyway.
Once she composed herself, at least for the moment, she told me about Annie, a one-and-a-half-year-old shepherd/collie mix. Annie had come in seven weeks before, which surprised me, since dogs generally did not last nearly that long in that shelter if they weren’t adopted.
But there was a good reason that Annie had stayed alive. Annie had come in with a badly broken leg, which would under normal circumstances have ensured her quick demise. There was no way the shelter would have the inclination or the resources to have a vet fix the leg, since the injury would probably kill any chances she’d have of getting adopted. So, they would reason, why spend the money on a dog that would eventually be euthanized anyway?
But Denise fell in love with Annie, in a way that she said had never happened before. Shelter workers are generally caring people who like dogs as well as anyone else. I don’t know how they deal with watching what happens to so many of them, but I guess they just shut themselves off to it.
But Denise couldn’t shut Annie
off.
In order to keep her alive, she started moving her around to different cages, fixing it so that each time, the record showed that she was a new dog, having just arrived. My guess is that the records system within the shelter is not without its flaws, and Denise used the inefficiency to put off Annie’s euthanasia.
She managed to do that for five weeks, at which point her bosses caught on, and the dog jig, as they say, was up. But Denise was not about to fail, and she took Annie out of the shelter and to a nearby vet.
But Denise had no money, and the vet was refusing to operate without getting paid, so Annie just sat there with her broken leg, in a cage, for going on two weeks. It was driving Denise crazy, and she had nowhere else to turn, so she was turning to us.
She knew we concentrated on golden retrievers and other larger dogs, but would we take Annie?
If ever there was a no-brainer, the decision of whether to rescue Annie was it. Her situation defined the reason for rescue; to refuse her would be to not belong in the field. So of course I said yes.
But we would not be having the vet that kept the injured Annie stuck in a cage for two weeks fix the leg. We took her to our surgeon, who x-rayed it and told us that the break was really bad, and that the situation was further complicated by the long delay since the injury happened.
He would do the surgery, but he’d have to put in a metal plate to make sure the bones healed correctly. Annie would then have to spend another six weeks in a cage at his office, since she couldn’t engage in any activity that might put stress on the leg. At his office they could keep her immobile and monitor her in a way that we could not.
She came through the surgery well and took up residence in her new cage. Debbie and I visited her regularly, but we couldn’t take her for walks, since that might endanger her healing. So we sat with her and petted her and gave her some biscuits.
I bonded with her during that period, and eventually I had to stop visiting because she’d get so excited when she saw me that she’d try to jump up and down. Finally the six weeks were up, and we could take her out of there and set about finding her a home. Denise couldn’t take her, much as she wanted to, because she was already over the limit in her apartment, and her landlord was threatening to evict her.
Debbie and I had a dilemma. Usually we would have brought her to the vet’s office where we boarded the dogs awaiting adoption. But it just felt too cruel to put her in still another cage, so instead we took her home. She was obviously too young and healthy to qualify as one of our “at home” dogs, but she’d stay there while we found her a permanent home.
When a potential adopter would want to see her, we’d bring Annie to meet them at the vet’s office. We felt it would be easier for her to bond with new people outside our home. This way the people could meet her on neutral territory, take her for a walk, pet her, and get to know her.
It didn’t work out so well.
Annie simply wanted nothing to do with any of them. She wouldn’t walk on the leash, always trying to drag them to where she thought I was waiting. If they tried to force her, she bared her teeth and growled at them, a sure way to kill any chance at adoption.
So we finally gave in to the obvious; Annie had been through a lot, and she was not going to let her journey end at any house other than ours. She had already made friends with the other dogs, and that was where she was going to live. As far as I could tell, her decision was final.
Of the three hundred or so dogs that we’ve had in our home as pets, I can give you an exact count of how many have preferred me to Debbie.
Three.
And Annie was one of them.
She was absolutely devoted to me; there was not a moment that I was home that she was not by my side. At the time, five dogs slept in bed with Debbie and me, and she was one of them, because she was one of the few young and athletic enough to jump onto the bed without assistance. But she wouldn’t get on the bed until I did; and when she did we literally shared a pillow, weird as that might sound.
She was my pal and my protector, and the feelings were very, very mutual.
Annie lived for thirteen years with us, and she died after a short illness. It was for me one of the toughest losses I’ve faced, and by definition, I’ve faced a lot of them. I held her in the vet’s office when she died, as I always did, and the best way I can describe it is that it was exquisitely painful.
I was losing a friend, a living, feeling being that had loved me unconditionally for every day that she lived with us. So that was as hard as you would expect—maybe harder. But I also reflected on where she had been, and how she had amazingly overcome it all to have a long and happy life.
It also showed me how dog rescue, like most everything else, is totally dependent on luck and being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time.
Had I not happened to get a call that day about a golden retriever, I would never have heard about or adopted Annie. I have no doubt that she would have died in that vet’s cage, probably at the end of a needle.
But Denise stepped up and gave a damn, I got the call, and it all worked out. And I know that in the majority of cases it doesn’t work out, but I want to celebrate when it does.
Annie was something to celebrate.
She missed going to Maine by about two years. She would have loved it, because she always loved wherever she was and whatever she was doing. The smile on her face and the wag of her tail proved it.
I will always feel good about that.
And I will always miss her.
Idiots
We’ve dealt with a lot of them in our time in rescue. They are the owners who dump their dogs into situations knowing that the dogs will not survive. They think of them as possessions, and it doesn’t bother them to discard the dogs any more than it would to discard an old car.
That is not to say that there aren’t circumstances in which someone simply cannot keep a dog. Economics, illness or death in the family, a change in living circumstances … all of those things can make dog ownership difficult or impossible. But that doesn’t mean you just throw out the dog without providing for its protection as best you can.
Dogs have feelings; anybody who spends five minutes with one has to know that. They feel fear and love and gratitude and joy and anger and much more. But there are some people, many people, who either don’t understand that or don’t care.
There is a name for those people.
Assholes.
As a rescue group, we usually tried to avoid taking a dog from an owner who wanted to get rid of it. Our theory was and is that those dogs at least had their owner to protect them, while the dogs in the shelter had no one. If the owner did not live up to his or her responsibility and dumped the dog in a shelter, then it would become a candidate for our rescue. But not until then.
The exceptions to this rule were golden retrievers. We made a posthumous promise to Tara that we would always take a golden, for any reason, at any time.
So it was that we got Reggie.
Reggie was an eight-year-old golden that was going to be put into a shelter by his owner if we didn’t take him. So of course we said that we would, and the owner showed up with his girlfriend and Reggie.
As we always did, we asked the owner why he was giving Reggie up. He explained, without apparent embarrassment, that he liked to go running every morning with his dog. For years Reggie had happily obliged, but now, at eight years old, Reggie simply couldn’t keep up anymore.
So it was time to get another dog.
You don’t want to tell such people what you think of them, for fear that they will not then give you their dog. It was easy for me to hold my tongue in such situations anyway, since I am not a fan of confrontation.
My task was to keep Debbie in check, and it was a difficult one in the case of Reggie’s owner. I prevailed only by asking her if she wanted to risk this dope’s leaving and taking Reggie with him, to who knows where.
So we got Reggie, with the intention of
placing him in a home. He would stay in a dog run at the vet until he got adopted. But first he would get checked out physically and get a much-needed bath.
He checked out fine, and then Debbie put him in the tub to give him the bath. Midway through it, she called me over and said that she needed to run a quick errand, and asked if I could finish the bath and put Reggie into the cage. She’d be back in twenty minutes to pick me up so that we could go home.
It was diabolical. Debbie knew full well that ten minutes alone with Reggie would result in my absolute refusal to put him in the cage. He had these intense eyes that looked right through you, and a quiet dignity that goldens possess in amazing abundance.
And while I was bathing him, he licked my face.
Game, set, and match.
When Debbie came back, I was sitting on a couch in the reception area with Reggie on my lap, and she just laughed and said, “Let’s go.”
Reggie lived with us for four years, and I can honestly say that there has never been a better dog than him, Tara included. In his last six months, we learned that he loved to lick the bowl of Cherry Garcia frozen yogurt after I had some. Soon I would leave a scoop of it behind so that he could do more than lick the edges.
Just as in Tara’s honor we no longer eat hot dogs, in Reggie’s we no longer eat Cherry Garcia. Can’t we find a dog that loves spinach?
Reggie’s death was comparatively easy on him, with a minimum of pain. He was doing really well, and then he woke up one morning unable to move. It was a cancer of the spine, and we had to put him down that day. There was really no decision to be made, and he barely suffered at all. I wish it always happened like that.
But of course it was tough on us. I cried when Reggie was euthanized, a rarity for me. It’s just a hard thing to process, that we were making a conscious decision to destroy this living creature that we loved. It wasn’t that we had doubts about what we were doing; the vet said that Reggie would die either way. We were simply hastening the process and removing the terrible suffering.
Dogtripping: 25 Rescues, 11 Volunteers, and 3 RVs on Our Canine Cross-Country Adventure Page 11