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

by Rosenfelt, David

  It was touch-and-go for a while, and it took six vials of anti-venin and intense treatment over three weeks, but Tommy made it. He had been through a rough time before getting to us, and now a rougher time once he was here, but he was a fighter.

  Tommy lived another two years, during which time he was healthy and apparently happy.

  Two weeks after Tommy was bitten, I heard shrieks coming from our driveway. Our mobile dog groomer, Sofia, who was parked in our driveway bathing a dog, had seen a snake sitting on the pavement. Apparently, she was not a fan of snakes, something she and I had in common.

  She was hysterical and couldn’t even tell me what was going on. She pointed to it, which was enough. It looked like a baby rattler, though it was hard to tell since it was curled up. I had heard from our vet that babies were the most dangerous, but it wouldn’t have mattered if it were Great-grandpa Rattler and took its dentures out at night. I wasn’t going anywhere near it.

  “Any chance you’ll kill it?” I asked, not holding out any hope for a positive response. I didn’t get one, so I cut a deal with her. I would kill the snake if she would agree to then take it out of the driveway.

  She signed on to the plan, albeit reluctantly. I think she only went along with it because she would need to go past the snake to get to her truck, and she was not about to do that if it was alive.

  Since I had previously been panicked about being in that same driveway with a dead coyote, a live snake just about gave me a stroke. But I had no choice; I had to do what I had to do.

  I am David Rosenfelt, the great snake hunter.

  I had a few possible approaches: I could go after it with a knife, or chop off its head with a shovel, or drop a large rock on it. Each of these would have required great courage in the face of danger, so instead I drove my SUV over it.

  That didn’t kill it.

  It just pissed it off.

  Not only that, but it reacted by moving over, so that it was only a foot or so from the side of the house, too close for me to drive over it again. We were at an impasse and I wanted to declare it a draw, but I couldn’t. To leave the snake alive and in place was to invite the possibility that another of our dogs would get bitten.

  We had a strip of wood in our garage, at least fifteen feet long, a leftover from some construction that had been done. I took the wood and moved, actually inched, toward the snake, which was waiting for me. It was probably my imagination, but it seemed to be actually sneering its disdain. Apparently, it had researched my history in situations that required some level of bravery.

  I got the wood up against the snake and nudged it out a couple of feet toward the middle of the driveway. I then dropped the wood, got back in the car, and did another drive-over. This time it appeared to do the trick, and after jostling the snake with the wood a bunch more times to confirm that it wasn’t moving, I told the groomer that she could go ahead and get rid of it.

  She refused, just out and out reneged on our deal. What were the odds that I would find an even bigger coward than me? You can throw a dart out your window and be sure of hitting someone with more courage than me. But she had the practical upper hand, if not the moral one. It was my driveway, so it was more important to me to get rid of the dead snake than it was to her.

  I finally hit on a reasonable and fair solution. I took our power washer out of the garage and hooked it up, and the groomer hosed the snake out of the driveway. She knocked it out onto the road outside the driveway, to a place where I wouldn’t have to get close to it.

  So it just lay there, dead.

  But it was gone the next day.

  I did not want to know where it went or how it got there.

  Heathcliff

  As I’ve said, we generally don’t take dogs from owners, since our view is that those dogs have their owners to protect them, while dogs in shelters do not. But sometimes we make exceptions, especially for golden retrievers, and it’s most often because of the story that the owner tells us.

  Debbie took a call from a woman who had two dogs, a golden named Cathy and a black Lab named Heathcliff, both of whom were seniors. She explained that her long-existing allergies had worsened, and she could no longer keep Cathy. Heathcliff, having shorter hair, presented less of a problem, and she was going to keep him.

  Debbie could tell how much this woman loved the dogs, and how much pain she was experiencing in having to do this. So we took Cathy, an absolutely wonderful dog, and the woman visited her occasionally, for short periods at a time.

  Cathy died after a couple of years with us, and about a year after that, the woman called and asked us to take Heathcliff. He was ill with arthritis and Cushing’s disease, and she was having difficulty caring for him and affording the expensive medication.

  When we got Heathcliff, he was in bad shape and was having great difficulty walking. But the meds that our vet put him on led to a very significant turnaround, and he maintained an excellent quality of life for two years. He handled the trip on the RV like a trouper; he was one of the dogs I worried about for what turned out to be no good reason.

  Heathcliff died in his sleep a few months after we arrived in Maine. He was one of the few dogs we had whose previous owner we knew, so we knew that he was loved for his entire life.

  That is a very comforting thing to know.

  That Lying Calendar

  It simply was not possible that it was only Wednesday morning, which meant it was less than forty hours since our Monday evening departure. Based on my infallible body clock, we’d been in the RVs for a little over three years, give or take a decade.

  It was just more of the same, and the same hadn’t exactly been a barrel of laughs. Feed the dogs, stop for gas, walk the dogs, stop for gas, ad infinitum. Each time we stopped, the people from the other RVs regaled me with funny stories about what a great time they were having.

  Of course the stories didn’t seem all that funny to me. Mostly the people were getting a kick out of how the dogs climbed all over them, or how they woke up with dog hair in their faces. It was basically the kind of thing that’s happened to me every day for the last eighteen years.

  I can tell you from experience … once you get past the first decade or so, the dog-hair-in-the-face thing can lose its charm.

  In any event, I didn’t need our team members to tell me what a grand adventure this was; I kept reading about it on Facebook.

  Nebraska went on forever, and it didn’t seem to serve any particular purpose other than to aggravate me. Were I the ruler of the empire, I would have broken it into about four hundred states the size of New Jersey. That way it would have given us the illusion that we were getting somewhere.

  Tollbooths were a bit of a hassle. We went through back-to-back, and I paid for all three RVs to save time. But this was tricky, in that we had to avoid allowing any cars to get between us. Although I certainly couldn’t see why they’d want to.

  Emmit was finally willing to give up the driver’s seat again, if only for a short time. Erik was taking over, and I was going to lie down on the bed in the back to get some sleep.

  That was wishful thinking; it was like sleeping in a pinball machine. I was getting thrown from side to side, which I admit would have been worse if there weren’t wall-to-wall dogs on the bed with me to cushion the impact. But sleep was simply not going to happen.

  I got up and staggered to the front, and I quickly saw that the reason I was getting thrown around was that we were swerving all over the road. I heard Erik say to Emmit, “You’d better take over,” and Emmit was not arguing the point. So Erik pulled into the next rest area and got up.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I’m just not comfortable with the steering.”

  This was not a positive development. First of all, Erik was a terrific driver, someone we’d been counting on to handle a lot of the load. Second, he had generously offered to take the vehicle back to Virginia after we arrived in Maine. If he couldn’t do it, then I’d ha
ve to. I had been counting the minutes until I could permanently get off that thing, and now I was going to have to drive it by myself for another full day. And it would be a Saturday; while the world was watching college football, I’d be taking the stupid thing to Virginia.

  But it was what it was, and there was no getting around it. Handling the steering was a fairly important part of driving, and if Erik was having a problem with it, then he shouldn’t be behind the wheel. It was also understandable; having driven the same RV, I can attest to the fact that it was not easy. I was just glad Erik was honest enough to admit it.

  Emmit got back behind the wheel, and I took my customary spot in the passenger seat. I was resigned to the fact that I was never going to sleep again in this lifetime.

  The dogs had caught on to the fact that when we stopped, they’d have a chance to get off the RVs and run around. Unfortunately, since we stopped so frequently for gas, they were growing more insistent, and we felt guilty about their being cooped up, so we’d let them off.

  This was a time-consuming process, even though we were getting better at setting up the fence. Wanda the mastiff made things even more complicated that morning by walking right through the fence. Wanda could have walked through the Great Wall of China, so a flimsy plastic fence was no problem at all.

  Fortunately, Wanda doesn’t possess Jenny’s speed; she’s more of a lumberer. Nor did she have any desire to run away; the RVs were where the food was, and Wanda makes it a habit to stay in close proximity to food. But I still had to retrieve her and reset the fence, both of which took time.

  At one point Terri told me that we were fifty miles away from being halfway to Maine. She said that as if it was good news; but as a country-half-empty person, I wasn’t thrilled.

  “Any chance the next half is shorter?” I asked, but she didn’t think so.

  Cyndi Flores had been using her iPad to scout out locations for us to stop for dog feeding times. I have no idea how she did this; I can barely play Words with Friends on mine. But she looked at maps or something, and called to say that we could stop at a certain exit. Then her RV would take the lead and bring us to a place that afforded us lots of space and no bystanders to distract the dogs.

  This time we were about an hour from Iowa City and it was getting late. She announced that she had the perfect place, and we got off the highway. She then led us along a road for at least fifteen minutes. I had no idea where she was going, and I was starting to think that she didn’t either.

  But wherever it was couldn’t be good, since for every mile we spent off the highway, it was another mile we’d have to cover going back.

  Finally we found ourselves on a small dirt road that seemed to lead up a sloping hill. At the top of the hill, the setting sun was shining brightly into our faces as we drove.

  Technically it was a dirt road, but it really should have been called a dust road. As Cyndi’s RV drove on it, it sent up a dust cloud so thick that it was completely blinding. It was almost like we were in a blizzard; the already lightly colored dust was further illuminated by the sun, and we literally couldn’t see through the whiteness.

  I called Cyndi to find out what the hell was going on, but there was no cell service in the area. This was no surprise; it was so desolate that I doubted they even had electricity or running water.

  Since by now I was driving completely blind, I stopped, and I hoped that Joe behind me could see us well enough that he would avoid smashing into us. He did; Joe had stopped as well, no doubt for the same reason as we did. I waited until Cyndi had gone far enough ahead of us that the dust from her vehicle wouldn’t impact us, so I could then set out again to follow her.

  Joe and I got out to discuss the matter. We couldn’t reach Cyndi, who was by now off in the distance and apparently not looking back. So there was really nothing else to do but continue to follow her. Maybe we’d reach the top of the road and there below us would be the Emerald City.

  There was only one home on the road, a small farmhouse that was set back at least fifty yards. As I went by, I saw the door open and a man standing there, looking out at us. He was a very large man; I thought he was going to have to bend down to come through the door, and a second later I realized that I was right, because he exited the house.

  In his pajamas.

  We continued on up the hill, and through the mirror I could see the man walking toward the pickup truck in front of the house. I hoped he was going down the hill to the market or something, but I had my doubts.

  Cyndi was stopped at the top of the hill, and Joe and I pulled up right behind her. It was a dead end; her iPad had let her down. The only way out of there was to go back down the hill, and it wouldn’t be easy to turn the vehicles around in that area.

  Worse yet, the guy from the house was heading toward us in his pickup. He might well be pissed that we’d invaded his space with these huge vehicles and blown dust all over his property.

  I hoped he didn’t have a gun with him, but having seen Deliverance, I preferred a gun to a banjo.

  Emmit, Erik, and I got out of our RV, and a few other people did so as well. I assumed my customary position near the back of the group, a general directing his troops from the rear.

  “Where you all going?” the guy asked, a big smile on his face. He seemed so pleasant that I made my way toward the front.

  “Well, we don’t actually know,” I said, and a conversation ensued about where we were, where we wanted to go, and the best way to get there. We all avoided asking him why he was in his pajamas while it was still daylight. I’d never been in Iowa before; maybe they weren’t considered pajamas there. Maybe it was his bowling team uniform.

  He heard the barking from the vehicles and thought the story was hilarious when we explained to him what was going on. He was still laughing when he got back in his truck and headed back to his house; because he lived in seclusion out here, this might well have been his first contact with certified lunatics.

  We gave Cyndi’s iPad another chance, and this time it came through, bringing us to a park not too far from the highway where we could do the feeding and the walking. It was getting dark, so we hurried things along. In our “dog park,” it was way better to be able to see where we were walking.

  Once again we made the decision that we should not drive all the way through the night but should instead find a hotel, and we went online and found one not far past Iowa City. We called ahead and reserved six rooms.

  Debbie, Emmit, and I would again sleep on the RVs with the dogs, while the others would stay in the hotel. It had gotten quite cold, so I got Emmit to show Debbie and me how to work the heater.

  It was going to be another long night.

  Dogs Can Bring Us Together

  My pre-writing career, as I mentioned earlier, was in movie marketing, and my last job in that field was with Tri-Star Pictures, where I eventually held the title of president of marketing. It’s an understatement to say that my career was not exactly filled with huge hits; I probably buried more movies than anyone in the history of Hollywood.

  There is almost always a natural tension between filmmakers and the movie studio, especially the marketing people. It is understandable; when you include the development of the property, the shooting of the film, the postproduction and editing, et cetera, the directors have often put two years of their lives into making a movie. They want desperately for it to succeed, since that is how they will be judged, so they pressure the studio to spend whatever is necessary to make the film a hit.

  The studio executives, of course, have to worry about the bottom line. So they make judgments as to the film’s potential, and spend accordingly. The filmmaker, if dissatisfied with the budget or perhaps the creative material or even the pattern of release, will frequently blame the studio for the film’s eventual demise. He might just be frustrated or he might be right.

  One of the earlier films that we released at Tri-Star was Short Circuit, a fairly entertaining film starring Steve Guttenberg, Al
ly Sheedy, and Fisher Stevens. It was directed by John Badham, who had previously had commercial and artistic successes including Saturday Night Fever and War Games.

  The plot revolved around a robot, named Number Five, that had been developed as a military weapon. Struck by lightning, the robot improbably became “alive,” with human intelligence and emotion, and was soon renamed Johnny Five. Then it was up to Guttenberg, the unlikely and miscast inventor of the robot, and Sheedy to save it from the villains of the film.

  This was not a movie that would go down in the annals of great filmmaking, and it wouldn’t change anyone’s life. But people liked it, and it did decent business at the box office. I’ve had worse, believe me.

  A couple of years later, our production people decided to make a sequel. It would be done on a relatively small budget, and it was felt that the favorable reaction to the first film, increased by subsequent viewings on cable and VHS, would be enough to let us realize a profit on the sequel. It was almost entirely a business decision, not a creative one.

  As frequently happened in situations like this, the original players were not interested in reprising their roles. Only Fisher Stevens signed on; Guttenberg and Sheedy were replaced by Michael McKean and Cynthia Gibb.

  John Badham also chose not to direct, and he was replaced by Ken Johnson. Ken had enjoyed a successful career in television, most notably on The Incredible Hulk and The Six Million Dollar Man, and now he was trying to make his mark on the big screen.

  The result, in my view, was a slight, amusing movie that did not reflect the quality or uniqueness of its predecessor. It was inevitable; the screenplay was mediocre at best.