The Dog Went Over the Mountain

by Peter Zheutlin

  More than mere curiosity about what lay over the mountain animated the journey, however. Though in good health and feeling no different really than in 1977 when I last crossed the country by car, this trip, I thought, might be a kind of last hurrah, a curtain call, a victory lap (celebrating what victory is unclear), a final big adventure, if not for Albie then certainly for me. Who knew if I’d ever get another chance to undertake a grand tour of America?

  Born in 1953, I am squarely in the middle of the baby boom generation. We are the generation that was supposed to remain forever young. But now that we are staring down the barrel of our own mortality, who is there to sue for breach of that contract?

  We try to escape the reality that our days are numbered but know we cannot. It is a time in life when we are forced to reckon with the inevitable, to take stock of our lives and the measure of our days. Each is a piece of valuable currency precisely because the supply is finite.

  Perhaps the trip would help me, once and for all, wrestle to the ground, or at least to a draw, a dread of mortality that has gnawed at me for as long as I can remember, simmering like a low-grade fever. My feelings about mortality are, somewhat paradoxically, a bit like those of Samuel Hamilton, one of the principal characters in Steinbeck’s East of Eden, who rapidly descended into old age after the death of a daughter:

  Samuel may have thought and played and philosophized about death, but he really didn’t believe in it. His world did not have death as a member. He, and all around him, were immortal. When real death came it was an outrage, a denial of the immortality he deeply felt, and the one crack in his wall caused the whole structure to crash. I think he thought he could always argue himself out of death. It was a personal opponent and one he could lick.

  Expecting to come home completely at peace with the reality that there was far more sand in the bottom of my hourglass than the top was probably unrealistic; I just hoped it might help a little. Just months from signing up for Medicare, perhaps something about dropping out of my day-to-day routine, rarely seeing a familiar face, and living with nothing but my own thoughts and Albie for company would lead to a place of acceptance about aging. Albie would be there not just to pave the way for social interaction but also as a constant source of perspective and no small amount of joy. I am pretty much convinced that dogs cannot contemplate their own mortality. They may sense and react to threats and fight for survival if need be, but they don’t navel gaze as humans do. That’s why dogs are very present in the moment and why their joy can be so complete. I aspire to be more like Albie in that way and hoped that after spending several weeks on the road alone with him some of his sangfroid would rub off.

  It didn’t. But I did come back with a much keener appreciation for home, both in the literal and figurative sense, and that’s no small matter, as anodyne as it sounds. I had missed all the little things—the garden, the white picket fence, the climbing hydrangea that grows more than fifty feet up the large oak, the way the sun sets over the backyard—and the big things—my good-natured, bighearted wife; the other dogs; our rather large village of down-to-earth, warm, and caring friends; and the old stone walls and craggy coastline of New England. Having radically altered my life and Albie’s for six weeks, I came to appreciate more keenly the life I had, rather haphazardly, managed to create by age sixty-four. And maybe that is the best we can hope for in coping with mortality: to do things that enhance our appreciation of the here and now and to be mindful about living in the present without dreading the future. Much easier said than done. Much.

  Like Steinbeck, I brought notebooks along. (I take notes the old-fashioned way.) But we were otherwise differently equipped. Steinbeck had his typewriter and typing paper; I had my laptop. My cell phone served as my stereo, my reference books, my camera, my navigator and, oh yes, as my phone. One of the big advantages of Google Maps is that they don’t need to be folded. I brought a road atlas and referred to it several times, but those maps are not nearly detailed enough to help you navigate when you end up well off the beaten path because of a road closure or because you missed a turn and didn’t realize it until miles later. With Google Maps, if you have a network connection, you know exactly where you are within a matter of inches. But you don’t always have a connection, hence the road atlas.

  When Steinbeck and Charley made their trip, the Interstate Highway System was in its infancy, but Steinbeck made a keen observation about these roads he called “thruways.” “When we get these thruways across the whole country,” he wrote, “it will be possible to drive from New York to California without seeing a single thing.” Albie and I traveled as much as we practically could along secondary roads, for there is little to be seen, heard, or learned at a rest stop along Interstate 90 in Ohio or Indiana that can’t be seen, heard, or learned at a rest stop along the same highway in Massachusetts or Montana. I wasn’t so much interested in driving across the country as I was in diving into it.

  We drove some of the country’s most scenic roads. Some I’d driven before, such as Virginia’s Skyline Drive, which runs down the spine of the Blue Ridge Mountains and above the Shenandoah Valley. But others were new to me, such as the Natchez Trace Parkway, which runs from just south of Nashville for over 440 miles to Natchez, Mississippi, and U.S. 20, which took us across much of Idaho. With a few deviations, some for practical reasons (I couldn’t afford to be away long enough to noodle around northern Maine and New Hampshire for two weeks as Steinbeck had) and others sentimental (I wanted to see the Oklahoma birthplace of my childhood hero, Woody Guthrie, and had arranged for Albie to have a reunion with the two women in central Louisiana who saved his life), we mostly stayed true to Steinbeck’s route with Charley. Steinbeck rarely identified the specific roads he traveled, but his approximate route can be plotted by the place names he mentions. However, unlike Steinbeck, who traveled west through the northern part of the United States and then east though the southern states, we reversed the order because of the time of year. Steinbeck traveled in autumn and we traveled in spring. For Albie’s sake, I wanted the weather to be as mild as possible, not too hot or too cold, for as much of the trip as possible and that meant heading south first.

  Any road trip, of course, traces a single, very narrow line, and none can lay claim to taking you anywhere near the entire country, even one that covers more than 9,000 coast-to-coast-to-coast miles. You’d have to drive up and down and back and forth like you were trying to fill in an entire Etch A Sketch to do that.¶ But by driving over 9,000 miles you can acquaint yourself with much more of the country than you can by flying or, aside from walking or biking, by any other means.

  Though my travels with Albie were inspired by Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, our aim was not an authentic re-creation of Steinbeck’s journey with Charley. What would be the point? Steinbeck had already written that book and done a damned fine job of it, too. Even if we had wanted to, no journey can truly be replicated, for every journey, as Steinbeck himself wrote, is one of a kind. Had Albie and I left Boston one day earlier, or one day later, we might have met an entirely different cast of characters. Instead of arriving at the Grand Canyon and finding several inches of fresh, wet snow on the ground and dense fog obscuring the view, we might have arrived on a perfectly warm, sunny day. It would have been a similar, but different, trip.

  There were still other differences. Steinbeck’s conveyance was a camper and ours a convertible. By the time he made his trip, Steinbeck was married to his third wife; I am still married to my first. Steinbeck was nationally famous and worried he’d be recognized wherever he went (he wasn’t); to say I had no such concern would be a vast understatement.

  Even if we had tried to faithfully re-create Steinbeck’s journey in every possible detail, someone would surely have chimed in, “But Albie’s a Lab and Charley was a poodle!” So, the goal wasn’t a re-creation of Steinbeck’s trip, but to use his journey as a touchstone for our own.

  We went over the mountain just to see what we could see, and t
his is what we saw.

  * Albie inspired my last two books: Rescue Road: One Man, Thirty Thousand Dogs, and a Million Miles on the Last Hope Highway (Sourcebooks, 2015) and Rescued: What Second-Chance Dogs Teach Us About Living with Purpose, Loving with Abandon, and Finding Joy in the Little Things (TarcherPerigee, 2017).

  † The Londonderry Lithia Spring Water Company of Nashua, New Hampshire, paid her $100 to affix an advertising placard on her bike that simply said “Londonderry” in a stylized script that was widely familiar from the company’s ubiquitous print advertising.

  ‡ This journey became the subject of my first book, Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry’s Extraordinary Ride (Citadel Press, 2007).

  § The book was a compilation of journalistic pieces originally written for Motor magazine describing a journey from Connecticut to Alabama in a car Fitzgerald called the “Rolling Junk.”

  ¶ For younger readers, the Etch A Sketch, introduced in 1960, is a mechanical drawing toy comprising a thin box housed in a red plastic frame with two white dials, one on the bottom left and another on the bottom right. The frame holds a clear plastic screen and inside the Etch A Sketch is aluminum powder that clings to the screen until, using the dials that mechanically control a pointed metal stylus (the left control moves the stylus horizontally, and the right one moves it vertically) causes a trace of the powder to fall into the box as the stylus traverses the underside of the screen. These traces allow you to draw pictures, the image created by the voids where the powder once was. When you are done with your picture you can begin again by shaking the box which causes the powder to again cling to the screen. Some of us, those with a little OCD, often make it a practice to clear the entire screen by meticulously tracing lines up and down and across many hundreds of times.

  PART ONE

  From Here . . .

  ONE

  Outward Bound*

  It sounds simple: pack a suitcase and some dog food, fill up the car with gas, and drive. Fat chance. No, a trip like this, especially with a dog, required some planning, some foresight, and some imagination about what might go wrong.

  In the weeks before our departure, as supplies—notebooks, maps, flashlights, a tent, batteries, dog food, and a hundred other odds and ends—began to pile up in my small home office, little piles of anxiety began to accumulate in my head, too, mostly at night as I lay in bed thinking ahead to the trip.

  My biggest worry was Albie. What if something happened to me? What if I got really sick, or was injured and had to go to an emergency room, or worse? Who would take care of Albie? How would I make sure he was safe? Would he somehow find his way home again? Right before we left I took a small adhesive mailing label and wrote, “In case of emergency please contact my wife,” added her name and cell phone number, and affixed it to the back of my driver’s license. I didn’t tell Judy I’d done this; not because it would have alarmed her, but because I’m always trying to convince her I’m not as neurotic as she thinks I am.

  My concern about Albie wasn’t just limited to what would happen if I got sick or was injured. He was never consulted about my plan and there was no way of explaining it to him. Like most dogs, open a car door and Albie will happily leap in. He doesn’t know if we’re going around the corner, heading out for a three-hour trip, or driving two days from Boston to South Carolina as we’ve done several times. How would he fare traveling for six weeks? Would he get depressed and miss Judy and the other dogs? Would he get enough exercise? Would he act out in some way, or become aggressive toward other dogs and people? Was this entire venture fair to him?

  As glamorous as the whole trip sounded—and everyone who knew about it seemed to envy me for it to one degree or another—I am a confirmed homebody and a creature of habit, so I was unsettled on many counts. But being unsettled was part of the point. Another six weeks of the usual routine didn’t promise to make much of an impact on my life, lead to any new insights, create any new memories, or change my perspective on anything. One of my hopes for this trip was to rattle my own cage a bit.

  I knew nights spent in cheap motels (I was on a budget) would often feel lonely and dispiriting. Sleeping on a bed shared by thousands of itinerant strangers in bland rooms designed only to meet the basic demands of human existence is inherently depressing. In towns where nobody knows your name, and no one really cares, hours in a generic motel room can make you feel like a character in a Eugene O’Neill play. “Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors,” O’Neill wrote. Oy.

  Right on cue, the anxiety that kept me awake at night started to infiltrate my increasingly rare sleep, too. Three weeks before we left, dreams about the trip took form.

  In the first I was back in college but living out of my car. It was so hard to stay organized in that little space that I had no idea when or where my classes were meeting and couldn’t find the schedule. I was supposed to be in class but was stuck in my car not knowing where to go or when. Panic about flunking out gripped me. Then, my roommate (my real-life college roommate, Jerry), who seemed oddly detached, got in the passenger seat and a stranger got into the driver’s seat and claimed it was his car and he was driving it home. When asked for proof of ownership he told me the car was registered to Lululemon, the clothing company. I know; it didn’t make any sense to me either.

  In the next dream, I’d ridden my bike across the country and was in Cannon Beach, Oregon, where we had vacationed in real life for twenty years as our kids were growing up. Just as I was about to head back East, a bunch of children started harassing me, my front tire went flat, and I was totally flummoxed by how my cell phone operated. When I woke up the next morning, I added Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood’s haunting 2009 rendition of “Can’t Find My Way Home” to my trip playlist.

  Initially, my plan was to make the trip in summer. Isn’t that the American dream? Driving the open road when the sun shines and the air is warm? But it’s also the worst time to travel by car with a dog. There would inevitably be times when I’d need to run into a grocery store, visit a restroom, or spend an hour in a laundromat, places Albie might not be allowed to go. He’s perfectly fine waiting in the car when it’s cool outside, but the inside of a car can heat up to dangerous levels within minutes on a hot day, even with the windows at half-mast. For his sake, making the trip in spring, when cooler weather prevailed, made more sense. Though he didn’t say so, perhaps the same considerations are what led Steinbeck to make his trip in autumn.

  The decision to go in spring made sense for another reason: Why travel when everyone else is, when kids are out of school and millions of families are hitting the road for summer vacation? The roads would be less congested in spring, the competition for space in state and national parks far less keen (or so I thought) and hotels, motels, and restaurants would be less crowded (that proved to be true).

  These were the practical, prosaic reasons for traveling in spring, but there was a more sentimental, maybe poetic reason, too. Given my obsession with mortality, maybe this little odyssey would be a spring-like rebirth, as I entered what was almost certain to be the last decade or two of my life. There’s no flipping the hourglass back over, but maybe, just maybe, this adventure would be a new beginning of sorts.

  So, just days after deciding I should spend part of my “summer of 64” traveling with Albie, I reconsidered. Spring, for reasons practical and symbolic, it would be. Since we would be traveling with the special dispensation of my wife, Judy, who was suspiciously enthusiastic about my being away for a good stretch and who would remain at home with Salina and Jamba, we couldn’t be away indefinitely. Six weeks seemed about right. We chose, or I chose, April 15 as the day for our departure, not because an astrologer said it would be an auspicious date to leave, but because the calendar said that if we left on April 15 and traveled for six weeks we’d be home by Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial start of the busy summer travel season.

  The plan was to try and average a reasonable two hundred miles a day
, a distance we could easily cover between breakfast and early afternoon, giving us the rest of each day and evening to take long walks and soak up the local atmosphere of wherever we happened to stop that day. Averaging two hundred miles a day we could make it to the West Coast—to Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, California—and then back to New England in six weeks, enough time for everything at home to fall apart. Judy isn’t exactly what you’d call skilled in the housekeeping arts—I’m the compulsive, organized, neat one that stands between order and chaos, the guardian of our galaxy—and it might take her weeks to realize a pipe had sprung a leak in the basement or that she’d left the oven on for eight days, if ever. Judy often has many things on her mind at once and has been known to put the orange juice away in the microwave thinking it was the fridge, only to be discovered days later. So, on top of the anxiety of making a cross-country trip with a large dog, there was the fear that we might return home a few weeks hence with no habitable place to live.†

  For nearly a year, on and off, I pondered the logistics of a road trip with a seventy-five-pound yellow Lab. Nothing was more vexing than the challenge of making the most of very little space. The trunk of my small car is, well, small, even more so with the top down because that’s where it’s stored when you’re traveling topless, so to speak. There is a back seat but it, too, is small and Albie would be occupying the back seat, both because it’s safer and because he could lie down comfortably there. Everything would have to fit either in the trunk (accounting for top-down travel) or in the front passenger seat.

  I planned on one small travel-size suitcase, a day pack, and a sleeping bag for me; a small tent for both us; a five-gallon jug for water; and a large container to keep his food fresh. This wasn’t going to be a camping trip—we planned to stay mostly in dog-friendly motels and occasionally with friends and family—but I hoped to camp at Grand Canyon. Other necessities were food and water bowls, poop bags, a cooler, several pairs of shoes, jackets for all weather, and the hundred and one last minute must-haves that always come to mind as you’re about to back out of the driveway—a first aid kit, an extra fleece, a spare leash, that second pair of sneakers.