The Dog Went Over the Mountain

by Peter Zheutlin

  Giving my rig, such as it was, a name as if it were a yacht, as Steinbeck did, seemed a wee bit pretentious so, after careful deliberation, I decided to refer to it as “the car.”

  Normally, April 15 in New England can somewhat safely be called spring. In 2018, the Boston Marathon was to be held the next day, April 16 (it’s always on the third Monday in April), and it’s often run in warm, even hot weather, though cool and rainy is possible, too. Visions of leaving with the sun shining in our faces and the wind riffling our hair or, in Albie’s case, his fur, filled my head. I’d even planned a very detailed route from our Massachusetts home all the way to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, that would take us on scenic backroads through Connecticut and along the Delaware River outside of Port Jervis, New York.

  But the spring had so far been a bust. One early-April day, several inches of snow fell, and throughout the first part of the month the temperatures struggled to escape the forties. Before our scheduled departure the forecast got worse with each passing day. By Friday, April 13, the forecast for Sunday, April 15, was miserable: a high temperature of thirty-five with wind and freezing rain. Never mind putting the top down, without snow tires my car is an adventure in wintry weather. Farther south, in the places we expected to be within a few days—Virginia and North Carolina—the weather looked perfect for cruising the Skyline Drive and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Having lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for a year in the early 1980s, I knew the exquisite beauty and intoxicating air of an Appalachian spring and was eager to get there.

  We hadn’t even backed out of the driveway and already our plans were in disarray. I’d booked dog-friendly motel rooms for the first five nights and now had to decide whether to leave a day early to beat the freezing rain, a day or two later and have to rebook all the reservations and lose some deposits, or stick with the original plan and hope for the best. The best laid plans, especially when planning a trip, are often pointless. Steinbeck himself had warned me.

  “When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man,” he wrote in the introduction to Travels with Charley, “and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good a sufficient reason for going.” That I had done. “Next he must plan his trip in time and space, choose a direction and a destination.” That, too, I had done. “And last he must implement the journey. How to go, what to take, how long to stay. . . . Once a journey is designed, equipped, and put in process, a new factor enters and takes over. A trip . . . is an entity, different from all other journeys. It has personality, temperament, individuality, uniqueness. A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike and all plans, safeguards, policing and coercion are fruitless . . . we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. Tour masters, schedules, reservations, brass-bound and inevitable, dash themselves to wreckage on the personality of the trip. Only when this is recognized can the blown-in-the-glass bum relax and go along with it. Only then do the frustrations fall away. In this a journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.”

  Thus, on the morning of April 14, I decided we should leave that afternoon, a day earlier than planned, and hope that by getting just a bit south, even to Connecticut, we would avoid the freezing rain forecast for Boston and stay on schedule. But since the forecast for the Northeast in general looked pretty dismal for the next couple of days, we scrapped the scenic route to Pennsylvania I had so meticulously written out on index cards. We’d head down to coastal Connecticut via the Interstate, have dinner with my younger son, Noah, who lives in Pound Ridge, New York, and spend the first night in nearby Norwalk, Connecticut. On the second day, the fifteenth, we’d drive through northern New Jersey and into Pennsylvania, again on the Interstate, all in an effort to hasten our way to fairer weather.

  So, at about two o’clock on afternoon of the fourteeneth, after nearly a year of anticipation, hours of packing and repacking, several hours of house maintenance instructions for Judy, and last-minute trips to Petco, CVS, and my therapist, I hugged Judy and each of the other dogs goodbye, hustled Albie into the car, took a deep breath, and put the key in the ignition.

  * “Outward Bound” was a song written by the folk singer Tom Paxton and released in 1966.

  † Things were pretty much in order when we did return home, except that Judy forgot to pay one bill: our mortgage.

  TWO

  Jersey Boys

  For more than sixty years I’ve been wearing out the roads of Connecticut. While growing up in northern New Jersey, we were always making car trips to Boston to visit my grandparents and other relatives. My mother was born and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, and her entire family was still in the Boston area. When I went off to college in Amherst, Massachusetts, and later to Boston College Law School, I traveled to and from home in New Jersey via Connecticut countless times. Then Judy, who also grew up in northern Jersey, and I were married and had kids, and both sets of grandparents lived in New Jersey. Actually, more than two sets since her parents were divorced as were mine and all lived in New Jersey either with second spouses, companions or, in my mother’s case, alone. That’s a lot of trips to see Grandma and Grandpa and Ellen and Papa Gus and Helen and Nana and Poppy. So, to say I am familiar with the drive through Connecticut is like saying Yo-Yo Ma is familiar with the cello. I can visualize almost every mile of Interstate 84 from Union to Danbury.

  It was disappointing that we’d be unable to drive my well-planned scenic route along the backroads of Connecticut and into New York State, but those are the breaks. The consolation was that we’d have a chance to see Noah. Less than a year out of college, he was working his dream job in the virtual and augmented reality labs at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York, about an hour north of New York City. That, in itself, was something of a miracle since the kid never even prepared a résumé and might never have gotten around to it anyway. IBM found him after he posted a short video about his senior project in virtual reality on Reddit, a social media site. Talk about a break!

  Because the roads we traveled that afternoon were so familiar, and we were only driving about three hours, it didn’t feel at all like we were at the beginning of a long journey. If, after dinner with Noah, I’d gotten cold feet, we could have been home well before midnight. As Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, “In long-range planning for a trip, I think there is a private conviction that it won’t happen.” Amen to that.

  Saturday, April 14, was overcast and cool and the trees along the Massachusetts Turnpike to Sturbridge were brown and bare. What a stingy spring it had been. But as we crossed into Connecticut a little south of Sturbridge, the skies brightened briefly, and the temperatures rose from the low forties to about fifty. Just fifty miles west and a little south of Boston there were a few, but just a few, signs of spring. A handful of roadside forsythia were starting to bloom, and we spotted a few daffodils and hyacinth, even a few green buds on some of the trees. This wasn’t entirely surprising; it’s often just a tad warmer inland.

  As we neared New Haven and drove through the town of Hamden to try and get around some traffic on the Wilbur Cross Parkway, I caught a brief glimpse of a very elderly man at the end of a driveway, turning back toward his house. He was shuffling slowly along using a walker. A few wisps of unruly white hair strayed from his scalp and his clothing was rumpled and ill-fitting. He was in view for just a few seconds, but the image of this old man, clearly near the end of his days, stayed with me throughout the trip. I can still see him quite clearly. Wasn’t this, after all, why we were taking to the road to begin with? To have at least one more big adventure while we still could, before all the sand in our hourglass had just about run out?

  I have often wondered how people stay sane when they reach a state of decrepitude. Unless dementia has robbed you of your self-awareness, how do you get through each day as a shadow of your former self? How do you carry on knowing that your circumstances aren’t going to get better? I’m not sure
who said it, but my brother told me years ago that someone was once asked, “What’s the hardest part of getting older?” and the reply was, “Remembering when I was young.”

  As I glimpsed this elderly man for a couple of more seconds in my rearview mirror I wondered: who was he? What life did he live? Was he happy with it? What goes through his mind as he shuffles slowly up and down his driveway? I would never know. But I do know this: having had a date with cancer in my early fifties, a cancer with a good prognosis but a set of surgical complications that left me wondering what I’d be willing to endure if I’d had a bad one, I don’t want to outlive myself. In other words, I want to live, not just exist, until I die.

  Steinbeck, too, had pondered these questions as he considered the trip he was about to take with Charley. “[I]n my own life,” he wrote, “I am not willing to trade quality for quantity . . . I see too many men delay their exits with a sickly, slow reluctance to leave the stage. It’s bad theater as well as bad living.” Words to live by.

  Noah has always been one of the most guileless, and dryly funny, people I’ve ever known. He’s six feet four inches tall now and all of about 150 pounds. For years we struggled to separate him from the video screens and computers that were his obsession, thinking he was wasting his time. It was now nearly a year after his college graduation and Judy and I thoroughly expected that he’d be living at home, glued to his computer and sleeping until midafternoon while we harangued him to get his résumé together and look for a job. And that might have happened but for that stroke of incredible luck that led IBM to find him.

  Noah has always had an unusual turn of mind, a sideways way of looking at the world. When he was in third grade, we were summoned for a conference to discuss some problems he was having in school. The children had been given an evaluation that included answering true or false to fifty statements. Noah only got through the first handful of questions. Why? Because one of those true/false statements was this: “Birds can fly.” As Noah explained to us and the special education staff at our meeting, he knew most birds could fly, but he also knew that penguins and ostriches are birds and they can’t fly. So, he was stuck. Rather than soldier on, he simply stopped, turning the question over and over in his head, unsure how to proceed.

  Now, over a pizza supper in New Canaan, Connecticut, and an after-dinner walk the first night of our journey, Noah talked on and on about theoretical physics, the possibility of time travel, the time/space continuum, and other topics that were very far over my head, not to mention Albie’s. By evening’s end I thought, This must be what it’s like to be in a book group with Stephen Hawking.

  When Albie and I checked into our hotel around eight o’clock it was already dark, and it felt very strange. It all had a “what do we do now?” feeling about it. The hotel was on a major thoroughfare, though there was little traffic, and the neighborhood comprised modern office and apartment buildings. We took a walk but there was nothing appealing about our surroundings and little grass for Albie to explore and hunt for a place to do his business. Could we really do this for the next six weeks? I kept reminding myself to take it a day at a time and not to jump to conclusions. There were bound to be moments like this.

  Not for the last time, I wondered again, now that we were on the road at last, if this entire venture was fair to Albie. Earlier in the afternoon he happily jumped into the car, but he’s always happy to jump in the car. It means we aren’t going to be leaving him alone at home with the other dogs for a couple of hours. I actually did explain to him several times before we left that we were going to take a long trip together. I’ve become one of those slightly daft people who talk out loud to their dogs as if they speak and understand English. I was whisking him away from the home, the routines, the people (mainly Judy), and the other dogs that populate his days and nights. For the next six weeks I’d be hustling him in and out of the car, taking him to strange places with strange smells, a new place almost every night. I would be the only constant and the only connection to the life he’d known for nearly six years. Would he be happy traveling?

  Once we had checked in, Albie spent a good five minutes sniffing all around the hotel room. It was, of course, a pet-friendly hotel, as all of the hotels and motels would be, and there were, no doubt, the lingering scents of dozens of dogs who’d been in this room before us that only another dog could detect. He eventually settled down and, to my surprise, chose to lay down on the floor, though I made it clear that he could, as at home, join me on the bed.

  Albie woke me up at 6:30 A.M. the next morning the way he usually does—by staring intently at me from a distance of about six inches while making a low groaning sound. He looked a little confused. Where are we? Why are we here? Are we really going to be gone for six weeks? Well, the last question was mine, but I wondered if I was projecting and whether Albie might become a canvas onto which I projected all my feelings as we traveled.

  We crossed the Hudson River on Interstate 287 and the new Tappan Zee Bridge, a graceful three-mile span. Two-eighty-seven skirts the New York/New Jersey border for about twenty miles before it plunges south into the Garden State at Mahwah. This was very familiar territory for me: my hometown of Paramus, deep in the bosom of suburbia,* is just fifteen minutes south of Mahwah.

  The small hills here are, somewhat generously, called the Ramapo Mountains, and they have always carried an air of mystery and foreboding for me. I can’t drive through these parts without thinking of the warnings many of us who grew up near here got as teenagers from our parents about these hills. If we had to go up Route 17 toward Mahwah we were told to stay on the highway and not to go driving on the roads that wind through the hills and hollers. The danger? The people who lived there.

  The Ramapo Mountains were, and still are, home to an insular group of mixed-race people we knew growing up as “the Jackson Whites,” though they have in more recent years become more integrated into the surrounding towns. The Jackson Whites, as I learned about them, were a mix of Native Americans, African Americans, and German mercenaries (Hessians, who fought alongside the British during the Revolutionary War). It was said that many Jackson Whites could be identified by their tawny skin, blue or slate-gray eyes, and blond hair. Albinism is also common. They kept their contacts with the outside world to a minimum. The children didn’t attend local public schools and they ventured into nearby towns only to buy things at local stores. My father once told me about a state game warden who went up into these hills and disappeared, never to be seen again. Rumor was the Jackson Whites were feeble-minded and degenerate. What makes their story so remarkable is that on a clear day you can see the top of the Empire State Building from some of these hills; they’re just thirty miles from Manhattan.

  The history of these people is so shrouded in layers of fact and myth, some so obscure they can’t be traced, that it’s virtually impossible to tease out the real origins of the people or the myths. Today, “Jackson White” is considered a racial epithet.† They prefer to be known as Ramapough Mountain Indians or the Ramapough Lenape Nation. The State of New Jersey recognizes them as an Indian tribe, but the federal government does not. The community comprises some 5,000 people in three primary settlements, in Mahwah and Ringwood, New Jersey, and Hillburn, New York.

  Tales of a primitive race of people living in the Ramapo Mountains date back to the Revolutionary War. According to an article in The New Yorker by Ben McGrath published in 2010,‡ the origins of these people as I learned about them from my parents dovetails with legends passed along for centuries, but with a little more detail: the “Jackson Whites” were a mix of West Indian prostitutes, Hessian deserters, and escaped slaves, all people who would have had a reason to seek refuge in the isolation of the hills. More likely, according to McGrath, their origins are Afro-Dutch.

  In any event, as we passed through the Ramapo Mountains on I-287 the legends and warnings I had heard as a kid about the people living in these hills automatically leapt to mind. As McGrath wrote decades after I fir
st learned of the so-called Jackson Whites, “Area teen-agers, recalling decades-old legends of unsuspecting people who climbed Stag Hill [the center of the community] and never returned, dare one another to drive up at night.” As I always had before, Albie and I drove through the Ramapo Mountains on the highway and didn’t venture into the hills.

  A heavy overcast hung over the day and it was chilly, only in the forties. Not what I had imagined for April 15. But at least we’d escaped the threat of freezing rain forecast for this day back home and were on our way. All across New Jersey and into the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania clouds and mist clung to the low ridges and settled into the valleys, and it showered on and off.

  We drove for four gloomy hours until we pulled off the Interstate in Dickinson, Pennsylvania. I knew people who had attended Dickinson College, but had never seen it, and a college campus seemed like it would offer pleasant surroundings for a long walk with Albie. And it would have, except the skies opened up as soon as we arrived, so we settled for a cold and very wet walk around campus. The magnolias and daffodils were out in full force, but it was hard to enjoy them in the drear. There was nowhere dry to sit outside and get a bite to eat, so I had to leave Albie in the car while I ran into a local pub for a quick sandwich.

  We’d booked a motel room in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania, for the night, just a dozen miles down the road. Having planned a backroads route through rural Connecticut, along the Delaware, and into Pennsylvania, it was disappointing, to say the least, to have spent the day thus far on the Interstate. It was only midafternoon and as a consolation prize of sorts we eschewed Interstate 81 and drove to Shippensburg on a two-lane road, Route 11, that paralleled it. Within minutes I was reminded why I had hoped to follow secondary roads as much as possible.