The next evening Danny and I had dinner at Upperline while friends of his, Quinn and Danielle, watched Albie, one of the few times we were apart, even for a moment, during our six-week trip. Having dinner at Upperline allowed me to watch JoAnn work her magic as she presided with grace and charm and gentle good humor over her dining room.
After dinner we met up with Quinn and Danielle and Albie at the Creole Creamery, my favorite New Orleans spot for ice cream, just a hundred yards or so from Upperline. Then we walked over to introduce Albie to JoAnn, a fellow good soul from Alexandria, Louisiana. Again, JoAnn’s perpetual delight was very much in evidence and she gave Albie, as she had me the day before, her undivided attention. She’s very present when she talks to you.
I suspect everyone who meets JoAnn comes away with a similar feeling: I could have talked to her for hours on end and felt fortunate to have spent time in her presence. She has poured herself into New Orleans and New Orleans has poured itself into her. Like Doreen Ketchens, she’s a New Orleans original.
And like an evening at Upperline, our three-night layover in New Orleans was restorative and gave me renewed energy and enthusiasm for what lay down the road. We did laundry and had the car washed and vacuumed so we could start, as JoAnn might say, refreshed. But mostly, we just walked the streets of the Uptown and Garden District neighborhoods and met many of the people—friends, neighbors, members of the gym he runs—who populate Danny’s world in the city.
With so much walking, by the end of the day Albie was pretty tuckered out. The arthritis in his front legs has gradually worsened over the past year or so, and though he is still capable of giving a squirrel a good chase, he was a little stiffer than he had been just a few months earlier. Back at our hotel that last night in New Orleans, I stroked his head and his face, showered him with little kisses and whispered sweet nothings in his ear.
“You’re the best guy, Albie,” I said. “Thanks for coming with me.”
There is something especially poignant about loving a rescue dog, a dog once lost, abandoned, abused, or neglected and now found. They put their complete faith and trust in you, and you need to be worthy of it.
Perhaps our last night in New Orleans was especially tender because our next stop, just a couple of hours to the northwest, was going to be Alexandria, where Albie had survived five months in a high-kill shelter until he came to live with us in Massachusetts. Tomorrow we would have our much-anticipated reunion with Krista Lombardo and Keri Toth, the two women most responsible for saving Albie’s life. Krista is the volunteer at the shelter who took a shine to Albie and kept buying him time until Keri, then a volunteer with Labs4rescue, could find him a home, our home, as it turned out.
Because Krista still volunteers at the shelter and it was her day to be there, we agreed to meet on the grounds outside, but I was wary. Would Albie remember the place, especially the distinctive smells of the shelter, and think I’d brought him there to return him? (When in doubt, I almost always go directly to the worst possible scenario, whatever the issue.) What would it be like for me to be back at this shelter, which I had visited a couple of years after we adopted Albie while working on Rescue Road? It had been deeply upsetting to see so many dogs like Albie confined in Spartan cages, especially knowing that most of them would be dead within a week. Imagining Albie there with death all around him and little to do but lie on a concrete floor day after day had been almost too much to bear. Now, we were less than twenty-four hours away from returning to this place together.
But I wanted Krista and Keri to see Albie again and to thank them, as I had before, for all they had done to make Albie’s life with us, and the journey we were on, possible, and meeting at the shelter was the most convenient place for them. Rescue work is tough, physically and emotionally. People like Krista and Keri see a lot of suffering and death, and for every dog whose story has a happy ending, there are countless others whose stories end badly. There are millions of dogs like Albie, especially in the South where the overpopulation problem is most acute, and those that luck out and find their way into an adoption program mostly find homes up North. So, Krista and Keri, two people who have cared for and saved thousands of dogs, rarely, if ever, see those dogs again. Reuniting them with Albie, even if just for an hour, was something I’d been determined to do since the idea for this trip first popped into my head. So, our last night in New Orleans, anticipating the next day’s reunion, was especially bittersweet.
Before getting back on the road the next morning we stopped at French Truck Coffee on Dryades Street. French Truck is one of those hip, funky java saloons where they sling gourmet coffee, pastries, and other sundries and is frequented by millennials with earbuds in, laptops up, and seemingly endless free time on their hands. I love these places, and I’m usually the oldest person in them by about thirty years.
Dogs aren’t allowed inside and since it was raining the patio wasn’t an option. Albie waited for me in the car. Standing in line I looked behind me and saw the distinctive, familiar face of a man I’d never met. Mitch Landrieu was in the final weeks of his second and, by law, last term as mayor of New Orleans and there he was, waiting in line like everyone else and chatting easily with other customers.
After the violence in Charlottesville in August 2017 that led to soul-searching in many southern cities and towns, Landrieu gave a powerful, deeply thoughtful and historically literate speech explaining why he had decided to order the removal of the city’s Confederate monuments. It was a controversial decision, but Landrieu’s speech, which I’d watched, led to speculation that he might make a viable presidential candidate, a southern moderate who could have wide appeal.
He seemed utterly approachable, so I introduced myself. He had none of the false, glad-handing, made-for-TV polish so many politicians exude. He seemed like a regular guy—affable, genuine, and unassuming. I told him my son had gone to Tulane and settled in the city and about my trip with Albie.
“Cool!” said the Mayor. “I’d love to do that myself someday. Get a little Mississippi red clay under my feet!”
He seemed delighted by our adventure and asked me several questions about it.
“Are you married?”
I said I was.
“And your wife is OK with you being away for six weeks?”
As I did to many people along the way, I told him, “My wife has been suspiciously supportive of the trip,” and he laughed.
I told him every morning when I woke up and surveyed the damage the current president was doing to the country I was deeply dismayed.
“You should be dismayed,” he said, nodding in agreement.
“So, are you going to run for president?”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said shaking his head slightly and smiling. “But there will be a lot of good candidates who will, and there are a lot of ways to change the country.”
I didn’t expect him to announce his political plans to a stranger in a coffee shop, but we’ll see.
At last, it was time to head up to Alexandria for our reunion with Krista and Keri. To get there we would be deviating from Steinbeck’s route. Steinbeck, as he made his way east toward the end of his trip, traveled from Amarillo down through Austin and Beaumont, Texas (east of Houston), and then across southern Louisiana to New Orleans. Our route, on the westbound portion of our journey, would take us from New Orleans up through Alexandria and Natchitoches (pronounced “knack-uh-dish”) in central and northwest Louisiana, respectively, to Paris, Texas, and then to Okemah, Oklahoma, before rejoining Steinbeck’s trail in Amarillo.
The reunion with Krista and Keri was one reason for this deviation, but there was another, which was also quite important to me. I didn’t have a long list of “must-dos” for this trip, but one was to visit Okemah, the birthplace and hometown of one of my lifelong heroes, the folksinger, songwriter, and social activist Woody Guthrie. And if one were traveling to Okemah from New Orleans, Alexandria was right on the way. It all made sense. And so, there we were, o
n the road again, with The Big Easy disappearing in the rearview mirror.
* Better known as the Big Easy, New Orleans is also called the Crescent City because of the way the Mississippi River arcs around the city.
† This is the highway that inspired Bob Dylan’s sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited. The southern portion of the highway passes through country that gave rise to many of the nation’s most influential blues musicians. The great blues singer Bessie Smith was killed in a car accident on this highway in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1937.
‡ Many street names in New Orleans are also part of that city’s charm. For example, there are streets named Constance, Desire, Felicity, Harmony, and Annunciation.
§ Neither the river nor the lake overflowed their banks: it was the failure of key levees that caused New Orleans to flood. The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by the great historian David Brinkley (Harper Perennial, 2007) is an extraordinary account of Katrina.
¶ Remember that Steinbeck was near the end of his trip when he reached New Orleans; we were toward the beginning of ours.
# Steinbeck’s reference to his “failings as a racist” is ambiguous. I don’t think he was confessing that being a racist was one of his failings. Rather, he was saying that since he failed to be a racist he was not welcome in the South.
EIGHT
Every Dog Will Have His Day*
Albie’s is the story of countless dogs across large swaths of the southern United States. Hundreds of thousands of dogs enter shelters in the United States every year, and while the “kill” rate has been dropping nationally as rescue awareness has increased, at some shelters it remains horrifyingly high.
The Alexandria shelter, where we were now headed for our reunion with Krista and Keri, serves a human community of about 155,000 people. When we adopted Albie in 2012, the kill rate there was close to ninety percent. In 2013, for example, 3,499 dogs came into the shelter and 3,041 were “put down” (eighty-seven percent). By comparison, that same year, public shelters in the entire state of New Jersey, with a population of nine million people, impounded 33,538 dogs and put down 4,509 (thirteen percent). Fifty-seven times as many people though only ten times as many dogs impounded as in one small Louisiana parish, and a vastly lower kill rate.
Keri, a prolific dog rescuer, routinely pulls litters of puppies alive from Dumpsters in central Louisiana, disposed of by people who don’t spay or neuter their dogs and simply throw unwanted puppies away. Houston, where I spent time while doing research for Rescue Road, has a stray dog population in the hundreds of thousands, according to city officials. Dogs, many malnourished and sick, wander the streets struggling to survive. It really is that bad.
Take a walk in New England or other parts of the Northeast and ask every dog owner you pass where their dog came from, and you will be amazed at how many will say, “Oh, he’s a rescue from Tennessee,” or Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, or another southern state. Do the same down South and you will never hear, “Oh, she’s a rescue from Vermont,” or Massachusetts or Connecticut. That isn’t to say there aren’t stray dogs, or abandoned and abused dogs, everywhere, but in the United States the problem is heavily concentrated in the South. Why?
The answer is complicated. People often say the root of the problem is that spaying and neutering are not as common in the South. While true, it begs the question: why not? The problem has social, economic, and political dimensions. But as I traveled parts of the South—including central Louisiana and southeast Texas—to write Rescue Road, I concluded the problem is primarily a cultural one. This is a generalization, but a fair one: many people in the South simply don’t value dogs, or live with them, as most people in other parts of the country do. Many dogs are obtained to serve a purpose—for protection or to hunt, for example—not to be companions. The notion that a dog should live in the house as opposed to outside is foreign to many, let alone sleep in the bed or sit with the family at dinnertime. It’s a way of living with dogs that has persisted for generations and is hard to change. Many a Southerner told me, “this is the South and change comes very slowly here.” The prevailing attitude toward dogs in parts of the South is captured in a phrase you often hear, “It’s just a dog.” Just a dog. I hasten to point out that most of the heroes of the canine rescue movement, those such as Keri Toth who work tirelessly and at great emotional and financial expense to save lives, are also Southerners. But there is no ducking the reality that the canine overpopulation problem is concentrated in the South.
So, my head this morning on our way to Alexandria was filled with thoughts of Albie, at the moment lying with his paws outstretched in the back seat with his head set down between them, and how he had to beat the longest imaginable odds to find his home with us, and gratitude to Krista and Keri and the countless other people, many whose names I will never know, who extended their hearts and hands to save Albie’s life and help deliver him to us.†
As we made our way across Interstate 10 and then north on Interstate 49 it quickly became clear that the mystery of Gordon McKernan had not been solved during our three days in New Orleans. And Gordon’s fate, which I assumed was of interest only to people around Baton Rouge, seemed to be a statewide matter because the billboards continued every few miles all the way to Alexandria. In fact, they took on a new dimension, literally. As we got into central Louisiana, some of the billboards were three-dimensional, with a re-creation of the hood of a large semi protruding a few feet straight out. And there atop the hood, legs spread wide and facing forward with his arms pinned up against the truck windshield, was a 3-D replica of Gordon McKernan, bigger than life. It was terrifying. Maybe Gordon had been squashed like so many bugs on the windshield of a huge truck rumbling down a highway somewhere in Louisiana. Or, worse yet, maybe he was still hanging on for dear life. Near the Alexandria Airport was yet another billboard exactly like many of the others we’d seen with Gordon’s name and picture and the words “Car Wreck?” on it. But on this one, inexplicably, Gordon was wearing dark-framed glasses, and an elaborate Western-style black handlebar moustache, both of which appeared to have been painted by an athletic graffiti artist. What was the message here? That Gordon might be alive but wearing a disguise? That he’d gone to ground? Who knew?‡
The mystery of Gordon McKernan was, on this morning, more than a way to occupy myself while passing time behind the wheel. It was a distraction from my concern about bringing Albie back to the shelter where he’d languished for five months. I started to wish I’d pressed harder for a different meeting place, but I wanted to make it as easy as possible for Krista and Keri and it was the logical spot.
There is nothing especially foreboding about the shelter from the outside. But knowing what goes on inside still unnerves me. When I walked past the kennels here just a few years ago, I saw many dogs who looked like Albie, dogs in chain-linked enclosures with soiled concrete floors and nothing to occupy their time, dogs that were desperate for a minute of my attention and strained to push their noses through the kennel bars so I could touch them. Most were never going to get out. I wanted to take them all home.
Keri and I pulled into the parking lot at the same time. We’d met several times since we adopted Albie. I’d spent a couple of days shadowing her as she went about her rescue work while researching Rescue Road, and she often travels from Louisiana to Rhode Island with a passel of dogs bound for adoption events in the state, and we’d met there, too. I’d also met Krista once before. Would Albie remember them and, if so, how would we know?
We quickly found Krista and she and Keri gave Albie lots of hugs and kisses. Watching Albie reunited with his saviors was one of the most emotional moments of the entire trip. Nothing betrayed his previous knowledge of them, however. He was happy for the attention, but there was none of the uncontrolled excitement you see on so many YouTube videos where a soldier, for example, is reunited with his dog after a two-year deployment. And he didn’t seem to remember the pl
ace, either.
We took Albie to the small yard, which is enclosed by a chain-link fence, where Krista took his adoption photos (in which he was wearing a little green kerchief) and a short, thirty-second video that had us falling in love long before Albie ever walked through our front door. A couple of times a week, Krista would bring Albie here to play fetch and give him a break from his cage during the five months she kept getting him a reprieve from the death chamber.
Albie rolled over on his back and squirmed energetically on the grass, something he loves to do.
“His face is whiter, but he still has his playfulness,” observed Keri. I told them about Albie’s life at home, how he roughhouses with Salina, and about our life with three dogs now. (Keri played a role in our adoption of all three.) Then he found a stick to chew on and settled under a concrete table in the enclosure where it was shady.
As we were getting ready to leave and stood chatting in the parking area, Henry Wembley, the longtime shelter director, wandered over to join us. We had circled each other warily while I was writing Rescue Road. He grudgingly agreed to let me tour the shelter back then with Dr. Sara Kelley, another rescuer I spent time with when I was in the area, but he insisted she not take me to the death chamber.§ Later, when I’d returned home and was writing, he reluctantly returned a message I’d left for him—I wanted to interview him for the book. But I missed his call and was never able to get him to return my calls again. I had some less than flattering things to say about the shelter in Rescue Road, but on this day Henry Wembley seemed to have no idea who I was—at least he gave no indication that he remembered meeting me before—which was just as well. He simply expressed his pleasure that things had worked out so well for Albie.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 11