To my surprise, he then invited us inside the shelter. I demurred. Just being outside was close enough. I didn’t think I could bear the sight of dozens of caged dogs, forlorn and waiting, against all odds, for someone to step up and save them from extinction. It was hard enough when I was here a few years ago to imagine Albie in this place; there was no way I wanted to go back inside with him by my side. When you walk through a shelter the dogs typically become overexcited and the noise from all the barking can be deafening. Shelters are inherently stressful places for dogs, and I saw no point in putting Albie back in that environment, even for a minute. Any one of the hundred and fifty days or so that Albie spent in this shelter could easily have been his last. I’d seen enough last time around.
Shortly before we left, a familiar scene unfolded, one I’d seen at several shelters in the South before. A woman in a large black pick-up truck pulled up and surrendered two dogs to the shelter staff right there in the parking lot. Dogs surrendered by their owners often have a shorter lease on life than the strays picked up by animal control. They’re not lost, and shelter staff know that no one is going to come looking for them. But, still, those may be the lucky ones. Many are simply let go to fend for themselves, abandoned on remote roads, or even shot.
The heartbreak people like Keri and Krista experience every day is what makes rescue work so difficult and hard to sustain. For every dog like Albie with a happy ending, there are countless others whose stories end with a heart stick¶ or in a gas chamber.
We stayed with Krista and Keri for about an hour and a half and then it was time to say goodbye. I’m so grateful to them for what they do in general, but eternally grateful for what they did for the sweet soul who obligingly climbed once again into the back seat.
Natchitoches is the oldest city in Louisiana and just fifty miles north of Alexandria. I was looking forward to returning there. It’s a lovely town astride the Cane River. The heart of historic downtown is Front Street, which parallels the river and sits about twenty-five feet above it. The commercial buildings on Front Street look across the brick-paved street to the river; the views are unobstructed, for there are no buildings on the river side of the street. Most of the second stories have balconies lined with elaborate railings of wrought iron, giving it the look of a mini-French Quarter in New Orleans. The river bank has been turned into a beautifully planted park, with flower baskets hanging from the lamp posts.
I had traveled to Natchitoches while working on Rescue Road to meet the young man, CJ Nash, whose dog, Mia, had given birth to a litter of puppies, one of which, Salina, we adopted in 2014. Mia, like many southern dogs, lives outdoors and isn’t spayed. The Nashes live about fifteen miles outside of Natchitoches in a very remote, rural area. When the puppies were born, CJ’s father told him to take them to the local pound, but CJ knew that was likely a death sentence. So, he reached out to a friend’s mother, Rae McManus, who was involved in humane work and she, in turn, contacted Keri Toth. Thanks to them the puppies were saved and adopted.
Rarely can an adopter trace their dog’s history with such specificity, and CJ would later become an unofficial part of our family, spending a summer in Boston with us, and we are in touch to this day. I had hoped CJ might be home from college while we were in Natchitoches, but he was otherwise committed so we missed each other.
After checking into our hotel, Albie and I headed into town to enjoy the evening by the river. A Cajun band was warming up in the bandstand on the riverfront; one of the sororities at Northwestern State University, located in town, was having an event.
We settled on an Italian restaurant with a patio overlooking the water for dinner. Since it was early we had the patio to ourselves. The evening was perfect, about seventy degrees with a gentle breeze and a cloudless sky. Our servers were two students from Northwestern State, a young woman and a young man she was training. We learned the young man was from Paris, Texas, tomorrow’s destination. Knowing nothing about Paris I asked him what we should see and where we should eat.
“The best restaurant in Paris is a Mexican place,” he said. “Dos Marias.”
As to what we should see, there was a long pause, one that seemed prompted not by his inability to choose just one of Paris’s many worthy attractions, but an inability to summon any at all. Finally, he said, “There’s a replica of the Eiffel Tower . . . with a red cowboy hat on top.”
As the evening deepened the entire town took on a golden glow. We walked some of the residential streets with their charming houses and well-tended gardens and eventually wandered back to Front Street. As always, Albie made a few friends along the way, people who just wanted to give him a pat on the head or shake his paw. Perhaps because we had just been at the shelter a few hours before, my love and appreciation for him seemed to swell as I watched strangers fawn over him. It had been our mission for the past six years to turn his up-side-down world right-side-up and we had succeeded. As we walked back toward the river, I felt an intense sense of well-being, appreciating, not for the first time, just how precious he is.
By now the sorority party was in full swing, which meant the peace and quiet of the evening along the river was shattered. Separate from the party, loudspeakers affixed to the lamp posts all along Front Street were broadcasting rock music from a local radio station. Between the Cajun band and the competing radio music the din was pretty much intolerable. On my previous visit to Natchitoches I hadn’t noticed the loudspeakers, but it was clear they were a permanent fixture. Why anyone would want to give a peaceful, quiet, and charming downtown the feel of a shopping mall I have no idea, but Natchitoches would not be the last town in this part of the country where we’d encounter this situation.
Forced from downtown by the noise, we drove to a local supermarket to buy a few things and watched the western sky turn purple, blue, and pink as the sun set. It was too early to go to bed, but there wasn’t much else to do so we headed back to the hotel and some loneliness crept back into the journey. I tried calling Judy but got her voice mail, as was often the case. I left a short message about our day—about our reunion with Krista and Keri—and said we were going to bed and would talk tomorrow.
The previous three nights we’d been in New Orleans with Danny, having dinner together or with some of his friends, and meeting others along the way. We’d run into the parents of good friends from home who live in the city and talked an afternoon away with JoAnn Clevenger. We’d reconnected earlier in the day with Krista and Keri, two people both of us had known before. There were familiar faces and familiar places. Now, once again, it was just Albie and me, alone together, and about to head west all the way to California. Barring some odds-defying random encounter, we wouldn’t see another soul we knew until we reached the Bay Area, where we planned to stay with Judy’s brother, my brother-in-law Andy, and my sister-in-law Ceci, for a few days. Until then Albie’s would be the only familiar face I’d see.
On that night, feeling a bit lonely, having each other was all we really needed. Here in central Louisiana where you so often hear, “It’s just a dog,” Albie was proving there’s nothing just about it. Being a dog is a fine thing to be, and maybe the best thing a being can be.
* This familiar saying is also the title of a song by Procol Harum from the 2003 album, The Well’s on Fire.
† Some of them I do know. Cathy Mahle and Harvey Wiener of Labs4rescue, the rescue organization through which we adopted Albie; Greg (Cathy’s brother) and Adella Mahle of Rescue Road Trips, which provided transportation; and the many “angels” who meet Greg’s truck along the way every other week to help walk and care for the dogs. Greg was the central figure in Rescue Road. Every other week he leaves home in Ohio in a big rig to drive 4,500 miles to Texas and the Gulf Coast to pick up approximately eighty dogs saved by people such as Keri and deliver them to their “forever” families in the Northeast. In early July 2012, Albie was one of those lucky dogs on Greg’s truck.
‡ After we returned home I Googled Gordon McKernan an
d learned that his ubiquitous billboards are the source of a lot of talk and jokes in Louisiana. One local media outlet in Lafayette, WHOT Radio, ran a short piece on its website asking whether the glasses and moustache, which were popping up on McKernan’s billboards all around the state, were the work of vandals or just clever marketing, a way to get people talking about them. The writer concluded it was the latter.
§ “Euthanized” is the word typically used, but it sugarcoats the reality. Some dogs, to be sure, are euthanized either because they are sick or in pain or dangerously aggressive. But many more are killed simply because the shelters are overcapacity and more dogs come pouring in every day.
¶ A heart stick is an intra-cardiac lethal injection. A needle and syringe containing sodium pentobarbital is pounded through the chest wall into the dog’s heart.
NINE
Texas Two-Step
Albie was up early, so we got started earlier than usual.
Natchitoches is such a pretty place, I wanted to go downtown one more time before we left. Having a coffee and sitting by the Cane River before getting back in the car seemed like a grand idea, provided the music had stopped. We were downtown a little before eight but, alas, the only coffee shop in town didn’t open until ten, which was rather odd because there was a sign in the shop window that urged, “Start your day with coffee!” Well, I was trying.
With no coffee in hand, Albie and I strolled along Front Street for a while, then I took a seat on a bench by the river and watched the morning slip over Natchitoches. When Albie lies down, as he did next to me, he often assumes the position of the stone lions that grace the entrance to the New York City Public Library. His paws extend straight out, his neck is straight, and his head erect. He looks very regal and alert in that position. He remained like that for a few minutes, sighed, and then lay his head gently on the grass. Albie is so handsome; I could look at him all day.
Mercifully, the band that had been playing in the riverfront pavilion the night before had gone home, and the speakers mounted on the lamp posts had gone silent. Chirping birds and the muffled sound of car tires rolling over the brick-paved street up the riverbank behind us were all we could hear.
In a couple of hours we’d be in Texas, and just as I had wondered when North would become South earlier in the trip (and decided it was when we were driving on the Patsy Cline Highway near Front Royal, Virginia), I wondered when the Southeast would become the West. Probably, I thought, when we come to a replica of the Eiffel Tower with a red cowboy hat on top. As it turned out, we didn’t have to wait that long.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said out loud. “Seriously?”
I don’t make a habit of talking to myself. I’m just self-aware enough to know it makes me seem like I’m losing it. But Albie was asleep in the back seat, so I was, for all practical purposes, talking to myself.
I thought we’d buried Gordon McKernan yesterday. But there were three more of his billboards north of Natchitoches and six or eight or ten around Shreveport—so many I lost count. His face was a constant fixture wherever we went in Louisiana and I was really tired of seeing his mug everywhere. It felt as if Albie and I and Gordon had been traveling together since Baton Rouge. Of course, I’d known from the git-go he was a lawyer trolling the entire state of Louisiana for business. Now I was desperately hoping he wasn’t a member of the Texas bar, too.
We stopped after a couple of hours in a small town to take a walk. I knew we were in Texas but didn’t know where. As we walked along First Street a group of women came out of a shop and admired Albie, so I asked them, “Where are we?”
The woman who answered was tall and thin and, I’d guess, in her late seventies. Her hair was done up in a beehive and she was wearing flared pants the bright yellow color of French’s mustard, a white blouse, and a yellow vest to match her pants. She looked like she was about to take the stage at the Grand Ole Opry in 1968.
“Why, this is Hughes Springs, honey!” she said with a twang. Since I was obviously clueless, she added, helpfully, “Texas!”
“And look at you! Aren’t you just the sweetest thing.” Perhaps it goes without saying, but she was talking to Albie.
As in Natchitoches, there were loudspeakers mounted on lamp posts along the street blaring music. Whoever the powers that be are in these towns, and whoever decides what radio station everyone has to listen to as they walk down the street, really ought to reconsider. It’s Orwellian. And incredibly annoying. At least they were playing classic rock in Natchitoches. Here in Hughes Springs the only song I recognized was “All My Ex’s Live in Texas”:
All my ex's live in Texas
And Texas is the place I'd dearly love to be
But all my ex's live in Texas
And that's why I hang my hat in Tennessee
If I had to listen to this music every time I went into town to run an errand, I’d probably live in Tennessee, too, or even Mogadishu.
We walked around a corner and saw a festival of some sort in progress, so we wandered over. There were carnival rides and vendors selling funnel cakes, cotton candy, and corn dogs (they really could have used a kiosk that dispensed Lipitor), and dozens of people selling crafts of one kind or another under portable tarps. One of them, an older woman selling knickknacks, greeted Albie, and I told her we were on a road trip from Boston.
“I didn’t think you were from around here,” she offered.
“Is it that obvious?” I asked.
“You sound like someone I knew from Michigan,” she answered. “He played basketball.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to parry that nonsequitur, or what makes people sound like they’re from Michigan, but she was kind and was enjoying petting Albie. The fair, she explained, was part of the Texas Wildflower Festival, an annual statewide celebration of the season when Texas’s abundant roadside wildflowers bloom, a legacy of Lady Bird Johnson’s highway beautification program in the 1960s. As we started to move on she had one more thing to say.
“Welcome to Texas! Drive safely. The truckers will run right over you!”
I had been surprised that the speed limit on the two-lane roads we’d been driving since entering Texas was a very speedy seventy miles per hour, and still there were plenty of trucks blowing right past us.
“If the speed limit is seventy,” she added, “they’ll be pushing eighty.”
Like many parts of Texas, this corner northeast of Dallas is cattle country and between Hughes Springs and Paris we passed several ranches with gated entrances adorned with the name of the hacienda on top. It was all reminiscent of Southfork, the Texas ranch where the dysfunctional Ewing family plotted against one another in the 1980s television melodrama Dallas.
As we approached Paris that afternoon I kept scanning the horizon trying to glimpse this Eiffel Tower replica we’d heard about from our waiter in Natchitoches the night before. It was apparently the biggest tourist attraction, maybe the only tourist attraction in town. Surely, we would see it rising above the treetops, but all we saw were radio and cell phone towers and none were adorned with a red cowboy hat. Maybe, I thought, it’s a ways out of town, or perhaps we’re looking in the wrong direction, but we’d find it after checking into our hotel.
After we’d unpacked a few things and Albie had some water and a short walk, I looked up the Eiffel Tower on my iPhone. It was less than a ten-minute drive away so off we went to see the biggest thing in Paris. But even as Google Maps suggested we had arrived at our destination, there was no Eiffel Tower in sight. We were in a big, empty parking lot directly in front of the Paris Civic Center. Where in the world was this thing? Then, off to the side of the Civic Center, I saw it. It wasn’t the biggest thing in Paris, after all.
Now, it would have been unrealistic to expect a full-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower, but something built a third or a quarter to scale wouldn’t have been unreasonable. The real Eiffel Tower, the one in Paris, France, stands over one thousand feet tall and it is intricate and graceful and ornate. Bu
t there it was, all of seventy feet tall, including the hat, according to the website I perused as I stood there trying in vain to ascertain why this was such a big attraction. It looked like a slightly oversized jungle gym, or a regular-sized jungle gym for overachievers, built using a child’s Erector set, just black piping assembled into a tower with a big red cowboy hat mounted at a jaunty angle on top. Yes, it was kind of shaped like the real Eiffel Tower, a splayed, arched base under a pointed spire, but all in all it was, to put it mildly, stupendously underwhelming. Albie seemed to think the whole thing was a gigantic fire hydrant.
To my utter astonishment, the website I was studying to get the dimensions of the thing offered this fascinating tidbit: “The average visitor spends one hour here.”
Really? An hour? A full sixty minutes? This was harder to apprehend than the Lilliputian scale of the tower itself. What could one possibly do here for an hour? You can’t climb it or swing from it or even find a nearby café from which to admire it. The red cowboy hat at the top doesn’t even rotate or spray water or blink on and off. I can only imagine that for the “average visitor” the last fifty-nine minutes of the interminable hour they loiter here are spent in an embarrassed silence as they try to figure out why they spent any time at all finding the place.
We did not spend one hour at the Eiffel Tower; I’d have passed out from boredom. So, about five minutes after we arrived, we hopped back in the car to check out downtown Paris which would, hopefully, redeem our decision to spend an entire afternoon and evening here, hopes that were soon dashed.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 12