Travels with Casey Read online

  I asked Mary about Bear, her fifteen-year-old outdoor dog. She told us that because of his unusual energy level (“He’s the most hyper dog in the world”) and his eagerness to urinate indoors (“He’ll pee right on the TV”), that he’s not allowed in the house. But he’s also not allowed to roam freely, for fear that he might run onto the road.

  Like many “outdoor dogs” in America, particularly those in poor areas, Bear spends most of his life chained up. Which, of course, means he doesn’t get enough exercise—only adding to his perceived hyperness. Mary feels guilty about Bear’s circumstances. She believes that if a dog can’t be a close companion to a human, he should at least be allowed to run loose in the country.

  “We’re never going to have an outdoor dog again,” she said. “We do our best to keep him comfortable—he has a long chain and has a nice dog house with pine needles so he won’t get mange. I go out there every day and feed ’im and check his water. But we know good and well it’s not the way it should be.”

  Bear probably needs a fenced-in yard, or an electric fence. “Sometimes I think that if someone had a big yard, that Bear could just run around and do his thing,” she told us. “But my son doesn’t want to give him up.”

  Sam and I could have spent all day in Mary’s bookstore, but we had to get back on the road. Before leaving, I bought a copy of Moonshiner’s Daughter and promised to send Mary a copy of Travels with Casey. She wouldn’t let us leave without a fight, though.

  “You know,” she said, “I am going to have a movie made of my book, and with the money I will have a new store, probably over there”—she pointed behind us, toward the south—“in that great big field by my house. I want to make it four times as big as this. It’s going to be huge. And everything will have its place.”

  She touched the cross on her chest. “I just hope the Lord don’t wait until I’m too old to reorganize!”

  THE SIX-HOUR drive to Savannah felt like ten.

  We took Interstate 26 southeast through South Carolina, until we connected with Interstate 95. Sam napped for part of the ride. I was tempted to wake him up so I’d have someone to talk to (or, better yet, so he could take the wheel), but he looked so comfortable curled up in the passenger seat. Besides, the RV insurance mandated that I be the motorhome’s only driver.

  We pulled into Savannah’s Red Gate Campground & RV Resort as the sun was setting. The park used to be a Confederate soldier encampment. Today, its grounds are impossibly picturesque. There are grassy fields, red barns, whitewashed fences, oaks hung with Spanish moss, and two lovely ponds patrolled by herons. The temperature hovered in the upper sixties when we pulled in, but after weeks in the cold it felt like eighty. I changed into a tank top and shorts, grabbed a tennis ball, and sprinted toward the closest pond, with Casey trailing close behind.

  “Wanna go for a swim?” I said, eager to see him in water for the first time in weeks. But just as I was about to hurl the ball into the pond, I spotted a small sign attached to a thick oak tree: BEWARE! SNAKES & ALLIGATORS.

  Later that night, Casey and I took a walk through the park. Everything was swathed in thick fog. Moss-draped trees loomed out from the darkness, and a halo of warm yellow light hovered around the pavilion and clubhouse. Even the roar of a passing Amtrak train sounded romantic. I kneeled down next to Casey, grabbed him by the scruff, and reminded him that he was the “best boy in the whole world.”

  Before bed, I signed on to Twitter to check on one of my favorite accounts, @dogsdoingthings, which reads as if David Foster Wallace and Hunter S. Thompson got together in the afterlife to inspire acid flashbacks in the literary-minded. The account’s creators, Clayton Lamar and Patrick Carr, delight in imagining dogs presiding over a dying earth—or something like that.

  In my few weeks on the road, @dogsdoingthings had tweeted dozens of gems. These were three of my favorites:

  Dogs holding out a map showing the whole history of your desire and casually tossing it at your feet, sneering “disgusting.”

  Dogs lamenting as the outer edge of history passes from tragedy into farce, “I was just—learning to—love.”

  Dogs dislodging a katana from the neck of a shuddering body and collapsing into an easy chair, sighing, “HONEY, YOU JUST WEAR ME OUT.”

  The next morning, Sam cooked eggs and bacon before we headed into town to meet Savannah Dan, the city’s most famous tour guide. He gives two dog-friendly walking tours each day, wearing a cream seersucker suit with a bow tie and pocket square, white buck shoes, and a straw Panama hat. At six-five and 275 pounds, he’s a sight to behold.

  The tour began at Johnson Square, the city’s oldest. Nathanael Greene, a trusted general of George Washington during the Revolutionary War, is interred under an obelisk in the center of the square. Nearby is a bronze sundial, a fitting touch considering Greene died of sunstroke.

  “What kind of dog is Casey?” Savannah Dan asked a few minutes into the tour, which would take us through six of the city’s public squares, most shaded by oak trees and adorned with a statue of a prominent local figure. There were several other people on the tour, but Casey was the only dog.

  I told Savannah Dan that I didn’t know for sure, but that I thought Casey was half-Lab, half–Golden Retriever.

  “That brushy tail looks like a Blue Heeler’s tail,” he said. “You familiar with a Blue Heeler?”

  I nodded.

  “Australian Cattle Dog—great dogs. I have one at home, and he has the exact same brushy tail. Casey’s also got that barrel chest, but it tapers off at the hips. That’s very Blue Heeler–ish. So are the different color guard hairs on his back.”

  It was the first time anyone had compared Casey to a Blue Heeler, and, frankly, I didn’t see the resemblance. But Savannah Dan spoke with such a deep, syrupy voice, that I didn’t dare interrupt him. He was a fountain of historical knowledge and salacious city gossip. His stories took us back all the way to the founding of the Georgia Colony and its roots as a buffer between Spanish-controlled Florida and the profitable Carolina colonies, and as a destination for the dregs of the British poorhouses.

  I never knew that Georgia was the only British colony to originally ban slavery, but Savannah Dan filled us in. “The rule back then was no Catholics, no Jews, no lawyers, no liquor, and no slaves,” he said.

  The no-slave rule didn’t last long, of course, and Savannah Dan tried his best to find the upside of losing the Civil War. “So the North may have won,” he told us, “but we ended up with NASCAR, sweet tea, and Lynyrd Skynyrd.” He smiled. “It all worked out in the end.”

  As we strolled through Savannah’s cobblestone streets, I thought of William Simon Glover, the elderly African American who used to walk this same city wearing a suit and a fedora and leading an invisible dog named Patrick. As the story goes (told by John Berendt in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil), William worked for years as a porter for the Savannah law firm of Bouhan, Williams & Levy. While Bouhan was alive, William served as Patrick’s caretaker; he would walk the dog and give him Chivas Regal to drink.

  Before his death, Bouhan stipulated that William receive $10 a week to care for Patrick. When the dog died, William went to court to say the payments should stop. The judge, though, wouldn’t hear of it.

  “What do you mean Patrick is dead?” he told William. “How could he be? I see him right there! Right there on the carpet.”

  It took William a second to figure out what the judge was up to. “Oh, I think I see him too, judge!”

  “Good,” the judge replied. “So you just keep walking him, and we’ll keep paying you.”

  When Berendt met William, he was eighty-five and had been walking a dead dog for twenty years. William would stroll through downtown each morning and late afternoon, and as he did townspeople would ask, “Still walking that dog?” William never broke character. He’d look over his shoulder and say, “Come, on, Patrick,” to the invisible dog lagging behind.

  If I wasn’t going to bump into William
on this walking tour (and I wasn’t—he’s dead), I was at least going to sit on the bench where Forrest Gump waited for the 39 Bus with a box of chocolates for Jenny. I knew this made me the worst kind of Savannah tourist, but I didn’t care. “Are we there yet?” I badgered Savannah Dan, who wisely saves the Forrest Gump bit for the end of his tour.

  You can imagine my disappointment, then, when Savannah Dan pointed to the north end of Chippewa Square. There was no bench. There had, in fact, never been a bench. Savannah Dan explained that Tom Hanks had instead relaxed on a fiberglass prop. It had been trucked in and placed at the edge of the park, facing out toward a one-way street.

  “We didn’t even know what movie they were making,” Savannah Dan recalled. “All we knew for sure was that Tom Hanks looked like a moron, he was sitting on a bench that had never before existed in Savannah, and traffic was going the wrong direction around Chippewa Square.”

  At the end of the ninety-minute tour, I took a picture of Casey with Savannah Dan and asked him for a dog-friendly place to eat lunch. He pointed us toward J. Christopher’s, a restaurant with a low-sodium dog menu.

  “My dog would never eat there, though,” he cautioned us. “He’s an American dog, and he’d rather have the sodium. If it ain’t salted, he ain’t interested.”

  WE TOOK off toward Florida the next morning, but Sam and I decided to make a slight detour, to Waycross, Georgia, a small city in the southeastern part of the state. Waycross is home to the Southern Forest World Museum, which displays a mummified hound dog that was trapped in the hollow trunk of a tree.

  We arrived at 11:30 A.M., but the doors to its log building were locked. A sign read, “Attention: Due to the economy, Southern Forest World is open now at greatly reduced hours—Tuesday–Friday: 11:45–3:30.” A few minutes later, a ponytailed man in his fifties showed up, unlocked the front door, and led us through this small museum devoted to Southern forestry. We saw a timber-hauling steam engine from the early 1900s, a loblobby pine replica tree to climb in, and a NASA space suit composed partly of pine. But the main attraction was Stuckie, which the museum confidently calls “the world’s most famous petrified dog.”

  A logging contractor discovered the brown and white dog in the early 1980s, about twenty feet up a chestnut oak tree, and only a few feet from an exit hole. It was estimated that the dog had been dead for some twenty years, but that a “chimney effect” resulted in an upward air current, causing the scent of the dead dog to be carried away and protecting the corpse from insects.

  In 2002, the museum held a “Name That Mummified Dog Contest.” CNN picked up the story, foot traffic in the museum tripled, and naming ideas—King Mutt, Woody, Stay, Pupenkomen—poured in from all over the country. (One person suggested the museum not name the dog, “since he couldn’t come anyway!”) But after two museum board meetings devoted entirely to the issue, the name “Stuckie,” well, stuck.

  Wedged in his tree behind two sheets of plexiglass, Stuckie manages to look both terrified and terrifying. Desiccation has pulled his lips back, giving him a leathery snarl. But there’s also an undeniable panic in his eye—he’s fighting for his life. It’s clear that he tried valiantly to escape from the hollowed trunk, only to get stuck tantalizingly close to freedom.

  I felt icky staring at the poor dog. So did Sam.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  We piled back into the Chalet and hightailed it out of town.

  5. In which Florida isn’t nearly as awful as I expected it to be

  “WELCOME TO the jutting extension of America’s groin,” I told Sam as we crossed into Florida on I-95.

  I can’t take credit for that line; writer Joe Friedman penned it in his essay “Why I Hate Florida.” Friedman’s takedown of the Sunshine State is seething with anger and jacked up on metaphor. “With her makeup off, her golden wig in curlers, and her teeth placed in a jar, we see the truth,” he writes, comparing the country’s fourth most populous state to an elderly prostitute.

  I wouldn’t go nearly that far, but it is nonetheless difficult to appreciate Florida if you grew up in California, as I did. To me, entire swaths of Florida manage to feel both ostentatious and drab. It’s worth noting that on John Steinbeck’s journey around America, he skipped Florida entirely. Nothing to see here, he seemed to be saying. I couldn’t skip Florida (too many dogs to meet!), nor did I want to. After weeks of driving and interviews, I was eager to park myself on soft, milk-white sand.

  But before I could do that, Sam, Casey, and I had to pay a visit to the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, home to the world’s largest annual pet industry trade show, Global Pet Expo. The massive exhibit hall included 2,487 booths, hawking everything from canine couture to dog treadmills to “paw-litical” car magnets (Bark Obama, Mutt Romney, Ron Pawl). There was no way to see everything, so I’d asked pet industry publicist Stephanie Krol to show us around. Her company, Matrix Partners, claims to represent “the bark of the town.”

  These are good times to be in the pet business. Americans spent $53 billion on pet products and services in 2012, up from $17 billion in 1994. The pet industry has proven to be largely recession-proof—it was one of only a few to grow during the downturn of 2008—and has attracted some unexpected names: Old Navy now makes dog sweaters, Paul Mitchell offers high-end pet grooming products, Omaha Steaks sells dog treats, and Harley-Davidson boasts “Bad to the Bone” dog bandannas.

  Our first booth stop at the expo was Stella & Chewy’s, makers of raw frozen and freeze-dried dog food. Raw food “is really hot right now,” Stephanie assured us, but I didn’t need any convincing. I’d read countless articles about the trend, including a New York Times piece in which Bravo Raw Diet cofounder Bette Schubert claimed dogs are healthier when they eat like their “wild ancestors.”

  While some vets are skeptical of the diet, I’d heard great things about Stella & Chewy’s and was delighted when the company’s founder, Marie Moody, insisted that we take bags of freeze-dried raw patties for the road.

  “Does Casey like beef?” she asked me.

  “He’s a Lab,” I reminded her. “He likes everything.”

  I suggested we rip open a bag right there and give Casey a taste, but when I spun around he was gone. So was Sam. I spotted them several booths down, near two gigantic sleeping Great Pyrenees. “Looks like you might need a leash for Sam,” one of Marie’s employees said with a wink.

  Next we were off to the Company of Animals, a British-based firm that sells everything from training leads and collars to Nina Ottosson’s toys for dogs. I’d never heard of Ottosson, but apparently she was a big deal. “She’s a rock star of this industry,” Stephanie explained, adding that Ottosson rarely leaves her native Sweden but made a special trip to Florida for the expo.

  Through a heavy accent, Ottosson told us she began making toys twenty years ago after worrying that her pets were bored. She spent much of the next decade driving around Scandinavia, selling her “brain games”—many of which require a dog to lift a block or turn a disk to find a hidden treat—and promoting the idea that canines, like humans, need mental stimulation.

  “Now there are many other companies,” making these kinds of games, “but I was the pioneer,” she said proudly, pronouncing it peeohneer.

  Poor Casey couldn’t reach the treats hidden inside Ottosson’s Dog Twister, a particularly complicated circular toy that requires dislodging plastic bones and sliding paw-printed plastic covers to find the reward. Casey knew where the treats were, but he couldn’t master either step and finally resorted to trying to bite off the plastic covers.

  “This is so difficult, not even humans can figure it out,” Ottosson said with a smile.

  In One Nation Under Dog, Michael Schaffer writes about the “three-sided conflict”—anthropomorphism, atavism, and solipsism—at the core of the contemporary pet industry. As Schaffer explains it, the tension is between “the desire to treat pets as humans; versus the interest in allowing them to live as close
as possible to what we imagine to be their natural state; versus the less altruistic inclination to have the whole experience be easy for our human selves.”

  Rare is the pet product that encompasses all three concepts, but Ottosson’s toys come close. Her games are convenient for us humans—they allow our dogs to entertain themselves when we’re busy. They clearly fulfill our desire to treat dogs as human children. And while dogs wouldn’t have had access to man-made toys in their “natural state,” Ottosson’s games can be said to combat the dumbing-down of the domesticated pet. They’re an attempt to make dogs use their brains and solve problems on their own.

  As Stephanie shepherded us across the carpeted convention floor, I asked her about the latest trends in the pet industry. “Eco-friendly stuff, for sure,” she said, pointing to the bamboo ball launcher I gripped in my right hand. I’d gotten it earlier that day at the booth for Chuckit!, a company that claims to be “revolutionizing the game of fetch.”

  It should come as no surprise that young dog owners—many of them health-conscious—expect “green” pet products. “Nearly any trend in human consumerism will soon appear in the animal market,” Schaffer points out. That might explain companies like FurBulous Dog, which produces organic shampoo “specially made for your sensitive dog,” or Yoghund, which makes “organic and all-natural” frozen yogurt.

  With half of America’s dogs considered overweight or obese, the pet industry understandably focuses on low-calorie treats and meals. PetSafe, a company based in Tennessee, was promoting one of its newest products at the expo: a liquid dog treat called Lickety Stik.

  “It’s great for training, because it’s low-calorie and won’t fill the dog up,” a PetSafe representative told us at his booth. As he spoke, he fed Casey chicken-flavored fluid from what looked like a glue stick. Casey couldn’t get enough of the stuff and practically French-kissed the roller-top ball that dispensed the liquid.