Travels with Casey Read online

  Cary’s face lit up. “Serves him right to mess with dogs!” She looked lovingly at Pepe, who loafed on the couch, his pink tongue dangling from his mouth. “If someone stabbed my dog, that would be like someone stabbing my child. To me, my pets are like my children. I love them the same.”

  Although I adore dogs, I’m surprised when I hear people equate their love for their pets with their love for their kids. Did Cary actually mean to say there’s no difference between the depth of love she feels for her daughters and the affection she has for her dog? If so, was that a sign of some advanced and egalitarian perspective on the value of different species? Or was it a sign of insanity? Whatever the case, did Cary really want her daughters to see that in print?

  “I don’t have kids,” I told her, “but I imagine that I would love them in a different way than the dogs I’ve loved in my life.” I suggested she think about how she might mourn the death of a child. “If Pepe died, do you think you would feel just as sad as if one of your daughters passed away?”

  Cary considered the question for a moment. Then she told me about Alf, the dog she’d owned when her girls were young. “Raising Alf was like raising a child,” she said. “He was very much a kid, just like my daughters. He was part of the family unit. We had a big Fisher-Price slide in the living room back then, and he would go down the slide, just like my girls did. I’d give them popsicles, and he would stand in line with my girls and wait for his. So when I had to put Alfy to sleep . . .”

  Cary started to tear up. “I still get emotional, as you can see. It was probably the worst thing I’ve ever had to do.”

  Though Cary couldn’t tease apart her love for her dogs and her children, she was quick to differentiate between how kids and dogs love their human caretakers. “Dogs never become teenagers,” she told me. “It’s a consistent relationship; the quality of their love for you doesn’t change. They don’t grow up and tell you that you’re the worst. They don’t move out. Even if you screw up, they don’t hold it against you.”

  Mike chimed in. “Dogs are like kids, but without the drama or the attitude.”

  (I’d heard something similar at a KOA in Florida. An elderly couple had invited me inside their mammoth motorhome and explained why they liked spending most of the year on the road with their two dogs. “Frankly, we do this so our kids won’t know where to find us,” they’d said, grinning like schoolchildren.)

  Cary said she’d learned a lot about human family dynamics in her years as a midwife and a nurse. “I’ve seen a lot of bitterness and downright hatred between family members who were supposed to love each other,” she told me. “But with dogs, you don’t seem to have that. They’re always going to be there, always going to want you.”

  Cary went on. “A dog’s love is different from human love, because it’s truly unconditional.”

  Is it, though? Patricia McConnell writes that “it’s become a cliché that we love dogs because they give us unconditional positive regard.” McConnell calls this belief “naïve” and suggests we’ve “convinced ourselves that our dogs love us constantly and relentlessly, simply because we’re not very good at reading their nonverbal communications to us.” McConnell writes about her Border Collie, Cool Hand Luke, who once saved her life but can still shoot her “a look that can only be translated as a four-letter word.”

  Anthony Podberscek, who studies the human-animal bond, told writer Hal Herzog that the unconditional love theory of pet ownership is “rubbish,” a peculiarly American phenomenon that’s dismissive of the intelligence and emotional complexity of pet animals. Podberscek argues that if we truly believe “that our pets are programmed to mindlessly love us no matter what we do to them,” Herzog reports in his book Some We Love, Some We Hate, Some We Eat, “they are essentially Cartesian robots that take whatever we dish out for them and then come back for more.”

  Still, I could understand where Cary was coming from. Adolescent dogs are less likely to “hate you” than adolescent humans. As psychiatrist and educator Aaron Katcher once wrote, “a dog is like an eternal Peter Pan, a child who never grows old and who therefore is always available to love and be loved.” Andy Rooney may have pinpointed another advantage that dogs have over kids: we don’t have to listen to dogs complain.

  “If dogs could talk,” Rooney once said, “it would take a lot of the fun out of owning one.”

  I STAYED on the topic of kids and dogs later that afternoon in Tampa, when I visited a stay-at-home mom named Kim and her dogs, Piper (the mutt who’d been stabbed by the intruder) and Hunter (a Brittany). We sat with Kim’s mother and daughter on the back patio overlooking their pool and the ball fields of an adjacent middle school. As we spoke, two squirrels tortured Piper, Hunter, and Casey by racing back and forth on top of a wooden fence. Next door, a neighbor’s parakeet did a perfect impersonation of a ringing telephone.

  After I told them about my conversation earlier that day in Sarasota, Kim spoke about the pain of losing her previous dog, Scout, to leukemia. “I had to put him down, and it felt to me very much like losing a child,” Kim said.

  “Were you especially close to Scout, as compared to other dogs you’ve lived with?” I asked.

  “Yes, and I do think it’s true that we have deeper connections with certain pets than with others,” she told me. “That dog used to go everywhere with us—we’d take him on trips, he’d ride with us on our motorcycle. If Scout couldn’t come somewhere with us, we didn’t go.”

  A few minutes later, Kim’s mom, Carol—a youthful and funny psychotherapist in her sixties—recalled the pain of losing her favorite dog, Shoshanna. “She died a few years after my husband passed,” Carol said, “and what made it especially painful was that she was my connection to my husband. It was his dog, his love. I mean, he let that dog sit on the table at dinner! When Shoshanna died, it brought up all the feelings of losing my husband again.”

  But Carol was sure to distinguish between the pain of losing a dog and the agony of losing her daughter. “My daughter died when she was thirty-seven, and nothing compares to that pain. If you can picture someone taking your guts, pulling them up through your throat and out your mouth while you’re still alive, that doesn’t even compare to the pain you feel. If someone tells you that they feel the same losing a child as they do losing a dog, then they haven’t experienced the death of a child.”

  At that moment, Casey, who had been wandering through the yard, spotted an armadillo on the other side of the chain link fence that separated Kim’s property from the school’s fields. He let out two barks in quick succession and rushed toward the fence, but he could only watch as the armadillo—moving with surprising deftness for an animal carrying an armored shell—scurried away.

  “It’s certainly the natural cycle for dogs to die before us,” Carol continued, “and in many ways they teach us how to deal with loss. But we’re not supposed to outlive our children. That’s not the natural order of things. I love my dogs, and they are my best friends. But I don’t dream about them when they die. I mourn them, and then I move on and get another dog—another best friend for the next ten or fifteen years of my life.”

  I looked at Casey, who had forgotten about the armadillo and was now busy sniffing a bush. It occurred to me—I mean, really occurred to me—that he wouldn’t live forever. I felt a tightness in my chest, a kind of panic.

  “I don’t want Casey to die,” I heard myself saying out loud, though I’d only intended the words for myself.

  Then I thought about what might happen if I died before Casey. Who would look after him? I hadn’t prepared a will, hadn’t made any arrangements. But those were mere practicalities. Where my mind went, I’m ashamed to admit, is toward more ego-based questions: Would Casey even notice that I was gone? Would he be sad? Would he mourn me? The answers seemed painfully clear to me that afternoon in Florida: maybe, probably not, and no.

  Oh, how part of me yearned for a dog like Capitán, the German Shepherd who spends most of his days sitting b
y his master’s grave in Argentina. Or Ciccio, another German Shepherd who waits for his owner each day outside a village church in southern Italy. For years, Ciccio’s owner, Maria, would walk her dog to a church in San Donaci every day as the tower bells began to chime. When Maria died in 2012, the dog first participated in her funeral procession, then continued to make his way to the church each day as the bells started chiming. The village has since adopted Ciccio, collectively feeding and sheltering him, but as he sits outside the church each afternoon, it seems he’s still devoted only to Maria.

  Perhaps I would have been better suited for the Victorian era. As Susan Orlean recounts in Rin Tin Tin, dogs of that period were believed to be “indefatigable mourners. They were said to visit their masters’ graves on their own, lying on the freshly turned dirt for days, inconsolable. If their grief was too much to bear, dogs sometimes committed suicide; newspapers of the period carried frequent reports of these canine deaths. One of the great attractions of having a pet, then, was believing it would miss us and mourn us and always remember us, even if friends and family let us down.”

  But as Orlean points out, this Victorian obsession crowded out the reality of sharing one’s life with a dog—unlike with human children, we usually outlive our furbabies. “A dog’s life is a short one,” she writes, “so most of the time it is we who are mourning them.”

  The French call dogs “bêtes de chagrin” (“beasts of sorrow”), because, as writer Roger Grenier puts it, they “inflict the suffering of loss upon us.”

  I hoped to have a few years before Casey inflicted the suffering of loss upon me. More than anything, I hoped I wouldn’t regret the life I’d offered him.

  Part

  TWO

  6. In which I cry over dogs in West Texas, hire a bed bug exterminator in New Mexico, and meet gay cowboys in Colorado

  IT’S CLICHÉD, of course, to blast Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again” while rolling along a lonely two-lane highway under a sun-drenched Texas sky, with only circling vultures and a desolate landscape for company. But that doesn’t make it any less satisfying.

  It was late March, six weeks since leaving Provincetown, and Casey and I were headed west on Route 90, which hugs the Mexican border west of San Antonio. We were headed to Marfa, a small town in the high desert named after a character in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. On the brink of becoming a ghost town in the early 1970s, Marfa had begun its transformation with the arrival of minimalist artist Donald Judd, who bought up downtown real estate and turned the 340-acre Fort D. A. Russell military installation into a contemporary art museum. Today, Marfa is home to an eclectic collection of artists, retired ranchers, and Mexican Americans—including the town’s elderly dogcatcher, who won the lottery. The area also boasts the Marfa Lights, mysterious brightly colored spheres that can sometimes be seen at night on the southwest horizon.

  I’d never been to South Texas, and I was struck by the area’s barren beauty. The landscape along Route 90 came with surprises, like when we passed over the majestic Pecos River, which empties into the nearby Rio Grande. I stopped to have lunch—and let Casey pee—at a scenic overlook with a stunning view of the river’s high canyon walls.

  After rolling through Langtry, the longtime home of famed judge/saloonkeeper Roy Bean, there was nothing approximating civilization for the next 150 miles. We came upon an occasional big rig or Border Patrol vehicle, but for the most part we had Route 90 to ourselves. The road to Marfa was straight, flat, and seemingly endless.

  Casey spent most of the drive curled up and snoozing in his usual spot between the driver and passenger seats. To my delight, he’d grown increasingly comfortable in the RV during our quick drive through southern Alabama and Mississippi. Sadly, I couldn’t say the same for myself. My butt had started hurting by the time I’d reached Louisiana, where I visited Animal Rescue New Orleans, a shelter and adoption organization. Every few minutes, I’d adjust my sitting position to combat the soreness that comes from six weeks behind the wheel.

  I’d had some human company in New Orleans. Marc, the guy I’d met less than a week before in Fort Lauderdale, had flown out to see me. To our credit, we both recognized that we were probably out of our minds. After only a brief encounter in a motorhome, we found ourselves walking together down Bourbon Street, feeding Casey beignets, and generally reveling in that delirious first stage of budding romantic relationships—infatuation.

  But we took comfort in the fact that we could speak soberly about our recklessness. We weren’t just two lovestruck idiots; we were two self-aware lovestruck idiots. We spent a lot of time in the Big Easy—and on the phone before and after our time there—psychoanalyzing our intense mutual attraction.

  When we weren’t navel gazing, we spoke about our families. At the time, Marc was mostly estranged from his. He’d never been close to his father. He had been close to his mother, but when he told her, in college, that he was gay, she insisted that he was accepting the devil and announced that he was no different from the criminals who hung next to Christ on the cross. Marc stopped going home for holidays after that.

  I told Marc about my father, who had come a long way since learning I was gay during a summer break in college. “I guess this is what I get for raising you in San Francisco,” he’d said, teary-eyed, when I broke the news. Though my dad isn’t a religious man, he’d struggled at first with the usual suspects: Was I destined for a difficult life? Would I contract HIV? (When I came out to him in 1995, an HIV diagnosis was still considered a death sentence in America.)

  It was fascinating—and heartening—to watch my father’s transformation over the next decade. At first, he struggled to say the word “boyfriend.” Whoever I happened to be dating was my “friend”—as in, “How’s your friend doing?” “What’s your friend up to these days?” Gradually, his perspective and vocabulary changed. Today, he’s the model father of a gay son and encourages me to bring whomever I’m dating home for the holidays. I wondered if Marc might eventually be a candidate.

  Privately, though, I worried about whether a whirlwind romance might distract me from the task at hand: traveling around the country with my dog. I’d designed the journey to strip away all non-dog-related distractions, and now here I was with a schoolboy crush. I’d also promised myself that I wouldn’t run away from feelings of loneliness that I knew would surface during four months on the road.

  I had planned to “lean into” any uncomfortable emotions, as Buddhist nun Pema Chodron suggests in her books, including Comfortable with Uncertainty and The Wisdom of No Escape. I’d brought along a handful of her texts, just in case I needed the reminder. Loneliness, she assures her readers, is not the enemy. Like any unpleasant feeling, it can instead be “the perfect teacher.” That is, if we let ourselves feel it instead of doing what we usually do—diving headfirst into distraction.

  But dive I did. I called Marc every day from the road. In between calls, I’d text him pictures of Casey and other dogs I’d met; he’d send me back adorable photographs of himself studying or getting out of the shower. There’s nothing like pictures of a person you’re newly enamored with to get you through long stretches of Louisiana and Texas.

  After saying good-bye to Marc in New Orleans (and agreeing that we would see each other again a few weeks later in San Francisco), I’d spent a week putzing around Texas. I loved my three days in Austin, a beautiful and quirky city that in 2000 adopted the slogan, “Keep Austin Weird.” Casey swam near Barton Springs, and we settled in for a few days at the city’s Pecan Grove RV Park, where a black and white Pit Bull hung out under a sign that read, “Life is too short to live in Dallas.”

  JUST WHEN I began to wonder if Casey and I might be the only living things on Route 90 on the way to Marfa, we came upon a temporary interior Border Control checkpoint manned by three uniformed officers and a beautiful German Shepherd. They stood in the shade under a small canopy.

  “Where you headed?” asked the youngest of the three, who looked li
ke a truant, as if he’d skipped high school that morning to play border agent with his buddies. Perhaps to compensate for his baby face, he puffed out his chest and tried his best to seem imposing. As he spoke, the German Shepherd gracefully lifted himself on his hind legs and rested his big front paws on the still of my open window. Before I knew what was happening, the dog’s wet nose was practically in my lap.

  “On my way to Marfa,” I told the officer, trying not to sound like the kind of person who might be smuggling drugs, explosives, or a family of illegal immigrants.

  I had an urge to pet the animal but thought better of it. “I suppose I’m not supposed to touch the dog?” I asked.

  “Correct,” the officer said.

  Had Casey been awake, he likely would not have reacted well to this strange dog’s head protruding through our window. Luckily, he slept through the whole thing. When the German Shepherd was done sniffing, the dog gently pushed back from the sill and returned to ground level.

  “You’re all set,” the officer said, waving me along with an uninterested flick of his wrist.

  After driving through the juniper shrubs and desert canyonland of Paisano Pass, a gap at five thousand feet above sea level, Casey and I rolled into Marfa under a passing rain shower. We’d encountered little rainfall to that point on our journey. The worst storm had come a few days before in Houston, where I parked the Chalet in an RV park next to the husband and wife team of Amy and Rod Burkert, who live full-time in a Winnebago with their two dogs and run a website—gopetfriendly.com—for people who travel with their pets. That day, a severe weather advisory urged people to take shelter inside “sturdy structures.” I didn’t know if a motorhome counted as “sturdy,” but I held Casey close as heavy winds shook the RV and lightning bolts lit up the night sky. I even mouthed a panicked prayer: Please, God, don’t let us die in a mobile home in Houston.