Travels with Casey Read online

  As Chapman and his colleagues wrote in their 2011 study, many African Americans were psychologically conditioned to fear dogs when the animals were used as tools of racial hostility toward the black community. That conditioned fear is transmittable through families, he explained, and has contributed hugely to a community-wide fear of canines.

  But though it seems that African American history has fostered a fear of dogs among some blacks, cynophobia mostly affects people who are conditioned to fear dogs and are predisposed to anxiety. When coupled, Chapman explained, environmental conditioning and genetic predisposition are “powerful enough to make someone develop a significant or substantial clinical fear of anything.” And people who are that afraid—who have what Chapman calls “a legit phobia of dogs”—don’t discriminate between canines, regardless of how their fear is conditioned.

  “It may begin with a Rottweiler or a Pit Bull, or something that is stereotypically trained to be vicious,” Chapman told me. “But if you’re conditioned to think they’re dangerous, that fear gets generalized to, say, Shih Tzus and Chihuahuas.”

  Regardless of race, those seeking help for their canine phobia have several therapeutic options. The most effective is in vivo treatment, where a therapist walks a person through instructions of increasing difficulty with a heavily trained dog, from leading the animal on a leash to, in the case of a brave patient, putting a hand in the dog’s mouth. But as Margo proved when she and her husband came home with a puppy, you don’t always need a therapist to recover from cynophobia. Sometimes, you just need to hang around a friendly dog.

  When I’d visited Dr. Gold in Manhattan, he told me that one of his previous dogs, Amos, was helpful for patients who were afraid of dogs. One woman had been so frightened by the prospect of Amos lunging at her in his office that Dr. Gold promised a year of free therapy if the dog so much as approached her. She left treatment sometime later “kissing Amos on the head.”

  IN NORTHERN New Mexico, the mountains seemed to come from nowhere. They rose up along the edges of an otherwise flat, dry landscape, which was broken only by the huge, fauxdobe casino complexes north of Santa Fe. The mountains themselves weren’t very big, but they congregated around the horizon like a group of people huddled in conversation on the opposite side of a room.

  The contrast of mountains and flat land was more impressive in Colorado, where I was headed with Garrett (whom I’d picked up at the Albuquerque airport) one morning in early April to see cattle dogs in action. The peaks in the distance were taller than in New Mexico, but the road stayed flat and even through a desert that seemed to grow a little more green every mile, until it wasn’t a desert anymore. Eventually the slopes weren’t so distant, and the rocky cliffs pressed right up against the roadside barriers, which wrapped around the turns that started to kink the road along Highway 50.

  It was a beautiful, narrow road full of bends and curves, and around each new corner was a view of snowy peaks in the distance. The mountains that weren’t snow-capped were brown and purple, but they were so covered with aspen trees that you could almost be tricked into thinking they were giant green hills. Despite the summits that had bubbled up from the landscape along the way, the asphalt remained smooth and straight; now it just seemed closer to the sky.

  We were making our way to Gunnison, Colorado, a small city at the bottom of several valleys in the Rocky Mountains. Gunnison is ninety miles east of Ridgway, a town with an unforgettable unofficial welcome sign posted on the property of a disgruntled citizen: Welcome to Ridgway. What we lack in wineries, we make up for in whiners.

  We’d been invited to spend two days in Gunnison with Rob and Bruce, a young couple. Along with Bruce’s parents, they herd 1,200 head of cattle across 44,000 acres of rangeland each year with the help of their eight dogs, most of them Border Collies.

  Garrett and I joked that we were headed to a real-life version of Brokeback Mountain.

  I’d asked Garrett to join me because of his skill behind the camera; I wanted him to document visually a portion of my journey. (I’d been taking pictures and video along the way with my iPhone, but he was bringing a real camera.) I’d met Garrett a couple years earlier in New Hampshire, where he was studying visual media and where I was on a two-month stint at the MacDowell Colony, an artists’ retreat. When I told Garrett in passing that I was looking for someone to join me for a week and shoot video, he nominated himself.

  Garrett loves coffee, and on his first morning with me in the RV he was shocked to learn that I didn’t have a coffeemaker. He tried to play it cool, but I could tell he found me uncivilized. “Let’s just stop and buy one as soon as we can,” he said, annoyed and groggy-eyed.

  We pulled into Gunnison late on a Monday night and found our way to Rob and Bruce’s mid-century ranch house nestled amid cottonwoods and aspens and surrounded by hundreds of acres of hay meadow. As we gathered some belongings from the Chalet, Garrett confessed that he was nervous about spending two nights with guys neither of us had ever met. (Rob had read an article online about my journey and emailed an invitation to visit.)

  Rob and Bruce were waiting for us when we piled out of the RV, and the second Garrett saw them relief spread across his face. Our hosts looked friendly and harmless; it probably didn’t hurt that they also looked like J. Crew models. Both wore plaid shirts and stylish jeans, and they somehow managed—even when we’d see them the next day in mud-covered boots and gloves—always to look clean and put-together. Rob, the more outgoing of the pair, was tall and blond and looked younger than his thirty years. Bruce was twenty-seven, dark-haired, and more conventionally handsome. They were, Garrett and I imagined, the coolest cowboys in Colorado.

  Rob told us that he never imagined living and working on a ranch. He had gone to school for journalism and was living in Denver when he met Bruce, who had grown up in Gunnison but wasn’t sure he wanted to be a rancher like his parents. Bruce worried about being gay and alone “and having no life outside of ranch work.” But when Bruce decided he was ready to return to Gunnison and his parents’ ranch, Rob came with him.

  Garrett—who surprised me with his eagerness to ask questions, most of them thoughtful and perceptive—asked the couple if they could see themselves living on this ranch thirty years from now. Rob and Bruce looked at each other and smiled. Then Bruce grabbed Rob’s knee.

  “I really want to see Rob as a crotchety eighty-year-old trying to get on his horse,” he said.

  Our first night in Gunnison was a short one; after setting us up in guest bedrooms, our hosts went to bed early. It was calving season, which meant they hadn’t gotten much sleep lately. Like parents of a newborn, Bruce and Rob would alternate who had to get up at various points in the night to check on the cows.

  “Yesterday we had a calf try to come out butt first, so we had to get that sorted out,” Rob told us before bed.

  Though I slept in both mornings in Gunnison, Garrett was obsessed with the idea of capturing a calf birth on video and told Rob and Bruce to wake him up if there was any action. But Garrett never got there in time. “Those babies are like ninjas in the night,” he told me, shaking his head.

  On our second day on the ranch, Rob and Bruce wanted to show us their Border Collies in action. We’d already met the dogs; they would meander to where we were staying from Bruce’s parents’ house down the road. At Rob and Bruce’s, the dogs sometimes hung out in the mudroom.

  “These dogs work better when they don’t live inside, but sometimes I’ll sneak them in the kitchen,” Rob told me with a whisper, feigning guilt.

  “Why do they work better when they live outside?” I asked.

  “Well, working animals really shouldn’t be pampered,” he explained. “You care about them and love them, but they need to clearly know what their job is. If a pet gets humanized, that can confuse the dog about who is in charge and what’s expected of her.”

  I heard something similar from another rancher, Marcia Barinaga, who uses several Great Pyrenees to guard her she
ep in Northern California. Normally Marcia doesn’t socialize her guard dogs, but one, named Gordie, had consistent contact with humans as a puppy. “I may be reading too much into it,” Marcia told me, “but I almost feel like he’s having an existential crisis because he doesn’t really know if he’s supposed to be with the humans, or with the sheep. My other dogs know very clearly what their job is. They’re very much professionals. But Gordie isn’t so sure what he’s meant to be doing, and sometimes he doesn’t seem as content as the others.”

  The oldest of Rob and Bruce’s dogs, a twelve-year-old black and white Border Collie named Tippy, was allowed inside their home the most. “She’s worked so hard for so many years, she’s earned her stay in the kitchen,” Rob told Garrett and me. Bruce’s parents often let her inside their place, too, where she likes to hang out next to an old steam radiator. “She loves to be hot. Even in the summer if we’re driving in the truck, she’s like, ‘Roll up the windows, please!’ She also loves sleeping in that truck. She slept in there the other night because we forgot her.”

  “Phew,” I said. “I’m glad I’m not the only person who’s forgotten my dog somewhere.”

  “Where did you forget Casey?” Garrett wanted to know.

  I sheepishly confessed to having once left him in the yard at a friend’s barbecue. “I was halfway home before I realized my mistake,” I told them. “I called the party’s host, and all I could hear in the background was everyone laughing at me.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Rob said. “My mom once picked up the wrong dog from the groomer’s.”

  “Seriously?” Garrett said. “How does that happen?”

  “I guess she was having a really busy day, trying to juggle three kids and a dog and trying to get them everywhere they needed to be,” he told us. “She’d picked up our Miniature Schnauzer, Penny, from the groomer and came straight to our elementary school to get my little sister and me, as well as my friend who was coming over that day. When we got into the back of our minivan, the dog snapped at my friend. Penny didn’t normally do that, but my friend could be difficult, so my mom probably thought he had it coming. When we got home, the dog went straight into the living room and peed on the carpet. That’s when my mom took a good look at the dog and realized it wasn’t Penny. She’d brought home the wrong dog.”

  THOUGH ROB and Bruce said that Tippy was happiest herding cows, they’d had to limit her activity in her old age. “She’s got a bad shoulder,” Rob explained, “and she just gets really sore if she’s out herding too long. She’s also kind of fat, which is my fault.” He laughed. “I’m definitely the enabler, sneaking her treats. Bruce’s mom keeps hoping we’ll give her grandkids, and she knows I’ll be the pushover dad.”

  On a frosty morning, Rob and Bruce drove us about fifteen miles away to their upper ranch where their yearling steers were out to pasture. Tippy and another Border Collie, Fooler, were in the truck’s rear bed, and I could see Tippy’s expectant face in the driver-side rear window.

  “The dogs know they’re going to work,” Rob assured us.

  Dogs have been used for farm work since the Roman Empire, when sheep tending was introduced to the British Isles. Early collies—a name said to come from the Gaelic word for “useful”—exhibited the natural drive and skill to meet a variety of Celtic farmers’ needs, Christine Renna writes in her book, Herding Dogs. The dogs would herd flocks of sheep, scout strays, hound cattle across great distances, and drive whole herds to market.

  Farmers relied heavily on their working dogs, but it wasn’t until the 1890s that breeders began intervening in the previously unrestricted mating of these sheepdogs, hoping to select for a handful of desirable skills. (Though effective herders, the dogs were often unfriendly, untenable, and rough with the sheep.) The result is the modern Border Collie, a “canine workaholic” with an endless drive to chase, circle, and protect a flock. They have no patience for easy tasks or busywork—collies are extraordinarily bright, and they’ve been known to get neurotic without mental stimulation. Stanley Coren labeled the breed the smartest in his book The Intelligence of Dogs.

  At their upper ranch, Rob and Bruce showed us how the dogs push the cattle across seemingly endless acres of rangeland. Using the commands “by” to move the dogs to the left and “way” to move them to the right, Rob and Bruce directed the dogs—who moved with their heads low to the ground—to turn the herd or bring back cattle that had strayed too far. When Tippy ran to the left side of the herd, for example, the cattle would veer right in hopes of putting space between themselves and the dog.

  Out on the range, in these rugged mountains only ten miles from the Continental Divide, the dogs are particularly useful pushing cattle out from among the willows or trees, or retrieving cattle from high mountain benches during the fall gather.

  “It’s a whole lot easier to move cows with a dog,” Rob told me, “because they move a lot faster and can get to places you can’t. We would spend way more time trying to manage and move the cattle without our dogs.”

  But dogs offer ranchers and farmers more than just physical utility. Jon Katz, who has written several books about the animals on his Bedlam Farm, told me that dogs “provide farmers a sense of connection in a somewhat fragmented world. Farming is lonely and isolating, so it can be very important to have a dog.”

  Donald McCaig, a writer and sheepdog trainer who loves Border Collies, waxed poetic about his dogs in a piece for The Bark magazine, where he followed up a list of “practical” reasons for using sheepdogs with less tangible ones: “From the start, you’ll have glimpses; momentary communication so intense, your and your dog’s mind will be one mind.”

  I’D HEARD practically the same words from sled dog racer Lance Mackey, whom I visited in 2009 outside Fairbanks, Alaska, where he lived with his wife and teenage son in a house with no electricity and ten dogs. Mackey was talking about his longtime “lead dog,” a fifty-pound Alaskan Husky named Larry, who had helped Lance win three Iditarods, considered the most grueling sled dog race in the world (it spans more than a thousand miles from Anchorage to Nome).

  At the time of my visit Lance owned eighty-five sled dogs, all of whom lived in small individual doghouses behind his house, where they would pace and howl in excitement at feeding time. Lance’s sled dogs are very much working dogs, but the reverence he held for them was evident. Lance can be gruff and inconsiderate toward humans (he spent a good portion of my visit ignoring me), but he spoke admiringly about his dogs—especially Larry.

  “We breed and train hundreds of dogs trying to find another one like him,” Lance told me.

  He compared his racing dogs to a football team. They all compete for only sixteen “starting” spots on his sled team, he explained, and if the more experienced dogs aren’t careful, an eager younger one will bump him off the squad.

  More than physical gifts, Lance says that what makes a great lead dog is a lot like what makes a great quarterback. “They have leadership that you can’t coach,” he said. “They either have it, or they don’t. Larry has it.”

  Lance recalled one race in which Larry tried to lead the sled team in one direction, while Lance kept commanding the dog to take them in another. “As usual,” Mackey told me, “Larry was right. I had missed the trail, but Larry knew exactly where we were supposed to go. How does he always know? I have no idea. But he’s saved me from myself more times than I can remember.”

  7. In which Casey gets a little sister

  IT WAS dumb luck that I pulled the motorhome over for gas in Kaibeto (sometimes spelled “Kaibito”), an isolated community of 1,500 in Northern Arizona on the Navajo Nation Indian reservation. Had I not stopped the RV where I did, Casey and I would never have met the dog that would change the course of our journey.

  Garrett, Casey, and I had come that morning from the Four Corners Monument, where we ignored a “No Dogs Allowed” sign and stealthily photographed Casey lying on the quadripoint at the intersection of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona.
From there we’d headed west toward Page, a small city near the border of Arizona and Utah where we planned to have dinner. But about halfway there, I had a craving for a Milky Way. As we rolled through the desert on Route 98, I stopped at the first gas station I saw: a Spirit, in Kaibeto.

  The area around Kaibeto has been inhabited since at least 10,000 BC, marking the first traces of Anasazi culture in the Four Corners region. Some of the oldest archaeological evidence of the Anasazi comes from nearby Navajo Mountain. Kaibeto, which means “Spring in the Willows” in Navajo, was permanently settled in the 1840s and was formally recognized as its own Navajo Nation chapter in 1955. The Navajo Nation is the largest of the more than three hundred Indian reservations in the United States, covering some 27,000 square miles in three states (though it has a population of only 174,000).

  Navajos live in some of the bleakest conditions in North America. Nearly half live below the poverty line, and many are sick—from addiction, diabetes, obesity, and, in a larger sense, historical trauma. That struggle extends to the hundreds of thousands of dogs who shuffle along the reservation’s dirt roads, rest in the shade under its low-hanging trees, and beg for food at its gas stations and convenience stores.

  “Rez dogs,” as they’re called, can be said to belong to everyone and no one. Most don’t have a single owner; they’re “community dogs,” Kelsey Begaye, a former president of the Navajo Nation who lives in Kaibeto, told me.

  Tamara Martin, the founder of the Blackhat Humane Society in St. Johns, Arizona, just off the reservation, added that “Native Americans don’t have the luxury to care” about their epidemic of stray dogs. “There are so many other pressing issues, and there’s an attitude of indifference toward the dogs that’s born of helplessness,” she said. “It’s similar to all the garbage blowing around on the reservation. People would prefer it wasn’t there, but nobody can pick it all up.”