Travels with Casey Read online

  Casey’s shoulders dropped, and his eyes drifted toward the floor. He looked guilty as charged. Or was I anthropomorphizing? The question of whether dogs are capable of feeling guilt—or whether they’re reacting instead to a raised voice, or a split-second change in our body language—is one of many questions being debated by canine cognition researchers across the globe. Most believe that while dogs do understand when they’ve broken a rule, they lack the ability to feel remorse.

  But try telling that to a dog owner who comes home to find the garbage overturned and the dog slumped in a corner. The dog certainly looks guilty. A few days before my departure, I’d read about a Basset Hound who was suspected of eating a $4,500 diamond wedding ring.

  “She was the only one in our room, so we immediately looked at her—and she looked guilty,” Rachel Atkinson told a New Mexico television station. (Basset Hounds are prone to swallowing things they shouldn’t. In 2010, one in Colorado Springs helped herself to thirty-one nails and her rabies tag.)

  Though Atkinson was convinced that her dog “looked guilty,” a study by psychologist and animal cognition researcher Alexandra Horowitz casts doubt on our ability to effectively label what our dogs are thinking. Horowitz asked study participants to tell their dog not to eat a treat, and then to leave the room. A researcher would then either give the dog the treat or throw it away. Upon returning, owners were told (often incorrectly) that their dog had either resisted temptation—or defied them.

  Owners who thought their dog had disobeyed perceived the dog to look guilty, even if the dog wasn’t. In fact, innocent dogs who were nonetheless scolded were thought to look more guilty than dogs who’d actually eaten the treat.

  Whether Casey felt guilty or not, my sandwich was still inside his stomach. I dispatched a friend to get me a replacement while I finished getting ready. The plan was to make the 115-mile drive to Boston and take Casey for a walk in Franklin Park, where he’d been first socialized with other dogs as a puppy.

  Then I would drive to Cambridge and meet Amy Hempel, a dog-obsessed fiction writer who coedited (with Jim Shepard) the 1995 collection Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs. A delightful exercise in anthropomorphism (conceived of after many cocktails), the collection imagines what dogs might say if given the power of poetic license. One of my favorite poems is by Karen Shepard, who wrote about her dog, Birch, though she could have been writing about most dogs:

  You gonna eat that?

  You gonna eat that?

  You gonna eat that?

  I’ll eat that.

  I had no idea where Casey was going to position himself while I drove to Boston. My bed seemed a natural choice, but that was all the way in the back of the RV. In case that didn’t suit him, I’d placed his doggie bed under the table and between the padded benches.

  “These are both terrific options,” I said, petting him on the top of his bony head.

  By 1:30, I was ready to go. Casey jumped onto the bed, where I hoped he’d stay, and I positioned myself in the driver’s seat. I took a deep breath and remembered what an uncharacteristically helpful tollbooth operator had told me as I drove over the George Washington Bridge the previous day on my way to Provincetown from El Monte’s New Jersey office.

  “Go as slow as you need to go,” he suggested. “The assholes can go around you.”

  There had been two assholes during that first terrifying drive from New Jersey: a trucker cut me off and nearly sent me barreling into Long Island Sound, and a middle-aged woman gave me the finger when I misjudged the distance of her car in my passenger-side mirror. But I’d survived, and those seven hours alone in the RV had given me a strange kind of confidence.

  “I can do this,” I thought, starting the engine for Day 1 of our voyage.

  CASEY DID not like the loud, deep, guttural sound of the Chalet’s engine. “Really?” I said, as he sprang off the bed and came to stand next to me. “We’re not even moving yet.”

  I gave Casey some comforting pats, unbuckled my seat belt, and walked him back to the bed. I kept the engine running, in hopes that he merely needed to get used to it.

  “Up you go,” I said. He looked at me with his sad face. “The bed is really quite nice,” I insisted. He didn’t move. “Good thing I keep you thin,” I told him, lifting him into my arms and placing him on my bed. Then I said “Down,” a command that Casey understands to mean two different things: lie down, or jump down from whatever surface he happens to be on.

  Casey’s not dumb—he chose the latter interpretation and tried to leap off the bed. I was a step ahead of him, though, and blocked his path with my hip. “Just give the bed a try,” I pleaded. Then I said “Down” again, this time elongating the word—dooooooowwwwwwnnnnnnnn—and repeating it twice, as I sometimes have to do when he’s being stubborn. He finally lay down.

  “Good boy!” I said, more enthusiastically than usual.

  I walked back to the driver’s seat. “Now, stayyyyyyyyyyyyyyy,” I told him as I buckled my seat belt again. He’s normally quite good at staying. For one of our favorite outdoor games, I tell him to stay and then walk about a hundred feet away. He waits patiently until I scream “Okay!” and then sprints excitedly to me as if he hasn’t seen me in weeks.

  I put the gear shift in drive and tapped lightly on the accelerator, causing the RV to move several feet. Casey’s head cocked up, and his body stiffened. I pressed on the accelerator again and began driving slowly around the outdoor parking lot where I’d loaded up the RV. Casey jumped up and off the bed again and went to stand awkwardly by the side door. He wanted out.

  My heart sank. I’d read in several online RV forums that dogs can take time getting used to a moving motorhome, and I imagined the worst. What if Casey never got comfortable? What if this cross-country journey designed partly to help me bond with my dog became just another thing for me to beat myself up about? And how much would he have to hate life on the road before I called off the trip entirely?

  I stopped the RV, unbuckled my seat belt, knelt down next to Casey, and kissed him on his wet nose. “Buddy, it’s going to be okay,” I said. I think I was trying to convince the both of us. We stayed like that for a minute before I led him over to his doggie bed under the dinette. I figured a small space might make him feel more secure. “Dooooowwwwwwnnnnnnnnn,” I said again. He sighed in resignation.

  Casey didn’t like the doggie bed, either, so he spent most of the drive to Boston seated awkwardly in the small space between the driver and passenger seats. I took my mind off Casey’s predicament by making phone calls. One was to a friend, Peter, who happened to be going through his own dog-related drama.

  “My wife’s using our dog as a weapon against me!” he blurted out before I could tell him that I’d just embarked on my cross-country adventure, and that this conversation really needed to be about me.

  Technically, the woman Peter was referring to was his ex-wife. They’d only recently divorced, and Peter wasn’t sure if he’d stayed in the three-year marriage to honor his wedding vows or to avoid losing the dog. They’d married too quickly, Peter realized in retrospect, and a year into their relationship it had become clear to him that they had little in common except for the young Pit Bull/German Shepherd mix they’d adopted together.

  Though the dog had served as an effective distraction from their marital problems, it had also sparked both spoken and unspoken resentments. Peter couldn’t stand that the dog seemed to prefer his wife—and that it slept on her side of the bed. She complained that Peter was more affectionate with the dog than he was with her, a claim that Peter denied even though he knew it was true. (Had I known earlier about Dr. Gold’s When Pets Come Between Partners, I would have bought Peter a copy.)

  Peter couldn’t imagine life without his dog. “She knows he’s what I really care about, and she resents it,” he told me as I rolled past the town of Orleans on Cape Cod. “I’d be happy with joint custody, but I don’t know if she’ll ever be willing to share him.”

  And if Pet
er raised the custody issue in court, the odds would be stacked against him. Judges in animal disputes tend to rule in favor of women, just as they do in child custody disputes. Though pets are still technically considered property in the eyes of the law (“a dog is the legal equivalent of a sofa,” Stanley Coren writes in The Modern Dog), most judges now understand dogs and cats to be far more than that—a “child substitute,” as one judge put it.

  In deciding pet custody cases, many judges seek to identify which human the dog is most bonded to. “There’s definitely a trend in recent years where we see judges really looking out for the best interest of the pet,” Jennifer Edwards of the Animal Law Center in Denver told me. “They’re applying the same standards they would with a child.” (In one unusual custody dispute over a mixed-breed dog in St. Louis, the judge told the divorcing couple to stand on opposite sides of his courtroom and call for the dog. But the test failed miserably, as the confused animal shuffled over to the judge instead.)

  Peter wasn’t about to put his dog—or himself—through that, and he had no plans to take his ex-wife to court. “I just hope she’ll stop hating me long enough to realize that I deserve to see my dog,” he told me.

  “Just give her some time,” I replied. “She’ll let you see him.”

  “I hope you’re right,” he said, sounding more depressed than I’d ever heard him.

  IT WAS nearly dusk when Casey and I arrived in Boston. I carefully navigated rush-hour traffic and parked the Chalet on a mostly empty street a few blocks from the entrance to Franklin Park in Jamaica Plain, the neighborhood where I’d lived with Casey for most of his life. Casey seemed relieved to be stopped, and he wagged his tail expectantly when I said the magic words—Wanna go for a walk?

  Jamaica Plain (known to residents as JP) is a dog walker’s delight. Once dubbed the “Eden of America,” there’s green around virtually every corner. Portions of the Arnold Arboretum—the oldest public arboretum in the country—are so beautiful that you’d be a fool not to take a promising first date there. Nearby is Olmsted Park, part of Boston’s Emerald Necklace, which borders the sixty-eight-acre Jamaica Pond, the largest body of freshwater in the city. Though dogs technically aren’t allowed in the pond, it’s a rule that’s enforced about as often as the old Massachusetts law that forbids frightening a pigeon.

  But my favorite JP haunt is Franklin Park. At 527 acres, it’s Boston’s largest, with miles of wooded dirt paths that make you forget you’re in a city. Dogs aren’t technically allowed off-leash there, but the lack of a consistent ranger presence along the trails makes it a no-brainer for dog lovers intent on exercising their pets.

  Unlike fenced-in dog parks, Franklin Park is a multiuse space, meaning that dogs encounter a colorful cast of characters on the secluded paths. There are homeless people, Tai Chi enthusiasts, high school cross-country teams, bird watchers, and, though you rarely see them, practitioners of the Santeria religion. (Dogs occasionally lead their humans to a makeshift altar and the remnants of a sacrificed chicken.)

  The dog people tend to stick together, roaming the park in packs and forming the kind of vibrant and close-knit community that makes dog parks “a kind of victory over the anonymity and transience of life,” as writer Mary Battiata once put it.

  When I’d first arrived at Franklin Park when Casey was a puppy, I was taken aback to learn that the community didn’t just get together every morning and evening to walk their dogs—many of its regulars also hung out with each other outside the park. There were long-lasting friendships and longer-lasting feuds. There was a phone list. And there were self-anointed leaders who were deeply invested in everything from the minutiae of the park’s cleanup committees to whether your dog was getting enough exercise.

  The queen bee of Franklin Park’s dog lovers was a short, stout woman in her late fifties named Gerry. She ran a small pet-sitting operation out of her apartment but spent much of her days at the park walking dogs and lecturing humans.

  “Your dog’s a little overweight,” she announced not long after meeting me. “What are you feeding him?”

  I recited the name of a brand suggested to me by my vet. “Well, you certainly can feed him that if you want to kill him,” she barked. Gerry then proceeded to lecture me about the evils of mainstream dog food, insisting that I trek across town to a small pet supply store that carried the two or three obscure brands she deemed acceptable.

  Most of us worked hard to get on Gerry’s good side. Once she liked you and your dog (she usually liked your dog well before she liked you), she was downright sweet. There was also no denying that she knew what she was talking about when it came to canine temperament and health. Her dogs were models of civility and slenderness. Plus, they seemed to live forever. Her friendly mutt, Buddy, lived to be sixteen and walked with her in Franklin Park until the end.

  I was hoping to run into Gerry—or any of the other park regulars—but the trails were mostly deserted. Still, it was comforting to begin this journey with a familiar walk. Casey bounded ahead of me on the dirt path, and in the woods he stopped and waited for me in front of a tall, jagged rock. For as long as I can remember, I’ve placed a tennis ball on that rock each time we’ve walked past it.

  On my signal, Casey stood tall on his hind legs and stretched to gently grab the ball in his mouth. Then he ambled along, proud as could be.

  AFTER NEARLY an hour in Franklin Park, Casey and I climbed back into the motorhome and headed to Cambridge to pick up Amy Hempel, who teaches creative writing at Harvard. It’s fitting that Amy’s office is located in a building called the Barker Center. Amy’s fiction is overrun with animals, especially dogs.

  In her novella Tumble Home, the narrator is tortured by the memory of her mother giving away her dog as a child. In Amy’s short story collection The Dog of the Marriage, she writes about a woman who trains guide dogs for the blind, and about another who hires a pet psychic to help her find a lost dog. In “In the Animal Shelter,” a short piece in The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, Amy writes about women who are spurned by men—and who seek emotional revenge at animal shelters by doting over, but ultimately rejecting, homeless dogs and cats.

  “And I know where they go, these women, with their tired beauty that someone doesn’t want,” Amy writes. “They reach out to the animals, day after day smoothing fur inside a cage, saying, ‘How is Mama’s baby? Is Mama’s baby lonesome?’ . . . But there is seldom an adoption; it matters that the women have someone to leave.”

  At the time of my visit, Amy had recently completed another short story about life inside an animal shelter. “A Full-Service Shelter,” published in Tin House, is labeled fiction but is based on Amy’s heartbreaking experiences volunteering at a high-kill animal shelter (a “house of horrors,” Amy calls it). She writes about helpless, traumatized dogs; about the Sisyphean devotion of volunteers who take Death Row dogs—mostly Pit Bulls—on their last walks; about underpaid shelter employees who seem inexorably calloused by the often monstrous nature of their jobs; and about the shelter’s uncaring, incompetent leadership.

  As I sat with Amy on the carpeted floor in her home’s empty attic—a space that doubles as her doggie play area—she told me that she used to write short, poignant biographies of each shelter dog for rescue organization websites. Combined with a flattering picture, a well-crafted biography “can mean the difference between life and death for these dogs,” Amy said as Casey and her Lab, Wanita, wrestled around us.

  Maybe it was because Amy and I were in her dark, cavernous attic, as if about to begin a séance, but she looked like a beautiful witch. Her long gray hair glowed silver and gold against the shadowy attic walls.

  “I’m a writer, and I would put everything I could into those bios,” Amy continued. “But the trap for me was that I would say, ‘Hey, I’ve got three hours. I could use it to write three sentences of a short story that I’ll probably throw out, or I could save a good dog’s life or a few good dogs’ lives.’ When I thought about it that way, I r
ealized that I might never write fiction again.”

  Amy hasn’t stopped writing, but she devotes much of her energy these days to dogs. She’s a founding board member of the Deja Foundation, which offers assistance to rescue organizations working to remove dogs from shelter euthanasia lists.

  “Where writing used to be, advocating for shelter dogs and Pit Bulls is now,” she told me. “If I ask myself if I get more happiness from writing or from dogs, it’s not even close.”

  Amy used to be involved with Guiding Eyes for the Blind. Wanita, who is nine, has birthed four litters and thirty-three puppies, many of which work as guide dogs today. “Two even walked a blind couple down the aisle at their wedding!” Amy told me, sounding like a proud grandmother.

  As Amy gushed, Wanita stretched her neck forward to kiss her human. Amy puckered up and obliged, stroking Wanita’s face with her long, delicate fingers. “You did good! You made good guide dogs, Wan,” Amy said, tilting her head back with her eyes closed, seemingly overcome with delight.

  I had a sudden urge to pet Casey, but he was nowhere to be found. After nearly twenty minutes chasing Wanita around the attic, he’d apparently given himself a timeout. He reappeared a few minutes later, his white, fluffy tail wagging as he shuffled toward us.

  “What a beautiful dog,” Amy said, studying Casey’s long face.

  We spent most of the next few minutes in silence. There is arguably no better cure for stress than lounging around on a floor with some happy Labs, and I could feel my body relaxing for the first time all day. Amy and I had bonded almost instantly. It wasn’t, I suspected, because we’re both writers. We’d bonded over something more visceral: we’re both dog people.

  In Amy’s attic, it occurred to me that my journey would be filled with moments like these—quiet moments with fellow dog lovers who instinctively know that when you’re in the presence of dogs, there’s no need to strain to fill the silence. And though I worried that Casey might never come to love the RV, I realized that at each stop he would at least be greeted by humans and dogs wanting nothing more than to make his day.