Travels with Casey Read online

  “Maybe Casey won’t hate this trip after all,” I told Amy later that night at a Chinese restaurant, having already confessed to her my trip-related insecurities. Amy insisted on picking up the tab (when you’re driving around the country in a motorhome, everyone wants to feed you), and after dinner we returned to her house to find Casey resting on her couch. I hugged Amy and Wanita good-bye, lured Casey to his feet with more magic words (“Wanna go outside!”), and drove the RV to my friend Jay’s place in Waltham, a suburb of Boston.

  Jay had agreed to let me park the motorhome in a lot next to his building, which isn’t far from the studio where Aerosmith recorded in the late 1970s. After showering in his apartment (I’d been warned not to put any water in the Chalet until I arrived in Florida—something about freezing pipes), I returned to the RV to find Casey curled up on the bed next to the football-shaped teddy bear I’d purchased on a whim a few weeks earlier.

  I was exhausted and eager to join Casey. I’m one of the roughly half of all American dog owners who allow their dog on the bed, though sometimes I have to work to get him there. Casey isn’t one for long cuddle sessions, but he’ll humor me for a few minutes before either moving to the other side of the bed or leaving it entirely. Casey may have been better matched with a married man over forty-five, the demographic group least likely to want to share their bed with a dog.

  Just as I was about to fall asleep, I received a phone call from an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in nearly a year.

  “Anything new?” he wanted to know, eager to catch up.

  “As a matter of fact . . .” I said, explaining that I was on the first day of an epic cross-country journey with my dog.

  “Oh, like Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley?” he wondered.

  I was getting used to that response. “Yes,” I replied. “Except, about dogs.”

  There was another important difference, though I hesitated to bring it up. Compelling evidence suggests that Travels with Charley isn’t entirely—or even mostly—nonfiction. In 2010, journalist Bill Steigerwald retraced the author’s ten-thousand-mile journey and concluded in a Reason magazine article (titled, “Sorry, Charley”) that “the iconic American road book was not only heavily fictionalized; it was something of a fraud.”

  Though Steinbeck claimed to have roughed it in a camper he named Rocinante (after Don Quixote’s horse), Steigerwald discovered that the author had mostly stayed with friends or in fancy hotels. Many of the people Steinbeck claimed to have met on the road seemed to be invented, and the author didn’t visit many of the places he’d claimed to.

  Steigerwald doesn’t believe that Steinbeck intended to fictionalize his book. “He was desperate,” Steigerwalk wrote. “He had a book to make up about a failed road trip, and he had taken virtually no notes . . . As he struggled to write Charley, his journalistic failures forced him to be a novelist again.” (Steinbeck’s son, John Jr., was less generous. “He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit,” he told Charles McGrath of The New York Times.)

  Does that make Travels with Charley, which enjoyed a year-long run on The New York Times bestseller list and is still deeply revered, a bad book? Certainly not. Even those who think it was mostly fiction find themselves charmed by it.

  “In many ways it is still a wonderful, quirky, and entertaining book,” Steigerwald concluded in Reason. (He went on to write a book about his discovery called Dogging Steinbeck.)

  Bill Barich, who wrote Long Way Home: On the Trail of Steinbeck’s America, believes Steinbeck “made up most of the book” but still admires the author’s cultural analysis. “I still take seriously a lot of what he said about the country,” Barich told McGrath. “His perceptions were right on the money about the death of localism, the growing homogeneity of America, the trashing of the environment. He was prescient about all that.”

  I found much to like about the book, too. Steinbeck’s descriptions of Charley, in particular, are delicious. “Charley is a born diplomat,” Steinbeck wrote in his introduction. “He prefers negotiating to fighting, and properly so, since he is very bad at fighting. Only once in his ten years has he been in trouble—when he met a dog who refused to negotiate. Charley lost a piece of his right ear that time.”

  A prolific anthropomorphizer, Steinbeck noted that Charley “would rather travel about than anything he can imagine.” I was envious of Steinbeck’s seeming certainty. How nice it must be, I thought, to know that your dog could dream up no better way to spend a few months.

  I couldn’t relate to that, but I took to heart Steinbeck’s travel planning advice. A meaningful adventure, Steinbeck believed, rarely sticks to the plan.

  “A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike,” he wrote. “And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”

  I was eager to be taken.

  THE NEXT morning, I awoke to a man shouting profanities at his dog.

  “Dammit, Jasper, stop eating the garbage!”

  I opened the drape next to my bed to find an old man in a New England Patriots sweatshirt shooing his dog away from a discarded pizza box. I felt for the guy—Casey can sniff out a rogue slice of leftover pizza from blocks away. He’ll also sometimes help himself to a steaming hot pie right out of the box.

  In an especially brazen maneuver, he once snatched a slice of pepperoni from a teenage couple devouring a large pizza in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. I’d apologized profusely and offered to buy them another pie, but instead they gave Casey a second piece.

  “Dude, I totally get it—we have the munchies, too,” the boy said, before offering me a joint.

  Though the forecast for my journey’s second day called for a possible storm, the morning skies looked unthreatening. I took Casey for a walk, scarfed down a bowl of cornflakes, and turned on the RV’s engine. Casey made a sad face, but I was determined not to let his attitude get me down. I was excited to be heading to beautiful western Massachusetts, where Casey was going to pose for Amanda Jones, one of the country’s leading studio pet photographers.

  I’ve been obsessed with photographs of dogs since coming upon the work of Elliott Erwitt when I was a teenager. The author of four books of dog photography (including Son of Bitch), Erwitt captures dogs in playful, ironic, often humanlike poses. He’s perhaps best known for his 1974 image “Felix, Gladys, and Rover,” which shows a woman’s booted legs between a Great Dane’s and a Chihuahua. But my favorite Erwitt photograph (titled Dog Show) depicts a white Standard Poodle on its hind legs leaning against a low railing at a dog show in England, checking out the action.

  I later discovered the work of William Wegman, probably America’s most famous pet photographer. He’s best known for his pictures of Weimaraners and frequently portrayed his most famous canine subjects—Man Ray and Fay Ray—as humans. In 1982, The Village Voice named Man Ray “Man of the Year.”

  Wegman’s success aside, The New York Times noted in 1990 that pet photography “ranks just above baby photography among least-favored photographic specialties.” Part of the problem, as the Times had pointed out a century earlier, is that “it is a difficult matter to get . . . dogs in a picturesque position.”

  But that’s also part of the fun. And as Americans have turned to the Internet and social media to chronicle (some might say advertise) their lives through pictures, dogs and cats have taken a starring role. Facebook and Instagram have turned average dogs into worldwide celebrities. Countless people have created Facebook and Twitter accounts for their dogs. Boo, a Pomeranian from California, has more than eight million fans on his Facebook page, which mostly features cell phone pictures taken by his owner. (Dogs are probably the least likely Facebook “members” to get defriended.)

  As amateur pet photography has exploded in popularity, so, too, has professional pet portraiture. Search for “pet photographer” today in any major American city, and you’re likely to be overwhelmed with options. Some will
photograph your pet in a studio. Others will come to your home, and still others specialize in capturing your dog outdoors. But few are as respected as the woman I was driving to meet.

  On my way to Amanda’s studio in North Adams, I drove along the historic Mohawk Trail. In the summer and fall, this scenic former Native American migratory game path is packed with visitors, many of them traveling by motorhome. On this cold and clear Saturday in February, though, I saw only a handful of cars as I rolled through the 6,400-acre Mohawk Trail State Forest, home to deep gorges and five-hundred-year-old eastern hemlock trees. The tallest tree in New England—a 171-foot eastern white pine—is also here, though its exact location is a secret.

  It had snowed recently, and there were patches of white along the windy, two-lane road. As I approached North Adams, the trail dropped some seven hundred feet in two miles, necessitating an intimidating hairpin turn. If your brakes give out here, or if you’re distracted by the stunning views of the northern Berkshires, you might drive straight into the Golden Eagle, a restaurant that sits close to the road.

  As I carefully navigated the turn, I saw two black Labs standing side by side in the Golden Eagle parking lot. They were waiting for their owner, a pint-sized woman with dyed red hair, smoking a cigarette as she gazed down the Hoosac Range.

  Her dogs reminded me of an improbable Mohawk Trail canine survival story. In 2009, an Ohio couple, Kathy and John Dunbar, were traveling to meet a family member in Maine when they stopped along one of the trail’s many turnouts to let their two dogs relieve themselves. But when Kathy and John got back in the car, each assumed that the other had grabbed the younger dog, a Maltese Poodle mix named Mindy. It wasn’t until forty-five minutes later that they realized their mistake. They sped back and searched the area for hours, but Mindy—whom they’d nicknamed the “ghost” for her ability to surreptitiously enter or exit a room—was gone.

  Three months later, a father and his son were hiking nearby along the Connecticut River when they spotted a small, emaciated dog stumbling in circles, blinded by a mat of fur that had grown over her eyes. It was Mindy. She had lost half her body weight, but she’d somehow survived in woods populated by coyotes and bears. The dog was safely returned to Ohio, where she’s living as a Maltese probably should—indoors.

  NESTLED NEAR the Vermont and New York borders, North Adams is a charming, rough-edged little city in the middle of a mountain range. Once a thriving mill town, it has tried to reinvent itself in recent years as a center of art and culture. It’s now home to the country’s largest contemporary art museum, as well as hundreds of working artists’ lofts.

  Casey took an immediate liking to Amanda Jones’s airy, 1,800-square-foot studio, located on the second floor of a brick building on the museum’s campus. The hardwood floor was littered with tennis balls, chew toys, dog beds, and water bowls, and within minutes of our arrival Amanda was feeding Casey Pup-Peroni beef-flavored dog treats.

  My dog will gladly work for food, and he practically galloped over to the white seamless background paper where Amanda—a tall, attractive, friendly blonde in her forties—needed him to stand. Though some dogs dislike bright photography lights, Casey barely seemed to notice them. Instead, he kept his eager brown eyes on Amanda, who gripped treats in her right hand while she knelt on a black pad, cradling her digital camera against her chest with an underhand grip.

  To get Casey to turn his head to a profile position, she would swivel her right arm to the left or right, or pretend to throw a treat toward a brick wall adorned with dozens of Amanda’s cover photographs for The Bark magazine. Casey—tail wagging, smile on his face—proved to be a model model.

  “He’s a total ham!” Amanda’s assistant said.

  “Oh my God, he’s so easy to work with!” Amanda gushed.

  I smiled. “I bet you say that to all the dogs.”

  Amanda laughed. “Actually, some dogs really get spooked,” she said. “They’ll get scared by the light, or the sound of the camera. When a dog’s afraid, then he doesn’t want to eat, and that’s a big problem because that’s how I move them onto the set. If a dog isn’t food-focused, this isn’t easy.”

  During a break a few minutes later, Amanda explained that there were only a handful of people known nationally for pet portraiture when she began photographing dogs in 1994. “One of my goals was to up the quality of animal photography, because a lot of it was pretty cheesy,” she told me. “Puppies in baskets, that kind of thing. I would never, ever, put a hat on a dog! I’m pretty adamant that dogs are dogs—they aren’t humans. They’re beautiful and striking enough without humanlike accessories.”

  Amanda walked me over to a computer and showed me the photos she’d taken of Casey to that point. Casey looked great, to be sure, but Amanda had also managed to capture the many elements of his personality—the playfulness, the eagerness to please, the laser focus on what might be happening next, and even the apparent sadness and frustration that I’d spent years interpreting as an indictment against me.

  What did it mean that Casey occasionally appeared dejected in Amanda’s studio, a place oozing with love, chew toys, and food? Was Casey actually sad? If he seemed happy in ten pictures and sad in one, did the one matter? And what might he be sad about? Was he disappointed that Amanda hadn’t given him a treat in thirty seconds, or was his wound deeper, more significant?

  There was also the possibility that I was misinterpreting Casey’s facial expressions and body language. Dogs make about one hundred different facial expressions, including ear movements. Children are especially prone to misjudging them; in one study, nearly 70 percent of four-year-olds interpreted an aggressive dog as smiling and happy.

  But adults don’t always get it right, either. A dog’s yawn, for example, is often perceived by humans to mean a dog is tired, or bored. But more often, a dog yawns to calm itself in a stressful situation—when a kid jumps on him or when someone approaches in an aggressive way. It means the dog’s uncomfortable, or would rather be left alone.

  (Sometimes, though, dogs yawn for the same reason humans yawn—because yawns are contagious. In humans, contagious yawning is seen as a sign of empathy. Researchers disagree on whether contagious yawning is a sign of empathy in dogs.)

  In The Other End of the Leash, Patricia McConnell writes that humans and dogs are “each speaking our own native ‘language,’ and a lot gets lost in translation.” She notes that we often assume dogs like the same things we do. Take the hug, for instance.

  “The tendency to want to hug something that we love or care for is overwhelmingly strong,” she writes. But most dogs aren’t huggers. “Your own dog may benevolently put up with it, but I’ve seen hundreds of dogs who growled or bit when someone hugged them. . . . Humans and dogs often miscommunicate, and the consequences range from mildly irritating to life-threatening.”

  I was amazed at how people misjudged Casey’s facial expressions in photographs. When I posted pictures on Facebook of Casey in the RV (a place he didn’t like), someone would invariably write, “Look at him, so happy to be traveling. Not a care in the world!”

  We tend to see what we want to see in pictures, whether the subject is a dog or a human. A friend of mine once looked at a photograph of me smiling with some classmates in high school. “Oh, look at how happy you are there,” she said. But she couldn’t have been more wrong. “Look at it again,” I told her. “That’s a fake smile.”

  Dogs presumably don’t put on fake smiles, but they do send out hundreds of subtle signals that we often miss. Amanda has become an expert over the years at judging a dog’s mood, and she’ll stop a studio session if she senses that a dog is anxious or uncomfortable.

  “Sometimes it’s a tough situation, because the dog’s owner is pushing you to keep shooting, but the dog clearly isn’t having fun,” she told me. “And if the dog isn’t having fun, then I don’t want to be doing this.”

  I couldn’t imagine a dog not having fun with Amanda. But two months later, when Casey a
nd I would see her again in San Francisco, we would all be faced with just such a scenario: a dog of mine, inexplicably camera shy.

  THOUGH I would have liked to spend the rest of the weekend poking around western Massachusetts, I needed to get to New York City for the Westminster Dog Show.

  Normally the drive is a straight shot down the Taconic State Parkway, but as is the case with many pretty roads in the Northeast, RVs are prohibited.

  As I was planning an alternate course, I remembered that I had lunch plans in Westport, Connecticut, with a man who’d spent the previous six weeks looking for his lost dog. It’s easy to forget about Connecticut—writer Rick Moody once dismissed it as a place you speed through “on the way to somewhere else, somewhere better.”

  For Moody, the state’s saving grace is the Merritt Parkway, which he calls “the finest roadway in the land.” The Merritt is thirty-seven miles long and is renowned for its beautiful forestry, creatively designed overpasses, and quaint signage. But I wasn’t allowed to drive on it, either. In the end I grudgingly took Interstate 91, the state’s busy north–south corridor that runs through Hartford, the state capital. Though it wasn’t much to look at from the interstate, Hartford was a favorite of Mark Twain, who wrote, “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see, this is the chief.”

  I thought about stopping twenty miles south in the town of Meriden, but I was running late and am afraid of ghosts. According to legend, Meriden’s Hanging Hills are home to a Black Dog that haunts this stretch of trap rock ridges casting their jagged shadows across south-central Connecticut.

  Locals attribute at least six deaths to an encounter with the phantom pooch, the most recent being on Thanksgiving Day 1972. As the legend goes, If a man shall meet the Black Dog once, it shall be for joy; and if twice, it shall be for sorrow; and the third time, he shall die.