Travels with Casey Read online

  The most convincing account of an encounter with the Black Dog came from nineteenth-century geologist W. H. C. Pynchon. In 1891, he undertook an expedition to West Peak for the purposes of collecting samples of hardened lava. As Pynchon worked, he became aware of the presence of a medium-sized black dog. With its wagging tail and “sad, spaniel-like eyes,” Pynchon’s new friend was “happy-go-lucky” and even playful, Pynchon later recounted in an article for Connecticut Quarterly. For the rest of that day, the dog remained his loyal and amicable companion. That is, until dusk, when it slowly made his way to the trees and “quietly vanished into the woods.”

  If a man shall meet the Black Dog once . . .

  Pynchon encountered the dog again several years later, while he was traveling with a fellow geologist named Herbert Marshall. As the pair rested one evening, their conversation turned to the dog legend. Marshall told Pynchon that he’d seen the dog twice himself, but that he “did not believe in omens unless their were lucky ones.” The next day, as they made their way through a deep ravine, the words of the twenty-third Psalm came to Pynchon’s head: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the Shadow of Death . . .” As the two continued to climb, they came upon the Black Dog standing on rocks above them. Marshall turned white.

  “I did not believe it before,” he quietly said to Pynchon. “I believe it now.”

  Just then, according to Pynchon, “the fragment of rock on which [Marshall] stood slipped. There was a cry, a rattle of other fragments falling—and I stood alone.” Marshall’s lifeless body was recovered later by rescuers at the bottom of the ravine. They described the scene as empty, save for the presence of a black dog that seemed to be watching over the dead body and fled as they approached.

  I KEPT on trucking down I-91 and pulled over for gas near New Haven, home to Yale University.

  The school had been in the news recently for its decision to rent out a hypoallergenic Border Terrier mix named Monty to stressed-out law students. Yale professor Blair Kauffman told the Yale Daily News that Monty was “extremely well qualified” and had graduated “summa cum laude” from his therapy dog course. Yale officials had at first worried that the rent-a-dog program would make the school seem “foolish,” but it turned out to be a huge hit. Several students said the dog reminded them of home, and there was a long waiting list for the chance to spend thirty minutes playing with Monty.

  As popular as he was, there was little chance Monty could dethrone Yale’s top dog—its beloved bulldog mascot, Handsome Dan XVII. Dogs are the most common live animal mascot, probably because they’re the only species that we regularly divide into personality types, allowing us a plethora of anthropomorphic possibilities. Dogs are also cheap. By contrast Louisiana State University boosters spent $4 million on the fifteen-thousand-square-foot habitat for their prized tiger, Mike, causing some to wonder if the cash might have been better spent on, say, scholarships for needy students.

  I’d met Handsome Dan (nicknamed Sherman) the previous year, when he was the “guest speaker” at Yale’s Trumbull residential college. His human, an investment manager and Yale graduate named Chris Getman, had offered to let me tag along.

  My most vivid memory of that day was the sight of Sherman—a brown and white bulldog with a large, droopy mouth—defecating on a cement walkway outside Trumbull, a picturesque granite building with gothic arches, Jacobean chimneys, and, ironically enough, a “Potty Court” featuring a statue of a man sitting on a toilet. (It’s a whimsical rendition of Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker.)

  The walkway wasn’t the most discreet place to go to the bathroom, and when Sherman chose it I wondered if he was punishing us for taking him outside in the rain. Sherman hates water, and he’d endured a full five minutes of it on our walk from the car to Trumbull. But Getman assured me that his dog wasn’t smart enough, or “catlike” enough, to orchestrate such retaliation.

  “He’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer,” Chris told me, though that can safely be said of most Bulldogs, who rank seventy-seventh out of seventy-nine in dog intelligence, according to psychologist and dog intelligence expert Stanley Coren. Only the Basenji and the Afghan Hound are dumber.

  As Chris fumbled through his coat pocket for a plastic bag, his wife looked at the bright side. “At least he didn’t do it inside,” she said.

  Among the breed’s many health problems, Bulldogs have hypersensitive stomachs and are the most relentless farters in the canine world. But gassy mascots also have their upside. Handsome Dan XIII, who served from 1984 until 1995, famously pooped on the commandant’s lawn at Army and threw up after chasing the Princeton Tiger. Both incidents were promptly anthropomorphized as proof that the dog knew the enemy when he saw it.

  Sherman was in his third season as Yale’s mascot when I visited, and he had taken to his job “with great enthusiasm,” Chris told me. He loved people, loved crowds. Inside Trumbull House, Yale students practically hurled themselves at the dog, who eagerly licked their faces in return. When it was time to get started, Chris sat on a red antique chair next to a black grand piano and regaled the students with the history of Handsome Dan, believed to be the country’s first live mascot. Sherman relaxed on the carpet next to him, occasionally poking his head into a plastic bag of treats.

  Four of the last five Handsome Dans have belonged to Chris, a longtime dog lover who illegally kept a sheepdog in his dorm room during his senior year at Yale. Proud of his school’s mascot tradition, Chris enjoys poking fun at his rival for mascot supremacy—Georgia’s Bulldog mascot, Uga (pronounced UGH-uh).

  “As you probably know,” he told the Yale students, “Georgia has a mascot named Uga.” (Whenever Chris says the word “Uga,” it sounds as if he’s been punched in the stomach.) “Uga is pretty high-maintenance. He flies first class to all the away games. He lives in an air-conditioned doghouse. I don’t think he’s ever been touched by an undergraduate. He certainly hasn’t been walked by an undergraduate! Handsome Dan is a very different kind of mascot. He’s a mascot for the people.”

  I ARRIVED on time for my lunch appointment in Westport, a town of 26,000 in the southwest corner of the state. I’d come to meet Michael Ghiggeri, who had spent weeks looking for his lost Pembroke Welsh Corgi, an eleven-year-old named Andy.

  Spooked by New Year’s Eve fireworks, Andy had bolted while Mike and his wife, Jordina, visited friends in Westport with their three other dogs. The Ghiggeris initially assumed Andy hadn’t gone far.

  “He’s kind of a lazy Corgi,” Mike told me over lunch at Whole Foods. “He doesn’t like to run very much. And he’s pretty stubborn, so it wasn’t that unusual when he didn’t come right when we called him. We put out some treats and figured he would be there in the morning.”

  He wasn’t.

  In the weeks since Andy’s disappearance, the Ghiggeris had become local celebrities of sorts for the relentlessness with which they searched for their lost pet. They’d plastered the town with posters, started a Facebook page, appeared on the local news, put out Amber Alerts, and generally acted in ways one would expect when searching for a missing child.

  Mike looked exhausted on the day of my visit. He and Jordina had barely been home to Massachusetts, where they lived. And if searching for Andy wasn’t stressful enough, a week before my arrival they’d had to put down their nine-year-old German Shepherd.

  “She was blind and literally couldn’t stand,” Mike told me later as we drove around Westport in his truck, with Casey riding in the backseat. It was a gloomy, overcast day, and I could see Andy Missing signs on just about every telephone pole we passed.

  Mike took us to see two of the traps they’d placed around town, both near where there had been recent Andy sightings. (The traps were filled with tasty food, including roasted chicken.) They would get sightings every few days, Mike told me, including a few miles away in Norwalk, where several people swore they saw Andy running through a residential area.

  When Mike posted about the Norwalk sightings on the �
��Bring Andy Home” Facebook page, thirty volunteers descended on the area. “One lady we’d never met printed out two thousand flyers for us, half of them in Spanish because there are many Spanish speakers in Norwalk,” he said. “People call us, crying, asking how they can help. One woman spends five hours each day looking for Andy. All for a dog they’ve never met.”

  The Ghiggeris did end up catching a dog in one of their Norwalk traps, but it wasn’t Andy. It was a Sheltie mix named Lana, who’d been missing for two years. Mike thinks all the Norwalk sightings were probably of Lana.

  “We’ve had some sightings in Westport that I believe were Andy, but the eyes see what they want to see,” he told me. “And people are well-meaning, but now they’re so personally invested in the search. I’m embarrassed, because a lot of people have seen people walking their Corgi around town, and people come up to them and say, ‘Hey, is that your Corgi?’ ”

  As we drove around Westport, I couldn’t help looking down every side street, and in every backyard. When I caught a glimpse of medium-sized tan dog, I practically screamed for Mike to stop the truck. But upon closer inspection, the dog turned out to be a small, Shepherd-looking mutt.

  “You get to the point where you think you see Andy everywhere,” he said.

  Mike estimated that he and Jordina had spent thousands of dollars so far looking for their dog. And the tab would have been higher, but many of the more expensive search items (including a dozen motion-activated night-vision cameras) were donated. The cameras—which the Ghiggeris placed near the traps, and near sightings—had sounded like a good idea, but they’d proven more tantalizing than useful. They ran on a two-second delay, meaning the Ghiggeris saw a lot of hind legs.

  “We call it the ass shot,” he said with a chuckle. “It could be a Corgi, or it could be a raccoon.”

  In one of the funnier moments captured by a camera, a raccoon and a skunk duked it out over a rotisserie chicken hanging from a string.

  AT ONE point during our time together in Westport, Mike left me alone in his truck for a few minutes with Casey.

  As I sat there, playing with Casey’s ears, I remembered the day I thought I’d lost him. Only a few months before embarking on my journey, I’d walked Casey to one of my favorite lunch places in Jamaica Plain and tied his leash to a placard on the sidewalk. When I checked on him two minutes later, he was gone.

  I have a fear of acting like a crazy person in public, so I probably seemed reasonably calm as I stopped passersby to ask if they’d seen a dog running loose. But, beneath the surface, my heart was hammering against my rib cage, desperate to be freed from my body. If a 2011 morning show segment was to be believed, the practice of dognapping was on the rise. Hadn’t they called it an epidemic? It all made terrifying sense: Casey was in the greedy, dirty hands of dognappers.

  I started sprinting up and down the street, screaming Casey’s name like a crazy person. How had no one seen anything? Why were they continuing on with their day as if nothing had happened? WHERE WAS MY DOG?

  As I braced myself for the tears I knew were coming, I saw a man and a woman walking toward me. And there, trotting along at their side, was Casey. I ran toward them, screaming thanks as I approached, but as I reached for my dog the man tugged slightly at the leash to keep Casey close.

  “You know, you really shouldn’t attach your dog to an unsecured sign,” he said, practically spitting the words at me. “It’s not safe. Not safe at all.”

  He went on to explain that a gust of wind had knocked over the placard, startling Casey and causing him to run down the sidewalk in a panic. The placard, which listed the restaurant’s specials, had rattled along behind him. The man and woman had followed Casey, and when he’d finally stopped running after two blocks, they’d untangled his leash from the placard, comforted him, and walked him back to the restaurant.

  “I can’t thank you enough,” I told them, prying the leash from the man’s fingers.

  As I sat in Mike’s truck with Casey, I wondered what I would have done had Casey been lost the day of the placard incident. Would I have gone to the lengths the Ghiggeris had? How many dog lovers would? Though Americans increasingly think of their dogs as family members (as “kids,” or “furbabies”), people who spend an inordinate amount of time and resources searching for a lost dog—or who spend months mourning a dead dog—are often viewed with suspicion. As much as we like to talk about dogs being family members, they’re still usually second-class family members.

  When I’d told several friends (two who have dogs, and two who don’t) about the Ghiggeris over dinner before embarking on my trip, three of the four expressed some degree of judgment toward the couple. They didn’t quite roll their eyes, but I could tell they wanted to. One friend mentioned Andy’s advanced age.

  “I suppose I could understand spending thousands of dollars and putting your life on hold for a month if the dog’s young and has his life ahead of him,” he said. “But for an eleven-year-old that’s probably near death anyway?”

  Even my friend who admired the Ghiggeris for their perseverance didn’t think he could match it. “I love my dog—I adore my dog,” he told us. “If he got away, I’d be devastated, and I’d look for him, call local shelters, put up signs. But I probably wouldn’t go on the news and put cameras around my neighborhood to find him. I don’t know. Does that make me a bad person?”

  When Mike returned to the truck, I asked him if he and Jordina had received any criticism for their extensive search. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s just a dog.’ But I don’t think they really understand what it’s like to truly love a dog. To me, it’s not any different than loving a kid.”

  The lost pet industry certainly understands. In the past ten years, there’s been an explosion of products and services designed to keep your dog from getting lost—and to find her if she does. There are collars with GPS tracking devices, professional tracking dogs trained to hunt down your lost pooch (the Ghiggeris used several), and perhaps the most obvious conflation of pets and children: AMBER Pet Alerts.

  Modeled after the highly successful alerts for missing kids, a handful of web-based companies promise to help you find Toto. (One is even called FindToto.com.) Some companies, including one the Ghiggeris used, send out thousands of telephone calls to homes in your neighborhood. Others rely on a nationwide network of animal lovers to search for a lost dog—and to spread the word of a missing dog—in their area.

  Thanks to their television appearances, Facebook page, and thousands of Missing Dog signs, the Ghiggeris had managed to build a remarkable network in their own right. “There’s no way we’ll find him without the help we’re getting,” Mike told me as he drove us back to the RV. “It’s been unbelievable. And I think the best way to thank everyone for everything is just by finding Andy.”

  The odds were in their favor. According to a 2012 study by the ASPCA, 93 percent of dogs reported missing are eventually found. I asked Mike how long he and Jordina would keep searching.

  “I honestly don’t know,” he said. He seemed to be considering the question for the first time. “We want to try everything we can to find Andy, but there’s the matter of our jobs, our lives. We need to be smart about this, to use our resources wisely.”

  As Casey and I climbed back into the motorhome to head toward New York City, where I would meet some of the craziest dog people of my journey, I did something I’d never done before: I said a prayer for a dog. Maybe, by the end of my trip, Andy would be safely home.

  2. In which dog-loving humans (okay, New Yorkers) behave badly

  THE CLOSEST RV park to Manhattan is a gravel parking lot in Jersey City.

  It’s called the Liberty Harbor RV Park, and what it lacks in park-like qualities it makes up for in “location, location, location,” as one reviewer put it on RVParkReviews.com, a site I would come to rely on. You can see the New York City skyline from your motorhome, and Midtown is a mere fifteen minutes away on the PATH train.

&
nbsp; I pulled into Liberty Harbor on a Sunday night. It was cold, I had a migraine, and Casey needed to pee. “There are plenty of spots—I could park anywhere,” I suggested to the young security guard who struggled momentarily to locate my reservation. But he was not easily persuaded, and I was relieved when he found my name on his list and escorted me to my spot near the bathrooms.

  This was my first night in an RV park, and I had no idea what to do. The Chalet had a number of compartments on the outside, one of which apparently housed the thick electrical cord that I needed to plug into the thirty-amp hookup. Or was it the fifty-amp hookup? Thankfully, the guard took pity on me. He knew exactly where my electrical cord was, and that I needed to plug it in the thirty-amp socket. The moment he did, the RV’s microwave flickered on.

  I took my migraine medicine, led Casey for a quick walk around the parking lot, and then called my friend Jason, who lived nearby in Newark. He had agreed to visit me in the motorhome and watch Casey the next two days while I attended Westminster. But he wasn’t answering his phone.

  I microwaved some Stouffer’s lasagna and plugged in my laptop to update my Facebook page. One can hardly take a trip these days without chronicling it on Facebook, and I’d created a special page for the occasion. I’d intended it for family and friends, but after several dog-related websites previewed my voyage, I suddenly had three thousand fans.

  They were a raucous, opinionated, dog-crazed bunch. The vast majority were women. Most had rescued their dog from a shelter or rescue group. Many had their dog (or dogs) as their Facebook profile picture. And virtually all adored Casey with a fervor normally reserved for rock stars or celebrity fitness instructors.

  “I LOVE you Casey!!!!!!” they would write on my wall, as if Casey spent his downtime as so many humans do—trolling social media for affirmation.

  Many of my fans (or, more precisely, many of Casey’s fans) had long fantasized about dropping everything and hitting the road with their dogs. “Livin’ the dream of so many,” one poster wrote, echoing what I would hear over and over again during my months on the road. Some of Casey’s fans had already lived the dream, and they emailed me daily with suggestions for my itinerary.