The Dog Went Over the Mountain Read online

  PETER ZHEUTLIN

  PEGASUS BOOKS

  NEW YORK LONDON

  In memory of my late mother Baila, a caring parent, voracious reader, and passionate advocate for education, social justice, and equality for all . . .

  . . . and for Albie, with whom every moment is precious.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Introduction

  PART ONE: FROM HERE . . .

  One: Outward Bound

  Two: Jersey Boys

  Three: Oh, Shenandoah

  Four: Gone to Carolina

  Five: Tennessee Waltz

  Six: Tupelo Honey

  PART TWO: TO THERE . . .

  Seven: Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?

  Eight: Every Dog Will Have His Day

  Nine: Texas Two-Step

  Ten: This Land Is Your Land

  Eleven: Get Your Kicks on Route 66

  Twelve: Grand Canyon Sweet

  Thirteen: California Dreamin’

  PART THREE: . . . AND BACK AGAIN

  Fourteen: North Up to Oregon

  Fifteen: Running on Empty

  Sixteen: Coming Home

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  In the course of our travels, Albie and I met and talked with a lot of people. Only a few visits and conversations were planned in advance. For example, we stayed in Sacramento with my old friend and colleague Bill Monning. Bill is a lawyer who worked for many years with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers of America and later California Rural Legal Assistance seeking justice for the hard-working immigrants and migrant workers who harvest our fruits and vegetables throughout California’s Central Valley. He’s now the majority leader of the California State Senate. In New Orleans, I arranged to sit down with 79-year-old JoAnn Clevenger, the legendary proprietor of Upperline, named best restaurant in the city by the New Orleans Times-Picayune in 2017. Clevenger’s remarkable life in the city has given her keen insight into what makes New Orleans, in my view, the country’s most unique city.

  During some of these conversations, with JoAnn, for example, I took contemporaneous notes. But since most of our conversations were the result of chance encounters we had with strangers, some brief and some that lasted hours, I relied on memory until I could write them down, to the best of my recollection, later that day or evening. Nothing kills a spontaneous conversation like asking someone if they can wait while you get a pad of paper and a pen or, even worse, turn on a voice recorder and stick it in their face. The presence of any recording device tends to inhibit open, unguarded dialogue. I have worked hard to be faithful to the substance of all the conversations recounted in this book and believe the rendering of them to be true and accurate, even if not all are reported verbatim.

  Albie and I were on a road trip. We never lingered long enough in any one place to immerse ourselves fully in the life of a community as, say, an anthropologist or sociologist would. What a traveler has to share are impressions, snapshots if you will, created from random encounters and chance events. Thus, the view offered here is kaleidoscopic and panoramic rather than microscopic. I don’t pretend to speak with authority on any of the communities we passed through. Doing that would require settling into a place, observing the rhythms of life over weeks or months, and getting to know many people well. The best the traveler can do is to be observant and aware of his or her own prejudices and preconceptions as impressions take form, impressions that are, ultimately, completely subjective. Some places impressed me favorably, some did not, and I’ll be the first to admit some of my impressions are based on limited evidence and may not be entirely fair. Maybe if we’d spent more time in Pampa, Texas, for example, I’d have loved it. But I doubt it. Albie is a less discerning traveler. He seemed to be pretty happy wherever we went, especially if there were squirrels.

  Introduction

  On a mild, rainy night in the spring of 2018, I patted the mattress of the bed in the dog-friendly inn where Albie and I were spending the night in Bennington, Vermont. Albie is the soulful yellow Lab and golden retriever mix our family had adopted six years before, when I was fifty-eight and he was, our vet surmised, about three. Albie hopped up on the bed and laid his head in the crook of my arm. As I had every night during our travels, I gently stroked his head, told him where we were, where we would be going tomorrow, and what a good guy he was. This night I told him we would, after nearly six weeks on the road, be going home. And I told him I loved him.

  He looked at me with his deep, dark brown eyes, rolled slightly on his side to rest his body against mine, and sighed. I knew he didn’t understand. I could have been reading him “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, or sections of the Internal Revenue Code, it didn’t really matter. He also didn’t know where we were or why. What mattered was the sound of my voice, that he was safe and sound, and that we were together.

  The safe and sound part is important. Albie had been picked up as a thin and frightened stray, a lost soul, on a country road in rural Louisiana in February of 2012, and impounded at a shelter where nearly nine of every ten dogs are “euthanized,” a bland euphemism for “killed in a gas chamber.” Against all odds, and thanks to a shelter volunteer who took a shine to him, Albie survived for five months until we found him online and vowed, without ever laying eyes on him, to set his world right.*

  That night in Bennington we had nearly 9,000 miles behind us and just a couple of hundred more to go. The next night, after a stop in southern Maine, we’d be sleeping in our own beds, reunited with my wife Judy, and our two other rescue dogs, also from Louisiana, Salina and Jambalaya (Jamba for short).

  During the nearly six weeks we’d been on the road, Albie and I had watched a full moon rise over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains in New Mexico, snow showers sweep across the Grand Canyon, and bison walking along the road in Yellowstone. We’d driven by massive stockyards in the Texas panhandle, through endless orange groves in California’s Central Valley, and alongside vast fields of onions in eastern Oregon. Travel around America and you’ll see where most of your food comes from.

  We’d stood on the spot where the great explorer Meriwether Lewis took his life along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee, spent time in front of the hardware store in Tupelo, Mississippi, where Elvis’s mother bought his first guitar (for $7.90), and walked up and down the streets that shaped the conscience of Woody Guthrie in Okemah, Oklahoma. Albie had posed for pictures standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona, and with curious Chinese tourists in Yosemite Valley. We’d driven through sun-splashed corridors of wild rhododendrons and dogwoods blooming along the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina, in rain so heavy it was bringing down trees in Mississippi, and along remnants of old Route 66 in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. And along the way we’d met many characters, each of whom enriched our lives in some way: restaurateurs, politicians, veterans, musicians, shopkeepers, and itinerant travelers also in search of America.

  So—why did we go and how did we get to Bennington on this rainy spring night?

  In 1960, as he was approaching the beginning of his seventh decade, the writer John Steinbeck hit the road with his French poodle, Charley. Steinbeck was the acclaimed author of some of the greatest works ever penned by an American writer—Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, and East of Eden to name just a few. But in the twilight of his life he “discovered that I did not know my own country. I, an American writer, writing about America, was working from memory, and the memory is at best a faulty, warpy reservoir . . . I had not felt the country for twenty-five years. In short, I was writing of something I did not know about.” Steinbeck deemed this lapse “criminal” and set out to right this writer’s wro
ng.

  So, he mounted a small camper on the back of a pick-up truck, called the rig Rocinante after Don Quixote’s horse, and, with Charley as his wingman, spent three months driving from his Long Island home to his native California and back. Among his provisions were the tools of his trade. To a modern-day writer most sound downright quaint: “paper, carbon, typewriter, pencils, notebooks and not only those but dictionaries, a compact encyclopedia, and a dozen other reference books, heavy ones.” Oh, and maps, the old-fashioned paper kind you spread wide on a table and then attempt, in frustration, to fold back into their original form.

  The result of Steinbeck’s wanderings was a widely beloved book, Travels with Charley, which became a number one New York Times best seller. By the time Steinbeck died in 1968 it had sold more than two and a half million copies, including one to a teenage boy from Paramus, New Jersey. At ninety-five cents, it was a bargain for a trip that would take me, or more precisely my imagination, through dozens of states along backroads, byways, and highways. During the summer of 2017, at age sixty-three, I reread that very same copy of Travels with Charley, yellowed with age, barely intact, and held together with Scotch tape.

  Over the years, the veracity of some of Steinbeck’s account has been questioned. Though his wife is barely mentioned as a road companion—she met him briefly in Chicago and again in Texas for Thanksgiving, he wrote—she apparently joined Steinbeck for several weeks during the journey. He purportedly spent many more nights in fine hotels than one would be led to believe. Some of his encounters along the way were with people who were more likely the product of his fertile imagination than of biological parents, or composites of several people. The introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of Travels with Charley cautioned readers not to take the book too literally; Steinbeck was first and foremost a novelist.

  When I first read Travels with Charley, I did take all of it literally. When I reread it nearly half a century later I was a little bit more the wiser, but it didn’t dim the experience. Maybe the gumption and imagination required to undertake such an odyssey are the same qualities that cause the journeyman, or woman, to embellish from time to time. After all, an epic journey is supposed to be the stuff of legend and no one wants to come home empty-handed.

  I am no stranger to the traveler on an epic journey who takes liberties with the literal truth. From 2003 to 2007, I labored to resurrect the long-lost story of my great-grandaunt, Annie Cohen Kopchovsky, who from 1894 to 1895 endeavored to become the first woman to circumnavigate the world by bicycle. A married mother of three and traveling under an assumed name (“Annie Londonderry,” adopted from the first of her many corporate sponsors),† she left Boston alone carrying only a change of underwear, a pearl-handled revolver and a hyperactive imagination. She was, quite simply, a fabulist with a casual relationship with the truth.‡ Though she cycled about 9,000 miles, many of the things she claimed to have done and seen were conjured while safely ensconced in the cabin of a steamship or the sleeping compartment of a train.

  Like my own Aunt Annie’s partly apocryphal tale, Travels with Charley may not be literally true in every particular, but it remains a beautiful, witty, evocative, and quintessentially American story. A story need not be literally true in whole or in part to contain Truth.

  As I reread Travels with Charley at age sixty-three, it occurred to me how I should spend at least part of my year at sixty-four: traveling America, roughly along Steinbeck’s route, with Albie.

  When we adopted him, Albie, at about three years old, was a canine teenager. But because dogs mature on a different timetable than humans, by the time I had turned sixty-four we had arrived on the cusp of old age together. Both of us were squarely in the autumn of our lives. Perhaps, I thought, we two aging gentlemen should, like Steinbeck and Charley, reacquaint ourselves with America.

  “A dog,” Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, “is a bond between strangers. Many conversations en route began with, ‘what degree of dog is that?’”

  Like Charley, Albie would be my calling card. I would count on him to attract passersby and ease me into conversations with strangers without them thinking I was deranged, dangerous, or slightly daft. He proved to be very much up to the task, endearing himself to countless people with his winsome good looks and his willingness to be touched and petted by everyone and anyone.

  One goal of the trip was to rediscover the country I’d lived in for more than sixty-four years, but one that seemed to have slipped its moorings and drifted into dangerous waters. My intention in writing about the experience was not to embellish, as Steinbeck occasionally did, or conjure stories out of whole cloth as my great-grandaunt Annie often did, but to render a faithful accounting of my travels with Albie and what they revealed—about the country, about myself, and about my ever-deepening bond with Albie. There was no particular agenda, and there were no specific questions to answer. The premise, really, was no more complex than that in the old children’s ditty about the bear that went over the mountain. We went over the mountain, metaphorically speaking, to see what we could see.

  I had last crossed the country by automobile in 1977 with my brother, Michael. Elvis died while we were somewhere in the wide-open spaces of Wyoming. More than forty years later, as for millions and millions of us, the romance of the Great American Road Trip still beckoned.

  In a September 2, 2017, piece in the Wall Street Journal, the renowned travel writer Paul Theroux recounted the origins of the Great American Road Trip beginning with F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald’s experience in 1920, a trip that resulted in F. Scott’s The Cruise of the Rolling Junk.§ In my more ambitious moments I hoped to write a book as avant-garde as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, as laugh-out-loud funny as Bill Bryson’s The Lost Continent, as meditative as William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, and as enduring as Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley—all Great American Road Trip books. I’d also like to play basketball like LeBron James, baseball like Babe Ruth, football like Tom Brady, and golf like Arnold Palmer. In my more realistic moments I just hoped man and dog would return home in one piece (well, two), and with enough material for a good book.

  Though, like Steinbeck, I wanted to better understand and know the country, this was not a mission to discover some verity about Donald Trump’s America and what had led us to this peculiar and precarious moment in our history. Many other writers and pundits have taken a serious swing at those questions, and it’s been discussed and argued about ad nauseum in the media and over kitchen tables for nearly three years. There wasn’t much to add that would be new or revelatory, but one could not travel America in 2018 and not brush up against those questions at some point.

  When there were discussions of politics, and it was inevitable, they happened organically. When it came up, usually I was not the one to raise the subject, something my family and friends might find downright unbelievable. And there were moments that shed some light for me on what was afoot, politically speaking, in the country. I wasn’t going to avoid the subject, not on the trip or in my book, but it wasn’t the core mission. As a news junkie who has obsessively followed national politics for decades, frankly, I needed a break from the headlines that were delivering me into a state of greater and greater despair on a daily basis. Indeed, within a couple of days on the road and with less exposure to the daily onslaught of dispiriting headlines (and Facebook) I began to relax and found my relative news blackout copacetic and mildly therapeutic.

  By taking you on this journey with us, my aim is to offer a bit of a respite from the dark and depressing state of our national politics—to share a more lighthearted, heartfelt, and dog-friendly tour of America and, in the process, remind us what remains wonderful and grand and good about it, even as it seems the country is coming apart at the seams. I didn’t come home more hopeful about the future; our divide seems to be growing, not retreating, and the breakdown of civility and democracy seems to be accelerating. But I did come home feeling that most Americans, wherever they liv
e, are fundamentally decent and less at each other’s throats than one might believe from spending time on social media or watching television where the extremes dominate our national conversation. Perhaps we will one day leverage this common decency to restore a sense of national unity. There are no easy answers for what ails us, but I did, I think, gain some insight into lives very different than my own.

  Not every trip we take is life-altering or results in a profound epiphany. But an observant traveler—observant not only of what is around him (or her) but of his own feelings and responses to what is seen, heard, and experienced—can’t help but be changed in ways that may be subtle and small but nevertheless meaningful. Our journey fell squarely into this category. When we returned home, I didn’t walk into the house and announce to Judy and the dogs that we were moving to Maui to seek enlightenment through meditation or psychedelics, decide to become vegan, or resolve to buy a camper so we could drive to Alaska and gaze at the northern lights, though I would someday love to see them. I did, however, become much more aware of the biases, preconceptions, and prejudices I had packed like my toothbrush and razor. And, I came back with a better understanding of why so many Americans feel left behind and forgotten in a fast-changing world and are susceptible to the appeals of demagogues who promise to make them winners again and provide them with convenient scapegoats.

  Ultimately, however, our journey was simply a personal one, no more and no less. I wanted to take in the country one more time in a single big sweep, to regain a measure of its staggering grandeur and breadth and to do so in the company of Albie, a genial and loving canine companion. That boy makes my heart leap every single day. Not only was he a passport to conversations with strangers, being with him twenty-four hours a day for six weeks forced me to be more attuned to what he was experiencing as the miles went by and to try to appreciate the world a bit more as he sees and feels and smells it.