Rescue Road Read online

  “People think it’s so glamorous,” Greg once told me, “that I’m playing with puppies all day.” But a week on the road and you realize how grueling, stressful, exhausting, relentless, dirty, smelly, and demanding the work is; you have to get used to having dog poop smeared on your shirt and the smell of sixty to eighty dogs permeating your clothes. Just driving more than four thousand miles in six days every other week, let alone taking care of scores of dogs along the way, would test even the most determined person. If you wanted to be a trucker, hauling bottled water or auto parts would be infinitely easier. And he’s doing it for considerably less than minimum wage to boot.

  Despite the endless miles, the stress, the physical and messy work, and the sleeping in a trailer far from home for half of every month, Greg will be the first to tell you he has the best job in rescue. Every other week, he gets to deliver a group of lucky dogs into the arms of waiting families and see firsthand the happily-ever-after scenes that unfold at each Gotcha Day.

  In addition to Greg, there are countless others who make these scenes possible, many of whom you’ll meet in the pages ahead. They are the ones who turn stories of despair into stories of hope and give these dogs a first or second chance at love. They may never witness a Gotcha Day themselves, but they keep Greg running. They walk the floors of high-kill shelters; look into the baleful eyes of dogs that have been neglected, abandoned, and abused; save as many as they can; and lie awake at night, haunted by those they couldn’t. They spend tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars out of their own pockets to get these dogs healthy and ready for adoption, sometimes nursing them back to health themselves. They sometimes burn through marriages or relationships, or work eighteen-hour days while raising a family for so long that they can’t remember a single day off. Without them, there is no Greg Mahle arriving in the Deep South to pick up eighty of the luckiest dogs in the world and bring them to safety. Without them, there are no joyful scenes in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and other states where expectant families, signs at the ready, look for Greg’s big white truck and wait for their first glimpse of the once-forgotten dog they are about to welcome into their lives.

  And for the dogs, whose long journeys began well before they ever climbed aboard Greg’s truck, it is because of these people that their lives are about to change forever when Greg swings the doors open, scoops them up in his powerful arms, and places each one in the bosom of their new, loving family. This is ultimately their story too.

  1.Founded in 2002, Labs4rescue has helped more than 12,000 Labs and Lab mixes find homes.

  2.For anyone who has a dog or is thinking of getting one (rescue or not), I highly recommend reading Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know by Alexandra Horowitz, a canine cognition expert who teaches psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. For those wary of adopting rescue dogs because of their often uncertain pedigree, Professor Horowitz says, “The myth that a shelter dog, especially a mixed breed dog, will be less good or less reliable than a purchased dog is not just wrong, it is entirely backward: mixed breeds are healthier, less anxious, and live longer than purebreds.”

  3.Some states, including Massachusetts, require imported rescue dogs to be quarantined. The practice is controversial, however, as many believe it is unnecessary and ineffective.

  1

  DOG’S BEST FRIEND

  ONE WINTER NIGHT IN 2005, AFTER THE last of five family restaurants he ran had closed and he was back in Mount Perry, Ohio, living with his mother, Greg Mahle received a call from his sister Cathy, the founder of Labs4rescue.

  A paid driver was transporting a handful of dogs from the South in a van and was nearing exhaustion. She was on the interstate nearby. Cathy was desperate and asked if Greg could help rescue the rescuer and her dogs. A dog lover since he was a kid, he readily agreed and ended up driving all of them to Connecticut that night and into the following morning.

  “It was awful,” Greg tells me when I come to visit him in Zanesville, Ohio, where he and his wife Adella now live, to join him on one of his road trips. “There was just one woman with a bunch of dogs in this minivan and it smelled terrible.” The trend of transporting southern rescue dogs up north on a large scale was just beginning, a phenomenon that would accelerate as the Internet expanded Americans’ understanding of the canine overpopulation problem in the South and facilitated match-making between dogs and families. “People were just winging it back then,” he adds. “They were transporting dogs in open horse trailers, in overcrowded cars, you name it.”

  Greg had two revelations on that trip. First, the need for rescue dog transport was far greater than the supply, and second, he could professionalize and systematize what was largely an ad hoc, hit-or-miss system for moving dogs north. He started making occasional rescue trips with a van to help his sister and a few dogs, and he quickly became hooked. Soon, he was hiring drivers and running vans, a box truck, and a small truck with a trailer. He was on the road three weeks a month, but he soon tired of managing drivers and realized he wasn’t comfortable leaving dogs in the care of others; he wanted to be hands-on and improve the conditions under which the dogs were moved.

  “When I started, I was just a guy with a van giving dogs a ride,” he says. “Transport has become much more professionalized since then.”

  But it also gave him an unexpected opportunity. “Before Adella and I became a couple, I was just going to live with my mother and cut hay,” Greg recalls. “But now that we were together, I needed something to do and I knew I’d rather be a greeter at Walmart than go back in the restaurant business.”

  “The first couple of years, there were weeks he would borrow money for gas from me,” says Adella. “It was okay with me because it wasn’t much and I knew it made him happy. As time progressed and he was carrying more dogs, he eventually got to the point when he was able to pay for gas on his own. He always slept in the vehicle because there wasn’t enough money to spend on a hotel room on the road. Back in the days when he had the vans, I felt sorry for him. Now that he has a trailer with a bunk, I don’t feel nearly as bad. But he still complains sometimes about how cold it is on nights when he doesn’t have dogs in the trailer because he won’t run the heater, to save money.

  “We still get by on a shoestring budget, a prayer, and a little help from God,” she adds. Until 2014, Adella worked at the local Head Start agency, which helped with the household bills, but she left to pursue her master’s degree in early education. “I still take odd jobs, teach a dance class, and do a little consulting with Head Start, and that’s been enough to get us by. But every month, I say a prayer that we will be able to make it to the next month.”

  • • •

  I first met Greg in September of 2013, about eight months before my visit to Zanesville, when I was covering Greg and his work for Parade magazine. I knew I wanted to share his story and hopefully encourage others to “think rescue” if they were looking for a dog. When Parade gave me the assignment, I traveled to Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I had arranged to meet with Greg and drive with him the next day to Putnam, Connecticut, the last stop of every Gotcha Day.

  A genial man named Keith Remaly met me at the Comfort Inn just outside Allentown. Keith organizes the Allentown Angels, one of three groups of resolute volunteers who meet Greg and the dogs along the route every other week, without fail, to give each dog a long walk, food, water, and a whole lot of love. They help clean the trailer and the kennels and bolster the spirits of a road-weary Greg and his backup driver, Tommy, an imposing man at six foot five with a four-hundred-pounds-plus physique.4

  Greg and Tommy, an air force veteran who always refers to Greg as either “Sir” or “Boss,” drive through the night on Thursdays, into Friday, stopping occasionally to check on the dogs, walk them, give them water and snacks, and clean the kennels. On other nights, when they do stop for the night, Greg sleeps in a tiny loft, on an old mattress in the trailer; Tommy, on a bunk in the cab.

  Greg and
I had been corresponding for weeks by email to arrange my trip, so I was a bit surprised when, meeting for the first time, he gave me a quick handshake and immediately handed me a black Lab puppy named Genesis and a leash. “Take her for a walk on the grass over there,” he said, pointing to a field nearby. It wasn’t a request; it was an order.

  As I would soon discover though, Greg isn’t gruff or unfriendly—quite the contrary. But the first thing you learn about Greg is: the dogs always come first. Always. Plus, there’d be plenty of time to get acquainted later. After all, we’d be riding almost three hundred miles together the next day.

  That night, after the Angels had left and the dogs were all back in their kennels in the trailer, I approached a little back Lab puppy named Audi. I had chosen to follow Audi’s journey for my Parade story because her short life was something of a miracle. She was one of eleven puppies (including Genesis) that were delivered to Blakely, who was found very pregnant and living by a Dumpster in New Iberia, Louisiana, and taken to a high-kill shelter. Like Albie, Blakely’s first stroke of luck was being a stray, not a dog surrendered by its owner. Many owner surrenders, even if they are healthy, are euthanized at overcrowded shelters almost immediately because shelter personnel know no one is going to come looking for them. Strays can buy a few days on the assumption that if they are lost, someone is searching for them.

  How any particular lost or abandoned dog defies the odds to ultimately find a forever home truly is a story of luck at every turn. On the surface, it seems simple: person finds dog, dog gets on truck, dog gets off truck into the arms of new family. But the story is always far more complicated. Very few people, even those with rescue dogs, know, or can even imagine, what it takes to do this work and the effort expended by countless people to get their dog to them safe and sound.

  In Blakely’s case, a Labs4rescue volunteer in Connecticut saw a cross-posted message online about a pregnant Lab in the shelter in New Iberia. She phoned two local volunteers who picked Blakely up from the shelter in their Ford Explorer. En route to the vet’s office, she started delivering her puppies. Because they were born in a car, Labs4rescue volunteers named each puppy after a car model: there was Chevy, Genesis, and nine more, including Audi, whose forever family, the Dooleys of Hamden, Connecticut, has since renamed her Brooke.

  Audi and three of her siblings were along for this particular ride; Greg would later bring Blakely and the rest of the pups to their forever homes too. Since Audi and the Dooleys were the focus of my Parade story, I wanted to get to know her a bit, and I had promised the Dooleys I’d watch out for her and give her some extra attention, which she craved. When I put my finger through her kennel door, she couldn’t stop licking and chewing it excitedly. I removed her from the kennel and she was a bundle of energy, squirming in my arms, licking my face, and nibbling on my ears. She didn’t want to be let go so, with Greg’s permission, I decided to let her sleep with me in the truck.

  On the phone a week before I joined Greg in Allentown, I had offered to stay in the motel. I was trying to respect his privacy (I knew he slept in the trailer), but Greg was having none of it. I would sleep in the trailer. When it was time for us all to go to bed, Greg gave me his tiny loft, the part of trailer that hangs over the back of the tractor. It’s about seven feet long, a few feet wide, and all of about three feet high. I took Audi and her kennel up there, played with her a bit, and put her in the kennel for the night, keeping her right next to my head. Greg was already asleep on the trailer floor—he goes out like a light—a worn blanket wrapped around his husky frame.

  It was surprisingly quiet in the trailer. It took the dogs twenty minutes or so to settle in for the night, but once they did, it remained quiet, except for the hum of the air-conditioning and the occasional dreamer chasing a squirrel in his sleep. The lights remain on through the night. Audi, however, wanted so badly to be out of her kennel; she whimpered and whined for a good hour before we both drifted off for a very short night’s rest.

  Greg was up before first light to get ready for the big day ahead. I, on the other hand, stumbled out groggily and walked into the motel whose parking lot Greg uses as though I was a paying guest and washed up in the lobby restroom.5 There are no amenities on the road when you’re traveling with Greg. His focus is solely on getting the dogs to their forever homes as quickly and safely as possible. So if you need to shower daily, this isn’t the job for you.

  We changed the paper in the kennels, washed off a few poopy dogs, and gave them all water and a small snack. They don’t eat a lot on the journey for two reasons. First, they’re under some stress and the motion of the truck can make a full dog queasy. Second, whatever they eat comes out the other end, and when you have eighty dogs in a confined space… Well, you get the idea.

  As soon as the sun cracked the horizon, we were ready to hit the road. For dozens of families, this was the day they’d been waiting for: Gotcha Day. And it’s the day when a week of drudgery, messy and stressful work, and the monotony of the road pay dividends for Greg in the joyful scenes that unfold at every stop.

  • • •

  Zanesville has been dying for as long as Greg can remember, ever since his days growing up on the rural outskirts of town. It’s a story that has played out in countless towns in the heartland: once-prosperous communities buoyed by manufacturing slowly suffocating under the weight of globalization. Vacant lots, abandoned factories, and boarded-up storefronts now dot Zanesville like some kind of pox. Owens Corning, the fiberglass manufacturer, still has a small plant here, but today, Zanesville, which sits on the banks of the Muskingum River, is more notable for its commercial strip of fast-food restaurants and auto parts stores than its manufacturing base.

  Greg and Adella and Adella’s twelve-year-old son, Connor, live in a house in a historic section of town. The streets, paved with bricks in 1890s, are lined with stately homes. The Mahles share theirs with four dogs, all rescues: Harry, a golden retriever pulled from the Muskingum County Shelter, and three southern dogs: Murphy, an Irish setter from New Orleans; Treasure, a Carolina dog mix found in Tennessee; and Beans, purportedly a Lab-Rhodesian mix from central Louisiana, though no one knows for sure what’s in Beans’s DNA.6 From the exuberance and tenacity with which he relentlessly plays fetch, he could be part Ty Cobb.

  The Mahles bought their home four years ago, a large, nineteenth-century Italianate house onto which a Tudor front was grafted more than a century ago. From the backyard—fenced in to keep the dogs from running off—you can see the Muskingum River and downtown Zanesville. Except for a few modern touches, such as a couple of flat screen TVs and an Apple computer on Greg’s desk, it’s a home evocative of another era: fifteen-foot ceilings, stucco moldings, clawfooted bath tubs, dark woodwork, stained-glass windows, a multi-colored slate roof, cast-iron radiators, tasseled lampshades, and multiple sitting rooms surely called “parlors” a century ago. In this old house, the TVs and computers appear to be flotsam from a still-to-be-imagined future. If this sounds like a grand home for a man scratching out a living transporting rescue dogs, walk down Convers Street and you can find larger homes like this in move-in condition for about $150,000 and some in need of work for under $30,000.

  Greg is an inveterate collector of “junk nicely arranged,” as he calls it, and he continues to buy out of barns and thrift stores to furnish the house, proud that he can spend a few dollars and some time—when he can grab it—refinishing and have a functional and attractive piece of furniture. He proudly tells me he found the bed and two dressers in the bedroom where I’m staying in an old barn where they were covered in hay. The price? A grand total of ninety dollars.

  “I cart home all kinds of junk,” Greg says, “but they’re treasures to me—like rescue dogs that are trash to some people, but treasures to me. I’ve always been this way.”

  When you’re driving a truck long distances with eighty dogs, you have to be resourceful, and Greg is resourceful at home too. “I once hauled an old iron bed partly buried i
n a hog feedlot out with a tractor. I cleaned it up, used it for a while, and then sold it and used the money to buy a brand-new bed,” he says, proud of the accomplishment.

  There are various works in progress around the house, victims of Greg’s life lived half on the road: a downstairs bathroom is far from completion and an ambitious, partly completed backyard patio awaits his attention.

  The home, indeed the entire neighborhood, evokes Bedford Falls, George Bailey’s hometown in Frank Capra’s 1946 film classic It’s a Wonderful Life. As I would learn during the course of the more than seven thousand miles we would ride together, “it’s a wonderful life” is precisely how Greg feels about his own life, whether it’s his two weeks on the road out of every month, or his two weeks at home with Adella, Connor, and the dogs.

  • • •

  Adella Mahle was only eighteen when she first met Greg some seventeen years ago. She was hired as a waitress at one of the five Brighton Ice Cream restaurants Greg operated with his mother in and around Zanesville. Greg is almost twenty years Adella’s senior.

  “My Dad owned a bar,” Greg tells me as we drive around Zanesville one afternoon, two days before we’re scheduled to leave Ohio for the Gulf Coast to pick up dogs. Greg, Adella, and I are in Adella’s Subaru because Greg still drives a dilapidated white panel van he used in his early days in rescue dog transport. It has only two seats, a lot of miscellaneous junk rattling around in back, front tires of questionable integrity, a windshield riddled with cracks, a nonfunctioning air conditioner, a broken odometer, useless and tattered windshield wipers, and various holes in the dash where controls of one sort or another used to be. Greg loves this vehicle and sees no reason to replace it.