In the country, you travel with your dog - whether driving down the street or across several states. But what if your dog doesn't travel well?
Ever since reading Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck, I have dreamed of having a dog to accompany me on an epic adventure. In his book, Steinbeck describes his travels of 10,000 miles across the United States accompanied only by his poodle, Charley. So, to follow in his footsteps, I also got a partner for my travels. In my case, it was a Labrador retriever named Abby. Together, we could live our own epic adventure. But for us, we would have to go no further than the grocery store.
Abby, you see, is not a traveler.
I should note, in my defense, that Abby has been trained. She will sit, whoa, heel and come. Some of these commands she will respond to as voice or hand signals. Put Abby in a truck, however, and she’s suddenly turbo-charged. Maybe vinyl is a form of dog nip or she thinks we’re off to a Scooby Doo movie. But she turns more rpms than the winning car at a NASCAR event.
Perhaps you will best understand if I illustrate. My idea of an epic adventure with a dog begins with an image of the pup perched on the passenger seat, still and upright, ears perky, eyes alert and tongue showing slightly in a big, toothy grin that does not involve drooling.
Abby’s image, on the other hand, apparently involves bounding laps around the inside of an extended-cab pickup, using the walls like banked turns, while trying to see how many paw prints she can leave on the windows. Since paw prints don’t show on a dry window, she slobbers as she goes by, leaving paw images as if being fingerprinted at the county pound.
This could be overlooked as mere excitement except for the fact that her laps go through my lap. She weighs 52 pounds and barely clears the gap between my stomach and the steering wheel, which she pushes off from in a great bound to bank off the driver’s side window a-slobbering.
Going 10,000 miles like this would read more like The Grapes of Wrath than Travels with Charley.
Abby’s other quirk that seriously impacts the experience is that she gets carsick. In case you haven’t noticed, dogs won’t use sickness bags. So having a 52-pound bundle of bouncing, spewing energy seriously dampens the mood, not to mention overwhelming any contribution by my pine-scented air freshener.
I’ve tried distracting her by rolling down the passenger window, but she has the look of a dog ready to pounce at the first sign of a distraction. Cats, kids and other roaming critters all seem to threaten a knee-jerk reaction that involves an airborne Abby.
My son had the idea of rolling the window up halfway while driving the dog around in his Explorer. At least then, she could hang her head out without the clearance to jump. Only Abby has another quirk; she prances on her front paws when excited, even if stationary. And when riding with her head out the window, she puts her paws on the arm rest to get her head up as high as possible.
Now, in my son’s Explorer, the arm rest also holds the electric window switch for the passenger-side window. Imagine Abby’s surprise, and his, as she is suddenly guillotined from below as she intermittently prances on the window switch. Only prompt action from the driver’s side prevents her from a good pinching courtesy of the Ford Motor Company.
The other thing that prevents a 10,000-mile adventure with Abby is that somewhere along the way I would need to leave her in the truck for only a moment. Abby’s response in short order would be to whine, bark and yodel until people passing by took this for dog abuse and turned me in. If no one came by in what Abby considered to be a reasonable time, I could count on my passenger seat being turned into pillow fluff. Her response upon my return would be a smile that reflected the pride of her accomplishment. If I could read dog lips, hers would be saying, “Look what I did while you were gone!”
Perhaps dogs just have a different view of what makes a good epic.
So I guess it makes some sense that Steinbeck could travel 10,000 miles with his dog and have enough stories to write a book about it. But if I tried traveling 10,000 miles with Abby, our story would look more like a set of encyclopedias.
