Rusty

Layne calls me a helicopter parent to Rusty. I suppose that must be partly true but as much as I fuss over his welfare I also like to see him run free. Or not…

Over the years in the Keys  I watched him vanish into the mangroves and leave me standing on the trail waiting for him to return. At first I worried he would get lost or injured and would disappear but pretty soon it became obvious to me he was more at home in the swamps than in suburbia. As much as he irritated me by refusing to come when I called I never stopped him running free and waited for him to come back to me at the side of the road. 

Then there was the time I couldn’t wait and according to a passerby he saw me drive off to an appointment without him. He ended up in jail and only next morning could a friend on his day off run over to the Marathon SPCA  and pick him up and bring him home for us. After that episode he never failed to come when I whistled so from that ghastly lemon we made lemonade. 

I never worried about him running off in Mexico. He was scared of the street dogs in a country where canines are not quite family members among the working classes. They get fed scraps to live, they hang on the streets like school yard toughs and when some middle class American dog walks through their neighborhood they gang up and try to see him off. 

The quiet streets of North America suit Rusty, the place where well fed  dogs spend  all day locked up and only come out wrapped in harnesses and bibs and all manner of restraints. He looks with scorn at the poor devils restrained in yards half mad from boredom and loneliness. Dogs are pack animals and Rusty knows his pack. We are his gang. 

When we arrive somewhere he sits outside and watches the world go by. I keep him leashed where I have to but he doesn’t need to be tied up. I even have a long tether for the rare occasions we use campgrounds where leashes are a requirement. Check out the Mexican campground in Pátzcuaro, Michoacán the only place in Mexico where the rules said we had to keep him tied up. Obviously  the tether stressed Rusty out completely: 

His home is GANNET2 and when he does get stressed or just wants to let go without worrying about being taken by surprise, he hops in and jumps up on his bed which travels on top of our bed. He sits up there and checks the world through the back windows. 

His other favorite spot is under the van. He’ll lay out in the sun for a while, then he’ll seek shade. Rusty isn’t a lap dog. He’s an American dingo and he lives like one. He survived being dumped in the Everglades so I know if we get desperate he knows how to keep us alive! For now we keep feeding him his treats. 

He learned to love to beaches in Mexico, a place where he couldn’t be ambushed. Seen here near La Ticla in the dangerous part of the coast of Michoacán…dangerous for turtles as we watched a cheerful man on a motorbike raid a nest. Rusty just played, no danger to anything. 

It was up in the mountains of Baja that I had one moment of worry for Rusty. I was enchanted by a condor circling over us only until it occurred to me that Rusty could be lunch. A quick swoop, a push over the edge and he would have been a fifty five pound meal on a cliff for the bird to pick over at its leisure. We spent a couple of nights at the vista point but I never expected it to live up to its name of “Condor Lookout.” Surprise, surprise. 

I try not to worry about him. Is he happy? Are we stressing him by driving him all over the place? 

A few months after we got him we took a planned trip to Canada. He was in his running free phase and we had a few scares when he disappeared but always came back. We spent a great time touring the  Ile d’Orleans and here is checking out the St Lawrence River:

I like to think he enjoys traveling as much as we do. Of course, if he doesn’t we are still going to keep rolling, so my fussing about him is to some degree empty self serving nonsense. Layne says he’s happy just to be with us. I agree. 

I try to imagine what a small abused abandoned dog thinks when he finds out the world includes temperate forests, cold winters and deserts so wide open he can run all day and not reach the end. 

He eats whatever kibbles we find along the way and much to our surprise his favorite treats are sticks we found in a Mexican supermarket. We call them licorice sticks they look so dark but they smell of meat. We’ve been rationing them out since we got back to the US to make our supply last. I don’t suppose he’ll miss them when we finally run out next week.

I am fond of saying you don’t get me without my dog and Rusty does his best to keep his side of the deal. Webb Chiles has never had a pet but he likes Rusty a lot. The best dog he’s ever known and Rusty is actually glad to see him. They are like old friends when we get together then he sits apart on his leash and watches us talk boats from his spot in the shade. 

They say the dogs you bond with most tightly are the hardest to train and the most resistant to domestication. Rusty fit the bill. I used to despair of myself, wondering if I was the right person for him he was so willful. Even now he sometimes refuses to walk or sits and stares at me until I give him what he wants. However he also knows when I really need obedience by my tone of voice and the balance is restored. 

We’re in the woods a few days, taking advantage of the cold front in North Florida and enjoying a wild camp before hunting season begins in a couple of weeks. Mornings are cold, 42  degrees, and when we let him out I wonder if he thinks back to all the places we have been where the cold set him free to be a dog. 

I hope he enjoys the journey as much as I do and the memories we make because without him the experience would be far less rich than it is, trying to see the world through his eyes. 

For some reason I don’t understand what breed of a dog you have fascinates people. Rusty is what I call a Miami Street Dog but a chance encounter with a stranger in Key West in 2016, the year we got Rusty, put me straight. 

https://bittersoutherner.com/carolina-dogs

Our vet’s best guess puts him at nine years old. His behavior makes me think he may well be a Carolina Dog. Who knows?

Dawdling

“Did you see five Asian males with guns threatening to shoot each other?” I should have preferred the police officer to have simply said welcome back to Florida after a year away. A year filled with color and life and fresh horizons. “No,” I said to her through a mouthful of potato chips, baked for good health, that I was sharing with Rusty, exhausted after a walk around the Publix parking lot. Our stroll was free of gunshots and other random violence but the police officer’s quest for evil doers was in line with expectations I suppose. “No one in Mexico ever asked us that,” Layne said when I told her what happened. She hadn’t seen any armed Asian men on her trek through the Jacksonville Publix. 

We stopped by Freedom VanGo briefly to report on the success of the upgrades they installed last year. They usually transform Sprinter four wheel drive vans into show pieces of custom off road art and our little workhorse home was a bit of a one off for them.  No one else has ever put a winch on a Promaster apparently. They were surprised we had actually used it twice to get us out of a jam. The tricked out Sprinters with huge bumpers and boxes, ladders and light bars towered over our dusty little road van, they pristine and sparkling with huge off road tires but also with no chance of being driven in dangerous Mexico. 

The fact is we aren’t going to be in Mexico probably before mid January. I am being required to mark time in the southeast until the end of the year to celebrate Layne’s sister’s wedding anniversary. My hope had been for a summer celebration outdoors under the sun but we will be required, by brother in law Bob’s desire, to freeze our backsides off under the shadow of Mount Mitchell a mid winter romp in Asheville, a city capable of producing snow and ice and damp short days in  lieu of beach days under Mexico’s winter sun. I am grumpy. I understand he wanted to celebrate the actual day of the nuptials fifty years ago, but his desire is holding up my travels! 

The weather gods did not cooperate when we stopped by to moochdock at Webbs place on the water. It was lovely and sunny and fresh in South Carolina but there was not a breath of wind. 

We did not take the original GANNET out for a day sail but we enjoyed sunsets and travel stories from the writer and circumnavigator and he reminded me Mexico will be there when we get there. 

I have Key West to look forward to while observing how Rusty reacts to his old haunts. We will see friends in a zig zag course across the sunshine state and arrive after Fantasy Fest for a few weeks moochdocking to catch up with friends.

Hanging out with Webb Chiles in the warmth of a southern autumn brought me home in a way. I have that end of vacation feeling as though I am about to slip back into routines, and the feeling makes me agitated. I’m retired and about to go away for a long time. I need to slow down and remember that which is old is new and even though it is all familiar, and welcome to some degree, I come home as a stranger. I am not who I was. 

“Traveling—it gives you a home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a stranger in your own land.”   — Ibn Battuta

Natchez Trace

“This is one of the least remembered parts of the story,” the ranger said as I waxed enthusiastic about my stop at Pompey’s Pillar in Montana, a long held ambition.

Lewis and Clark and the Corps of Discovery have traveled with us since we crossed the bridge over the Columbia River and spent the night at a rest area on the Washington State shore. I stood and stared at the tiny bight where the explorers waited out a freezing storm for a week as they struggled to spot the Pacific Ocean a few cables away. 

Above you see Grinders Stand, a recreation not entirely accurate according to the ranger, but a close similarity to the inn where Meriwether Lewis spent his last night alive, in October 1809. We had driven 11,000 foot Lemhi Pass in Idaho, where the corps struggled to get through the mountains to the Columbia River. I had stood on Pompey’s Pillar where Clark inscribed his name. 

That was also where I bought a book by historian Stephen Ambrose on the life and expedition of Meriwether Lewis. I was in North Carolina when I got to page 484 of the huge paperback and discovered Meriwether Lewis was buried under a monument a few hundred miles away in Tennessee. Irresistible.

The broken column represents a life cut short and the structure was built in 1818, then promptly forgotten for a hundred years. You need to read the book Undaunted Courage to understand the politics of the time and the determination of President Jefferson to get the Louisiana Purchase explored. It was a struggle not quite equal to the difficulties of the journey itself. Thereafter Lewis and Clark were largely forgotten in the public rush to scoop up free land offered to white settlers ready to travel. 

Not many people know Lewis died here but he did, by his own hand, with two shots, the first scraped his head and the second went through his body killing him slowly and painfully. The innkeeper and his servant and slave found him bleeding to death after he staggered outside and there has been talk of murder. 

Ambrose dismisses such talk on the very sensible grounds that those who knew him, Jefferson and Clark above all, evinced no surprise that the 35 year old celebrity explorer killed himself. He had shown signs of personality disorders and drank massively and seemed unable to handle his status as most famous explorer of them all in the burgeoning United States. His love life fizzled and he died a single unhappy man.  William Clark married and lived in the West as a high government official dying at the respectable age of 68 in his son’s St Louis home. Very undramatic compared to this mess. Consequently we have this monument to the sad end of a fascinating life.

The ranger offered it was fine to bring Rusty inside if he was well behaved. Perfectly behaved of course but not interested! 

I am the history nerd so I soaked up the exhibits hardly able to believe the good fortune of being so close when I found out about this place. 

There is a pioneer cemetery next to the monument, small marble squares inlaid into the turf, with as many “unknowns” as names. It’s fashionable to decry colonialism but I think these people were incredibly brave to carry their country into the wilderness. 

I also learned from the ranger that the Trace was a major thoroughfare created to allow riverboat crews to walk six weeks upriver from New Orleans back to St Louis to pick up fresh down-river jobs. The old Trace was a major highway, hence Lewis’ journey here on his way to Washington to report to President Madison with his journals supposedly ready for printing at last. In his depression in St Louis Lewis failed to edit his journals and they were never printed before his death three years after he completed his journey of discovery. 

I have ridden the Natchez Trace Parkway previously and I was not impressed. Compared to other roads we have driven even just on this long trip through mountains and valleys, round notches and along coastlines, the Natchez Trace is pretty tame. At a pullout I asked a motorcyclist what the view might reveal as we walked the parking lot. 

“The power lines,” he laughed. His buddy comes up from Pensacola and together they ride his neighborhood including the Parkway. 

I prefer a van these days I laughed. One of them was thinking along those lines. I had to have a jolt to get me off my motorcycle, plus my wife wanted to travel with me… that helped make the transition to four wheels. 

The Natchez Trace will grow on you if you let it. Like Florida in some respects it’s not obviously spectacular. However it does have a particular low key rhythm if you can find it. Perhaps you need to have lots of time on your hands and the wisdom of age.  

The Trace permits no commercial traffic so the 50 mph road is smooth asphalt easy to drive. It passes through woods and farmland with occasional rest areas and viewpoints. 

It’s not flat but it’s not full of spectacular overlooks either. 

It is a serene drive in mid October on a low traffic weekday. 

And there are roadside attractions like the Lewis monument or this random stop I chose: 

The forbidden cave, I needed no encouragement not to go spelunking! I could feel the cool cave breeze blowing out of the hole. Slightly weird. 

For the first time in a long time, months maybe, the air in the woods  was warm and moist on my skin. The cold air from the cave was very noticeable by contrast. In fact we slept that night at a rest area with the rear windows open for fresh night air to prevent stuffiness. 

The free campground at the Lewis monument was full! Not a space left much to our astonishment. We drove east a couple of hours to a rest stop celebrating Huntsville’s role in the space race. A Saturn rocket parked right next to us. 

This continent  really is littered with places yes of beauty, but also of interest to captivate the inquiring mind. I foresee an old age of exploration without end in this country.