Now that we’ve journeyed six entire chapters together, I feel like we have developed a relationship. And since we are now in a relationship, I wanted to pause and share a couple of things that are very important.
First off, I want to clear something up. My travel shenanigans are in no way limited to shitty flights or shitty hotel stays. I’ve only been writing about these things because there are just so many stories, and it really is the majority of how I travel. Secondly, there is one thing that you need to know about me, and that is, I make terrible and incomprehensible decisions when I’m in a panic. For some strange reason, when a situation arises that requires immediate action, my brain shuts off, and my body will proceed to do any of a number of things that a person tends to only see in vintage cartoons.
This next adventure requires some back story to properly set the stage. If you have a weak stomach, you might want to skip over this chapter, or at the very least, put down the sandwich that you are eating. And a bowl of chili is entirely out of the question.
I have a breed of dog that is known for having high anxiety, she is a Toy Fox Terrier, and her name is Brody. Most of the day she burrows underneath blankets and pillows to hide from household predators, or paces back and forth looking for a place to hide her bone that she believes EVERYONE is trying to steal from her. She will hide this bone, and then the paranoia of someone else possibly knowing where this bone is will consume her, and she will retrieve it and go to find another hiding place. She hates walks. She is a dog that will relentlessly produce a high-pitched whine from the second she sets one paw outside, until the very moment all four of her paws reach the sanctuary of our house. It almost requires a skilled level of sorcery to conjure up her leash from thin air, because if she sees you walking towards her with it, even if it is behind your back, she will bolt out of the room and lodge herself tightly into the corner of another room or underneath the bed in order to avoid the cruelty of fresh air and exercise. She actually gets so anxious on walks that her insides tense up, and the result is uncontrollable and frequent diarrhea. So we don’t go for walks very often.
We used to live in a condominium complex in Orange County, California before moving up to Northern California to pursue my current job. That condo complex was three levels of residential units that were connected by long hallways. In order to get to the exit of the building, and out to the main street, we needed to traverse this long hallway. If we were taking the dog with us, this trek required my neighbors to endure the excruciating squeals of a reluctant and partially-walking, partially-dragging dog. So one day, while delightedly taking my dog for a drag down the hallway with Tara, Brody makes it about halfway down the long (and newly carpeted and painted) common area hallway before making a squealing noise and squatting on this two-day-old carpet. We happened to be directly in front of a neighbor’s front door. I knew this situation was going to be explosive, and so my brain quickly shuts down and abandons my body in order to build a plausible deniability defense against what was about to happen.
Just as expected, my body whips into ridiculous action, grabbing the dog like a live hand grenade and swinging her around in all directions frantically looking for an emergency exit, or an open window. There were only seconds to react. If I were able to speak to my body without my mind interrupting, I would ask my body what the end-game was supposed to be in this scenario. “STOP!” Tara was screaming, “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” I began to run in no particular direction, hoping to sacrifice myself in order to save others. I could feel the gurgling belly of the dog, and I could hear the screams from Tara, but being without a brain at the moment, I was unable to process anything. What I would realize later on, was that for several moments, I was recreating a most horrific version of Hansel and Gretel… minus the bread crumbs. It didn’t take a brain to be able to process this foulest of smells, which punched me square in the nose harder than Mike Tyson. I continued to swing the dog around in circles for some unknown reason, apparently expecting a fire exit or a patch of grass to materialize in the hallway like some Harry Potter or Chronicles of Narnia film. The only thing that was materializing was the worst monochromatic and terribly aromatic Jackson Pollock painting, which covered at least a fifteen foot section of my neighbor’s hallway. If you are hoping for a better visual, picture someone lifting an electric hand mixer directly out or a bowl of mashed potatoes while the mixer is set on high speed. I was covered, the walls were covered, the new carpet was covered, there were even stalactites hanging from the ceiling. If someone were to tell me that I had a certain amount of material in which to spread over the same affected area, I don’t think I could have purposefully done as good a job distributing said material.
So now in walks my brain with an unconvincing “What the f### happened here?!” as Tara and I survey the crime scene.
“Why did you do that?” Tara demanded.
“Why did I do what?” my brain replied. “Spin a pooping dog around like a centrifuge? Fling dog droppings around like I was throwing gold coins up in the air from a newly opened treasure chest?”
As punishment, my body was sentenced to return to my condo and collect armfuls of cleaning supplies and a dozen rolls of paper towels. The odor lofted through the entire hallway at this point, like a toxic wasteland, with steam churning in circles like a sauna. When I returned to the Brody Incident, Tara was laughing. We couldn’t help but picture a neighbor blissfully stepping out of their front door directly into a shitty day. I scrubbed down the hallway as quickly as possible so as not to be identified as the person responsible. Brody somehow managed to break free, and began running down the hallway, with leash wildly and whimsically trailing behind like a paint brush further spreading poo paint in a wavy line behind her. Tara and I were literally left I holding the bag. Tara chased after the dog while I was left with the shitty task of cleaning up the mess I helped create. If a person would have walked up the hallway at this point, and saw me with my pants covered in excrement, and no dog, I’m sure the first thought would have been that I myself needed some medical attention. And so I scrubbed down the hallway for what seemed like an eternity. It was so bad that we ended up selling our condo and moving six hours north, to the San Francisco Bay.
Now that you have a bit of an important back story, let me tell you a little bit about this move. Packing and moving is never fun. At one point, we had moved three times within a five year period. Two of those moves we did with kids, and one of them was across the country along with two cats and a dog. That move was quite an experience, and I’ll make a note to myself to be sure and document it. For this first move, we packed the condo into the back of a rented moving truck. We had hires some guys to help load the truck on the cheap, so roughly half of our stuff ended up being busted up from being jammed into the truck. I quickly realized that I underestimated how much stuff we had, and that I had admittedly rented a truck that was way too small. We were too far committed to the move date at this point, and so my plan was to drive the moving truck up to our new apartment, taking Brody with me. Tara was going to drive our car up and take the two cats. Once we got there, I was going to fly back down and load a small truck with the rest of the belongings that we had to leave behind.
Tara lead the way in our car, I pulled the moving truck out of the driveway, with Brody as my co-pilot standing guard on a blanket in the passenger seat. The first jarring bump in the truck was at the bottom of the drive. Cushion of air my ass! Knowing that this was going to be a bumpy ride, I text Tara to go ahead without me, as I was going to have to take the drive a little slower. After about an hour of jumping back and forth between seats, Brody finally curls into a tight ball in the passenger seat, and appears to fall asleep. Two hours into our journey, and the rhythmic bouncing of the truck in combination with being outdoors begins to wear on the dog. The whimpering starts out slow, but soon reaches a loud whine and shortly after that, a full on howl. Brody is standing up in the passenger seat and shaking. I managed to pull off the highway and into a rest stop so that she could do her business in the grass. Once we get back on the road, the howling starts up again, followed by the shaking. I am now on a very long stretch of highway that is at an incline, with no side shoulder to pull off into. Brody is again jumping from the passenger seat onto my lap, and back again, with her tiny pointed hooves digging into my leg. On the next pass to my lap, she rears back on her hind legs, and puts her front paws on the steering wheel, as if to steer us off the road. I command her to sit down on her blanket, and she leaps off my lap again, and back to the passenger seat.
Then she does the unthinkable. She squats on the blanket in the passenger seat, and lets out a stream of nervous diarrhea. In a panic, I grab at the blanket with one hand, and rip it away as to try and contain the mess. The corner of the blanket gets caught up in her back leg, and the tension ejects some particles up on the dashboard and parts of the passenger door. As I’m trying to roll up the blanket with one hand, the dog squats again, and this time it goes all over the seat. With no blanket to cover it, she steps back into it, and then leaps on to my lap. I’m doing a half scream and half cry, all while trying to keep the truck on the road. The dog is also freaking out that she has poo on her feet, so she is scratching and climbing all over everything.
Poo feet on the window jam, poo feet smeared on the window, poo feet back on my lap, and then poo feet leaping back over to the bucket seat of poo like a frolicking reindeer enjoying a fresh dip in poo before jumping back over to give me a second coat. And I’m driving and yelling, which makes her more anxious. This, in turn, means more paint for her paws. This cycle continues for several miles, as there is no shoulder for me to pull off the road, and no place to stop and get cleaned up. Just as I think this situation can’t get any worse, the temperature gauge on the truck lights up. I shift into a lower gear and slowly chug along uphill while angry motorists behind me serenade my Shitmobile with their horns. Poo, sweat and tears fill the cab of the moving truck. I see the faint lights of a gas station about a mile up the freeway, and I focus my energy and pray that we can make it there. Somehow I get us to the gas station, and as I open the door of the truck, Brody takes off running towards some gravel to the side of the parking area, where she lets out whatever is left in her body. I grab a pile of wet paper towels, and begin wiping down the entire interior of the truck. I find a clean blanket in the back of the truck that I lay back down for the dog, and I give the truck another fifteen minutes or so to cool down.
As I watch the temperature needle slowly slide back to the left of the gauge, I look over to see Brody fast asleep in a ball on the blanket. She doesn’t even open one eye as I start up the truck again, and head back onto the freeway. I had to make three more stops to keep the truck from overheating, but for the most part, Brody slept peacefully.
A few hours later, I was taking the off ramp to our new apartment in a city that I’ve never even been to, and starting my new job in less than a week. I have never been so relieved to reach a destination in my life, and Brody was relieved in a much different way. In the back of my mind, I was reminding myself that I would need to do this all over again in a couple of days, as I still needed to fly back to our old condo and drive another truck back up. I shook this thought out of my head for the moment, it was just too much to comprehend. There was no place to park the big moving truck in our complex, so I parked it in a lot up the street from our new apartment, and began walking the dog up the street to our new place. Brody didn’t so much as whimper, as she trotted along with an air of accomplishment, or dare I say, courage?
It was well into the evening as the dog and I spot Tara walking down to meet us from the steps of our new apartment. “What took you so long?” she asked.
And as I’ve heard myself say so many times, I reply “Let me tell you about my trip”.
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