14: On the Road with a Small Dog
Traveling with kids is easier, if only because they eventually grow up.
A few mornings ago, I was making Melissa Clark’s pozole-like soupy stew, a project meant to focus my mind on a Substack post about cooking while traveling.1 In the background, I heard Billie barking outside in the enclosed space behind my townhouse in Uptown New Orleans. Then she stopped barking. It took me a couple of minutes to complete the step I was at in the recipe. Wiping my hands on a dish towel, I walked to the back door to check on her.
She was gone. The back gate was latched. Then I noticed for the first time that the crawlspace under the row of 5 townhouses was completely exposed and only partially blocked by a patio chair and a patio table turned on its side. Holding panic at bay, I knelt down and peered into the dark space. I called her repeatedly. I saw no movement under there, but I did see daylight along the far side of the crawlspace. I ran inside and out the front door to the street. She was nowhere in sight. Pairs of dog walkers, a father helping his son learn to ride a bike, and other randos generous with their time offered to help look for her.2 My friends Jill and Charles Abbyad, patron saints of visitors to NOLA, came to help.3 New Orleans takes neighborliness seriously. We spread out across a several block area. I drove around in my car calling “Billie!” out the window. I returned to my rental, peered under the building one more time, and called again and again.
After about 30 minutes had passed, at a loss to know where else to look, I sat on my front stoop. Tears filled my eyes. I couldn’t bear the thought of her wandering around lost. The moment felt nightmarish. Losing her might shatter me with grief. My comrades tried to reassure me that someone would eventually find her. Unable to contain that thought, I jumped up to take one more look around inside. At the end of this last search, I opened the back door. There she was, on the top step right outside the door, looking anxious. Somehow, she had found her way back to the crawlspace. I like to think we both feared we had lost each other. But I’m not sure about that.
Dogs have always been important to humans and vice versa. We domesticated each other. Certainly, by the 21st century, the status of dogs in urban human societies has never been higher. Privileged or not, ludicrous or not, the emotional tenor of many urban dog owners’ relationship to their pets now resembles that of a parent’s attachment to their child. As a person who chooses to live by myself, I have assigned Billie very high status in my life.
The painful episode of nearly losing her, however, has led to a healthy restoration of my attitude. Traveling with a dog is exhausting. Over the past two years since I retired, many are the times times I have carried heavy bags in both arms while maneuvering her by leash or carrying her in her Ghanaian basket (see above) at the same time that I’m trying to unlock a door, enter a shop, board a train, a bus or a metro. I’ve caught myself saying to her “Could you at least help?” Or there are the times when she has wound her leash multiple times around my legs while I’m at a counter holding tote bags filled with groceries. I have long tired of her try-and-catch-me game when I want to take her out for her post-prandial poop. Moving her in her airline-approved carrier on one arm while pushing a wide roller bag down a narrow aisle on a plane has long ceased feeling like an adventure. Since she’s a small dog with chronically bad knees, Billie prefers to be carried, preferably in a palanquin-type vehicle so she can sit up and look around. She is a rider, not a walker. Climbing up and down the never-ending stairs in the Paris métro with her in a backpack boosted my VO2max score to the highest it’s been since the brief period I owned a Peloton bike about 8 years ago. Sometimes, at the end of a busy day, when I flop on the sofa, I text my friend in England, whose children are nearly grown, with some variation of “I have no fucking idea how you survived years of running errands in London with one small child never mind two.”
So, it’s not a bad thing to be jolted out of my crabbiness to be reminded of how much she means to me. And I know some would say that I bring all this on myself. I can hear some of you thinking, why not leave her behind while I do my errands? I do go off without her sometimes once she has settled into the hotel room/house/apartment. I must confess, though. Hearing the whimpering once I’m outside the door I’ve just locked always gets to me. Once, in Santander, Spain, I left her behind for an hour in the care of my goddaughters. They told me later she bayed a few minutes after I left. I have never heard her bay. A few weeks later, in Madrid, a woman who had been watching Billie while I was talking to a salesperson in a store said to me, “Your dog is happy wherever you are.”4 At the time, it seemed like an obvious statement, but the more I thought about it the more profound her simple observation became. Billie and I make each other happy and that does us both good.
Next time, food shopping in New Orleans. This is my marker.
I hope to explain why I was making pozole at 10 o’clock in the morning when I finally write the post I’ve been thinking of writing about eating and cooking on the road. Events keep compelling me to defer writing that.
If an international confraternity of dog owners doesn’t exist, it should. Political activists should not underestimate the gatherings and encounters of dog owners as sites for building trust among people with wildly different political beliefs agreeing.
The Chimes Bed and Breakfast, where I’ve stayed every year since 2006.
My favorite country for dogs is Spain. Billie enjoyed the popularity of a Korean pop star. We couldn’t walk a block without someone asking for her autograph.
And after our children have grown, we can get back to treating our dogs like royalty again! I think dogs thrive on routine and when you are traveling, you become the routine thing in their lives.
Sally you are not alone. Daughter Ashley treats her Pug Olivia like the daughter she never had and Olivia goes everywhere it's feasible, and when she's not taken, Olivia sits wherever she can best see Ashley's car coming up the driveway. And then she howls!!