Outlaw and order

...“I’ve got a surprise for you. A real treasure.” 

Mom had been talking so much about the race's broken promises that I’d almost forgotten she’d promised me a surprise after the race, too. I sat up. “Does it have to do with that cookout I smelled at the finish line?” 

“No, but it involves dinner later.” Mom pulled something sparkly from behind her back. It was my mermaid costume from last Halloween. She strapped the seashells across my chest and fastened the fin around my waist. 

When I was a puppy, the feeling of having something on my head used to turn me to stone. All I could do was plead helplessly with my eyes until Mom removed the hat and lifted the spell. The trouble was that turning me into a statue made it much easier for the Witch to take pictures, so Mom started bringing hats and other costumes with us on all of our hikes. She actually liked how the different costumes helped tell our adventures apart when she and the Witch looked back on them. 

Even after the curse was lifted and I learned how to move under hats, Mom kept bringing costumes on our hikes. I didn’t mind so much because if anyone caught me wearing a stetson at the edge of a cliff or a beret on a mountaintop, they were more likely to notice what a good boy I was and reward me with extra pats. Now my “hats for pats” schtick was famous and people came from all over the internet to tell me how handsome I was.

“What do mermaids have to do with treasures?” I asked as Mom clicked the walking leash onto my collar. “All they do is flirt with princes.”

“It’ll be extra sparkly now that the sun’s out, so that’s a bit like treasure. We want you to stand out, don’t we?”

“It’s the treasure that sparkles, not the treasure hunter,” I reminded her. “Why don’t you wear the sparkly clothes for a change?”

“Don’t be silly,” Mom said. “You’re the star of the show.” 

I couldn’t argue with that.

Mom led me back to almost there and stiffly lowered herself onto a log. “This way people will see you at the best moment of the whole race,” she explained.

We clapped for all the twenny-five killmometer and fiddy killmometer winners as they burst limply into the finish area. We’d already cheered for many winners by the time a tall lady I’d never seen before came around the corner. 

She perked up like her finish line came sooner than everyone else’s. “Oscar!” she said, with the energy of someone who hadn’t been running through deep sand all day. 

All it takes for me to fall in love at first sight is someone noticing that I’m a good boy. Mom dropped the leash and I sprinted into my true love’s arms, plowing like a cannonball into her heart. 

“Who the heck are you?” I squealed, wagging my fin and jumping around so she could pat both my head and my butt with the same hand.

“Oscar! Oscar! Oscar!” my Surprise said. 

“My name’s Oscar too!” I told her. “It’s a very good name.”

“No, she’s saying your name,” Mom ’splained. “This is your friend Lily from the internet. She’s the one that got us into this mess.”

“Hi, Lily!” I screeched. “Come on, I’ll show you the way to the finish line. I thought there was treasure there, but now I know that the treasure won’t arrive until you do.”

I set Lily free to discover the finish on her own. Mom found a table close to the water jugs and I sat beside her, sparkling to make it easier for Lily to find us again. She appeared with one plate and two sammiches and sat down, forgetting to put the second sammich—my sammich—where I could reach it.

“Hey, aren’t you forgetting something?” I screeched as Lily took another bite without offering me one. 

“Oscar, quiet!” Mom scolded.

Lily handed me a piece of turkey anyway and took another selfish bite. “Sharing is caring,” I reminded her in an even louder voice. Mom shushed me a second time. 

I’d seen this movie before. Mom had put me under a silence spell so Lily would pay attention to her instead. If I wanted my voice back, Lily would need to give me the kiss of true love. 

I gently kissed Lily’s sweaty knee through her tights. “You’re very beautiful,” I thought at her. When she put a bite of sammich in her mouth without giving me any, I used body language to get her attention instead. I rested my head in her lap and shimmied my hips suggestively.

“Oscar! Be polite!” Mom squawked. She yanked the leash, pulling me away from my new-true love’s leg. 

But Lily thought my twerking was quite fetching. She leaned over to let me lick the salt from her face. With the kiss of true love, the spell was broken. My soulmate peeled back the bread on the second sammich, letting the turkey drop onto the ground as if by accident. I cleaned it up before Mom could scold her for making a mess. 

“Let’s go find some real food,” Lily announced.

“I thought you’d never ask,” I wagged, leading the way back to the car kennel.

I escorted Mom and Lily to a restaurant to complain over chicken fingers. The complaining was Mom’s reward for all that running, the chicken fingers were my reward for listening to her all over again, and Lily ordered chili. 

“I thought that the dunes would only be a small part of the race,” Mom whined. “I didn’t know that 80% of the course would be through deep sand!” 

Numbers are the only way Mom knows to tell other people how she feels. She never says, “It’s raining,” she says, “There’s a 90% chance of rain” to remind herself that there’s always a chance that the world will go back to how she thinks it should be. She says “Quiet! It’s 2 o’clock in the morning,” as if the number should make me extra sorry for saving her life when she’d rather sleep than hunt ghosts. 

“… And the course was long!” Mom went on. “Like really long! 25 kilometers is like…” her face squished as she tried to convert mental suffering into miles. “… like 15-something miles, and my watch said more than 17 and a half. That’s like… um… like 10% longer than it should have been.” Numbers are also how Mom tells right from wrong. The first person to make a number that everyone agrees with is supposed to be crowned Right. If Lily agreed with Mom’s numbers, perhaps it would erase the extra miles altogether. But all the day’s suffering would be for nothing if Mom’s numbers didn’t convince Lily. 

“And I only ran half as far as you did… less!” Mom looked at Lily’s face and nervously awaited her verdict.

“It was pretty long, wasn’t it?” Lily said to show that the numbers were right, but not necessarily Mom’s feelings. 

To my surprise, Mom nodded. “You’re much more polite about correcting Mom than the Witch is,” I told Lily, marveling at how Mom seemed to find letting go of her outrage soothing. “Do it again.”

“And what’s with only having 2 aid stations?” Mom blustered with slightly less force. “I can go 6 miles without water, but not when it takes 2 hours to cover the distance.”

“The 50K came through the aid station four times, but I visited five because I thought I lost my phone,” Lily recounted. 

The horror of losing the Witch lured Mom’s attention away from the numbers into real concern for Lily’s safety. “Oh no! What did you do?” 

“I noticed it was missing more than a mile from the aid station, so I ran all the way back, looking for it on the ground the whole way. When I got there, someone pointed out that it was in my pocket the whole time.”

“Your witch is a trickster, too?” I asked. “I bet you were real disappointed when you found out you hadn’t lost her after all. Aren’t witches awful?” 

“So wait, you ran an extra 2 or 3 miles, on top of the 31 miles it was meant to be, and on top of the 2 miles that weren’t supposed to be there?” Mom sputtered, trying to count Lily’s attitude in a way that made sense.

“Yes, it was a long day,” Lily said in a voice like it hadn’t really been such a long day after all. 

“Are you sure you don’t want a pitchfork and maybe to light someone on fire?” I asked supportively. “Don’t you think someone should pay for this?”

“I would have given up right then and there,” Mom said. “I was having a real pity party for those last few miles.”

“You weren’t partying,” I reminded her. “You were grumbling and bellyaching like every doom had been put there to make your life harder.”

Mom ignored me so as not to lose track of her rage. “And I didn’t have to start in the pouring rain like you.” 

“It was a beautiful course. I came for the scenery and the challenge, and I got both,” Lily said. “Sometimes things don’t work out perfectly. That’s life.” 

“Ah! That’s where you’re wrong,” I said, glad that I could share my life coaching skills. Lily seemed to think she was a dog. It was time somedog loved her enough to remind her how to behave like a human. “In our house, we get frustrated when life doesn’t go our way because we know that things could always be better. That’s called standards. Whenever you start to feel too good, remind yourself that you have standards and you’ll be back to normal in no time.”

“I would’ve lost my ever-loving dog doo and thrown a temper tantrum,” Mom said. “You can’t give people wrong information and send them off into the wilderness. What if they act on that bad information? Someone should pay for putting us in that situation.”

“You did throw a temper tantrum,” I reminded her. “But you held onto your ever-loving dog doo for several miles, remember?”

“Well,” Mom said, warming up for a goodbye. “We should probably…” 

“You’ve had a long day. Why don’t you at least stay the night?” Lily said. “There’s an extra bed in my hotel room.” 

Nothing makes Mom more anxious than a kind invitation. She ground her teeth, searching for an excuse. 

“It’s not just you,” I reassured Lily. “Changing plans makes her nervous, in case she has fun and it proves her plan wrong.”

“It’s a 15-hour drive to Death Valley,” Mom said eventually. “I’d like to knock out a few hours before bed tonight. It was nice to meet you.”

In a world crowded with so many interesting people, Mom must go to lengths to avoid the choking grip of friendship. Part of the reason she decided to drive such a long way from rainforest to desert was that a big drive makes for a good excuse to escape. 

It’s easy to count the hours between Oregon and Las Vegas to impress someone, but it’s more difficult to sit through them. I fell asleep as Oregon disappeared from the tail window. The trees had disappeared by the time I woke up again. Then the grass went away. The mountains came, turned white, and then bald until the only thing left outside the Wagon windows was dirt and bare rock. I was starting to think we were going to stay in the Wagon until the whole world disappeared when Mom suddenly perked up.

“I’ve always wanted to visit that place with the walking rocks,” she said. 

“The walking what?” I asked. “It sounded like you said rocks.” 

“There’s this dry lakebed where rocks move on their own. No one has ever seen it happen, but they leave grooves in the ground to show where they’ve been.” 

I imagined a scientist studying the lake floor with boulders charging toward him like a game of redlight greenlight. “That sounds dangerous. What if we get run over?”

“In pictures, none of them look any bigger than a basketball.” She cupped her paws awkwardly around the driving wheel to show how big a basketball was. “I think they did eventually figure out how they move; something about wind and rain. The only reason they didn’t figure it out sooner is probably because it’s so hard to get there.” 

“Where is it?” I asked, expecting somewhere imaginary like Narnia, Middle Earth, or Milwaukee.

Mom flapped her hand toward the naked mountains outside her window. “They’re right over there in Death Valley.” 

I imagined a rock rolling out of those mountains and myself down below, escaping with the aplomb of Indiana Bones. “That sounds like just the kind of adventure we’ve been looking for. Let’s go!”

“I looked it up before we left. Death Valley is a National Park. No dogs.” She looked around mischievously. “But this place doesn’t look too closely monitored, does it?” She held the Witch to her mouth and commanded, “Give me directions to Racetrack Playa.”

My tail twitched rebelliously. “But I thought Parks were forbidden.”

“The rule is that dogs aren’t allowed on trails, but they can go on roads! That means that we can visit so long as there’s a road that goes there. If we happen to take a few steps off the road for a good picture, well… Everyone gets a little lost sometimes.”

“Won’t we get vaporized or something if we step off the safety of the road?” 

“Listen, National Park rules are for 2 things: to protect the wildlife and to protect the Park Service from liability. The wildlife in Death Valley are things like lizards and beetles, not fuzzy, chasable, edible, or infectible critters. We won’t be outside the van for very long and I’ll keep you on leash. So that takes care of the wildlife.” 

“What about the lie-ability? Isn’t it sort of like a lie if we go somewhere we know we shouldn’t?” 

“Liability means they don’t want anyone to get hurt, but it’s not like there will be crowds of tourists all the way out there. You and I are experienced hikers and we’d be taking the same risks outside the Park as in it. Where’s the harm?” 

“In two miles, turn left,” the Witch butted in.

“Really?” Mom held the Witch on the driving wheel so she could read and drive at the same time. “Well I’ll be darned. It looks like we don’t even have to go through the main park entrance to get there.” 

“Turn left,” the Witch commanded. 

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