That afternoon, we drove away from the coast and over a mountain that blocked the gloom until Washington turned empty with nothing but sun in the sky, no hills on the ground, and hardly a tree to decorate it. Outside, the land was scrubbed of anything more interesting than dried grass and windmills. I drifted in and out of naps where I was the valiant Doggiexote, riding through the planes with Mom as my faithful sidekick.
It was night when the Witch led us off the road. When the Covered Wagon stopped and Mom let me out into the darkness, all I could see were shadows and stars. So many more stars than we have at home. The darkness smelled of trees, water, dirt, chipmunk pee, and all the smells that usually get lost under the human smells of soap, sweat, and cars.
And that staticky white noise was back.
“Mom, what’s that sound?” I asked. I wasn’t about to let her try to trick me into another river. Especially after What Didn’t-Happen Last Time.
“It must be a river,” Mom said in a sleepy voice. “This place is called Mad Gorge which means—"
“I know all about Mad George,” I told her. “I’ve listened to Hamilton. To prove I knew who I was talking about, I hummed a few bars as I pranced back to the Wagon. Bah-dah-dah DAT dah...
“Not Mad King George. A gorge is a ravine for a swift-moving river. We’ll see it in the morning. Come on. Go potty so we can go to bed.
“But I thought you learned your lesson about rivers,” I said, sniffing potty spots carefully to give her more time to think before her idea became a plan.
“We won’t be crossing, we’ll just be walking next to it the whole time. Think of it like a companion.”
"Oh good. George was the most fun of all those old timey guys. He seems like a good hang.” I couldn’t help humming the part I’d missed before under my breath. daah-dah dah dah dat-daah-dah ya-de-daaah daaaaaaaaaah....
“I promise, Spud. I’ll be more careful and won’t even think about unnecessary risks. But we’ll need practice if we want to learn to stay safe in all this nature.”
Morning came and filled the air with twittering birds, but I could still hear the droning static of the river behind their la-de-dahing.
“At least it’ll be flat,” Mom said as she rolled around in bed the way she does every time she changes her shorts. She looks like I do in white dirt, kicking her legs in the air and scooting her butt side to side, but without so much joy. “We’ll be able to run most of it, I bet.”
“Just as long as we don’t have to swim any of it,” I said.
Shorts on, Mom opened the door and lined up her shoes side-by-side on the ground outside. She looked toward where the static sound was coming from as she pulled on the laces. “I don’t think it’ll cross the river. If it does, I’m sure there’ll be some kind of bridge.” She looked at the trees and mountains that had appeared overnight. “Lewis and Clark must’ve come through this part of the country. Imagine when the whole world was like this.”
“The whole world is like this, Mom. Look around.”
“I suppose you’re right. But even all the way out here, there are still roads, electricity, even cell service sometimes.” She swung the packpack into place and hit a button on the keys. The Wagon beeped that it would wait here till we got back. “It really is astonishing that we managed to build all that in all this emptiness. When Lewis and Clark came through here two hundred years ago, they had to walk through places like this. Except when they took canoes.”
“They hiked in canoes?” I asked, following her down the trail toward where the noise was coming from.
She shifted to a lazy jog. “I suppose they must’ve carried the canoes sometimes. But can you imagine carrying a canoe over some of the mountains and canyons we’ve seen? Or all that empty land filled with nothing but gopher holes and ankle-turning rocks?”
I imagined myself wearing a canoe like a turtle shell on my back as I marched from one-horse town to one-horse town, barking at all the horses along the way. It sounded like fun, but I decided I didn’t need the canoe to do it. “Why didn’t they just ditch the canoe and walk the whole way?” I asked.
“Who knows. That’s what I would have done, but you know how boat people are. They’ll haul their boat hundreds of miles just to float in a little pond for a few hours.”
The trail reached the river and turned to join it on its journey. We trotted up the canyon as the river flowed down beside us. The water was quiet and polite beside us, but rumpled and frothy as a tantrum in the middle.
The farther we ran, the more the walls of the George hugged in around us. I didn’t like the way the river was hogging the space left in between. It crowded us politely at first, then insistently like someone pretending to be mannerly while they warm up to ask for a favor.
Suddenly, the water made its move. The line of the river bent in a spot where the George didn’t. Water bumped gently into the wall in front of us, making a sock-deep puddle that washed over the trail.
There was no escape. Even in the shallowest part, there were no rocks or logs to keep our paws dry, only pine needles and pond scum floating around the edges where the water bumped against the wall.
Mom stopped to study the soggy trail. The water was sock-deep in the shallowest part, with pine needles and pond scum floating around the edges where the water bumped against the wall. I took and drink and waited for Mom to realize it was time to turn back.
Instead, she grabbed a nobble on the canyon wall and carefully jammed the toes of her shoes into a dent in the rock. The wall that bulged out a little farther at the bottom, sort of like how the trunk of a tree spreads before it goes underground. If Mom hung onto the rock and placed her toes carefully, she could slither over the wet spot to the other side where the ground was dry again.
As soon as I figured out what she was doing, I copied her plan. I flew from speck to nobble, knocking Mom out of my way on the descent. I needed to keep my momentum to keep from falling in, and she was taking too long.
Mom landed heavily on the dry trail beside me. “Cheeses, Spud. You were supposed to go through the water. It’s only a couple of inches deep.”
“I didn’t want to get my shoes wet, just like you.”
“You don’t even wear shoes!"
“Maybe I should start.” I didn’t really understand why Mom wore shoes all the time. Something about her goofy, floppy feet getting stuck with sharp rocks and Legos. Mom wore special shoes for lots of things—slippers for inside the house, clippity-cloppity shoes for riding her bike, big shoes with claws on the bottom for walking on dirt, and shoes that couldn’t get dirty for work—but the shoes that I was most interested in were running shoes. I would need fast shoes to get away from all that water chasing me. Then again, Mom’s running shoes didn’t seem to be helping her move any faster.
“Catch me if you can!” I woofed and pranced away down the George to show how nimble I was, even without shoes.
I thought Mom was right behind me. I expected her to come around the next bend with fists on hips, complaining about me leaving her behind like her being slow was my fault. But she was taking too long. I turned to go back for her, but then an intriguing soggy smell caught my nose.
I followed the swamp scent to a spot where the river coiled gently through a cluster of trees. In most of the George, the river stayed on one side of a line and the land stayed on the other, but here, the water and mud sort of faded together so that it was hard to tell where the water stopped and the forest began.
The water reminded me that all this exploring was making me thirsty. I stepped closer and the mud gently sucked on my paws and splooged between my toes. Water bathed the tops of my paws in pond scum. I prefer my water fresh from the puddle, but I don’t like the taste of pond scum, so I looked around for a better drinking spot.
A little ways away, there was a kind of step down from the trail to a tiny beach that ended in clear, sparkling water. The step was only a little higher than the inside walls of a toilet bowl and the beach no more than a strip of mud and pine needles wide enough to hold my front paws as I leaned out for a drink.
I craned my neck toward the fresh water and stepped down.
SPLASH!
It was a trap! The pine needles and pond scum had looked like solid ground from above, but that was just a trick of the eye. All those twigs, pine needles, and other bits of forest floated on top of the water like a picnic blanket stretched over a deep hole in a cartoon trap. As soon as my paw came down, the illusion broke and I was diving head-first into the river.
The pool among the tree roots was deeper than it looked, too, with enough water to swallow a dog whole, and even more below to flush him out to sea.
Water went in my nose and in my ears. I thrashed around in the scum and wet, but it was hard to find the air now that my powerful stroke was stirring up all the pond scum and pine needles. I groped at the water, knocking sticks out of my way. I wasn’t even sure which way I’d come from, so I wriggled this way and that, figuring the air had to be around here somewhere.
The more I searched for air, the more important it felt to find it. There was an urgent feeling in my chest and a jumpy feeling in my throat that told me to hurry up or I’d be hoovering pond scum whether I liked it or not.
Finally, when I thought my chest would burst, my head broke through. The sucking water hadn’t taken me far, but the dirt lip I’d fallen from might as well have been the Grand Canyon. I reached out to grab it, but my toenails just pulled a clod of mud back into the river. I looked around for Mom to pull me out, but she was nowhere to be seen.
It took a few tries before I could catch the edge. When I did, I crawled out by my elbows and claws, digging my back paws into the muddy wall for a better grip. Rather than lifting me up, the underwater dirt just sloughed away under my scrambling claws. Bit by bit, I dragged myself back onto the bank—on my belly at first, then standing on legs still wobbly from the ground’s betrayal. Water streamed off of my belly and chin, turning the dirt under my paws to mud.
“There you are!” Mom came around the bend far too late for the witty comeback I’d been planning before my world got turned upside-down. Now I just wanted her to pat me and tell me that dogs only fell into rivers in her imagination.
“Mom, you were right! The wilder-ness is full of traps!” I ran toward her without even bothering to shake off the river first. As long as I didn’t have to bear the imaginary adventure by myself. “I’m sorry I left you behind.”
“What happened? Did you go swimming?” She gave me a pat that was more like a wringing, but I didn’t care. I wanted Mom to pet me as hard as she could. “Sheesh, Spud. I’m glad you’re okay. What the hell were you thinking swimming in THAT?” She waved at the Mad River. “Don’t do it again. You could drown.”
“I know,” I shivered off a layer of river onto Mom’s legs. “Wolves are dangerous. Rivers are dangerous. Spaghetti monsters are dangerous. Clouds are dangerous. And letting someone else feed the Wagon is dangerous. I believe you about all of it! Can we go now?”
“Go? We just got here.” Mom pointed to the trail ahead with her chin. “There’s nothing wrong with the trail. Let’s keep going.”
I stood in my own drip-puddle and watched her go. Was it all a prank to get back at me for leaving her yesterday? How come we had to turn around for something imaginary that Mom was scared of when she didn’t even notice when her own nightmare came true?
Then again, this whole trip started with Mom being spooked by a spaghetti monster. We’d turned back, and that was when the Wagon blew a fuse and I needed the biggest bath of my life. We’d turned around in Oregon when Mom wasn’t ready to leave California and she’d paid the heavy penalty of two perfectly-ripe avocados for her mistake. We’d turned back while trying to find the way to Kentucky on the Oregon Trail, and disaster struck at the very next gas station. Every time we turned our backs on adventure, something bad happened.
But now, instead of getting spooked by the river reaching up and pulling me in, Mom was marching on. I shook the last of the heebies out of my spine and the jeebies out of my fur and trotted after her.
This time, when I came around the bend, the river had gotten Mom.
She hadn’t fallen in like me. Instead, the river had jumped its banks to stop her in her tracks. It rushed through trees as easily as the bars on a storm drain, bumping off the canyon wall as if to borrow momentum for wherever it was off to next. The whole George ahead was filled with a fuming, frothing doiley of water rushing past the last bit of dry land Mom’s shoes could stand on.
“Well that’s that, I guess.” Mom shrugged.
“What’s that, you guess?” I asked, afraid she was going to make me swim again.
“The end of the line. We might as well mosey along.” She turned and was already planning our next move before she took her first step.“I’ve never been to Idaho, so maybe we could stop there on our way to Montana.”
“What’s in Idaho?” I asked.
“I don’t know. It’s one of those I-states, so it’s probably flat and boring. There must be a lot of farmland because all that Idaho is known for is...”
“...the Bear Lake Monster!” I guessed.
“...potatoes,” Mom said at the same time. She looked at me. “What did you say?”
“Did you say potatoes? Why, I’m the most stupendous potato beast there is!” I lifted my chin in the proud way a king might. “They’re gonna love me in Idaho.”