Outlawed
- Oscar the Pooch
- May 12
- 9 min read
Updated: May 18
“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.
Beside the road, a teepee-shaped sign guarded a dusty car-trail into the desert. The Wagon didn’t click, or even slow down. The car-trail zipped through the windows front to back.
“In one thousand feet, make a U-turn,” the Witch scolded. Mom hit the shut up button.
I watched the teepee-sign shrink in the back window. “You were supposed to turn. Didn’t you hear her tell you to turn?”
“Do you know what that sign said?” Mom tested.
Dogs can’t read, so she was asking me to tell her something she wanted to hear. “Does it say, Dogs allowed this week only?”
“It said the road was blocked 22 miles ahead.”
I wasn’t about to give up on my excuse to get out of the Wagon that easily. “That means we’d have twenny-two miles to figure out what to do next.”
“It also said NO ACCESS TO DEATH VALLEY.”
“Excellent! That plays right into our plan. If anyone gets mad at us for sneaking in, we can blame the sign that told us we weren’t going to Death Valley!”
“You can’t close nature.” Mom wagged her head like it was silly to even try. “It just means that the road is so poorly maintained that it’s easier to put up a sign than raise the money to fix it, which could take years.”
“It could be a decoy. Maybe they knew there was a brave dog coming who wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
“It’s a public road, so it’s not like they’re going to lock you up just for being there,” Mom said, like the solution to one problem was just a warmup to an even bigger problem. “But you can’t count on anyone to come out there and rescue you if you get in trouble.”
The Wagon pulled to a stop across the beginnings of a dirt road beside the highway. It wasn’t really a road, since a gate blocked its path a few steps from the copilot’s window.
“Are we there?” I smooshed my nose against the window and searched for clues about the adventure to come.
“No, I just need to think.” Mom never thinks for herself, so she called on the Witch for help.
“Mom! Mom! Lookit the size of the chain on that gate! Do you think it’s locked so the rocks don’t get out? Hey, are you sure this is a good place to stop?”
“I just want to check something before cell service drops out again.”
“Won’t someone wonder what we’re doing, and be mad when they find out that we’re here for no reason?”
“I haven’t seen any NO STOPPING signs,” Mom said without taking her eyes off the Witch’s screen to check. “I’m out of the road and it doesn’t seem like anyone’s using that gate, so I don’t think we’re breaking any rules. I doubt anyone will even notice.”
“Phew. I thought so. So how long is the hike to the walking rocks?”
“The drive takes 4 hours from here, and it’s… 60 miles long!” the Witch said through Mom’s mouth. Mom translated, “The road must be really gnarly. That’s an average of 15 miles per hour! The van would never make it.”
“High clearance and four-wheel drive are a must,” the Witch added smugly.
“We don’t have either of those.” Mom sagged so hopelessly in the driving chair that she looked like she never planned to get up again.
“We have four wheels,” I reminded her. “What if we just walked in? I’m a very strong dog, remember? I ran the world’s longest twenny-five kay yesterday.”
“It’s much too long to run. What if we got stuck 50 miles from the nearest road? It says here there’s no cell service along the way.”
You don’t usually see whales in the desert, but just then a killer whale breached the hill behind us. It stopped across the driveway with two wheels still perched rakishly on the road, flashing the lights on its back to call even more attention to itself. I watched Mom’s eyes in the mirror as the whale flapped a fin and a Law climbed out of its finpit. Mom rolled her eyes and rolled down the window.
The Law paused to check out the Wagon’s butt. He clutched at a big button on his breast, tucked his chin, and whispered into it. It let out a squawk.
“Don’t worry, Mom. I’ve got this one,” I whispered.
When the Law was finished preening, he strutted toward the cockpit, checking himself out in all the windows along the way. His shirt filled Mom’s window and my hackles prickled.
“Is everything okay?” the Law asked.
“I WAS ON THE LEASH!” I barked at the top of my lungs.
Mom covered the ear closest to me and flinched. “Oh yeah, just fine. I’m trying to decide whether to stop in Death Valley to camp or carry on all the way to Las Vegas. I stopped here because there’s cell service.”
Dog doo! That sounded like something a guilty person might say.
Mom tested his bluff. “Have I done something wrong?”
“Oh, no. Nothing wrong.” He leaned back on his heels to check himself out in the back window. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
“Yup. Just fine,” Mom reassured him. Then, remembering that an excuse is never finished until you say when you plan to move along, she added, “I was just looking at the different routes into Death Valley.”
“The turn-off is about twenty miles up the road that way,” the Law waved in the direction we were all facing.
A man-dog must never accept directions, especially if he didn’t ask for them. “We know where it is,” I barked. “We already know about the secret passageway and everything, so buzz off.”
“Ow!” Mom held her my-side ear again and scowled. “Get in the back, Spud. You’re not helping.”
Once he saw that Mom was listening again, the Law continued, “… and then you’re going to make a left.”
“Great. Thank you. But I’m okay parked here, right?” Mom made her face do a smile. “Just until I have my route programmed into the GPS?”
“There’s almost no cell service in the Valley,” he said, leaving the little lady part silent.
“Yes, I know. And is it okay if I sit here, just while I wait for my offline maps to load?”
“Yup. I’m just making sure you’re okay.”
I poked my head over Mom’s shoulder. “You already said that!”
Mom grabbed my face and shoved it behind the driving chair again.
The Law looked the Wagon up and down nosily while Mom and I argued. He inspected the camera periscope and the dish-sized mirror on the Wagon’s backside. “So what’s up with the car? Are you filming something?”
“It came that way,” Mom explained. “It’s just an old Postal Service van I got on Craigslist so I could camp in the back.” She remembered that it’s illegal to be poor in some places, so she added, “… when I’m on vacation. Like today.”
“Oh, cool,” he said, still not going away.
“So… if I stay here, is that cool?” Mom asked again. “I’ll be gone in like 15 minutes. As soon as the maps, y’know, finish downloading.”
“Oh yeah. I was just checking to make sure you were okay.” The Law waited for Mom to ask him to rescue her. When she didn’t, he said, “I’ll let dispatch know you’re okay.”
“Thanks.” Mom eyed the Witch on the copilot’s chair but remembered her manners. She kept her hands on the driving wheel until the Law crawled back into the whale’s finpit and they swam away.
The Witch went back to singing and Mom went back to poking. The Witch hadn’t even finished a whole song when another killer whale prowled past. It made a tight turn and beached itself in the same place as the last Law-mobile. Mom rolled her eyes again, rolled down her window again, and waved again.
This time, two Laws got out and stood one on each side of the Wagon.
“I was WEARING a LEASH!” I bellowed even louder to be sure they could hear me.
“Hi.” Mom spoke first to establish dominance. “I just spoke to your colleague a few minutes ago. Am I in anybody’s way?”
“Nope, we just wanted to make sure you weren’t in trouble,” the New Law said.
The Other Law checked his hair in the copilot’s window.
“I don’t want to be any bother,” Mom promised. “Am I in trouble?”
As Mom explained all over again about Death Valley, and Witch service, and where we were going, and why the Covered Wagon looked that way, I barked all the important parts with her for emphasis.
“Working PERSON!” I screeched.
“A WOMAN who doesn’t need directions!” I bellowed.
“MailMAN’s CAMERA!” I screamed.
“It’s not hooked up to a TV!” I shouted.
“Thank you for the directions,” Mom said when the interrogation was over. “I think I can find it without the GPS now. I guess I’ll just be moving along, then.”
The Other Law bragged into his shirt about bravely rescuing a lost tourist as they walked back to the whale. Mom waited until the fins thumped before waking the Wagon.
“What was all that barking about?” she asked as the Wagon led the whale back onto the highway.
“Person, woman, man, camera, TV,” I said. “Remember that magic password any time someone thinks you’re a dummy. It instantly shows people you know what you’re talking about.”
“What, like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious? You do know that song is about how people who use big words are full of crap, don’t you?”
“You’ll see.”
But Mom wasn’t about to accept that the walking rocks were out of reach just because it was dangerous, a really bad idea, and the Law had already investigated us twice for even thinking about it. Her eyes kept slipping off the road toward the miles of desert between us and the walking rocks. “The part that gets me is that more people are hurt every year in Parks where Rangers are nearby than in all the other public wilderness lands combined.”
“Defund the Rangers!” I agreed. To hear most humans talk about it, the wilder-ness is a dark and frightening place, but really it’s just what’s left over outside civilization where no one gets to make rules and anything can happen.
“What a strange thing to say. We can’t get rid of law enforcement or we’d descend into chaos. Rules are the only way to keep everyone safe when you can’t trust their judgment. You’ve got to protect nature from people, and people from themselves.”
I tried to picture the Law’s pestering as affection. “Nah, some people just think the world is their own territory and make it their mission in life to keep everyone else off the furniture. What kind of freak uses rules as their love language?”
“The Park Service, the EPA, people with clipboards outside the supermarket…” Mom sighed. “They’re just trying to preserve nature. Sometimes the best way to protect something is to keep your distance.”
“I see.” I paused thoughtfully and waited for the ideas to come together. The Law couldn’t get enough of us, and yet we weren’t in trouble. No matter how many times Mom told them we were okay, they only became more interested. “So that’s why the Law looks for people who aren’t in trouble,” I solved. “Because they’re staying away from anyone who’s really in danger. To protect them.”
Mom looked longingly at the desert slipping past the windows faster than she could store it in memory. “Life is so much simpler in the wilderness where there’s no responsibility and you only have to look out for yourself.” She sighed. “The problem is that Park rules give people the illusion of security. If there’s someone to enforce the rules, that must also mean there’ll be someone to help when they take dumb risks. It ain’t Disneyland out there, folks. You can’t count on anyone to come and rescue you.”
Humans live under a magical spell that makes them the most powerful of all beasts, strong enough to defeat any danger. They can conjure enchanted screens that become any toy they want to play with and magical travel machines to take them anywhere they want to go. They call the spell civilization and use its magical powers to fill their food fortresses with treats and build great buildings to keep them warm, protect them from the rain, and give them light at night.
To keep the spell alive, everyone must say or do the same thing at the same time, like a worldwide game of Simon says. They create rules to keep it going, but it takes a lot of work to keep everyone playing by the rules. So Simons print their rules on signs to recruit people to play with them. They put their rules on the internet so witches will tell far-away Simons all about their accomplishments. They write them on papers and make you paw-tograph them to remember forever the time you played by the rules together. Professional rulers even hire the Law to act as their Simon in case anyone misses the signs, and papers, and witch warnings.
Most people spend so much time in civilization that they forget it’s all in their imaginations and they can step out of it at any time. If there were no civilization at all, wildness would just be a fact of life, but the wild feels wilder right after you’ve broken the spell. That’s why they call it the wilder-ness; because it’s both a place and a way of being.
I nudged Mom’s elbow. “Let’s make a break for it.”
“I’m stubborn, but I’m not stupid,” Mom said, proving that she couldn’t see the future as well as she thought. “It’s not worth the risk of needing to call for help. Let’s push on toward Vegas so we’ll have time to do something fun tomorrow.”
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
