Piddle of nowhere

She looked back at the house. There were still no signs of movement in the dark windows, so Mom, poop juice cup, and I all took our positions and the Wagon rolled silently away.

As the Wagon crept through the deserted neighborhood, Mom kept her eyes on the side of the road as if she were looking for a place to finish our short night’s sleep. Suddenly, the Wagon turned so sharply that it rolled me hard into the wall. When I righted myself and looked out the window, we were in a crowded Starbucks car kennel. The Wagon excused itself as it pushed around the line of waiting cars to one of the empty parking spots. Mom dismounted in such a hurry that she forgot to tell me she’d be right back. 

She ran to the door and yanked the handle. The door didn’t open, but a face appeared on the other side. It pointed to a piece of paper on the door and then pointed to the line of cars. 

Mom balled her paws in front of her waist and squeezed her knees together in sign language for it’s an emergency, but the troll behind the glass just closed her eyes, shook her head, and sent Mom back to me.

“There's a steaming-hot cup of poop juice for you right here,” I said when she got back. 

“Clawed Janet smother shucking pun and a stitch! Another closed bathroom,” Mom didn’t-quite-yell as she threw herself into the driving chair. “How dare they! What else is Starbucks there for?” 

“There was a bathroom at Castle Charming,” I reminded her. 

“Yeah, but I don’t want to soil their bathroom. They were so kind to us.”

“What about the people in Starbucks? Aren’t they hospitable and kind?” 

“Starbucks is practically a public utility. Locking the bathrooms is… is… it’s a human rights violation! You can’t take away public infrastructure in the middle of a crisis. Where are we supposed to wash our hands, huh?”

“You can always use the dog bathroom,” I suggested.

“Not in the middle of a city. Especially Salt Lake, of all places.”

“Why? People in Salt Lake City don’t go potty?” 

“There are people in Utah that wear full-body underwear so that not even God can see their bum. We’re gonna have to find some woods to hide in.”

Mom bashed urgently on the Witch’s screen. “Turn back toward Castle Charming,” the Witch ordered. “You will arrive in seven minutes.”

“What?” Mom stole a look at the screen and her face burst open with surprise. “It’s a miracle!” 

“Don’t tell me!” I wagged. “We’re going back to Castle Charming?”

“No. I picked out a trail in Salt Lake City months ago, just in case we ever found ourselves here without a plan. Apparently I picked somewhere less than a mile from the Charming house, so I won’t have to hold it halfway across Utah. What are the odds?”

Sometimes the whole, wide world turns out to be a pretty small place after all.

The Wagon squeezed back through the line of cars and sprinted onto the road with a squeal. The same houses we’d crept past a few minutes before now blurred as we vroomed by. Just before Castle Charming came back into view, the Witch directed us onto a side road that snuck behind the houses and quickly got lost in the trees. Mom squirmed in the driving chair, urging the road to be a little shorter or a little wider, just so she could stop the Wagon and duck behind a tree. Finally, the pavement spread into a tiny car kennel. On the far side, the road shed its pavement and continued naked up the mountain.

Dogs go potty in words, leaving public messages for any passing creature to enjoy, but Mom doesn’t like to pee where someone can see. Humans go potty like punctuation, as if its only meaning is a moment of privacy between important things. 

We dismounted in a hurry and Mom rushed me down the wide dirt track without giving me a chance to sniff anything. Every few steps, she looked over her shoulder like someone about to do something sneaky. When we were out of sight of the car kennel, Mom pulled me to the side of the trail and unhooked her belt.

She was about to execute the toilet-paper-free maneuver that I’d taught her for self-reliance, when suddenly a truck came tearing around the corner, splattering a fanfare of mud onto anyone squatting beside the road.

Mom barely had time to reach for her pants with one paw and my collar with the other. At the very last moment she stood up, pulling her pants into place and me into her pee puddle so I wouldn’t get squashed. We stood beside the road like we were made of wood, and our eyes found the eyes of the man inside the truck.

Now we had another problem. The way that you’re supposed to show that you’re friendly in the woods is to wave at everyone you see. The wave says, I see you, and even if I have a gun, I know that you’re not a bear. The closer the truck got, the weirder it was that Mom was looking at the driver’s eyes and not waving to him or any of the big grins and small hands waving from the back seat. 

Mom had a choice to make: she could put either me or her pants in danger by letting go, or she could let the man in the truck think she was rude. There was really only one choice she could make. 

Mom let go of her pants and flashed a palm to Joe White and the seven dwarves. She caught her pants right above her knees and pulled them up again as the truck passed. 

“Don’t worry, I think you fooled them,” I whispered. 

Mom flattened her eyes and mouth into lines of embarrassment. “They weren’t fooled.” 

“How do you know?” 

“Because they were laughing.”

Mom buckled up her pants and led me back to the Wagon. Without her pulling on the leash, I had more time to look around. The mountain above us was so steep that I had to twist my head at an uncomfortable angle to see where the clouds swallowed the peak. 

Mom eyed the piles of white dirt higher up the slope with suspicion. “There’s an awful lot of snow,” she said. “Maybe we should find somewhere else to run. I bet the Salt Flats would be pretty cool.”

The Salt Flats were a patch of Utah where the earth wouldn’t load and the ground stayed so blank that you could see the grid lines through it, just like on the Witch’s mapps. Any time we drove through the Salt Flats, Mom timed it so we would pass through in the daytime. She liked to take pictures of me on that blank background where there was nothing to distract from my glamor. I’d sniffed the salty flatness around the car kennel, but I’d never properly explored its vacant interior.

“Won’t we get lost with no trails or roads?” I asked. 

“How could we get lost? The rest stop is literally the only thing you can see besides the road.”

Mom asked the Witch to point the way, and we remounted the Wagon. As we rolled toward the exit, I thought I saw something wooly moving between the only two pickup trucks in the car kennel. 

The whatever-it-was hid between the butts of the trucks, but I could see its steamy breath drifting up from its hiding spot. As the Wagon approached, I leaned in for a better view. When Mom’s window was even with the gap, the Wagon stopped. Two nomadic hill people wrapped in blanket-capes sat on beach chairs holding steaming cups of poop juice under their noses. When they felt the Wagon stop, they both froze.

I butted Mom out of the way and barked, “No thank you!” as the window rolled down in front of me.

“Back it up!” Mom put her arm across my chest and swept me into the bedroom.

“No! Mom!” I barked furiously. “Social distancing! Stranger danger!” If it wasn’t enough to snap Mom out of her recklessness, at least I scared the nomads into beating a hasty retreat. They stood up and took a step back.

Mom waved the shut-up paw in my face. I closed my mouth and squinted to inspect the strangers. Their messy head fur and the dull blush of someone who uses yesterday’s dirt as sunscreen told me that they weren’t from here. People in Salt Lake City positively sparkle, and there was no toothpaste-ad smile on these faces when they stopped talking. They looked at us with the same suspicion that Mom wears around strangers. 

“Remember,” I coached at top volume into Mom’s ear, “don’t bark at strangers. Judge them silently from far away.” 

“Do you guys know if the trail is clear?” Mom barked through the window. 

“The trail to Not the Peak You’re Going To?” the lady-one asked. 

Mom forgot the name of the peak we were going to. “Um… yeah!” 

The wooly stranger’s sidekick gave Mom a hard look up and down, then studied the sky over his other shoulder to show what he thought of us. 

“I hiked up there yesterday,” the Danger Stranger said. “The snow’s still deep and you have to take it slow, but you can get there.” 

Mom sized up the Danger Stranger as the wheels in her head turned. The Stranger was about Mom’s size, but rounder and jollier. That meant that if Mom started hiking, she would have to do at least as much as this tramp did, no matter what. 

“We’ve been hiking in the snow for the past several days, and frankly I’m sick of it,” Mom said, which was sort of like two truths and a lie. It’s true that we had been hiking in the white dirt and that Mom had lost her patience with it before the first step, but that was days ago. And who knew if Utah white dirt was the same as the stuff we’d rolled in back in South Dogkota. 

“We’ll come back in a few months,” Mom announced, as if the Stranger in the blanket-poncho were taking reservations. Her finger crawled to the button that closes conversations and the window.

“You should take The Trail You Were Going to Anyway,” the Danger Stranger said. “It’s clear all the way to the top.”

Mom’s finger paused over the hangup button. “I’ve heard that trail is dangerous,” she said to give herself an excuse to drive away with dignity if she chickened out. “Is it, like, really dangerous? Or dangerous like leaving my house is dangerous?” 

All the humans laughed nervously. The two strangers took another step backward and Mom pulled her face back inside the Wagon walls. 

The Danger Stranger thought for a moment. “There’s one spot where there was a rockslide, but… well… it’s hiking.” 

“Thanks! Be safe out there!” Mom shouted through the closing gap in the window.

The strangers’ waves wished us safety back. 

“But Mom, what if a rock falls on your head?” I asked. “What if you need to go to the hospital, and someone can’t have boogeyvirus and dies because you have a rock for a head?”

“Don’t we always try to stay out of the hospital?” She pushed the all done lever behind the driving wheel. “Nature is dangerous. Life is dangerous. It’s not like we go out on every hike thinking, I sure am glad that there are search & rescue and medevac teams out there, because this cliff looks dangerous and I’ll probably fall off.” 

“Yeah, but what if you do? Need to go to the vet, I mean. And someone with boogeyvirus has nowhere to lie down because you’re in their bed like Goldilocks?”

“If someone needs help, they should get the best help available, no matter who else is in the hospital that day. Sure, we have a responsibility not to put someone else at a risk they didn’t sign up for, but we can’t take responsibility for all the danger in the world. Hiking may be dangerous, but we’re the only ones we put at risk by doing it. We can’t stop living our lives just so someone else can live theirs.”

“Isn’t that why everyone is staying home, though? People stopping their lives so that other people can live theirs?” 

She made a disgusted noise in her throat. “No. Staying home is about the damned hospital beds so everyone doesn’t get sick at once. We’re just sheltering in place while we wait for my turn to roll the dice.” 

So that’s why Mom was so nervous about breaking the rules all of a sudden; she was afraid that someone would catch her rudely cutting in line at the hospital. As long as she didn’t get sick, nobody could accuse her of not waiting her turn. But the boogeyvirus wasn’t only in California anymore. If it had caught up to our travel speed, there was nowhere to hide. 

“But danger finds us all the time,” I said. “I thought you knew the commands to keep us safe.” 

“It hasn’t gotten us yet, has it? And we learn from it, don’t we?” She wriggled out of her jeans and pulled a pair of running pants out of the wad of clothes stashed on the copilot’s chair. “We turn around all the time when things seem dangerous, even though we could probably figure out how to get through safely. Life is a game of risks and rewards. Most rounds you win, but sometimes you draw a crappy hand. You’re bound to have a few unlucky accidents in a lifetime. If you stop your life to avoid every risky thing, you’ll miss the best parts. At least in nature you can usually see the danger coming.”

I shuddered at the thought of a danger Mom couldn’t stop.

Mom’s eyes caught mine in the mirror and softened. “How about we pick a safe word, just in case?”

“What’s that? A magic spell to keep us safe?”

“Sorta. If something gets too risky or scary, you say the magic word and everything stops. Okay?” 

I stopped shivering and let my body get a tiny bit bigger. “Okay.”

“So what’s our safe word? It’s got to be something that you wouldn’t say normally so that no one gets confused.”

“How about supercalifragilisticexpialidocious?”

“That’s a bit of a mouthful. How about, I’m scared?”

“I would never say that.” 

“Then it’s settled.” She nodded and reached for the packpack. 

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