The call of the mild
- Oscar the Pooch
- Nov 24, 2025
- 7 min read
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. The best way to see a thing is to smell it, and you can’t smell it unless you’re practically on top of it.”
“I don’t mean seeing with your eyes. Until you know how it’s going to end, you’re constantly collecting clues about what kind of story you’re in. It’s hard to appreciate an experience while you’re having it because you’re too absorbed and distracted by what’s going on around you.”
“The part where you don’t know how it’s going to end is the funnest part of any story,” I agreed.
“Yeah, but even if it turns into a nursery rhyme with meaningless threats and a happy ending, you’re still picking up hints of danger and suspense, just in case. It’s only when you get home, put all the pieces together, and throw out the ones that don’t fit that you find out what kind of story it was, and whether the anxiety was foreshadowing or just a red herring.”
“Wait, you mean you relive our adventures after they’re over?”
“Yeah. Memories are why we come out here. It certainly isn’t for comfort.”
“Maybe the boogeyvirus will turn out to be an epic story that we love to tell when it’s all over,” I suggested. “When you share my pictures from this trip, no one will see any of the wind or boogeyvirus swirling around, and from far away it will all look like a grand adventure.”
“Maybe,” she said like a goodbye. She did an about-face without announcing it and walked stiffly away like she does when she’s determined to be alone, no matter who else is around.
Her head never lifted to check that I was following, so I called, “I’m coming!” and knocked her out of the way as I rumbled like a gutterball back toward the Wagon.
Now that the wind was to my nose, I caught the scent of a flying monkey. I followed it, leaving Mom alone inside her head. I ran until Mom screamed for me not to leave her here alone. As soon as she scuttled back into sight, I took off after the monkey again. She’d be too proud to be angry once I caught him red-pawed trying to scoop up a horse.
The valley ended before I caught that rascal. The clouds fled back to the hunking mountaintop the moment I popped out of the canyon, and the sun smiled like I’d stepped into a scene from a different movie. I rolled in the scratchy grass, enjoying the feeling of sun on my belly until Mom popped out behind me and unlocked The Wagon.
Slower than a sundial, the Wagon made a turn with a thousand spurs to point itself back toward Winnemucca¹¹. It groaned and squealed, lurched and heaved over the bushes and rocks until we were back at the gate. Once Mom had tied the gate locked behind us, she pulled out the Witch for a meeting.
“Looking for more trails in the Outback of Nevada?” I asked.
“I just want to check one thing…” She ordered the Wagon onto the highway in the wrong direction from Winnemucca¹², or California beyond.
¹² Twelve Winnemuccas!
As we rolled through the Outback, I watched through the front window for the one thing that Mom needed to check, but all I found was a whole lotta nothing. Finally, I spotted another sign marking another car trail. Except this time with no gate.
“What does it say?” I asked.
“Horse Canyon,” Mom said in a flat voice like she was too tired to say more.
“Oh good! The horse came home after all. I knew we’d find a happy ending.”
The Wagon rolled over the cattle rattle and onto the glassy-smooth dirt road. It turned in a wide circle around the roomy, hard-packed dirt of the car kennel.
Mom looked bewildered. “We just turned too soon. If I’d just been more patient…” she said like a dog trying to reason out something beyond his understanding. She looked up for answers, but the hills just shrugged against the sky.
“This is nice.” I sucked a satisfying lungful of wind through my nose. “Should we stay another night here?”
“Nah, let’s just get somewhere safe. I’ve had the heebie jeebies all day with those clouds and the wind. Every time I open the door, I’m afraid I won’t be strong enough to pull it shut again. It feels like something out of a movie, don’t you think?” she asked, as if movies weren’t usually about real life.
“I thought that was the point. Not to get shut in, I mean.”
From the way she didn’t answer, I couldn’t tell whether she’d heard me or not.
We continued our sprint westward through Nevada’s furrowed brow, where the land rolls through one unremarkable hill and forgotten valley after another. The hunerds of miles of slow-rolling earth lulled me into a trance of deep thoughts. It wouldn’t be long now before we were back in My Hometown at the End of the World.
I liked living at the End of the World before we left. It made me feel like a king to stand in the dog bathroom behind the Stuck House and watch the last mile of a whole continent fall into the ocean. Now that going home meant being trapped in the Stuck House for who-knew-how-long, the End of the World felt more like a dead end than the leading edge of something.
It wasn’t just the stuck routine that made me not want our adventure to end. In the time we’d been away, humans had gone from a cuddlicious bouquet of human-mutts to a cesspuddle of plague and suspicion. It was as if the boogeyvirus cast a spell that turned the whole world into grumpy, territorial cats. As long as we lived in the Wagon, I wouldn’t have to see what the boogeyvirus had done to My Hometown.
The Witch, who enjoyed nothing more than making trouble, was in awe. She didn’t even have to come up with her own imaginary threats anymore with so many nasty words from real people to report on. Every day, she gleefully repeated what our Friends said about how leaving a stuck house was murder, or how everyone who didn’t mind their own beeswax deserved what they got. Mom, who practically lived on the internet, was afraid to say anything at all, lest our Friends find out where we were and say those nasty things to her.
But we couldn’t hide in the desert forever. We needed to come home to report to my new business posting, and there was nowhere else to turn. There weren’t even trails in the empty forehead of Nevada, and California was closing in fast.
“Where should we go tomorrow?” I asked Mom that night as she swiped at the Witch.
“I don’t know. Northern Nevada doesn’t have much going for it and it’s too early in the season to hike in the Sierras. By the time we get below the snow line around Auburn, it’ll be too densely settled and all the trails will probably be closed.”
“How do you know they’ll be closed? We haven’t even checked yet.”
“It’s California. The state that never met a petty rule they didn’t enforce.” Mom used to see rules as a fun puzzle, but now there was only surrender in her voice. “Maybe if we go somewhere far outside the Bay Area…”
“But where can you find a place as lawless as Wyoming inside California?” I said in despair.
“Here’s a trail in Humboldt County!” Mom sat up taller than she had in days. “It goes along the coast.”
“I thought you said they closed all the beaches. Are you sure this isn’t another one of the Witch’s traps?”
“It’s called the Lost Coast. That sounds remote, doesn’t it?”
“If it’s lost, how are we going to find it?”
“Good point. I guess the coast is pretty hard to miss.” Mom got a little floppier. “But it’s Humboldt. The county’s entire economy has been based on growing illegal weed since the 70s. How well are Humboldt cops really going to monitor the trails?”
I never could understand people’s obsession with making rules against plants. Some people get their kicks from executing any plant that grows where they think it doesn’t belong. I saw a documentary once where the Law dressed as ninjas and swarmed into the woods from land and sky just to weed the forest. They burned the outlaw plants like witches when they were done, just to prove that they weren’t messing around. What did that plant ever do to them? It seemed extra silly to be weeding in the forest, especially if you called in the Law to do it.
“Isn’t Bumbolt where the people in that movie got murdered for sticking their noses where they didn’t belong?” I asked.
Mom’s lips bunched on one side of her mouth as she thought. “I’m pretty sure that’s less of a problem now that it’s legal. It can’t hurt to check. Where else are we going to go?”
When people think of California, they think about the beaches on the left and the mountains on the right. They know about the desert in the south and the City in what they call The North. What they don’t know about California is that the part called north is really the middle. There is a whole other half of California above the elbow that hardly anyone knows about. It’s filled with bundles of mountains you’ve never heard of, lakes shaped like strangers’ birthmarks, giant trees and dwarfed towns. A place that no one knew about seemed like the safest place for referees who weren’t ready to face unreality.
Usually I get a thrill when I see the Sierras crushing together in the front window, but this time I got a funny emptiness in my tummy when the ground started to rumple and turn white.
“Welcome to California,” the Witch said. Where you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave, her tone added.
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
