Wiener takes all

“A crisis is no time for a vacation!” Her paws balled up and her back got a little taller. “The virus is gonna blow over in a few months, and then what? “A few months? Who can wait that long?” I howled. “This isn’t America anymore!” I was starting to enjoy my new catchphrase. 

“This isn’t just happening in America, Spud. It’s all over the world. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t have to be like this. People get stuck in thinking there’s only one answer to a problem, so they give up when their first answer stops working. Take the camping fees: most people don’t even carry cash anymore. Maybe instead of not collecting the envelopes, they could see it as an opportunity to join the 21st century and take credit cards.” Her lips curled back like she was ready to bite. “Or take the bathrooms: they’ve always been gross and stinky, so hand sanitizer would be an improvement, even if lives didn’t depend on hand-washing. As long as we’re hanging on to the old ways of thinking, we’ll never get back to the way things were before.”

She opened the Wagon door and we climbed back inside. The sharp smell and wet smacking of hand sanitizer filled the Wagon, dulling my appetite for hot dogs for only a moment. The kibble bag rustled and my mouth started watering again. Mom put the half-full bowl down in front of me and dug through the bag with the canned food in it. Her paw came out holding a can of chili, which she set aside and went back to digging. 

I sniffed my dry, naked kibble. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

She turned on the Witch’s spotlight and aimed it down the bag’s throat. “Where the smell did I put it?” she asked from halfway inside the bag. “I must’ve missed when I threw the can back.” She squashed the bag to better aim the Witch at the shadows behind it and lifted the rumpled-up corners of the blankets. “Seriously, I swear this van eats things.”

“But those were my wieners,” I whined. “You promised!” 

“I’m sorry, Spud. Tomorrow. Cross my heart.” 

Mom was quiet as we ate dinner, but the social studies lecture continued at full volume inside her thought bubble. Every so often, bits of an argument escaped her mouth. 

“… do with all that free time, huh? …Outside, that’s where. …more visitors than ever …no fees from any of ’em …fund a whole barrel of hand sanitizer… Stupid, stupid, stupid!” 

“Everyone’s gonna think you’re a genius when you reveal your plan,” I said. “You’re gonna be a hero!”

“That’s what’s so scary about it. It doesn’t matter what I think. It’s completely out of my control.”

“Oh good! If there’s nothing you can do, there’s no sense in worrying.” The relief reminded me of the Jumper, who would never see that everything was going to be okay in the end. “Hey Mom, you know how sometimes a mountain looks so steep that there’s no way that someone could climb it without falling off, no matter how brave and mighty they are?” 

“Sure. I was thinking about that this morning when we were slogging through the snow.”

“Maybe the boogeyvirus is like that. Just because we can’t see the way out from here doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.”

“Or it could kill us all. Sometimes the path is way worse than you expect.”

“But you’ll never try to climb anything at all if you let everything that could go wrong scare you out of it. It’s not like you have to climb the whole mountain in one leap. All you have to figure out is where to put your paw for the next step. There’s always something you can do that’ll bring you a little closer to the top, and each step is like another clue. It wouldn’t be such a thrill to solve the mystery if you don’t put the clues together yourself.” 

“Sometimes it’s not the trail that’s the danger, though,” Mom said, steering the conversation away before she hit the lesson. “The people who get in trouble are the ones who weren’t prepared and run out of food, water, or daylight.” 

“Or toilet paper,” I reminded her. “It’s like you were saying about the potties; when something stops working it’s not a sign to give up and go home, it just means it’s time to change. You’d be surprised how much more you can do if you’re okay with things not going exactly the way you expected.”

“But it’s stressful when you don’t know if you’re in danger or not,” Mom whined. “The stress of not knowing can be worse than the actual danger.” 

“It’s only stressful because you’re afraid of being uncomfortable,” I coached. “It’s like those marathongs I trained you for. Every week we ran farther than ever before. How did we go so far from the car if we didn’t know whether we could run all the way back?” 

“I’d run marathons before I met you,” Mom lied. 

Since she hadn’t answered the question, I answered it myself. “The trick to doing something hard for the first time is knowing that it’s gonna be uncomfortable, and doing it anyway. Training yourself not to think about being uncomfortable is why they put the thong in marathong.”

Mom fell right into my trap. “Uncertainty about what it’ll be like when you push your limits is where the feeling of accomplishment comes from,” she said, like it was her idea. 

“So what if this boogeyvirus, and the ecomommy are like a marathong we didn’t plan for? There’s no sense in worrying about how awful the last miles are gonna be when we’re still running the first. Maybe it’ll feel like it’s going on forever and we’ll never stop running. I bet there’ll be a lot of times when we’ll want to sit in the shade and wait for the sag wagon. But hopelessness is how you know you’re getting close to the finish.” 

“Real life almost never has finish lines,” Mom said. “You just keep running past the point of exhaustion forever and ever, and you never even notice that one crisis has ended because you’re already running through the next one.”

“But one day, we’ll be sitting on the couch together writing the story of today, and we’ll notice that we aren’t afraid of strangers anymore; that we’re free to go where we please again; and that all the potties are unlocked. When we left home, we took all those things for granted. When the boogeyvirus is over, a new Friend or an open potty will feel like a trophy. I bet every day there’ll be something that makes us feel like champions.” 

“But I got rid of the couch when I got the treadmill.” 

“We might get another one someday,” I told her. “You’ve got to have goals if you want a better life.”

“I hope that finish line isn’t too far off.” Mom gathered up the dishes and threw them in the trash. She tied off the top of the bag so it wouldn’t spill chili slime and poop-juice grounds before we found an unlocked trash can. “It’s been more than a week and I don’t know how much longer I can take this nonsense.” 

“I bet when we tell these stories, we’ll realize that they all had happy endings,” I said. “Maybe then we’ll realize that we won.”

“Dream on,” Mom said, reaching for the lamp.

The wind was raging when we woke up. It followed me around the campground as I searched for a potty spot, blurring smells and blowing the splashback into my ankle fur. 

“Get ready to hold onto your hat,” I told Mom as I jumped back into the Wagon. “You’re gonna have to do this whole hike with your paw on top of your head.”

Mom was busy setting up the kitchen inside the Wagon, where the wind couldn’t blow the stove out. “I changed my mind. We’re not hiking today. I don’t know if we’re even allowed to be here with everything all locked up.”

“You can’t close nature,” I reminded her. “Who’s going to catch us? Not the garbage man, the money picker-upper, or the bathroom unlocker, that’s for sure.”

“Even so, New Mexico is already closed. Who knows how long Colorado will be open for. Anyway, we’re less likely to get in trouble for being so far from home in Wyoming. I read that it’s one of the only states that isn’t planning to close down.”

“If you’re afraid of getting in trouble, then why don’t we just go home like the rules say?”

“And let this thing ruin our trip? No way!” 

It kind of seemed like the boogeyvirus had ruined our trip already, but the fire in Mom’s eyes told me I shouldn’t bring it up. Instead, I asked, “They don’t have rules in Wyoming?” 

“Nope.”

“Can’t the Wyomighty catch cooties like Californians?” 

“Sure they can, they just have a different sense of responsibility. I’m less likely to get in trouble for breathing somewhere where you’re allowed to put cans in the trash. We should stay in places with loose gun laws and no recycling programs if we don’t want to get sent home or locked up.”

The wind pushed the Wagon relentlessly toward the side of the road as we made our way toward Colorado. Every so often, a gust came along and gave us a vicious shove, just to make a point. It was as if even the boogeytrapped air wanted to keep us in place. The poop juice cooled in Mom’s cup as she kept both paws clamped to the driving wheel to prevent the Wagon from being blown off course.

“I should get gas before the state line,” she said, fresh cups of fresh poop juice steaming in her thought bubble.

“The Wagon isn’t going to faint. It’s just faking,” I said sullenly, steaming hot dogs filling my thought bubble. Why should even the Wagon get its treats before me?

“I know. But you never know when you’ll find a good gas station out here. You don’t want to end up at a Sinclair, do you?” 

“No!” I yelped. “I take it back!” No snack is worth a trip to a Sinclair station, where there are no cheese sticks or fuzzy water, and there’s always a line for the people-potty. The only time Mom doesn’t spend a lifetime in the Sinclair potty line is when the troll who guards the key won’t let anyone use the potty. 

The Wagon rolled off the freeway and stopped in front of a juice box. As Mom stuck the straw into the Wagon’s mouth, a cowboy at the next juice box called from behind his truck, “California, huh? What are you doing all the way out here?”

“We’ve been on a road trip for the past week,” Mom shouted over the wind. Then, because she didn’t want the cowboy to think that her germs would kill everyone in his village she added, “We’ve been hiking and camping in the wilderness to get away from it all.” 

“So I guess you don’t know what’s been happening, do you?” His smile said that it would put the giddy in his giddyup to see Mom’s reaction to finding out that this wasn’t America anymore.

“Sir,” Mom said, “this is the only road trip I’ve ever been on where the whole country is talking about the exact same thing. You can’t get deep enough into the wilderness to get away from this news.” 

It was true. Over the years, Mom and I had been close enough to throw a stick at Mexico, close enough to throw a stick at Canada, and all the western places in between. One of the best parts of visiting other places was hearing the exotic ways that people told familiar stories, and recognizing a different side of yourself in the tale. But this was the first time that everyone from Oregon to Arizona and California to New Mexico were all telling the same story in exactly the same way. For once, it was like we were all from the same pack. I couldn’t tell yet if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

Mom left the ha-yuck-ing cowboy by his truck and went into the gas station in search of fuzzy water and a potty. She was in there long enough that I was starting to wonder if we were at a Sinclair station after all. When she finally came out again, she was carrying an armful of bottles, a steaming cup of poop juice, and a little paper basket that could only mean one thing: She found me a hot dog!

Her fur whipped around her head like wisps of angry thoughts as she hunched toward the Wagon. I stood at attention to give my tail room to wag and smooshed my nose against the window so my mouth would be ready as soon as the door opened. 

“HUR-RY!” I barked through the glass. 

When she reached the Wagon, Mom put the hot dog platter on the roof to free one paw for the door handle. She opened the door. The wind closed the door. When she opened the door again, a bottle slipped from the crook of her arm. As she leaned over to pick it up, the wind slapped her booty with the door and howled with laughter. 

“Slam it!” Mom held the door open with her butt as she threw the bottles at my feet and carefully poured the poop juice into her cup. 

“Don’t forget my hot dog!” I barked. 

When her paws were free, she reached up to the roof. Her arm moved like it does when she’s searching for the Witch in the dark, but her paw came back empty.

“Southern ducker!” Mom growled, and stepped back into the wind. I wanted to help search, but the door slammed in my face.

The wind pinned the platter against the cowboy’s tire, but the escaped hot dog was making a run for it. Mom chased it toward the street, holding her hat with one paw so it wouldn’t blow away while she reached out to catch the fleeing weenie with the other. 

A million years later, she came back with my hot dog smelling of hose water and New Mexico. She used some of our precious toilet paper to wipe off the specks of sand, put my dinner back on its platter, and served it to me muttering, “5 second rule.” 

I licked the delicious slime off the outside, but couldn’t fit the whole thing in my mouth. 

“Fix it,” I told her with the biggest eyes I could.

Mom found a knife and tried to guillotine the hot dog into easy-to-swallow bites, but the brave hot dog wouldn’t surrender. It jumped out of the basket and rolled onto the pillow, leaving a scent trail that would fill my dreams with hot dogs for the rest of the trip. 

Mom groaned again and used the serving basket as a glove to pick up my brave breakfast like she would a turd in a poop bag. She stabbed it several times with the knife so my teeth would have something to grab onto. 

I finished the whole thing in two bites as the Wagon rolled back toward the freeway.

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