🌟 Yes-I-Can-ada or What’s-Next-ico
- Oscar the Pooch
- Mar 20
- 9 min read
Updated: Mar 26
The whirring wheels under the bed made me drowsy. I must’ve drifted off, because a sway in the Wagon woke me and I couldn't remember where I was for a second. I’d been dreaming I was back in the Stuck House, where the bed never moved and there was enough room to stretch out, even with Mom there. That must’ve been what she meant when she said we’d be sleeping in our bed by tomorrow night. But who knew what lay along the road between Oregon and the Stuck House. We could be anywhere.
When we first set out on the Oregon Trail, Mom told me that you couldn’t really be lost if you knew where you were going and how to get back home. We’d traveled around the whole world since then without ever really knowing where we were going, but we’d always found our way back to the Wagon. It didn’t really matter where the Wagon was, as long as I was inside it with Mom. But what happens when your home goes back home? I snorted deeply for a hint about where we were, but the snort turned into a snore.
It was dark by the time the Wagon stopped. I looked up groggily until I remembered... Dark meant it was dinner time! Mom slid open the bedroom door and I jumped to my feet. “I’ll have a grand slam with extra bacon, extra sausage, and cheese on my eggs,” I ordered.
“No Denny’s up here, Spud. Maybe tomorrow. Come on, you needa go potty?” She walked away, leaving the door open to the night.
So we weren’t in moose country, or else she would have closed the door to keep the meese out.
And I could hardly see a thing, which meant no rude campground lights. I sniffed the air. It smelled like dry and sky.
I dismounted to feel the road under my paws. It was made of dirt—warm dirt that made skritching sounds under Mom’s shoes as she wandered into the darkness. I sniffed around until I found the edge of it. More plants, but not the greedy, thirsty kind that grow over everything in Oregon. I piddled on them so they would have something to drink and kept sniffing to give Mom time to finish watering whatever plats she’d found out there under the stars.
“Aren’t you going to make a fire?” I asked Mom when we met back up at the Wagon.
“Nah. We’ve got to be extra careful now that we’re back in California. I’d hate to accidentally start a forest fire. I’m not exactly an eagle scout. It’s not like I know what I’m doing.”
So I was right after all! Mom had been faking like she knew what she was doing this whole time, just as I’d suspected. I decided not to let on that I’d caught her confession.
“I thought I recognized this place.” I sniffed the air thoughtfully. Behind the scent of sky, there was something that smelled like home. Or maybe it was just the scent left behind when all the difference is gone.
Mom opened the kitchen door. The Wagon turned on its light to greet her. It made the dark even darker, but in that nice way where nothing in the world matters because you’re home.
“We’ve been here before,” she said mysteriously.
“We have?” I jumped back into bed to watch her cook.
“Maybe not up here, but nearby. You’ll see. Tomorrow.”
But when the sun rose, I didn’t see anything familiar. We were surrounded by mountains, but new mountains that could have belonged anywhere. Between my nose and the mountain nextdoor, there was nothing but sky swirling with a mix smells from all of the places underneath it.
I trotted up the road ahead of Mom, letting my ears flap jauntily. The road got wider and the faint smell of old smoke tickled the back of my nose. I followed it to a circle of rocks on the ground, hidden behind a picnic table. “Look, Mom! Eagle scout scat.” I sniffed under the picnic table to see if anyone had dropped a hot dog. “If we’d camped up here last night, you could have made a fire after all.”
“Campgrounds are for amateurs,” Mom said. “Now that we’re self-sufficient, we can do things our way. Oh look, there’s a bathroom!”
She opened the door and the stink of people-doo rushed out to crowd all of the nice mountain smells from my nose. “People-potties are a waste of time, just like shoes,” I told her. “I never use them. There’s always a dog bathroom right outside that smells better and has better lighting.”
The trail was hiding between another set of picnic tables and a lake. Without any rivers to mess with it, the lake was as still as a painting of the sky.
“This place will be crawling with people in a day or so,” Moms said in her head so as not to break the morning silence.
“Where is everybody?” I barked. My bark bounced against the rocky tips of the mountains and filled the sky.
Mom winced. “Still at work. School, maybe. It’s only Tuesday, but Memorial Day is this weekend. I bet the campground will be crawling with people by Thursday. Not to mention the PCT hikers will probably start coming through pretty soon.”
“What’s a Pee See Tea hiker?” I asked, just to make sure it was a good thing before I decided that I was one.
“See that ridge up there?” Mom raised her arm and pointed her eyes straight ahead at the furry part between two spikes of mountain. “When we get up there, we’re gonna hook up with a trail that goes all the way from Mexico to Canada. People spend half a year walking the whole thing start to finish.”
“Are we gonna walk all the way to Canada?” I asked, already getting ready for a yes-I-can-ada slogan.
“Hell no. We’d have to walk all the way across Oregon.” Her face twisted like it always did when she thought about Oregon.
“Are we going to what’s-next-ico, then?”
“I’d love to. Someday. But there are parts of the trail where dogs aren’t allowed.” She looked up at the sky. “Then again, now that we have the van, just think of all the places we can go.”
I obeyed, and just thought about the places we could go. But the feeling of belonging that started last night was too distracting. It kept bringing my imagination back to California.
The trail got steeper as we climbed the last bit of rock before the land quit and gave way to sky.
“Can we go back to Utah, too?” I asked.
“I’d like to,” Mom said, taking two breaths to say it as the trail got steeper.
“We can go back to any state we want? Like Nevada? And Arizona? And Montana? And Washington? And Oreg... I mean Idaho?”
“There are even more states than that, Spud. We could even go to Oklahoma or Michigan, if we want. But don’t you kind of want to go home for a little while first?”
“And do what?” Every time we went to the Stuck House, Mom left me alone most of the time to do fun things I wasn’t invited to. Like work.
“I don’t know.” Mom flashed her belly button as she used her shirt to wipe the slimy sweat off her forehead and the snot from under her nose. “I’m kind of tired of living like a hobo.”
“I thought your dream was to to be free?” I said. “There’s no FOMO when you’re a hobo.”
The trail in front of us split and headed into forests in both directions. Mom looked one way toward Mexico and the other way toward Canada. She picked one, but with the forest blocking my view, I wasn’t sure which.
“Being a hobo is kind of like retirement if you skipped all the good parts. I kind of want to feel like I’m contributing something again. Like my life has more purpose than finding a laundromat before I run out of clean underwear.”
“That’s your first mistake,” I coached. “If you never wear underwear, you don’t have to worry about whether it’s clean or not. Just like you don’t have to worry about losing shoes you don’t wear. That’s why I—”
“Maybe we could find one of those jobs where they let dogs come to work with you,” Mom interrupted.
“You mean like a dogsled musher?” I asked. “Or a CSI, where we search for dead bodies together? Oh! Oh! You could be a firefighter and I could be the dalmation. I already have the spots and you have a talent for making fires go out.”
“I was thinking about a desk job. The kind where you get to sit down and they bring you lunch.”
“I love lunch,” I said. “Will it have bacon on it?”
The trees stopped and we walked onto a field of rocks. It was flat and open as a city square if someone had just dumped the cobbles on the ground without bothering to arrange them or stick them in place.
But I was still thinking about lunch. Hiking was hungry work. “Do they have cheese in offices?” I drooled.
“Sometimes,” Mom said distractedly, like cheese wasn’t the most important thing she could possibly be thinking about here on top of the world. She wobbled, made a noise, and her arms chopped at the sky. When she was steady again, she looked out confidently across the mountains before taking the next step, as if to show that she had it all under control. The mountains grew in sharpness as they lined up behind each other, shortest to tallest. The last row glowed whitely against the sky like a row of teeth. “C’mere, Spud. Let’s take a picture.”
“Which way is Canada?” I asked, looking at her eyes for a hint about where to point my face.
“That way.” I looked toward Canada and she took my picture with Mexico in the background. Then I looked toward Mexico and she got another one with Canada in the background. “And where’s Idaho?” I asked.
Mom looked back toward the trees, where the trail was waiting. “Must be back that way somewhere." She took another picture while I looked into the distance for potatoes.
“And what’s that way?” I asked, looking off the edge of the mountain. On this side, the hills slowly faded to the sky like ripples around a stick on the surface of a lake.
“That way is home. Where we should probably get going.” Mom peeked into the empty sky below us. “But let’s take the long way round.”
Mom turned and walked back toward Idaho. I followed her back into the trees.
