Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies

West Texas

1 WestTexas Billy Bob’s West Texas high school hired a new English teacher; a Yankee who liked to talk about “epiphanies.” She used the word in every other sentence. Puzzled, Billy Bob went to the dictionary. Next morning, when the teacher discovered another “epiphany,” Billy Bob raised his hand. “Ma’am,” he said, “There ain’t no ‘epiph­ anies’ in West Texas. Hell, it’s two hundred miles to the nearest ‘coincidence.’” I am a visionary. Not the “visionary” CEO grinning from the cover of your seatback magazine, much less a Joseph Smith or Isaiah. I am a run­of­the­mill visionary: plain vanilla. When I was younger, I didn’t discriminate between visions produced by decades of spiritual discipline and visions got by swallowing a pill. I became a pharmacological tourist in the iridescent world where William Blake communed with angels. Visions are not created equal. Some altered the way I saw the world, others how I feared it. Some of the best were funny. I recall one fine fall afternoon in Detroit’s inner city when I’d ground, boiled, encapsulated, and ingested (at the time legal) mail­order peyote and was dissolving into Brahms’s German Requiem when fire erupted in the mortuary school across the street. The cinematic confusion—fire trucks, flames, and bus­ tling undertaker trainees each in white shirt and somber black suit—was, since I’m not William Blake, indescribable. Visions are not created equal. A jiggling highway center line is banal. A center line melding with the shoulder line is a headache. It was Janu­ ary and I was heading to West Texas for the Sheepdog Winter Olympics, sixteen hundred miles from home, right now outside Texarkana. “In those old cotton fields back home”—damned if I could get the tune out of my head—“just about a mile from Texarkana.” I needed a rest stop, but if Texas had any, they were deep in the heart of . . . Quit it! Just quit! 2 mr. and mrs. dog I’d dozed at midnight shivering under my jacket at a Tennessee rest stop. I woke to a white world: my and the dogs’ breath had frosted the inside of the windshield. I scraped icy slivers onto the dash. Four­thirty a.m. That damned center line wouldn’t stop flopping around and how to stay awake until daybreak? Where was that truck stop? Remember when truck stop coffee tasted like dog piss? Luke and June were zoned out in the wagon’s wayback. They’d keep until the sun came up. I’ve an old friend who’s abused every substance known to the DEA and some they haven’t heard about. His interest is both practical and theo­ retical; he’s worked needle exchanges and taken intoxication seminars at Berkeley. One spring he and his wife accompanied me to a sheepdog trial north of San Francisco. It was young June’s first trial and we were DQed in less than thirty seconds. That evening over dinner, when I tried to explain what it was like when it went well—the pure focus and swiftness of handling a sheepdog—my friend snickered. “Bullshit,” he said. “You just like to get stoned.” He may have had a point. The dogs and I were traveling twenty­six hoursinatwenty­year­oldstationwagontogetreadyforatrialontheother side of the Atlantic. I had this vision, you see. Next October at Llandielo, Carmarthenshire, Wales, I would step onto that lush green British field with Luke or June and there’d be white sheep in the distance. It’d be cool; might be a breeze blowing. My dog and I would glance at one another. That glance was as particular and as far as my vision could carry me: to the intimate silence just before everything gets real. Me and the dogs hit Dallas during the morning rush and the old wagon’s temp gauge shot up but dropped after I killed the AC. The Texas speed limit shot up to seventy­five outside of Midland. Midland, Texas, is ugly. Poor folks’ homes are smaller and shabbier than in Appalachia. Dirt roads lead to oil wells protected by razor wire and wind turbines clutter the ridge tops, thousands of wind turbines. I wouldn’t want to be a bird in Midland, Texas. West Texas 3 I stopped to phone my hostess, Sarah Boudreau: did she want me to pick up groceries...