When dogs fly: cower in place 43

Kathleen met and fell in love with our new puppy Louis (pronounced “Louie”) from a picture of him she found on the internet. Just like Archie before him. And just like me, 45 years before that.

Louis was living at a labradoodle breeder/trainer’s house with his brothers and sisters. We had been thinking about adopting a new puppy to help complete our pack. Nobody could replace Archie, but we recognized we were better, happier people with a dog in the family.

We closed a deal as quickly as we could, then waiting anxiously until Louis was old enough to leave his mom and start a new life on his own. He would be 11 weeks old and ready on December 22, and we wanted him immediately after that. What could possibly be better than a puppy for Christmas!

There was but one significant obstacle to our plan: Louis lived in Kentucky, 700 miles away. That’s a good nine-hour drive, google says. We couldn’t just drive over and pick him up without violating our self-imposed coronavirus safety protocols, which included importantly that we don’t go into any public restrooms, anywhere, ever, until we’re vaccinated.

Why, oh why, didn’t we think about how we were going to get him when we arranged the adoption? It had been well into the fall and we had many month’s experience in not traveling anywhere that we couldn’t get back from before we needed a pee break. But too late now, we’ve made virtual eye-contact with Louis and now no one else will do, whether he lived in Kentucky or another world.

The breeders had the solution. For a few extra bucks they would arrange for an “angel” to fly from Kentucky to DC, round trip, bringing Louis as carry-on luggage. Pricey, but not as pricey as it could have been, and probably not any more expensive than us working out our own corona-proof road trip. We had a brief period of worry that nobody would be willing to brave an airplane flight so close to Christmas, but they found a stalwart soul. Problem solved!

Or almost solved—the question remained: were we brave enough to go to the airport to pick Louie up? Second only perhaps to a public restroom, it’s hard for us phage-o-phobes to imagine a scarier place than a large international airport at Christmastime, full of people from all over the world. Including people from England, home of the new improved (from the virus’s point of view) coronavirus variant that I call “COVID-1Q”^*.

The things we do for love! We made sure our travel “angel” was willing to meet us outside the airport buildings, at the passenger pickup curb. We bought some hazmat suits to supplement the face shields, masks and gloves that we wear to ordinary public places. We brought along some anti-covid wipes, and asked them to apply Louis’s flea medicine to his coat several days early, so we could give him a good covid wipedown the minute we got him without interfering with its effectiveness.

Then we waited. The days ticked by so slowly, as we waited for Louis to take up his new position in the Carlson pack. It was more stressful than waiting for Christmas! I practiced not getting any sleep (apparently Louis liked staying up until midnight, and then rising at 5 or 6 AM the next morning), and we bought two of every toy, treat, bed and jail we could think of, just in case.

The fateful day rolled around, December 23. Everything seemed to be “go” in Kentucky. We debated hopping in the car first thing in the morning, to make sure we weren’t late for the late-afternoon arrival, until we calmed down enough to realize that we’d be safer from the coronavirus vampires sitting at home than idling in a parking lot. We gave ourselves a reasonable amount of time and took off. And let’s just leave those tyvek suits behind, ‘kay?, they’re just too unwieldly (not to say silly-looking).

But where’s the beltway exit to the DC airport‽ Have they rearranged the entire city in the two years since I retired? We (Kathleen, Google maps and I) wound our way through the scenic part of Alexandria and finally found where they had hidden the new secret passageway to the airport. Some of our built-in spare minutes were lost, but we were still okay.

New scares awaited. The airport authority had apparently decided that the zombie apocalypse, with its drop in airline passengers, was the perfect time to set up construction crews to spiff up the airport. (This caused us some worry, but on reflection seems like a sensible decision.) Among the disruptions—the cell phone parking lot where we were to wait for our angel to let us know she’d arrived was closed for construction! More of our precious buffer minutes were lost!

The signs told us to go to the short-term parking lot, which they said was free if you were just waiting for a pickup. But that was within a multi-storey parking structure, which Kathleen felt was just too close to being trapped indoors with all those covid germs. So we exited there and headed for passenger pickup, planning to wait there. But oh no! Passenger pickup was closed for construction too! And unlike the cell waiting area, there were no instructions or detour signs here.

Where to go? The minutes were ticking by, and we were getting panicky! What if we can’t make contact and the travel angel has to make her scheduled flight back to Kentucky without making the dropoff! It’s hard to think when you’re frantic, and the whole airport complex, which must have circumnavigated four times looking for an opening, was starting to resemble one of those “imaginary prisons” that Giovanni Battista Piranesi drew (in the throes of a fever-induced delerium, it is said) back in the late 1700s.

The only place to pick up a passenger seemed to be at the passenger dropoff curb. We pulled in, immediately behind an airport police car with lights flashing, and hoped he was too busy with some other problem to notice that we were waiting right under the “No Waiting” sign.

We were in time. We called our angel, who was already wandering the airport, and told her of our new rendezvous point, and shortly after spotted her walking toward us with a bright orange backpack over her shoulder. In the backpack was Louis.

Louis took to me immediately, scoring me an immediate first goal in the “favorite parent” contest. I attribute this to my foresight in mailing the breeder a stinky T-shirt a couple of weeks ago to throw into Louis’s pen. (I offered to send something of Kathleen’s too, but she eschewed the idea. Ka-ching!)

Once he hopped into Kathleen’s lap, we forgot about our wipedown protocol. I told Kathleen, “he can’t have any covid, he’s TOO CUTE”. This isn’t dramatic license. I literally said those words out loud. (Don’t judge! This year, in this country, that is not the stupidest covid risk assessment I’ve heard. Not even close.)

The drive back home was mercifully uneventful. We let Louis sleep in a travel crate in the back during the drive home (“poor thing, he must be exhausted, taking two flights to get here”).

We (and Louis) took a while to recover from our respective travel adventures and start to get to know each other, but that’s a story for another day.

Thanks for listening, and Happy New Year!
Dorn
12/31/2020