Belinda Jones - Bodie on the Road: Travels with a Rescue Pup in the Dogged Pursuit of Happiness

Copyright 2017 by Belinda Jones

First published by Summersdale Publishers Ltd.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Cover design by Jarmila Taka

Cover photos Belinda Jones

Print ISBN: 978-1-5107-3293-3

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-3296-4

Printed in the United States of America

For Winnie
Bodies First & Biggest Dog Love
20072017

Contents

He loves to ride in cars!
PRYORS PLANET ON BODIE

Prologue

Before Bodie, I would have sworn I was a cat person to my very core. With a minor sideline in shrews around the age of five. And only then because my tabby Tibbles had scared them rigid, excavating them from the flower bed, and I was trying to resuscitate their dainty rodent selves by giving them mouth-to-mouth.

My mother was horrifiedshe wasnt even keen on the idea of a muddy-pawed cat in the house.

Have you seen Tibbles? she would ask every night as she came to tuck me in.

He looked like he was heading out Id reply vaguely, as if Id caught him streaking his whiskers with cologne and adjusting his fedora when, in reality, he was wedged hot and stifled down by my feet.

The second my mum closed the bedroom door, Id raise the top of the duvet and hed tunnel towards the light, take a moment to inhale the cooler air, then settle his head on my pillow where wed sleep nose to nose, exchanging breath for breath until morning.

I was rarely parted from him. When my parents divorced, I insisted on transporting him to and from my dads every single weekend and even brought him house-hunting with us on the grounds that he had to like the new home too.

Moving away to London at age 19 to study journalism, I was forced to get my fixes on street corners: there wasnt a cat secreted under a parked car that I couldnt coax out for a nuzzle. Ten years on, when my magazine freelancing took me to Los Angeles, I began volunteering as a Cat Socialiser at the Glendale Humane Society. The American kitties were just as lovely as the British ones, but I would avert my eyes every time I walked past the dog enclosures, flinching like a prison newbie as those hardened convicts rattled the iron doors and bashed tin cups against the bars, taunting and whooping and howling.

Why did they always make such a racket? It felt so threatening to me, all that lunging and flashing of teeth. Such a relief to get to the cat room where my feline sisterhood would slink and splay in the sunlightjust another day at the spa. Id scoop up the neediest furball, relish its purring and look out of the window at the dogs: all that pent-up energy, all that walking and running they were longing to do. But I was no use to them. Aside from being scared and skill-less, I was more on a par with the repose schedule of catsI liked to be lying down almost all of the day.

But then, as spring unfurled its fresh greenery, I underwent The Change.

Part One

Finding Bodie

Chapter 1

Love at First Sit

It was almost eerie how it happened.

Each time I stepped outside my door, I found myself entranced by every passing dog, be it a trudgey, waddling dumpling or dainty pin-legged prancer. As we made our approach, the world would shift into slow motion and Id feel like Id stepped into one of those shampoo ads where the woman shakes and flips her cascading locksonly in this case it would be the golden swing and spring of a Spaniels ears or the grasses-in-the-wind sway of a Sheepdogs coat that held me spellbound.

Drawing level, our eyes would lock and they would give me a knowing look as if to say, Its time

At first I couldnt understand this sudden urgent pull. Typically after a relationship break-up Im ultra-sensitive to the sight of every coupleyearning for their sense of togetherness, experiencing every public nuzzle and dreamy-eyed gaze with left-out longingbut this time all I saw was imminent pain: didnt they know that happiness was just a phase and heartbreak was lurking around the corner? The bond that seemed to be calling to me the most was that of human and dog.

Perhaps it just seemed safer and more honest. Dogs dont leave you. You dont come home one day to find a suitcase by the door or a farewell note stuck to the fridge. Dogs dont fall out of love with their owners. And, most emphatically, dogs do not abandon you to go and fight pirates in Somalia.

As exit strategies go, I suppose Nathans was a pretty good one. You cant really argue with the US Navys deployment schedule. You can, however, complain about it, shake your fists at the sky and ask why-why-why after over 20 years of duds you finally meet a good one and then hes taken away.

Of course plenty of couples survive these six-month separations. And I was all set to do the same. Even when they added a second cruise to Russia and permanently relocated him 3,000 miles away from me in Virginia, meaning that we would only be able to be together for two or three weeks of the coming year.

As I prepared to turn the anguish of long-distance love into an art form, he told me that he felt he couldnt make me any promises in the face of such uncertainty. He was just being realistic. Responsible even. All I heard was the rejection. He said I was the love of his life but he was letting me go.

I fell to my knees as I watched my dreams of having a happy heart and a dimply baby and someone to snug up to at night evaporate into the Los Angeles smog. I was 41 at that point and I had finally started to believe that my turn had come. Now I felt like the plain girl who cant believe her luck that the school stud has asked her out, only to find out that it was all for a bet. Humiliated by my own hope.

Yet some part of me wouldnt accept what was happening. Why would things finally line up within my grasp only to be snatched away? Was I really supposed to go back to the way I was before? Suddenly everything I had been looking forward to had gone. My life had never looked so blank. Even my writing, which had always been my salvation, offered no solace.

While I disappeared into a murky underworld of disillusionment and despair, everyone around me seemed to think Id dodged a bulletlife as a Navy wife would have been no picnic. That I couldnt deny. The year we had been together had already been testing and I was about as far from military-compatible as a person could be. So it had to be for the best. At some point I would stop shaking and feel relief. Right? I was lucky in so many other ways. Just not romantically. Eventually this sensation of having experienced a life-changing love wouldnt even seem real. Eventually, I too would tut at the whimsical notion that it could have lasted. Eventually, I would just go back to being me.