My travels with Smokey and Toko

Feeling heartbroken, in the fall of 1980, after breaking up with Gwen, my Vermont girlfriend, and with nothing to keep me there, I traveled west to try to reconcile with her. She had returned to her job in the oil fields of southwest Wyoming.

My friends, Tom from New Jersey and Smith from Vermont, planned a trip to the west coast. I asked if they’d take me and my pets with them. I had adopted my gray longhaired Smokey a year earlier. My Vermont neighbor recently gave me Toko, a six-month-old mixed Collie. Tom and Smith agreed, and I helped to pay for gas and oil.

Once the snow-covered Rockies appeared, we erupted in cheers! Our first stop happened in Telluride, Colorado, high in the western San Juan Mountains. Tom had New Jersey friends who camped with a white Siberian Husky in their teepee on state park land. We stayed with the couple for two days and Toko played with the Husky.

Fall 1978, Jeremiah with his Bedlington Terrier “Midster” in NYC’s Lower Eastside. Photo by Denis Reardon.

A towering canyon wall dominated the far end of the ski resort. The gaiety and excitement of its old west setting created a lively diversion for us weary travelers. At a party in town with Tom’s friends, I met folks from Silverton, a one-and-a-half-hour drive which circumvents snowy peaks to the east. They said that Silverton’s gold mine was hiring.

Leaving Colorado, I rode with Tom and Smith to the Interstate 70 off-ramp at Green River, Utah. Mountain ranges and buttes dominated the landscape. I exited the car with my pets and said, “Thanks, guys!” Toko stretched on the asphalt while I held his leash. On top of my backpack Smokey purred against my neck. In addition to a sleeping bag and a two-man mountain tent, my pack contained water in a plastic jug, food for myself, dried pet food and bowls.

I hitched rides north to Salt Lake City. One driver remarked when I mentioned my journey from Vermont, “Damn, you’ve done some traveling! It’s unusual to see someone out here hitching rides with a cat and dog.”

By afternoon, we arrived in Salt Lake. Easily catching rides, by nightfall we arrived at Evanston, Wyoming. After asking around for Gwen and her older sister Mary, I found their crew’s motel. The workers had just returned from far-flung fields where they surveyed and mapped subsurface structures for oil reserves.

Summer 1979, Jeremiah in NYC, wearing Plainfield, VT’s Juanita Cafe tee shirt. Juanita gave him his cat Smokey. Photo by Denis Reardon.

In her room, Mary told me how Gwen flew home a week earlier, shaken by an abusive relationship with a local guy. Saddened with this news, I accepted Mary’s invitation to crash that night with my pets in the room she shared with a coworker. I tossed and turned with worry about Gwen.

In the morning, I hitchhiked three hundred miles on Interstate 80 to Elko, Nevada where I met Rolling Thunder, a renowned medicine man and advocate for Native American rights. Back in Vermont, I had read Doug Boyd’s book, Rolling Thunder: An Exploration into the Powers of an American Indian Medicine Man.

Rolling Thunder invited me to ride with him and other seekers to his ranch in Carlin, twenty-five miles west where he had established Meta Tantay on his 262-acre ranch. The non-profit community center attracted followers of his teaching and healing practices. In exchange for a place to stay, I helped reroof the goat shelter over a few days.

The greatest doubt about having my pets with me occurred as I prepared to leave. Smokey didn’t answer my call as my ride back to the highway awaited. At the last minute, I saw her emerge from behind a building. Smokey rubbed against my leg as my companions looked on in astonishment at such luck. I felt relieved to leave on time.

Back on the road, I hitched as far as the Great Salt Lake and camped beside its shimmering stillness that night. Thanksgiving fell on the next day when I set out to find a job in Silverton.

Gray longhaired similar in appearance to Smokey.

Approaching the city of Provo, Utah, the driver of a pickup said, “Thanksgiving dinner is being served when I get home, would you like to join us?” My host and his Mormon family shared a memorable feast and warm fellowship with me that afternoon.

After dinner, I returned to the highway, and in a few more days, arrived at 9,300-foot-high Silverton set in the Animas River valley. Telluride party friends offered me the use of a broke down van a couple of blocks away.

At last, Smokey, Toko and I had a place of our own. Across the street in a house trailer lived a young Hispanic family supported by their gold miner father.

Silverton is noted for the narrow-gauge railroad bringing up summer tourists from Durango and expanding fivefold its off-season population of a thousand. I applied for work at the gold mine and took a construction job. The next day I arrived at the huge and drafty steel and sheet-metal ore concentrator. Under its three-story high roof, my crew built an addition onto the concentrator to meet increased production demands.

Workers on the ground processed the ore into useful metal. They separated the minerals in chemical baths into gold, silver, copper, turquoise and uranium. In 1980, the price of gold reached a then-record high of $850 per ounce.

Mixed Collie similar in appearance to Toko.

In February 1981, I left Colorado for Arizona. With Smokey and Toko, I hitched and got a ride to Durango with a young woman driving a pickup with a camper shell. The next driver took us west where we entered Arizona in the Four Corner’s Region which belongs to Native American nations. Dropped off on the Navajo Reservation, I felt relieved to have reached a lower altitude to enjoy the warmer air. It soon troubled Smokey, and she panted from the heat. We rested in shade where she lapped water and recuperated.

In Tucson where I had attended the University of Arizona ten years ago, an unfortunate incident at the home of my college sweetheart Linda Abrams put a damper on our reunion. Before entering the house for a visit, with my pets’ leashes tied to it, I stashed my pack outside next to the door. Then Linda’s father came home and tried to pet Toko. Toko bit him.

Perhaps Toko, restrained in an unfamiliar place, meant to scare him. The medical professor suffered a bloody wound but, as we later learned, had no rabies from Toko’s bite, thankfully. Upon Linda’s insistence, I boarded Toko at an animal hospital for the ten-day quarantine.

Downtown Silverton, Colorado.

Once Toko emerged from quarantine observation, my pets and I departed for Odessa, Texas. I had learned that my college housemate, Dennis St. Germaine and his family lived there. I camped that night outside Benson, Arizona where I heard coyotes howl. Toko briefly joined them before curling up next to me. My sense of responsibility for Toko’s behavior increased after that bite.

In the morning, we traveled through Las Cruces where the Organ Mountains’ vertically fluted facade presented a scenic backdrop to the low-profiled city. Entering Texas in a car driven by a guy headed to Van Horn, our route paralleled the Franklin Mountains terminating in El Paso.

Our kind driver dropped us off in the Sonoran Desert at the Van Horn truck stop. The endless landscape supported plants such as yucca, creosote, mesquite and cacti. I ran into a trucker willing to give me and my pets a ride.

I enjoyed the change of perspective, riding high up in the truck’s cab while my pets stretched out on the bunk behind me. At sunset we arrived where I-10 joined the start of I-20. I stepped down with my backpack and pets before the trucker continued on I-10.

Downtown Odessa, Texas.

Odessa lay a hundred miles to the east on I-20. To get out of that God-forsaken Chihuahuan Desert before it got dark, I prayed. Ah! There is a God! I thought as I ran up to a car that had stopped for us. Arriving in Odessa with a guy driving to Dallas, I helped my pets exit from the rear seat. “Thanks, Mister,” I cheerily called as I hoisted my pack with Smokey perched on top and grabbed Toko’s leash.

“Good luck,” he called back as he pulled onto the asphalt. We camped by the road, and its rush hour traffic woke me up in the morning. Toko sprang to his feet and sniffed at the oil scented air. On her back, Smokey twirled in sand before stretching. With my pack comfortably hoisted onto my shoulders and Smokey perched on top, I led Toko on a street crossing under the interstate traffic.

At a phone booth, I found the number for The Permian Basin Pipe Fitting and Valve Company. When Dennis answered, I shouted, “Hey, Dennis, I’m here in Odessa at an interstate gas station!”

“Jerry! Well, I’ll be! How the hell are ya’?”

“Fine, Dennis. I have a cat and dog with me.” I replied, thinking of the disaster at Linda’s.

I felt happy and relieved to hear him say, “Be right there, Jerry.”

Seated in a pickup truck, he told me how his family asked him to run the business after his grandmother died. Business boomed since January when the government lifted price controls on gasoline and sent the price for a barrel of oil up to $34.

Dennis and his wife Deana had four children and lived in a one-story ranch home north of downtown. It sat on a quarter-acre lot which bordered a block-long pipe supply business. The clanging of pipes and the honking of forklift horns halted after the day’s work. Outside the door leading from the kitchen to the side yard, Dennis kept his German Shepherd Queenie. She had a doghouse around which flowers and vegetables grew. She and Toko got along well.

Dennis hired me to remodel the entrance to the company’s sheet-metal and steel-framed building. It shook from gusts of wind in the afternoons when spring season tornados whipped across the prairie. One afternoon, arriving home from work, I discovered that Toko disappeared. At lunchtime Dennis and I visited the city pound to check the kennels. On evenings, I walked in the neighborhood calling, “Toko!” The loss of Toko saddened us all and, after a couple of weeks, we gave up the search.

Dennis asked me to take Queenie. He and Deana had sold their property to the adjoining business. “The subdivision of our new home has no fences. In the past, Queenie has eaten neighbors’ chickens and rabbits and if they catch her doing it again, the city pound will put her to sleep,” he told me.

I agreed, “Sure, Dennis. Queenie and I get along well.”

When I left in May, I hitched with my cat Smokey and Queenie back to Vermont. A month after our arrival, the gentle three-year old Queenie had a litter of puppies. She remained my pet for another seven and a half years. Sad to say, walking near my home a month later, I spotted Smokey, dead on the shoulder of the road, her blood stained body hit by a vehicle. Though gone, my pets are constantly with me in my memories.