This story began many years ago, with a dog named Molly, an English Pointer. Even though I grew up with all kinds of dogs, Molly was the first one that really felt like mine. She was my first adventure dog, sprawled across the back seat through all my early explorations, dust kicking up behind us in that white Jeep Cherokee, my off-road machine. Everywhere except college. She passed away from cancer while I was there, and if I hadn’t been able to spend significant amounts of time with other people’s dogs during those years, I think I would have had a much harder time. Housing was tough enough as it was, and I did four study abroad trips over the span of four years.

I was open to a dog again by then, but it had to be just the right one. After my last study abroad trip, during my master’s degree, Hank found me, by chance, the way the good ones always seem to.

Hank passed away last July, and there was this quiet ache that came with it, for all of us. Hank was a legendary dog, the type tales are written about. I wasn’t looking to replace him, and had no plans on the horizon to get another. In fact, for the amount of money I spend on my dogs, I was looking forward to not paying for two of them for a while. I almost made it a year. But I’ve always said dogs have a way of finding us quietly, at the right moment, whether we’re ready or not. I rarely go out looking for them.

Somewhere in the middle of all this, Ellie Roux came in 2020, the quintessential Covid puppy. I was looking for a dog like Hank when I found her, a similar mix. After Ellie Roux and Hank, it became apparent I had a thing for mostly-white, blue-eyed merle herding dogs.

Around the beginning of the year, I saw a little white, blue-eyed, pink-nosed double merle girl all the way out in Ohio. I was drawn to her instantly, but I talked myself out of it. No, of course it’s too far away. I let it go.

I’d been following Pink Heart Rescue for a few years, along with a handful of other deaf and blind dog rescues. I always wondered if I might be a good guardian for one someday. Part of that curiosity traces back to college, to a woman I worked with at Poudre Pet and Feed Supply who went on to become a certified trainer specializing in deaf and blind dogs. I was inspired watching her build that expertise. A friend’s sign-language-trained deaf boxer, another college fixture, had always kept it on my mind.

In June, they posted the little white dog again. Omelette and her brother Opossum, matching little double merles, had been pulled by the rescue from a shelter in Kentucky. Luckily, they didn’t have to spend much of their puppyhood there. Opossum was adopted, but Omelette still hadn’t found her person, the right one that is. And something in me just knew. That might be it. I might be it! So I had to put in the application. And let me tell you, it was thorough and rigorous. They do not mess around, and they shouldn’t: these dogs have already been through so much in their short lives. When they find their forever homes, it really should be forever. They even called my vet. I wrote a series of short essay responses, and doubt still setting in, I convinced myself for some reason I wouldn’t get her, that someone else was better, or would go through first, would be approved first.

But we were approved, cleared as a match after a long discussion with her foster about our lifestyles, and mapping out a cross-country road trip began. I even had some airline and hotel miles saved up. Brent and I would fly into Columbus, pick up a rental car, make a quick pitstop at a Columbus brewery (Campfire Brewing) on Saturday night, pick up our new pup on Sunday, and spend the week driving back west.

Day 2, Sunday, Columbus, OH –> Chicago, IL (324 miles, 6 hours)

We pulled up to her foster home at Good Dog Society, a dog trainer in beautiful Columbus, Ohio, on Sunday morning, my stomach full of anxious butterflies the drive over. Months of looking back over the rescue’s photos, wondering. Now just a lawn and a front door stood between us. We met on the grass. The pup bounded out the door like a firecracker on a mission to explore the world, all four paws and pure momentum — until she spotted me standing next to the rental car and beelined straight my way, like she’d been expecting me. She was immediately drawn to me. Brent even caught it on camera.

Back in the house, while we chatted briefly, she was pure joyful chaos! Full parkour off the couches, ricocheting off furniture like she’d been training for it her whole life. Zero chill, all vibes.

Looking back now, I can see how that might’ve thrown some red flags for other folks. But I barely noticed, too busy laughing, too excited giving this little wiggle creature pats mid-flyby. She was as extraordinary as I’d imagined — maybe more. One look at this little tornado, and we knew. This was her.

We loaded her into our collapsible back-seat crate and turned the car toward Arizona — via Chicago, Nebraska, Colorado, the deserts of Utah and finally, home.

I remember she kept staring at us on the drive between Columbus and Chicago, her little head cocked slightly to one side or the other. It seemed as if she was trying to sort us out, or assign our voices to us in her head — sometimes we’d say one thing and she’d turn her head completely sideways. She wasn’t deaf or blind, maybe slightly sight impaired, but she doesn’t know that, and for a dog who’d just had a fresh bath that morning, a mad run around her living room, and then been whisked into a crate in a car with strangers, she was doing miraculously well.

Closer to Chicago, it began to pour. I was so thankful I had Brent to switch with. Big-city driving still terrifies me, so he drove us all the way through. We ended up at Keith’s that night, had some lovely brews and pizza at Middlebrow in the rain, and retired for the day at Keith and Connor’s beautiful home (I love that place).

Day 3, Monday, Chicago –> Syracuse, Nebraska (515 miles, 8 hours)

The next morning, the sky cleared and the sun came out. We snuck in a visit to Keith’s veterinary clinic, Fauna, for a quick tour of the place. It really is special, built pet-minded rather than human-minded, the kind of clinic that makes you wish every vet visit felt this calm. Then we took a meandering drive through downtown Chicago, which Brent had never seen. We didn’t have time for the sights, not really, but we made sure to swing by Cloud Gate anyway, because you can’t pass through Chicago without at least a glimpse of the Bean.

Then it was on to Nebraska. We made a super-quick stop at Antique Archaeology in Le Claire, Iowa. No famous folks around this time, just us fangirling over a show we’ve watched together for years. Then we hightailed it the rest of the way to Brent’s hometown of Syracuse, Nebraska. It had been a long time coming. Brent and I have been together for 12 years and had never once set foot in Nebraska together, and he hadn’t been back himself in just as long.

We’d grabbed a quick bite at the famous Runza I’d heard about for years, right on the road in, and rolled into town just as the sun dipped below the fields, the whole place going quiet and gold the way small towns do at dusk. First things first: in an attempt to get Omelette to potty, since she hadn’t all day (she doesn’t much like to potty on a leash, and prefers free run and private space to do her business), we took her to a nearby park in the dark. It was the kind of park every small town seems to have: a little worn playground, a path looping the perimeter, a few old trees standing guard over it all. And there, walking laps around that little park, we caught lightning bugs together in the dark. It was Brent’s first time back home in over a decade, and somehow it started here, chasing little sparks of light through the grass.

Day 4, Syracuse –> Lincoln –> Kearney –> Arapahoe, NE (227 miles, 4 hours)

The next day dawned sunny over Syracuse, population 1,900 and change, farmland sprawling out in every direction with no end in sight. Warm air, blue sky. We started at Brent’s high school for a tour with his old school friend, Carrie, now a teacher there, where his dad had once worked. His dad’s old shop and classroom were largely unchanged, he said, frozen in time the way small-town buildings tend to be. From there, we did the full Brent hometown tour: his old paper routes, the friends’ houses he used to ride to, girlfriends’ houses where he’d pick them up for dates, the hangouts, the one main street downtown, the winery that only opened sometimes, the fairgrounds, the house he grew up in. I imagine those backcountry roads taught him as much as anything he ever learned in a classroom. We drove one of them on our way out of town, the same gravel-and-blacktop stretch he used to cruise as a teenager, out to his friend’s farm and beautiful wedding ready barn – complete with the most beautiful view of the area at Tony and Tina’s, collecting a story or two about his childhood along the way. Though I have a feeling that road, largely unchanged as it is, didn’t hit quite the same in a rented Hyundai Elantra as it did in one of his old muscle cars or motorcycles. My favorite story from the day: someone remembered looking up to see Brent driving the length of that road backwards. Nobody knew why. Not even Brent.

We rolled through Lincoln for lunch with his childhood friend Kay and her daughter Addy, giving me another small window into the years before my time, then on to Kearney to see Aunt Marcia and family. I’ll never get to meet Brent’s parents, but I got to meet his dad’s sister, who gushed so proudly about her little brother, and Brent. What a gift, catching so many people in one day, under one gorgeous June sky in Nebraska. Afterward, aiming for real rural Nebraska, but first, an unplanned detour to Mac’s Creek Winery, because apparently Nebraska makes wine, who knew? At this point I think every state in the U.S. has a winery. This one grew Edelweiss and Brianna, cold-hardy grape varieties that lean sweet, which, on a warm golden afternoon like that one, was exactly what we needed.

We made a quick stop near the lake where Brent had so many stories from growing up, memories of his dad, of Aunt Marcia, of family, then a drive-by of the old Fetters family farm. It was one of those places whose directions went something like, “make a left at the dirt road with the cluster of trees, head down a stretch of dirt road, over some hills, and it’s there, by another patch of trees.” We didn’t find it that day. The farmhouse was long gone, and the land had quietly given itself back to the prairie.

We had one final stop for the day: the cemetery where Brent’s parents lay at rest, together. Two people I’ve heard so much about, some of whose stories I feel I almost by heart. I even share a birthday with one of them, and will never get to meet them. We parked as the sun began to lower itself into the fields, at a rural Nebraska cemetery, manicured and green, and walked the path around it as baby frogs sprang up from the grass in waves, like the ground itself was breathing. Omelette danced along ahead of us, tail high, glad to be out of the car, nose full of farm air and the storm that was building on the horizon. At the end, we paused at their gravestones, and I understood, quietly, that this was as close to meeting them as I would ever get.

We drove back to the main road, toward the nearest town: Arapahoe, Nebraska, population just under 1,000, though you’d never know it. There was a gas station, a Dollar General, Subway and Long Dog Distilling, then our motel for the night, the most questionable name and the best motel of the whole trip so far, the Shady Rest Motel. Arapahoe turned out to be exactly the right place for that night, and we settled in just as a storm rolled through.

Day 5, Arapahoe –> Ogallala –> Sterling, CO –> Fort Collins, CO (5.5 hours, 330 miles)

Next up was Ogallala, Nebraska, to see cousin Troy, the town’s favorite high school English teacher, the one I’d heard so much about for years. The land stretched out flat and endless, the kind of drive where the horizon doesn’t change for an hour at a time, and you find yourself just watching Brent watch it. At one point he quietly pulled off to show me his favorite road, one wrapped in trees like something out of a fairy tale, and I watched something loosen in his shoulders each time we got closer to something in this stretch of the world he came from. His neighborhood, like Syracuse, felt so much like Akron and Sterling, the small Colorado towns where my own family was from, where I’d spent scattered pieces of my childhood. Brent and I, it would turn out, were raised on the same stretch of great American plains, just different corners of it: his the southwest Nebraska side, mine the eastern Colorado side, two versions of the same wide-open, small-town world. We sat down to catch up with Troy and his son just before he had to head off to an appointment, so it was a quick visit, but it was so good to finally meet him in person after years of hearing his name.

Then it was on toward Sterling, Colorado. My birthplace, at least according to my passport, though I’ve spent little of my life there. We headed west again for what amounted to a quick fly-by of the town. I realized almost as soon as we pulled off the interstate that every other time I’d been there, someone else had been driving, so I had no real sense of where anything was. Still, I managed to find the hospital where I was born (not that it’s a big town or anything) and a small park along the railroad tracks with an old penny-farthing bicycle parked in it like a piece of forgotten history. Then onward to Fort Collins.

I could write books about my time in Fort Collins, where I did both my undergrad and graduate school. As my first home away from home, I couldn’t wait to step back onto the campus that shaped so many years of my life, and revisit some of my favorite old haunts on College Avenue.

Our first stop into town was Poudre Pet and Feed, my favorite college job, where I got Hank and picked up a real education in dog food, dog health, and wellness, and met some great people along the way, including Erin, who went on to become the dog trainer (Down to Earth Dog Lady) I mentioned earlier. The place had been through some remodeling, but I found that even over ten years later, I was still in their POS system. Ha.

Then on to the CSU campus, where we walked through the Oval (where I used to spend hours lying in the grass under the trees and trying to feed squirrels) and made a quick loop around the warm, familiar campus, since we were still racing the clock to hit a few more places before closing. We just made it to New Belgium Brewing (I tried for O’Dell’s too, but there was a huge event going on) and Equinox Brewing before the local breweries closed for the night, then had dinner at Beau Jo’s for a hit of college nostalgia. Omelette sat quietly on the patio with us, tucked out of the rain that had just started, as we ate and people-watched over one of Fort Collins’ more lively intersections.

Day 6, Fort Collins, CO –> Edwards, CO –> Moab, UT –> Kayenta, Arizona (10 hours, 584 miles)

The next morning brought an extra-special treat: breakfast with some of my favorite people in Fort Collins, at Lucile’s Creole Café. I met my cousin Kevin and his wife Cara for the first time back when I was studying at CSU. Cara is a professor at CSU, and Kevin has had a string of wonderfully unexpected careers, brewer at O’Dell’s, a stint living in France, and these days, a potter, shaping beautiful work with his hands. We lingered over coffee and life stories, before saying our goodbyes with a handful of beautiful and unexpected pottery gifts, and hit the road.

From there, we made our way to see another friend from college, Margaret, now working with Ruffwear, who happened to be up in Edwards, Colorado. We grabbed a quick lunch in the little ski town I’d somehow never even heard of, the kind of place where a sandwich costs more than a tank of gas, but where the mountain views made it hard to complain too much. It was a strange, funny little pit stop between two very different worlds, Nebraska farmland one day, Colorado Rocky Mountain ski country the next, and somewhere in the middle of it, Margaret and I picking up right where we’d left off years ago, like no time had passed at all.

The last stretch was a long one, taking us through Moab and Monument Valley for some photo ops, before ending our night in Kayenta, a small town on the Navajo Reservation, where I encountered my first-ever $80 pet fee at a hotel. I nearly cried when they told us, so close to the end, and then such a large unexpected fee. But it was the only place in town that accepted dogs, so we didn’t have much choice. I love that area, though. The red rock rises up out of nowhere, cliffs and spires carved by wind and time into shapes that don’t look real, like something out of an old western. The light changes everything out there: gold in the morning, deepening to a burnt orange and violet by evening, the mesas glowing like they’re lit from within. Monument Valley alone stops your breath a little, those towering buttes standing sentinel over miles of empty highway, the kind of scale that makes you feel appropriately small. It’s some of my favorite landscape in the desert Southwest, and I don’t think you can drive through it without feeling two things at once: awe at how breathtaking this earth is, and a quiet ache that we aren’t always taking good enough care of it.

Running through Monument Valley with Omelette

Day 7, Kayenta, AZ –> Flagstaff –> Phoenix –> Yuma (7.5 hours, 479 miles)

Looking back, I don’t think this trip was ever really just about picking up a puppy. It was a pilgrimage through Brent’s history and mine, through the roads and people and places that made us who we are, long before we became an “us.” Somewhere along the way I kept bumping into the same thread I’d started pulling at the very beginning of this story: Poudre Pet and Feed, the place where I first learned so much about dogs, where I met Erin, where Margaret got me the job, where I brought Hank home all those years ago, showing up again as the quiet connective tissue running through Molly, Hank, Ellie Roux, and now this little white tornado curled up on the passenger seat beside me. Dogs have a way of finding us, as I’ve said before. But this trip made it clear that sometimes it isn’t just the dog finding you. It’s you finding your way back to yourself, one town and one old friend at a time, to end up exactly where you’re supposed to be.

By the time we rolled back into Yuma, dusty and exhausted and thoroughly changed by the week and 2,200 miles on the road, it felt less like the trip was over and more like it had simply delivered us home with more than we left with: not just Taz, but a fuller sense of each other, of where we both came from, and of how far we’d both traveled, separately and together, to get here.

But the real surprise came in the days after. Ellie Roux had been in a quiet slump since Hank passed, some spark just missing, some part of her still waiting for him to walk back through the door. The moment Taz arrived, something in her lit back up. She’s a shy dog, always has been, but she’s started acting braver around Taz, a little bolder, a little more willing to lead, like she’s stepping into being a big sister in a way she never quite got to be with Hank, who’d always just taken care of everything for her. I think, in the end, Roux needed Taz.

Molly was my first adventure dog. Hank was the legend. Ellie Roux is the steady presence who’s weathered post-college life with me: Brent, Hank’s passing, the quiet after, and now this next one, wide open and waiting to see what happens. And now there’s Taz, a little blue-eyed merle lady ready for the world, found us the same way they all did: by chance, at exactly the right moment, exactly when we needed her.