We Left It All On Goodfellow Road

My dog disappeared into the Vermont woods on a snowy November afternoon. He's a hound dog and expecting him not to follow his nose was like expecting a bird not to fly.

For months, Jared and I had been chasing the fantasy of buying a little piece of land in the Northeast Kingdom, away from our crowded suburban cul-de-sac. We found a company that would build us a yurt from our own trees if we felled and delivered them. We researched composting toilets. We imagined ourselves stargazing and listening hard to take in all the sounds of the night that didn't come from cars or our neighbor's air conditioners.

We even set aside some money and started talking to a bank about how we could pay for our own slice of wilderness. I'd been emailing with a real estate agent named Josh who sent weekly property listings to my inbox:

12 private acres with a stream and views for miles!

22 acres on a south-facing slope close to two ski mountains!

Own a mountain with this 46 acre plot bordered by over 1000 acres of conservation land!

They all sounded perfect and I wanted to pull the trigger and make an offer. But my husband's request, to at least drive up and visit some of the properties, seemed reasonable.

So we packed our kids and our dog into our Jeep Cherokee and headed up 89 North into the great Vermont woods. It was a Monday, and when we left our house in southern New Hampshire, it was a grey, forty-degree day. But as the exit numbers got higher, the temperature got lower and by the time we reached northern Vermont, it was below freezing.

If you could hear Salty bark, you'd know in a second that he is 100% hound dog. His howl is long and musical and his velvet black ears hang below his jowls. We got him when he was two years old after someone found him running along the side of a highway and scooped him up. They brought him to my sister's vet clinic, where they located his family and tried to return him.

The family surrendered him, saying he was a no-good, runaway mutt and they didn't want him anymore.

My sister gave him a bath, cut his nuts off, and gave him some shots. Once he was all cleaned up, he was a sweet, mellow dog with big brown eyes and a soft coat. She called and told us about him, and the next weekend we were on our way to pick him up. When he first came to our house, his runaway habits were hard to break. Before he knew that our house was his house, he'd take off around the neighborhood, barking at the front door of any old house like those guys who come around offering free window estimates to everyone in the summer.

I kept my bike at the ready, chasing him down every time he took off. He was always happy to come home, and slowly, we were able to convince him to stick close by. We spent hundreds of dollars on an electric fence and radio collars before we finally trained him to return to us when we blew a whistle in a certain way. And we showered him with love and attention until our house was the only one he wanted to call home.

By the time we were on the way to scope out our Vermont properties, Salty had been well-trained for nearly a year and it never occurred to us that the moosey smells of the hemlock lowlands would bring back his old runaway habits.

We took an old logging road to get to the first property we wanted to look at. The ground hadn't frozen yet, so in some spots, we were up to our axles in mud. There were raccoon-sized rocks in the road and it got so narrow, brush was scraping both sides of the bumper.

And then, out of nowhere, a Century 21 'FOR SALE' sign appeared.

My visions of building a yurt and erecting a wood-fired pizza oven crashed to the ground like a tree alone in the woods.

The terrain was entirely impassable. Earlier that summer, there was a famous prison break where two guys survived undetected in the woods for almost two weeks. At the time, it seemed implausible. But standing at the edge of this unmanaged lot, I saw how a person could just disappear.

According to the information from Josh, this lot was a little less than 30 acres. The closest power lines were miles away and there hadn't been any logging or development in decades. When I read about it on my laptop at home, I thought that was exactly what I wanted.

But looking into the grey, scraggly, uninviting forest, I realized that maybe it would be nice to have power, a driveway, or a well on the property. Maybe it would be OK if there was another house within five miles or if there were hiking trails already established.

We let Salty and the kids out of the car, and they shivered on the side of the road for a few minutes before asking if we could move on.

There were three more properties on our list, so we crossed this one off and picked our way back through the logging road to head to the next one.

Half an hour later, we were headed north on Goodfellow road looking for our next potential paradise. We found another 'FOR SALE' sign and were pleased to see that this plot of land already had a driveway cut into it.

Now that I think about it, I guess we were trespassing, but at the time, it didn't even cross my mind.

The Goodfellow road property was a long, sloped rectangle. We had looked on Google maps and seen that there was a clearing on one end. It had started snowing and it was getting colder, but I convinced the kids to follow me down the footpath that I was sure would lead us there.

Meanwhile, my husband and Salty headed in the other direction to look for the stream. It felt like we were off to a better start with this property.

We found the clearing and imagined what it would be like to build a little shed or a tent platform. There was an old lawn chair and a few beer cans in one spot, and I found them reassuring as if they were proof that this was a nice spot to chill for a while.

Back at the Jeep, the kids buckled in to warm up. I wandered the land, admiring the mix of hardwoods and softwood species. And then in the distance, I heard the shrill call of a familiar whistle. Salty had on his remote collar, which gave him a small shock when we pushed a button. But we often found that he responded better to the whistle, so hearing it didn't concern me.

Until I started hearing the whistle blow again and again and again. Usually, when we go to the woods, we let Salty run free with the tacit agreement that he will return to us as soon as we whistle. Once he understood his end of the bargain, we rarely had to blow the whistle more than twice before he came crashing back to us at top speed.

Then in between the whistle blows, I heard Jared's voice calling.

"SALTY! SALTY! SALTY!"

His voice got closer until I could hear his steps breaking through the snow and brush. Our dog was nowhere in sight. The temperature had fallen to the low twenties and the wind had picked up.

Jared explained that while they were exploring, they'd surprised a moose. The moose took off and Salty took off with it. No shock, whistle, or pleading call could coax that nose of his off the scent. And so our dog disappeared into a thousand acres of undeveloped wilderness.

We were hours away from home, our kids were in the car and we'd lost cell phone coverage when we'd pulled off the highway hours ago. And now our dog was missing. This was not the dream we'd imagined.

We spent the next hour in the woods, stumbling through streams and hedges, alternating between calling and listening. The snow had was coming down quickly enough that it covered our tracks and we had to be careful not to get lost ourselves. We'd left the kids in the car with the engine off so we wouldn't run out of gas.

This. Damn. Dog.

The sun had set, but there was still enough dim light for us to see when we returned to the safety of our vehicle. We looked at our paper map and decided to drive around to a different road where we thought our dog might pop out.

When we arrived, there was no sign of Salty. We decided to split up, with Jared on foot and me in the Jeep. I set my headlights to bright and drove slowly up and down all the roads within a three-mile radius of Goodfellow Road. Jared tromped his way back into the woods, nervously knocking on a few hunting-camp doors to ask if anybody had seen our dog.

By the time I returned to our rendezvous point, both of us were empty-handed. I'd kept a stiff upper lip, but it was hard to stay strong when I pictured our poor, snuggly dog realizing that he'd strayed too far in a strange new place. Could he survive a night alone in the woods in a snowstorm? Would he freeze or get eaten? His thin fur did not well prepare him for the cold night ahead.

And then I was faced with an equally dismal situation: our two kids, eight and three years old, had been sitting in the cold car for hours. No food, no games, no happy fantasies about how we'd return here in the summer for s'mores and ghost stories. We were hours away from home and they had to go to school the next day.

The things I'd thought I wanted to get away from were all that I wanted: cell phone service, a restaurant, or even a Dunkin' Donuts.

Jared and I talked out of earshot of the kids and decided that we needed to head home. Without our dog. It was heartbreaking but there wasn't another option.

Forty minutes later, we were back on the highway. It was completely dark and the roads were snow-covered and icy. Nobody talked and the radio was off. We were heartbroken.

And then there was a ding on my phone. A voicemail!

We had to drive a few more miles before I could check it. When the signal was strong enough, I listened to the most glorious voice in the world: our vet!

In her message, she said that someone in Vermont had called her saying that she'd found Salty running down the middle of the road. The vet thought it might be a scam, so she didn't want to give out our contact info. The woman on the phone said she'd be waiting at a little roadside diner called The Roadside Grill until it closed at 8 pm.

I called our vet back and explained the situation. Once I hung up the phone, I burst into tears that turned into laughter. We put music back on and soon everyone was talking and speculating about what the scene would be like back at the Roadside Grill.

An hour later, we met a red-haired woman who drove a Prius. Salty was curled on her backseat, exhausted and cold. She had been driving slowly because of the bad weather, and when she came around a corner, she saw a black dog contrasted against the white of the snow-covered road. She pulled over and found him tired and eager to go with her.

He was exhausted, but we coaxed him out of her car and into ours and then and insisted on buying dinner for his rescuer.

Inside, there was a pot-bellied woodstove cranking out warm, dry heat. We sat at a horseshoe-shaped counter and ordered hamburgers, hot chocolate, and french fries. The cook showed us a handful of bear teeth that had been dropped off that day--part of Vermont's bear hunting registration system.

Fat and happy, we got in the car--this time with our dog--and drove home.

And guess what? We did not buy property in Vermont.

We were sort of like Salty: at first, he was thrilled by the excitement of chasing a wild moose. But at the end of the day, what he really wanted was a cozy blanket and a family of people to snuggle with.

We thought we wanted acres and acres of solitude, but in the end, we bought a tiny ski condo instead. And every weekend, we bring Salty and the kids there. We hike, we ski and we look at stars. We snuggle under blankets and read books while we snack on popcorn.

And it's exactly the perfect amount of magic.

Salty thinks so too.