A Rescue Chihuahua Story, Without the Halo

I do not, as a general rule, write the genre of column where a small dog restores my faith in anything. The genre is, on my reading, mostly a way of avoiding the actual work of paying attention. The dogs do not, in any direct sense, restore faith. The people who drive the dogs four hundred miles in a hatchback occasionally do, and a column about the people, written carefully, is one I am willing to attempt.

This is the column about a chihuahua named Marble, a volunteer driver named Ron Whitaker, and a Saturday morning in April when the math, against my own pessimism, worked out.

The pickup, in El Paso

Marble had been in a regional shelter in El Paso, Texas, for nine weeks. She was four pounds, an estimated three years old, and had been surrendered by an owner who had moved out of state. The shelter had her listed for euthanasia at week ten, on a clock that I am not going to dramatize because the math is what it is.

A small-breed rescue group in central Indiana had agreed, in week eight, to take her. The logistics of moving a four-pound dog from El Paso to Indianapolis are, in the rescue world, a cascade of phone calls. Marble's cascade resolved into Ron Whitaker, a retired postal worker in his early sixties from Tulsa, who had a 2014 Honda hatchback, a soft crate, and a habit of doing two long drives a month for a network of small-breed rescues.

Ron picked Marble up on a Friday at 4 a.m. in a parking lot off I-10. He drove her to Tulsa, fed her dinner in his kitchen, slept five hours, and drove her the next leg, through Saint Louis, to a hand-off point in southern Illinois, where a second volunteer named Patricia took her the last 200 miles to Indianapolis.

The sincere paragraph, planted on schedule

I will plant the sincere paragraph here, because the column needs one and Ron earned it. I called him a week after the drive to ask why he does it. He said, in a tone I am going to try to render accurately, "I have a station wagon, and I have a free Friday, and there are dogs that need to be in another state."

This is, I think, the entire content of what most people who do this kind of work would tell you, if you got them on the phone for a few minutes. They have a vehicle. They have a free day. There are dogs that need to be in a different state. The reasoning does not, on the available evidence, get more elaborate than that, and I have stopped expecting it to.

The handoff, in southern Illinois

Ron handed Marble off to Patricia in the parking lot of a small diner outside Mount Vernon, Illinois, at 9:14 p.m. on Saturday. The two of them stood in the parking lot for fourteen minutes, comparing notes on Marble's eating, her bathroom schedule, her general affect. Ron handed Patricia a small notebook he had been keeping in the glovebox, with timestamps and observations. Patricia photographed the notebook on her phone and texted it to the receiving rescue's foster coordinator. The handoff was, by Ron's later count, the most documented thing he had done that week.

Marble arrived in Indianapolis at 2 a.m. Sunday. The foster home, a quiet couple with two cats and a previously fostered chihuahua, took her in. By the next afternoon, she had eaten a small dinner, drunk water, and chosen a corner of the couch.

She was adopted, three weeks later, by a graduate student at Butler University who had been on the rescue's waiting list for several months. The adoption fee covered approximately a third of the transport cost. The rest, Ron told me cheerfully, was "the cost of a Friday."

What this asks of readers, if anything

I am not going to tell you to drive four hundred miles. The genre would expect that. The honest version is more modest.

• If you have a spare bedroom and a free month, the small-breed rescue nearest you is, almost certainly, looking for fosters. A separate piece on the first 90 days covers what foster work actually involves.
• If you have a working vehicle and a free Saturday, the same rescue often coordinates short transport legs (50 to 150 miles) that do not require a hatchback or a Tulsa-to-Illinois commitment.
• If you have neither time nor space, a $25 monthly recurring donation to the rescue covers the gas and tolls for one transport leg every other month. The math, in my experience, scales in both directions.
• The ASPCA's get-involved guidance covers the broader landscape if you do not have a local breed-specific rescue.

Where Marble is now

Marble is, as of this writing, asleep on a small fleece bed in a graduate student's apartment in Indianapolis. The student sends Ron Whitaker a photo every few weeks, which Ron forwards to me without comment, which is how I know to write this paragraph. The photos are unremarkable. The dog has put on weight. The kitchen counters are clear. The student is, by all reports, finishing a thesis on geophysics.

I do not, as a general rule, write the column where a small dog restores my faith. I will, this once, write the column where a small dog and a 2014 Honda hatchback and a retired postman in Tulsa run a small system that mostly works on the days I am not paying attention. The bond between a small dog and a household is a longer story; the bond between a network of strangers across four states and a four-pound dog they will never personally adopt is, this week, the one I am keeping.