Five days to go

Today we paid a visit to the local PetSmart with a list of supplies from our Dogs for the Deaf trainer to acquire for my service dog Trooper, who arrives next Monday.

We came home with:

One medium plush dog bed.

Two stainless steel food and water bowls. (Not plastic, the trainer said.)

A six-pound bag of Purina Pro Plan small-breed chicken-and-rice dog food.

Three small bags of moist training treats.

Poo bags for the holidays?

Several rolls of plastic poo bags and a dispenser. (Plain grey. We decided against the festive decorated bags. Who comes up with such ideas?)

Two plush squeaky toys, one a moose and the other a teddy bear.

A small rubber Kong.

Three special tennis-like balls for small dogs.

A spray bottle of pee neutralizer just in case.

A collar ID tag we customized at a tag machine in the store.

It wasn't on the required list, but we also came away with an auto bucket seat protector. Early December can be very muddy.

At the hardware store we bought two plastic leftover dishes with lids and added a couple we already had. (Those will be used for the training treats.)

All told, the bill came to just over $225. We still have a meet-and-greet vet appointment to pay for, and that should bring the total to about $300, as Dogs for the Deaf said it would.

In the past we have lived with dogs and are quite familiar with their costs, so none of this was a surprise and we are not in the least complaining. The presumably rich lady who owns the Yorkie we saw being fluff-dried in the salon probably spent ten times that on her little darling.

All the same, it's nice that genuine service dogs are considered medical equipment for tax purposes.

Six days to go

Six days to go to get ready for Trooper.

My new service dog arrives next Monday, and yesterday a thick packet from Dogs for the Deaf came in the mail: a letter, a placement guide, a booklet of training instructions, and a questionnaire that amounts to a take-home test.

That extensive paperwork immediately upended my admittedly vague expectations.

Quite unlike a toaster oven that just needs to be plugged in, Trooper will not perform flawlessly right off the bat. He has been trained to “work sounds”—the phone, the doorbell, the smoke alarm, etc.—with the person who trained him. Transferring that training to a new handler—me—will take the better part of a week, with some fits and starts.

On Sunday night Laura, his trainer, and Jessica, a new certified trainer coming along to see how placements are made, will arrive by air with the pup from Central Point, Oregon. Starting Monday morning we will go over the fine points of what I can only describe as an operating manual, like that for a locomotive. For the next five days we will practice Trooper’s tasks inside and outside, including visits to restaurants, shops and supermarkets. We will pay a call to his new veterinarian for a meet-and-greet.

In this bonding endeavor, I am the one being trained. It’s going to be like boot camp, only without a drill sergeant to rip me a new one every time I screw up.

Next month Trooper and I will start obedience school. Of course that’s part of my training. I have to be taught how to keep the dog’s skills sharp, and if we are both lucky, we will learn some new ones. A skilled service animal needs a skilled service human.

It'll take the better part of a year, the manual says, before Trooper and I can be considered fully trained.

Tomorrow I’ll be dropping a small fortune at PetSmart for Trooper’s necessities—food, treats, a bed, dishes, toys, pee neutralizer just in case, poop bags, and the like.

This isn’t going to be cheap. But it’s clearly going to be an adventure. I hope I'm up to it.

Trooper

Trooper, a 16-pound schnoodle (schnauzer/poodle)

The other dog bootie has dropped.

Last May my application for a service dog for the deaf was accepted by Dogs for the Deaf in Central Point, Oregon, and I was put on the waiting list.

Yesterday, a little more than six months later, an email arrived: "I have good news. We have a dog that just completed his training that we think would be a good match for you.

"Trooper is a 16 pound Poodle/Schnauzer mix."

It's early days, but it appears that Trooper and his trainer, Laura Burke, will arrive in Evanston some time during the week of December 7.

Will Trooper and I bond? Can I be trained to help him with his lessons? What adventures will we have together?

This will be interesting, and I'll be blogging about it frequently in the months to come.

Another favorable review

Publishers Weekly checks in on Tracking the Beast:

In Kisor’s nicely plotted fifth mystery featuring Sheriff Stephen Two Crow Martinez of Porcupine County in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (after 2013’s Hang Fire), someone is murdering preteen girls and disposing of their bodies in disused railroad cars. Det. Sgt. Alex Kolehmainen of the Michigan State Police alerts Martinez to the first body. Since the search for additional victims is difficult given that a single town stores hundreds of railroad cars, Martinez calls on the local tribal police and other agencies for help. While the FBI assumes nominal control of the cases, Jack Adamson, the special agent in charge in Detroit, wants Kolehmainen and Martinez to continue investigating. The work is slow and meticulous, but it’s Martinez who helps identify a suspect by following him on the Circle Tour of Lake Superior and then adapting a famous WWII ruse to flush out the killer. Kisor’s intimate, appreciative view of the sparsely populated, richly historic Upper Peninsula is a plus. (Dec.)

Joyride

The Hoosier State. Note the full-length dome car behind the locomotive. 
Photo courtesy Indiana Dept. of Transportation.

Quite some time has passed since I last posted a piece about riding a train. That was because I hadn't ridden any new trains in quite some time. Last week I did at last: I took the Hoosier State between Chicago and Lafayette, Indiana, just for the hell of it.

The Hoosier State is an unusual train for Amtrak. Its locomotives and cars, done up in attractive orange-and-brown livery reminiscent of the old Illinois Central during its heyday, are owned by Iowa Pacific Holdings, an outfit best known for luxury cars coupled to Amtrak trains and booked for luxury prices. The train, subsidized by the state of Indiana, runs four days a week 196 miles between Chicago and Indianapolis on the days that Amtrak's three-day-a-week long-distance Cardinal from Chicago to New York doesn't run.

Amtrak provides engineers and conductors as well as the tickets, but the service crew is from Iowa Pacific. (Tickets on the Hoosier State, by the way, cost no more than they do on the Cardinal.)

And so I decided to take a joyride just to see what the Hoosier State was like, stopping at Lafayette at 10 p.m. and getting back on the return trip at 7:36 a.m. rather than detraining at Indianapolis at near midnight and reboarding at 6 a.m. Each journey ran about 3 1/2 hours.

Last week was the first week for business-class passengers, who are accommodated on the second level of a beautifully restored full-length two-story dome car from the 1950s. They're served free drinks (alcoholic, too) and meals there while coach riders can buy dinners and breakfasts in the dining area on the first level. The coaches, by the way, are also nicely refurbished former long-distance cars from the 1960s, and the seats are roomy and the legroom ample.

Business class inside the full-length dome car.

Servers wear old-fashioned white jackets.

The service, from a quintet of veterans and eager young attendants, was pleasant and efficient. While the cuisine is hardly gourmet, it's prepared fresh on the train, is served in china dishes on white tablecloths and is acceptably tasty. The bud vases on the tables contain real flowers. There's free wi-fi, too. No complaints there, none at all.

Real roses in the bud vases on the tables, something we no longer see in Amtrak dining cars.

There were just two downsides to the trip. One is that I had to spend two nights and a day in Lafayette because the return trip to Chicago skipped a day, and Lafayette, while a honest and sturdy Indiana town full of honest and sturdy Indianans, is not the Athens of the Midwest. There isn't much for a city boy to see except the Tippecanoe County Courthouse, a Victorian mishmash of six different architectural styles. It is so homely that it grows on you, and I spent a couple of hours photographing it from every angle.

The endearingly ugly Tippecanoe County Courthouse.

The other drawback is that rural northwestern Indiana offers no spectacular views from the train, unless one is a connoisseur of farmland. It didn't matter on the nighttime trip down, but on the way back the morning sun rose mainly on cows and cornstalks. (I have the same complaint about Illinois and Iowa.)

It's still dark when the northbound Hoosier State arrives in Lafayette. The consist: GP40H locomotive, two coaches, full-length dome car, coach, another GP40H.

It's hard to understand why a full-length dome car, most suitable for gorgeous mountain scenery, is employed on this boring run. Maybe it's because Iowa Pacific has one and might as well use it. That is fortunate for people who have to go to Indianapolis, especially those who can swing business class.

I'm glad I took this bucket-list trip. I'm also glad I don't have to take it again.

(Later. From time to time Amtrak safety inspectors find something wrong with an Iowa Pacific locomotive, and there apparently are no replacements, so the Hoosier State becomes a bus to Indianapolis. If you'd rather avoid "bustitution," call Amtrak the day of the trip to make sure the actual train is running.)

First advance review

. . . and it's not bad. Kirkus Reviews says of Tracking the Beast:

"Sheriff Steve Martinez of Michigan's Upper Peninsula tackles a complex case that involves a cluster of competing law enforcement groups plus some mobsters from Detroit.

"The bones of a little girl found on a train in Omaha find their way back to the Upper Peninsula when a Nebraska lawman tracks the train car's origin to Martinez's jurisdiction, where it's been in storage until recently. Martinez has knowledge about the railroad that proves useful; he narrates in an engaging first-person voice, folding in interesting bits of local history. The case is somehow connected to the murder of an illegal immigrant named Diego. The investigation stalls at first, but a call from the FBI concerning skeletal remains found in a train yard in North Dakota, and more in Philadelphia, complicates the case. In all, the remains of three other young female victims are discovered. Enter state troopers, numerous members of the press, and FBI agents in the flesh, uncharacteristically admitting their need for assistance. Once they decide to handle the murders of the girls, they ask Martinez and his sidekick, Alex, to investigate the adult victims found in other places. A visit from alleged crime boss Dominic Benedetto brings the simmering pot to a boil. Ultimately, Martinez needs to hit the road to crack the case. On the personal front, Martinez lends a hand to ladylove Ginny Fitzgerald in convincing her son Tommy not to forgo college to work as an activist for the American Indian Movement.

"In this fifth Martinez procedural (Hang Fire, 2013, etc.), Kisor's measured yet relaxed style is a very good match for the multidimensional case."

The ARCs are here

Advance Reading Copies, that is. These are paperbound uncorrected galley proofs that are sent out well ahead of publication date (December 16 in this case) to review media, library venues and the like. Their arrival is a regular milestone in the life of a new book, and the beginning of hopes that it will be widely noticed—and bought. For more info, visit henrykisor.com.