To Cap Off 2020, My Dog Locked Me Out of My Car
By: Taylor Foreman
Tags: Life Lessons, Life, Travel, Relationships, Dogs

My dog is smiling at me through my car window.

His paw is on the lock button.

My phone is in the car. The keys are in the ignition. I can hear my podcast still playing through the glass.

We are 50 miles from any town. It truly — suddenly — matters that we are in the middle of the Great American Desert. 18-wheelers barrel past me at 90 MPH.

Boring routine collapses into unbearable chaos through the simple touch of a dog’s paw.

There is no way forward.

“OK,” I say to myself, yanking on all the possible handles. “I need to think.”

I start doing breathing exercises that I learned to deal with the stress of the pandemic. I’m not sure what the universe wants me to have learned here . . . but that seems like something.

Tell Yourself There Is Always a Way

After I quit my marketing job, I worked as a handyman for about a year to fund my writing addiction.

Surprisingly (to everyone I know), I was a pretty good handyman. I had a motto:

“There is always a way.”

Things don’t always fit together right in the real world, or you have the wrong tools, or there are issues you could have never foreseen. For example, you need to mount exercise equipment to the ceiling, but the building is 100 years old, and the studs are impossible to find (or perhaps never existed).

No matter what, I muttered to myself that there was always a way. Even if it was clear that there was not. Even if the client was breathing down my neck. I just needed to take a deep breath and change the way I was looking at things. Every single time, I figured it out if I kept the faith.

Since I stopped being a handyman, that has been the number one lesson that applies to nearly every area of my life.

Standing in the middle of the desert, no phone, no keys, locked car running with my dog in it — this crosses my mind: There is always a way.

OK. First things first.

Get Your Feet in the Dirt

By “get your feet in the dirt,” I mean get practical, get physical, and get active. If you stay in your head, you will freak out, hyperventilate, and get stuck. It’s important to breathe and move your body. There is a lot of wisdom trapped in your body.

In this case, I literally had to get my feet in the dirt. My first instinct was to look for a wire hanger in the side-of-the-highway detritus. When I was little, a family friend named “Hotshot” unlocked a car by jamming a hanger in the door.

I found flattened cans, shredded tires, bits of plastic straps, and even a metal hook. No hanger.

I went back to the road. I waved my hands over my head to get someone’s help. I needed to borrow a phone — or maybe a trucker would have the equipment to unlock a car.

I waved and waved. People honked a waved back happily. “Merry Christmas!” was the vibe. What the hell did they think I was doing on the side of the road?

I thought about breaking the window with a big rock. That calmed me down. At least I had something I could do if worse comes to worst.

In between plans, I would try to convince my dog to unlock the car again. I pressed my mouth to the glass and said, “You wanna treat??” He would look at me — bored.

I went to pee in a bush.

Ask a Stranger for What You Need

While looking for a good peeing bush, I wandered farther and farther from my car. I find an old sign that reads, “Callbox.”

Over the callbox is a solar panel. I open the box and inside is what looks like a payphone.

I pick it up. A dial tone. My heart flutters.

After a few seconds, a voice comes over the phone.

“Hello, can I help you?” “Uh,” I say, “My dog locked me out of my car. Can you send someone to unlock it?” “. . . Hold please.”

Look Working Men in the Eye and Shake Their Hand

Only 30 minutes go by, and a guy in a big toe truck pulls up. There is a big, cloth Santa head on the grill.

“Merry Christmas!” he says. “Where are you from?”

He names a nearby town, which probably has a population of 200 people. The man is twice my size and red-faced.

“This is the third person I’ve helped locked out of their car . . . It’s always either a dog or a kid!” “I could have sworn I was unique!” I tell him.

He opens my door in 5 minutes. He charges me 150 dollars. I would have offered him blood if he had asked.

I thanked him, looked him in the eye, and had my hand swallowed up by his.

Don’t Treat the World Like More TV

There is a whole world out there that isn’t actually separate from us, as much as it might feel like it is.

You know how strange the side of a highway feels on foot? At first, it feels like a forgotten place. After a while of waiting, panicking, and looking for a hanger, it wasn’t so distant from me. It was a real place in the world.

For the rest of the trip, I felt more connected. By getting my feet in the dirt and shaking the hand of someone who lived out here, I felt like I wasn’t just passing it by. It was real.

Use Travel to Think

Travel is great for thinking. The thing about thinking is that you never realize you need to do it until you are forced to have done it.

My trip was 21 hours over a couple of days. Only so much of that can be filled with interesting podcasts and music. Eventually, I had to sit with myself and think.

I talk too much. I am selfish in my relationships. I love my family.

Probably pretty obvious realizations, but I needed to have the space to have them.

Read a Lot

Reading makes me better able to understand the world. The more I read, the more I take from my experiences.

Reading won’t stop my dog from locking me out of my car, but it will give me the tools to learn the right lessons from the whole experience — and that is absolutely priceless.

After my side-of-the-road scare, all I wanted to do was read. I wanted the comfort of deep ideas. Now and then, I would pull over and take some notes.

Counter-intuitively, having a profoundly worldly experience made me more willing to read about abstract ideas.

Compare Theory to Action by Trying and Failing

Read a lot, and then go do stuff.

You will make a fool out of yourself. That’s great. Read some more, think about where you went wrong, and try again.

I thought it was a mistake that I was failing so often for so much of my life. Now I realize that it is all part of the package.

As long as I am learning from my time in the desert, I am on the right path.

Learn to Tolerate Hours of Mild Discomfort

There is a lot of wisdom in prolonged mild discomfort. I think that’s why people meditate with their backs straight and not in a La-Z-boy.

Driving a car for hours on end can seem like torture to some people — so easy that you could fall asleep, but if you did, it would kill you. You have to force your attention on the endless road ahead for hours and hours. I think of it as training.

When life throws you into extreme discomfort that you didn’t plan for, you will be ready.

Bring a Dog (Chaos) With You Everywhere You Go

Dogs are a great way to get used to the facts of life. Life brings you chaos — whether you like it or not. No matter how much you exercise, you still might get sick. No matter how much you clean, dust always returns. No matter how much you care, you will still lose people.

Dogs train you to love the chaos in your life. You get used to the hair everywhere. The daily walks. The occasional emergencies.

Life — and dogs — require equanimity. Forgive life for bringing us COVID-19. Forgive the dog for locking us out of the car.

I don’t wish that a dog locks you out of your car . . . but I kinda do also. Those experiences are the stories we tell one another. They reveal who we are, like it or not.

Forget Worrying About Unlikely Things

Being trapped on the side of the road forced me to confront my fear of unlikely events. What if a car crashed into mine? What if the dog suffocated? What if someone mugged me?

To take the steps I needed to get out of the situation, I had to let go of those things.

In life, we can’t control if we get COVID-19 (mostly) or if the economy fails, or who is elected president. The world probably isn’t going to end anytime soon. Let’s focus on what we can do, here and now.

What is the first, practical step forward?

Ask People Where They Are Going And Where They Have Been

In rest stops, little kids like to pet Seymour.

I learned to ask their parents where they are going and where they have been. Social interactions without anyone standing to gain anything are golden. I plan to ask more people in my normal life the same question.