The Odyssey in the Air and on Four Legs

Or, The Mock-Heroic Epic Story of How We Took Our Dog to Prague

Bloomsday is almost here! The holiday celebrates James Joyce’s great novel Ulysses, whose action takes place on June 16. The novel adapts the story of the Odyssey to Joyce’s Dublin. Most people know the story of the Odyssey even if we’re a bit rusty on the details, and even if we have never read Ulysses. (A confession: I have never read Ulysses,¹ but I have read and taught the Odyssey a couple of times.)

People celebrate Bloomsday by dressing up as characters from the book, reading the book aloud, listening to Celtic music, and—of course—going on pub crawls and drinking copious amounts of beer. While my humble essay isn’t quite so festive, I did think it would be fun to commemorate Bloomsday by recounting a midsummer odyssey of my own: Moving overseas with our family’s elderly basset hound, Lily.

At one point Lily’s vet thought she might have hypothyroidism. “Has she been more lethargic than usual?” the vet asked. How would we ever know?

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Epic and Mock-Heroic Odysseys

Homer’s epic begins in medias res: The Trojan War has been over for ten years already when the story opens. During that time, Odysseus has had several adventures, which culminate in his being held captive on Calypso’s island, where he has been stuck for eight years. Meanwhile, back home in Ithaca, Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, and his wife, Penelope, are coping with a raucous houseful of importunate suitors, all of whom want to marry Penelope and take over the kingdom. Thanks to Athena’s intervention, Calypso releases Odysseus and he embarks for home. He is shipwrecked and washes up on Scheria, where he recounts his story to a rapt audience of Phaeacians²—how he escaped from Circe, defeated monsters like the Cyclops, visited the underworld, navigated between the Scylla and Charybdis, resisted the Sirens’ song, and got caught by Calypso. The sympathetic Phaeacians equip Odysseus with a new ship, and he sails for Ithaca. He finally arrives home, successfully battles the suitors, and reinstates himself as the ruler of his home.

As you will see below, I experienced a mock-heroic version of a few of these events myself, on our journey with Lily to Prague.³

Prologue: Calypso’s Island

Thick, luxuriant woods grew round the cave,

alders and black poplars, pungent cypress too,

and there birds roosted, folding their long wings,

. . .

Soft meadows spreading round were starred with violets,

lush with beds of parsley. [5.71–73, 80–81]

Our family’s version of Calypso’s enchanted island was our pretty New Jersey town, our home for twelve years. When my husband got an offer to set up a data-science center in Prague, he made sure that Lily could come with us before broaching the idea to me, because he knew that I would never go without her. Even with Lily, moving was a tough sell; I had many friends and a terrific community in our little town, and I didn’t want to leave. But I recognized that the move would be good for our family, and so I agreed to go and got to work on the complicated arrangements for an overseas move with a dog.

Lily at home in New Jersey. As a friend put it, Lily looks like she has been painted by Salvador Dalí.

Telemachus and the Suitors

. . . We ourselves?

We’re hardly the ones to fight them off. All we’d do

is parade our wretched weakness. A boy inept at battle. [2.64–66]

Telemachus longs to have control of his life, but he is constrained and thwarted by the suitors. I, for my part, was temporarily thwarted by the airlines and their arcane rules for transporting dogs. Because we were warned that it could take two to three months for the shipping container filled with our worldly goods to travel from the US to Europe, we decided to spend the summer in Minnesota with my family and then to fly to Prague from there. So the first stage of the journey was to get Lily to Minnesota, which required a fair amount of tangling with red tape. After some research and a few phone calls, I obtained a travel crate that would pass muster with the airlines. We even drilled some additional ventilation holes in it just in case.

Buying our tickets was more frustrating; it took nearly an entire day online and on the phone, but I ultimately managed to book Lily on a flight to Minnesota. I received a rather disconcerting confirmation email, which said that we would be sending “one piece” in cargo. Under “type of item,” the airline had entered “live dog.” (Which kind of makes you wonder what else is going into those cargo compartments!) The flight to Minnesota was uneventful, and in fact before we took off the man in the window seat in our aisle reassured me that Lily was alive and well and on the plane; he spotted her riding up the conveyer belt into the cargo hold and exclaimed, “Oh! There’s a dog on this plane! A basset hound!” Whew!

Scheria

So nothing is as sweet as a man’s own country,

his own parents, even though he’s settled down

in some luxurious house, off in a foreign land

and far from those who bore him. [9.38–41]

Odysseus washes up on the shores of Scheria, where he enjoys the magnificent hospitality of the Phaeacians. Our family enjoyed Minnesota hospitality during our lovely summer at my parents’ house and in a cabin Up North to the Lake.

Lily was so happy at my parents’ house! Could it be because my dad kept sneaking her treats?

However, the visit was also plagued by tussles with Kafkaesque bureaucracy. To start with, finding a flight to our new home was a challenge. Delta flew from Minnesota to Prague but didn’t take dogs in the summer. United took dogs and flew from Minnesota, but not to Prague. Lufthansa took dogs and flew to Prague, but not from Minnesota. United and Lufthansa were partners, and humans could be cross-booked on the two airlines, but the airline would not transfer dogs from United to Lufthansa at the connecting airport. (At this point my husband floated the idea of freeze-drying Lily, carrying her in powdered form onto the plane, and reconstituting her with warm water when we got to Prague.)

We got our flights sorted, and it was on to the next hurdle: The chip and the rabies shot. As it happened, Lily was already chipped and had received a rabies shot a few months before in New Jersey, but EU rules stipulated that the chip needed to come from their approved list, and that only after the proper chip was inserted would the rabies shot “count.” So poor Lily got two bonus shots—first the new chip, and then an extra rabies vaccine. At least she was now doubly safe, should she encounter any bats or raccoons.

The Cyclops

A grim loner, dead set in his own lawless ways.

Here was a piece of work, by god, a monster.

. . .

. . . The hearts inside us shook,

terrified by his rumbling voice and monstrous bulk.

Nevertheless I found the nerve to answer, firmly. [9.210–11, 288–90]

Probably the most famous monster in the Odyssey is the Cyclops Polyphemus, a horrifying one-eyed giant who holds Odysseus and his men prisoner in his cave. Odysseus manages to escape though the clever expedient of telling Polyphemus that his name is Nobody, so that when Polyphemus yells for help after Odysseus stabs him in the eye, “Nobody’s killing me now!” [9.455], the other Clyclopses (Cyclopes? Cyclopi?) laugh at him instead of rushing to his aid.

I encountered my own version of the Cyclops in Minnesota. Before we could import a dog to the EU, a final obstacle stood in our path: Lily’s chip and rabies shot needed to be certified by a USDA veterinarian. Luckily, there was a USDA vet about an hour’s drive from my parents’ house. The visit began amusingly enough, when it became apparent that the USDA vet thought I was a hockey wife. It’s ok—I laughed too. How many hockey wives are bespectacled, middle-aged Plain Janes? you may be wondering. The USDA vet made this strange assumption because the only people he had ever met who moved from Minnesota to the Czech Republic were University of Minnesota Gopher hockey players who were going pro. He thought I might be a goalie’s wife, because, in his words, “Some goalies are quite old.”

Unfortunately, after this promising beginning, the situation rapidly deteriorated. It turned out that the local vet who had given Lily her chip and rabies shot had filled out the paperwork incorrectly, and so the USDA vet called him and proceeded to viciously berate him for more than fifteen minutes. He then slammed down the phone and paced around, ranting for another half hour or so to his captive audience (me) about the incompetence and fecklessness of other people. I had to just sit there and listen to him, even nodding along and placating him, because I worried that if I spoke up or walked out, he would refuse to sign Lily’s papers. I am not as clever as Odysseus, but I did use my feminine wiles to appear agreeable, accommodating, sympathetic, and submissive, so that he would give me the paperwork I needed to keep my dog. (And then I called the local vet to apologize and sent a bouquet of flowers to his office.)

A Visit to the Underworld

And I saw Sisyphus too, bound to his own torture,

grappling his monstrous boulder with both arms working,

heaving, hands struggling, legs driving, he kept on

thrusting the rock uphill toward the brink, but just

as it teetered, set to topple over—time and again

the immense weight of the thing would wheel it back and

the ruthless boulder would bound and tumble down to the plain again. [11.681–87]

Odysseus’s journey takes him to Hades, where he meets fallen compatriots as well as Sisyphus and other figures from mythology. Our own version of Hades was the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, where we had a mere ninety minutes to change planes. This would be a tight connection even under ordinary circumstances, given the crowds and chaos that are typical of Charles de Gaulle, but our situation was still worse. We had to

1. Go through passport control,

2. Pick up Lily as well as our four very large suitcases,

3. Schlep everything to a distant ticket counter and recheck all our baggage, including Lily,

4. Go through security again, and

5. Somehow get to our gate before takeoff.

All after a twelve-hour overnight flight and no sleep. Anyway, we arrived at the baggage claim to find our suitcases and a desperate Lily awaiting us. So far so good. My husband got a large cart and we loaded it up with Lily in her crate (yes, she was baffled that we weren’t freeing her) and all our bags. Our daughter, who is disabled, hitched a ride on the back. Pushing our giant boulder of a loaded cart, we set off at a pace worthy of Usain Bolt and made it a kilometer or so . . . only to discover that we were headed in the wrong direction. We swerved to turn around and the entire cart toppled, tipping over Lily’s crate—out of which splashed a puddle of ominous yellow fluid onto the floor of a very crowded concourse. I tried to abjure responsibility for the mess and run away—“What’s that?! That isn’t ours!”—but my husband, a finer person than I, found a custodian to mop it up.

We loaded Lily, the bags, and our daughter back on the cart and continued our Sisyphean journey back the way we came. After what felt like a marathon, we arrived at the correct ticket counter, only to learn from the ticket agent—who was taken aback at the sight of Lily—that the airline had no record that there was going to be a dog in the cargo hold. The agent called the pilot personally to make sure he knew to pressurize the cargo hold. And then Lily was whisked away on the conveyer belt. At this point Athena must have intervened on our behalf, because we zipped through security and made it to our gate with a few minutes to spare.

Epilogue: Argos

Infested with ticks, half-dead from neglect,

here lay the hound, old Argos.

But the moment he sensed Odysseus standing by

he thumped his tail, nuzzling low, and his ears dropped,

though he had no strength to drag himself an inch

toward his master. [17.328–32]

The most touching moment in the Odyssey for dog-lovers like me occurs near the end of the book, when Odysseus returns to Ithaca after twenty years away. His loyal dog, Argos, who was a puppy when Odysseus went off to war, is the only living creature to recognize Odysseus after his long absence. Argos rouses himself to lick Odysseus’s foot and then dies happy.

While our own old hound was as overjoyed as Argos to see us when we picked her up at the Prague airport, and while she must have felt herself to have been sadly neglected during the previous twenty hours, I am happy to report that unlike Argos she survived, and tick-free to boot.⁴ We cut the zip-ties on her crate, released her, and walked her over to customs, where the officials scanned her chip and—to my considerable relief—waved her through. We hopped in a cab, dropped our bags at our new house, and strolled down the street to a family-owned pizza restaurant that would become our family’s hangout for the next four years. The waiter brought a bowl of water for Lily and a beer for me, and I knew that at long last we had made it home.

Lily making herself comfortable in our new house in Prague—on our daughter’s bed, where she was emphatically NOT allowed. Zlobidla! (Czech for “naughty girl!”)

The Moral of the Story

Every story has a moral, and this one, it turns out, has five:

1. Our beloved pets are worth the hassle. No need to discuss this one; everyone who has a pet knows this is true.

2. We must do what is right, even when it’s difficult. We were in such a hurry during our ninety-minute connection in Paris that I was tempted to leave Lily’s icky mess on the floor, but being in a rush doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to clean up our own mess. I’m grateful that my husband took care of it.

   Or here’s another example: Several people suggested that we could avoid the hassle and expense of taking Lily in the cargo hold by getting her a fake therapy-dog vest so we could take her in the cabin with us. But we never considered exploiting this loophole. Fake therapy dogs cast suspicion on real therapy dogs, making life more difficult for people with mental and physical disabilities.

   It can sometimes be challenging to do the right thing, but when we do, we will be rewarded with a great story and with the knowledge that we have the power to solve our problems.

3. Rules may seem stupid and annoying, but there is usually a good reason for them. Even though I chafed at the various airline and EU policies, I also understood that the EU quite reasonably wanted to keep out rabies, and that the airlines wanted to protect pets from heatstroke.

4. We should give workers our respect and gratitude. Raging USDA vets aside, most workers we encounter in our travels are just trying to do their jobs and be as helpful as possible. So we shouldn’t make their jobs harder by arguing with them or demanding special treatment. And if they go the extra mile—cleaning up our dog’s puddle or making a phone call that saves her life, for example—we should thank them!

5. If you can’t be at home, take home with you. We itinerant types, we happy wanderers, yearn for home just as Odysseus does. So we build a home where we are.

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How about you, readers? What odysseys have you been on in your own life, and did you come away with a great story? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

Kate Bush has been enjoying a well-deserved renaissance, thanks to the appearance of “Running Up That Hill” on Stranger Things last year. “The Sensual World” is a fantastic song too. Kate Bush reimagines Molly Bloom’s monologue at the close of Ulysses:

I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

The song is lush, sexy, and worthy of Molly Bloom herself. Enjoy!

1. I have a pact with a grad school friend. He studied Modernism, and I studied seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Puritan literature. I have read Samuel Richardson’s 1500-page epistolary behemoth Clarissa three times, while my friend has read Ulysses twice. If I ever read Ulysses, he has to read Clarissa, and if he ever reads Clarissa, I have to read Ulysses. So far we are both safe!

2. For some reason the inhabitants of Scheria are called Phaeacians. Does anyone know why?

3. All quotations come from Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1996).

4. She was impeccably behaved for several weeks after the flight. We could imagine her thinking, “I’ll be good! Please don’t throw me back in that noisy, scary, dark room!”