Samwise's Blood Test: A Wake-up Call

All photos in this letter (other than one) are from yesterday’s dawn hike at White Sands National Park. A lovely and freeing off-trail four-mile ramble into the dunes.

I know we will not be able to take these annual winter trips as we do forever. Times change, and circumstances, too. Age plays a factor—it is a raw reality that dogs age six times faster than humans.

The first long trip came seven years ago as a response to surviving heart failure, kidney failure, stroke, sepsis, blood clots, and the rest of the items on my Pupu Platter of Death. My father had taken his seven youngest around the country in August of 1969 while pulling a Skamper tent trailer. It was an indelible month on the road, made all the more important since my mother died the previous Christmas week.

I always figured I'd take my own family on such an odyssey, but I never got married or had kids.

I was so near the end of life during those five weeks in Maine Med that I realized I might not have the opportunity to see…