I met Len and his dog, a German shorthaired pointer, at the dog park early on a Saturday morning amid the shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.  I didn’t like him.  When I said that we were heading out to Death Valley National Park, Len, who seemed to know something about everything, told me the park was closed and had been now for weeks.  He asked which way we were heading into the park and told me that I should go a different way.  He all but shook his head and told me that I shouldn’t go.  I thanked him for his advice and escaped from the dog park before I gave him a piece of my mind.  Brian listened as I complained about Len on our way to Death Valley later that morning.

On Monday afternoon, I found Len and his dog in the same little dog park in the RV park where we were staying.  If Skipper hadn’t expressed an interest in playing with his dog, and if we hadn’t had a very nice visit to Death Valley National Park, I likely would have kept going.  But instead, we entered the park. 

“How was your trip to Death Valley?” Len inquired.

“It was beautiful,” I answered.  I continued informing Len of the park’s official closure on Saturday during our visit.

He asked if we had driven the road he recommended.  I explained the route we took and how we planned to drive his route out of the park that day, but found it closed.  Len acknowledged that he hadn’t seen parts of the park that we saw that day and that he had never entered the park where we did.  The conversation started rolling. 

One of the first things off his chest included announcing that he had been clean and sober for over thirty years.  As a result of trying to protect people from getting the virus, Alcoholic’s Anonymous had canceled meetings across the country.  But here in front of me was a man wrestling with his sobriety and the anxiety caused by the recent pandemic. 

In the hour or two that we talked that afternoon, Len told me that he was a Vietnam vet who spent his first months back from the war doing crazy things.  The reckless abandon with which he lived in these months, reportedly included putting himself to bed with a half-gallon of whiskey and a gun loaded with a single bullet.  Having survived his nightly game of Russian roulette, he tried dying in other ways the next day either by his carelessness or by pissing others off enough to want to kill him.  As I recall, at some point, he had to go to the VA for psychiatric consultation either to get financial assistance or to stay out of jail or both.  During an intensive treatment program, a psychologist diagnosed Len with PTSD and helped him to get clean.

I listened to each of his stories, interjecting occasional suggestions for him to call his sponsor, his shrink, or someone to help him stop feeling hopeless.  He told me he’d tried to attend an AA meeting via zoom, but that “it didn’t really work for him.”  He told me a lot of stories that day.  I think many were attempts to make me dislike him for the things that he had done and the way that he had lived his life.  When I didn’t react negatively to him, he told me more stories.  At one point, he recounted a story of watching a fellow soldier shoot his foot off with a gun too big for the job.  It resulted in the soldier’s death and the burden of survival for Len.  I knew it was a story that he had shared many times as a means of owning it and helping him move on.  He cried as he told it.  I listened and thought to myself that it just doesn’t get any more real than this.

At different times, our dogs played together, breaking up the time, and providing a little levity to the afternoon.  At some point, we agreed it was time for each of us to head back home.  He apologized for talking so much. I thanked him for trusting me with his stories.

I found myself looking for him as I walked around the park and as people walked by our motorhome during the rest of the weeks that we stayed in the park.  A few days later, Skipper and I saw Len and his dog just as they were leaving from the park.  When he decided to stay and chat for an hour or so,  it was that he was just as happy to see us as I was happy to see them too.

That day, Len told me that he’d had phone conversations with both his sponsor and with someone that he sponsors that helped him sort through some of his feelings.  He also told me that he had an “appointment” with his past psychologist that afternoon.  And he’d found a Zoom AA meeting and had installed the Zoom app on his phone.  He needed to figure out how to join the meeting.  Looking over his shoulder at his phone, I helped him navigate the application.  It turns out that when he told me, “it didn’t really work for him,” it literally meant that it didn’t work for him. 

Armed with the knowledge of how the app worked and a chance to attend a meeting with his home AA group, life was looking a little brighter for Len.  He told me a few more stories while the dogs played.  On our way from the park, he invited me to sit down outside his rig.  He introduced me to his wife, as “Anne, the woman from the dog park that I told you about.”

Brian and my time in the park was quickly coming to an end.  I hoped to see Len once more to ask how his meetings had turned out and generally to check in on him.  He found us at the dog park the day before we left.  He and his wife were planning to leave in a few days as well.  They would return to the area where most of their family lived and wait out the rest of the quarantine.  He told me some more stories.  And I told him how I believe that everything happens for a reason.  I’m not 100% sure why I met Len, but I’m glad I did.  If nothing else, we offered each other some companionship during a time when it’s difficult not to feel completely isolated, even living in an RV park with 150 other rigs.  And I can say that he provided me with a lesson in gratitude as I see how little we’ve had to change as a result of the pandemic. 

I doubt that our paths will cross again.  But if they do, I will consider myself lucky and happy to listen to more stories from Len. 

Len’s name has been changed to protect his anonymity.