‘Just terrifying.’ How Paso Robles author found missing dog in a 1,500-acre wilderness
“Poppy got loose. ... She’s gone. ... She ran away.”
As Teresa J. Rhyne listened to a panicked phone message describing how her dog had bolted during a walk, her heart sank.
“My reaction when I first got the call ... was denial. And then absolute fear and panic, with a lot of helplessness thrown in since I was 60 miles away,” recalled Rhyne, an attorney and author who divides her time between Paso Robles and Riverside.
Rhyne and her boyfriend left their seats for a Laker game at Staples Center in Los Angeles and raced into a massive wilderness park in Riverside to search for their their beloved rescue beagle in the middle of a thunderstorm.
Rhyne details the frantic search for Poppy in her latest nonfiction book, “Poppy in the Wild: A Lost Dog, Fifteen Hundred Acres of Wilderness, and the Dogged Determination That Brought Her Home.” It’s available Oct. 6 from Pegasus Books.
“Poppy in the Wild” is the third in a series of “dogoirs” — or, dog-inspired memoirs — Rhyne has written.
“I have often joked that I write books about tragedies that happen to me and my dogs that have happy endings,” Rhyne said, although she’d prefer to skip the “tragedy” part. “I have to live these experiences and I don’t want to keep living them with my dogs.”
Author’s love of beagles inspires books
Rhyne, a lawyer who specializes in estate planning and wealth protection, is a lifelong dog lover with a passion for a particular breed. Over the course of 30 years, she’s had 10 beagles.
“Beagles are one of those breeds that people passionately love or can’t stand them,” she said. “I fall on the ‘passionately love’ side.”
Rhyne, 57, said she first fell in love with beagles as a child when she visited her dad’s dog-breeding relatives in Georgia. When the attorney, who attended UC Santa Barbara, graduated from Loyola Law School in December 1986, she got a beagle puppy for Christmas.
“They’re the perfect-looking puppy with those big round bellies and floppy ears,” she said. “I just love them. I love their stubborn, entertaining personality. They’re very smart dogs. ... If you get a beagle, you need to have a sense of humor because they’re going to outsmart you.”
Rhyne’s love of beagles helped inspire her first book.
A year after she adopted her beagle Seamus, doctors told her that the dog had a malignant tumor and gave him less than a year to live. Three years later, Rhyne was diagnosed with breast cancer, leading to chemotherapy and surgery.
“When I first was diagnosed, I went straight to Barnes & Noble to try to find a book to help me through (the experience),” she said, but only discovered “heavy medical books written from a doctor’s point of view.”
“I wanted to hear from someone who was going through it.” Rhyne said. “I ended up doing what they say: Write the book you want to read.”
The result was a blog that became the basis of “The Dog Lived (and So Will I),” a 2012 memoir that landed on bestseller lists for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today. It’s a story of cancer, recovery and romance; part of the book explores Rhyne’s relationship with her boyfriend, Chris Kern.
“I get asked all the time, ‘Is it going to make me cry?’ ” Rhyne recalled. “I say, ‘It’s a book about two cancers, so at some point, yeah.’ ”
Rhyne’s followup book, 2014’s “The Dogs Were Rescued (And So Was I),” follows her and Kern as they adopt two beagles — Daphne, who was shot with buckshot and discarded by a backyard breeder, and Percival, who was freed from an animal-testing laboratory by the nonprofit Beagle Freedom Project — and search for a more compassionate lifestyle. (Seamus, who died eight years past his initial cancer diagnosis, also appears in the book.)
“In (Southern California) in particular, there’s still a huge overpopulation of dogs in shelters, and there’s not a lot of room. We’re euthanizing so many of them,” Rhyne said. By adopting those dogs, she added, “You’re rescuing them from near certain death.”
After Daphne died of lymphoma, Rhyne set out to save more unwanted animals. “I’m partial to the tough-luck cases myself,” she said.
The author ended up bringing home Roe, an abandoned hunting hound, from Meade Canine Rescue & Sanctuary in Creston. And she agreed to foster Poppy, a beagle-Jack Russell terrier mix rescued from the Chinese dog meat trade by Beagle Freedom Project.
“It was clear she had no socialization whatsoever. She was terrified of people and basically feral,” Rhyne said of Poppy, describing a dog so shy that she’d cower under the attorney’s desk whenever people came into her office.
Still, Poppy charmed Rhyne’s paralegal, Jessica, and Jessica’s fiance, Austin, who planned to adopt the dog as their own.
Search for escaped dog featured in ‘Poppy in the Wild’
The events chronicled in “Poppy in the Wild” began with a daring escape.
One night, while Rhyne and her boyfriend were enjoying a date night at a Lakers game, Jessica and Austin took Poppy for a walk at their Riverside apartment complex, Rhyne recalls.
Then it started raining. Frightened by the thunder, Poppy twisted out of her harness and ran off, racing across a shopping center and two busy streets to disappear into Sycamore Canyon Wilderness Park.
“The four of us spent hours in the rain and the storm that night hiking through the canyon,” Rhyne recalled.
After their initial search proved fruitless, she sought help, turning to everyone from pet psychics to the police to a Native American man who communes with owls.
According to the author, it was two real-life “dog detectives” — pet recovery specialists Mike Noon and Babs Fry — who helped her work out a winning strategy for getting Poppy home.
“I thought I knew a lot about dogs, and I did everything wrong,” Rhyne acknowledged. “My instinct was, go to the dog, chase the dog, call to the dog, and those are the wrong things (to do).”
Instead, she learned, she had to help Poppy find her way back by herself.
“Here was a dog who was going to consider everything a predator,” Rhyne realized. “When we sent people out into the wilderness park to search for her, we sent out predators, so she was going to stay hidden.”
Rhyne said she wrote “Poppy in the Wild” in part to help other people struggling to find lost pets. The book includes a special section aimed at those animal lovers — “Doggone Helpful Tips for When Your Dog Is Gone” — with advice on crafting flyers, organizing volunteers and setting humane traps.
“A lost dog is just terrifying,” she said. “You’re losing a member of your family.”
Pets offer comfort during coronavirus
Without giving anything away, Rhyne noted that Poppy is now a healthy, happy member of her household.
“We call her ‘Big Adventure’ now,” Rhyne said. “She was lost in a wilderness park in a storm for five days. That’s a pretty big adventure for a little dog.”
Rhyne said Poppy and her other pets have been a source of comfort during the coronavirus pandemic, albeit a noisy one.
“Our biggest issue is when the dogs howl” during Zoom calls, she said with a chuckle.
Although she’s still visits Riverside a few days a month to work at her law practice, The Teresa Rhyne Law Group, Rhyne has spent the last few months mainly working out of her home on the Central Coast. She shares office space in Paso Robles with another attorney.
“I’d rather sit this out in Paso Robles in our house overlooking vineyards than sitting in my townhome in crowded Riverside,” she said with a chuckle.
Kern, the former tasting room manager of LXV Wine in Paso Robles, now serves as Rhyne’s office manager while offering wine education courses via Zoom.
Rhyne keeps in touch with other dog-loving writers via the author collaborative Dogs & Books. “We do ‘yappy hours’ every Thursday,” she explained. “Somebody’s dog always crashes the party.”
She’s working with those authors to figure out how to promote “Poppy in the Wild” in a time when COVID-19 restrictions have made traditional book tours, television appearances and public readings a challenge. But she’s confident the book will find an audience.
“’Poppy in the Wild” is “a story of finding home,” Rhyne said. “To me, that’s dogs. Dogs are home.”
