As traffic came to a standstill on the Veterans Memorial Bridge on Monday night, at first I couldn’t tell what was going on. Then the long, shadowy figure of a dog emerged. The car in front of me in Interstate 89 north forged ahead, and I followed.
But after I crossed the bridge, I saw a vehicle’s lights off the highway, just beyond the ramp to White River Junction. I pulled over into the breakdown lane and parked my car with its hazard lights on. There were no police yet on the scene, so I figured I should call it in.
My impulse that night made me a witness to a story that has since appeared in outlets as far away as New Zealand: Heroic dog leads police to its injured owner.
When I saw that story on Facebook on Tuesday morning, posted by the New Hampshire State Police, I was surprised, and, I confess, a bit dismayed.
What I had seen, standing in the breakdown lane, was a crash that was sure to make a mess of multiple lives. Before we learned the names of the two men injured — the driver, Cameron Laundry, of North Hartland, later said he received a concussion, scrapes on his back and stitches on one hand; his passenger, Justin Connors, of Norwich, remains hospitalized and has had at least two surgeries — we had heard the name of Laundry’s Shiloh shepherd, Tinsley.
Humans have always been susceptible to sentimental narratives that overshadow the prosaic details of ordinary events. Maybe the combination of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the power of the internet is making those narratives more common. The recent death of Joan Didion, who dedicated most of her writing career to puncturing stories overinflated with sentiment, should remind us that we owe it to the world to try to see it clearly.
Maybe from where he sat, New Hampshire State Trooper Tom Sandberg believed that Tinsley was asking him and a Lebanon police officer to follow her back to the crash scene. I don’t have any reason to doubt him. It was dark and cold, and I was standing a couple hundred yards away.
I fumbled around calling the authorities. First I called the Hartford police, a number I’ve dialed so many times as part of my job that I can’t forget it. But I was tired and struggled to concentrate on the phone menu, so I gave up and dialed 911, which routed my call to New Hampshire.
It took a few minutes to route the call to Vermont and from there to Hartford and the Vermont State Police. They took my information, including my name, phone number and, oddly, my date of birth, and told me to wait for a Vermont trooper to arrive.
While I was on the phone, I could hear people talking around the wrecked vehicle. I stayed up in the breakdown lane. Usually, I keep a blanket, a change of clothes and a first aid kit in my car in the winter, but didn’t have any of those things with me. I wasn’t even all that warmly dressed and, at one point, I had get back in the car and run the heater to warm up. My unreadiness marked me as the reporter I am; I’m no rescuer.
I can’t recall whether the New Hampshire officers appeared on the bridge while I was on the phone or shortly thereafter. The two cruisers seemed to me to be trying to herd Tinsley off the bridge.
(I never saw Grizzy, Connors’ bulldog, who was found dead next to the highway Tuesday morning by a Vermont Agency of Transportation worker. And I never heard back from VTrans about where Grizzy was found.)
At one point, one of the cruisers ran its siren and seemed to weave back and forth to drive Tinsley off the bridge. It was hard for me to see. (I tried to fill in this account with an email to Sandberg and a phone message to Vermont Trooper Stacia Geno, who put out the Wednesday morning news release about the incident, but I didn’t hear back.)
Not long after the siren, the cruisers drove up the highway and into the breakdown lane. The officers put their jackets on and went down the bank to aid Connors and Laundry.
I didn’t catch sight of Tinsley until after the officers were at Laundry’s wrecked truck and speaking to him. She trotted along the guardrail of the Interstate 91 ramp, opposite where I was standing, then down to the truck. It seemed to me that she had heard Laundry’s voice and went to him. He was in despair, at times wailing, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Soon, Hartford ambulances arrived. Vermont State Police must have arrived, too. I saw Connors placed on a backboard and carried to an ambulance. By then it was nearly 11 p.m., and though I hadn’t spoken with a state trooper, I got in my car and headed home.
The story that made the rounds of social media Tuesday morning was at odds with what I’d seen, but I let it go. At a shorthanded newspaper, it’s hard to know where to start digging each morning. And once hundreds of people have gushed on social media about the exploits of a heroic dog, it’s hard to start assembling what sounds like a counternarrative. On Tuesday, we wrote what we could confirm, which was a version of Tinsley’s heroics, though hopefully not as fawning as those offered by other outlets.
But on Wednesday, when Vermont State Police released more details and announced it was charging Laundry with driving under the influence, we could start to pull the story apart. I talked with Laundry and with Kristen Connors, Justin’s ex-wife, and we were able to report how the crash has affected Justin Connors’ family.
Also, the account VSP sent out seemed closer to what I had seen — that the officers on the bridge drove up after seeing the wrecked truck. The crash, it turned out, was much more than the story of a dog’s heroism or her enduring love for her owner.
The violent wreck, allegedly fueled by drunken driving, led to criminal charges for one man, caused significant injuries to another and cost a dog her life.
Piecing together an account of an event is a chancy business, one that relies on the witnesses and on their ability to set their feelings aside. Everyone likes to bask in the warm glow of good deeds and righted wrongs, but few events unfurl in a way that lend themselves to simple emotions.
Monday night’s crash isn’t the only recent example of a heartwarming Upper Valley story that got picked up by a national outlet. A month ago, CBS News aired a segment about how patrons of Dan & Whit’s, Norwich’s justly revered general store, stepped in to stock shelves and work the register when employees were in short supply. The story had already circulated on Vermont Public Radio, Boston TV affiliates and elsewhere. Robert Reich, a Dartmouth College graduate and former labor secretary in the Clinton administration, also picked up the story as an example of what happens when a community rallies.
The story is true, but incomplete. Lost in that coverage were Norwich’s ample resources. In 2017, Norwich boasted the highest median household income in the state, $141,660.
It isn’t Tunbridge, where a couple is trying to revive the North Tunbridge Store and the town has been without a store for a few years now. The median household income in Tunbridge was $58,571 in 2019, according to Census data. It’s tougher in that town to work an otherwise low-wage retail job for nothing but the warm fuzzies.
It’s OK if national outlets want to believe that dogs can save their owners, and that communities can rally to save their general stores, but without the key details, should we believe them?
If Joan Didion, who wrote about the atomization of American culture from the 1960s on, taught us anything, it’s this: Question the easy, emotionally uncomplicated story. It might be true, but it probably isn’t the whole truth.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
