Of all the blog posts I’ve ever written, this one falls in the top ten stories that I WISH I had video of.  You know those moments where you laugh so hard, for so long and no sound ever comes out?  This one nighttime journey tops all those moments, and I was behind the wheel.

It happened with Carmen, the woman from this post, and it also happened on the same night that my drinking and driving encounter with a police officer occurred, only on the way back from where we had gone that night.

I need to foreshadow this story by explaining the conditions of the stretch of road I had to drive in order to get from point A to Point B.  Between the San San area and Long Bay area of Portland, the road is basically deplorable.  So awful that Carmen and I invented a new acronym for this stretch of road:  BSR – short for Bullsh!t Road.  Along BSR there were very short stretches of smooth, un-potholed bits of heaven.  We nicknamed those wonderful (although VERY short) stretches, “Road we don’t deserve”, because those spots were so wonderfully smooth that we didn’t deserve them.

Now, back to dirty road puppies….

It was well after midnight when Carmen and I were driving back to Sea Cliff Hotel from visiting friends in San San.  If you’ve ever been on a country road in Jamaica at night you’ll know that #1, it’s pitch black and #2, the road usually sucks.  Needless to say, I was driving very slow.

We rounded a bend in the road when my headlights centered on the smallest little critter right in the middle of the road.  It was a puppy, no bigger than a handful.  He stood in the middle of the road, legs splayed, and there he was just staring into our headlights and I had no choice but to stop the car because he wouldn’t move.  I inched closer and closer hoping it would make him move out of the way but he just stood there.  So we were in a standoff with a 3-pound little puppy.  I couldn’t go around him because the road was narrow and I sure as hell wasn’t going to drive over him so we just sat there.

Carmen decided to take action in the situation.

She got out and walked to the front of the car where the puppy stood and tried to shoo him to the side of the road so we could pass.  The puppy was having none of this because he just wanted to play, and shortly into this little playtime in the middle of the road, the puppy’s mother emerged from the darkness to see what was going on.  The second mommy appeared, Carmen regretted her decision to be out there  because she thought that mommy might not appreciate someone messing with her puppy.  But to our surprise, mommy dog just wanted to play as well so there was Carmen on a dark country road, now with TWO dogs who didn’t want to get out of the way.  Instead they wanted to frolic and play.

It was at this point that I really wanted to whip out my camera and start taking video but I was inside the car laughing so hard that I couldn’t.  All I could think about was what if there were Jamaicans out there witnessing these two dumb white ladies trying to save the lives of road dogs at one o’clock in the morning in the pitch black.

FINALLY Carmen was able to lead the dogs off the road and jump back into the car so we could move.  This is the point where the “laughing so hard that no sound comes out” moment began.

We only drove for a minute before we decided we were hungry and then Carmen remembered that we had a bag of Jamaican festival in the car from earlier.  So she found the bag and was about to reach in and grab one for me, but then said, “I don’t want to touch the festival because I have dirty-road-puppy all over my hands”.    

I lost it. 

I started laughing so hard at “dirty road puppy” that I couldn’t breathe.  And because I laughed that hard she started laughing that hard and it was all down hill from there.  I was laughing SO hard that I think the car was creeping along the road at 20 KMPH because I didn’t even have the strength to hit the gas pedal.

That one comment about the dirty road puppy morphed into an entire story about the puppy’s mother being a bad parent….a crack mom who sent her child out in the night to find her a cigarette.  And our ridiculous story continued to morph and morph into something much more ridiculous, as I continued to drive at a snail’s pace because I was weak with laughter.  At some point during the story we managed to take a bite or two of the festival but then we were just two idiots choking on festival while laughing too hard.

I guess it was one of those moments where you had to be there to get caught up in the laughter.

I remember after the whole ordeal, when we came to our senses, I told Carmen that she probably literally saved that puppy’s life because if a Jamaican had been driving around that bend he surely would have been driving much faster than us and would have flattened that puppy before even realizing it.  I really think that us being on that road at that exact time was a life saver for the dirty road puppy.

Since this incident happened within our first couple of days on the island, dirty road puppy became our little mascot and we invented yet another new acronym:  DRP.  We pronounced it “derp”, as if it was a word, and until right now only we knew what “derp” meant.

Some day down the road, Carmen and I are hoping to go back to that spot and find dirty road puppy all grown up and responsible, and find mommy all cleaned up and taking good care of her children.