My Old Friend, Surely Not

Pepper Richardson

May 22, 2026

 

At thirty-three, I was newly divorced, and I decided my children needed a family pet.

Truth be told, I wanted a cat. Cats mind their own business and leave people alone..., but I figured the children needed a pet that would pay attention to them, something that would love them no matter what. I drove down to the animal shelter and came home with a black puppy small enough to fit in one hand.

I named her Surely Not because she was surely not a cat.

What I did not realize then was that this tiny creature possessed the emotional stability of a dust storm.

The children loved her at first. They carried her gently and whispered their heartbreaks into her fur. Surely Not tolerated them the way a cantankerous woman tolerates loud grandchildren at Thanksgiving, with long, agonizing sighs and the occasional warning growl. She understood they belonged to me, and since I was the center of her universe, she accepted them as necessary inconveniences.

Then my son brought home a kitten.

Lord have mercy.

That cat nearly unraveled her mind.

Surely Not started jumping into the bathtub and licking the faucet until her tongue bled. Afterward, she would crawl into my bed crying like her whole world had collapsed. I finally hauled her off to the veterinarian. He looked at me and asked, “Did you bring anything new into the home?”

The kitten was rehomed.

That dog won.

Obviously, she was not an especially pleasant creature. She had the disposition of a bill collector and the stubbornness of an old mule. But she loved me with a devotion so fierce it could have bent steel. I was her whole world.

She also knew county lines.

 Every time we crossed a county line, Surely Not would rise up in the backseat and begin screaming like we were driving straight into the gates of hell.

As she got older, she became downright mythical-looking. Her back hunched in the middle, fur sticking out like she had been drug backward through a brush pile. A white diamond appeared on top of her head right above her eyebrows that looked exactly like Andy Rooney’s, bushy and unkempt.

She was over ten years old when my mother and I moved into an itty-bitty RV and started traveling.

Before we left, we figured no dog quite that unbalanced could survive life on the road. We even discussed putting her down.

My daughter stepped in and saved that dog’s life.

Turns out Surely Not was not neurotic.

She was highly manipulative.

There is a difference.

That dog could play me like a fiddle at a revival tent.

Once we hit the road, she turned into the happiest little hobo God ever put breath into. She rode in a tiny bed between the driver and passenger seats. Every place we stopped, we let her hop out first so she could announce herself to the world by barking so loud you would think she was seventy pounds instead of fourteen.

I wrote about our travels in my blog, and people followed right along with us. They read about Surely Not hiking with her head thrown back singing into the wind, dragging sticks around twice her size, and her love affair with pig ears and peanut butter.

I was cautious. I rarely posted photos of the RV or of Mom and me, and I always shared our locations three days after we'd left. But I posted plenty of pictures of Surely Not.

Two years into our journey, in an Arizona campground, I opened the RV door and let her out to make her dramatic declaration to the world. A couple sitting nearby looked up from their beer and I heard one of them say:

“Look, honey. It’s Surely Not.”

And I stood there amazed that this odd little black dog with the rat face and wild eyebrows had become known in places she had never even sniffed before.

When Surely Not died, people mourned her like an old relative. I wrote her a eulogy and ended it with a quote from James Herriot’s “The Card Over the Bed,” asking whether dogs go to heaven. Thousands of people read the tribute, and quite a few posted condolences.

But long before we lost her, the road had already done its quiet work on all three of us.

The journey my mother and I began in May 2005 changed us, including little Surely Not.

After a year on the road, I realized my mother and Surely Not were not nearly as different as I had thought.

 My mother survived by making herself smaller. Surely Not survived by making herself louder. Fear wears different disguises.

But something shifted once we started traveling. My mother, who had always played it safe, began saying yes. Surely Not, who had once seemed nervous and nearly unhinged, became a happy little drifter riding shotgun across America like she'd been born for it.

We carried old bruises into that itty-bitty RV. Somewhere between coastal highways, desert campgrounds, and all those nights with Surely Not curled against my belly, the three of us became one another's soft place to land.