On a Saturday in the genteel San Francisco neighborhood of Noe Valley, well-cared-for dogs are paraded on leashes by their well-heeled owners along the 24th Street strip of upscale boutiques, cafés, and real estate offices touting multimillion-dollar properties.
The intimate bond between canine and human, nearly 30,000 years in the making, is most dramatic at the corner of 24th and Noe, where an adoption event, a warm, spontaneous bustle of yearning and love replete with yaps and aws, has been organized by Rocket Dog Rescue. Volunteers keep watch over an array of pop-up pens where groups of dogs—mutts and not-quite purebreds, mostly young, some of them siblings—bask in the attention of delighted children and potential adopters and fosterers. Katie Newsom, a special ed teacher grieving her dog Stevie (who died yesterday), has her heart set on Louie, a black Labrador retriever–border collie mix. Teenager Caitlin Kane will choose one of two brown hounds to keep her company till she heads off to college.
Pali Boucher, Rocket Dog’s fuchsia-haired 62-year-old founder, stands chatting with Pattie Gerrie, whom she met some years back while walking down 24th Street. Boucher recounts finding an abandoned xoloitzcuintli, a hairless breed, for Gerrie in a shelter in Los Banos: “The animal control officer was literally laughing at me, sitting there holding what he thought was an infected-skinned Chihuahua. I said, ‘You have no idea how rare this dog is. This is an ancient breed.’”
“The magic of Pali is how she manages to put dogs together with people,” says Gerrie, sighing.
Rocket Dog Rescue was created by Boucher in 2001 to save the lives of homeless animals at risk of being euthanized in under-resourced shelters. Operating its own transitional shelter in Oakland, Rocket Dog also works with like-minded groups around the world to find permanent homes for dogs. Supplementing support from generous benefactors, Boucher stages auctions, garage sales, and benefit concerts called Bummer’s Balls to fund her operations.
Boucher’s own life story in many ways parallels those of the pets she rescues. She was born in 1962 as a ward of the court, after her mother, Barbara Estelle Caughlin, who struggled with drugs and unstable relationships, was declared unfit. Boucher’s father, Paul Boucher, was a DJ at San Francisco’s KSAN and Marin County’s KTIM around the late 1960s.
Boucher spent her childhood shuttling between her parents’ homes, with numerous detours. “I never remember waking up in the same place,” she says. “Mom would leave me with people she felt were safe, whether or not she’d only just met them. I would be sleeping out there on Hippie Hill [in Golden Gate Park] with a bunch of passed-out, wasted people, not knowing where my mom was.”
“When they took my mom to jail or to a mental hospital, they’d put [me] into holding facilities or foster homes,” she recalls. “During those times, I’d go to school, although I flunked out of kindergarten because I was feral and didn’t know how to be social.”
Music—especially the genres her father might have spun up on the radio—was a comforting medium. “I didn’t have a lot of positives in my life, but music always made me feel very heightened and positive,” Boucher says.
Dogs, early on, served as guides and guardians. At age 11, Boucher took her first acid trip and found herself in Marin’s Larkspur Creek: “I was lying in the water, and my dad’s dogs were around me in a circle, and a little squirrel walked right over my face on a little branch and sat there and looked at me. Then the dogs ended up telling me it was time to go home. It was the first time—and I really mean this—that I felt safe.”
At about the same time, fleeing from a predatory middle-aged man at a raucous party, Boucher took refuge in a doghouse with a large Doberman pinscher. “She made room for me,” Boucher says. “She knew I needed to be there.”
Striking out on her own at age 13, Boucher squatted in abandoned warehouses or train cars. She always sought animal company, feeding junkyard dogs, stray kittens, raccoons, and pigeons. “I didn’t know much about the world outside of what I did and saw,” she says. “High-speed police chases, people getting stabbed, shimmying across an I beam seven stories up in an abandoned building when the sun’s coming up, watching the birds fly through the sunbeams.”
Ultimately, Boucher craved more stability. The way forward opened up following her adoption of a black-and-tan hound she got from the SPCA. She named him Leadbelly.
In and out of jail on minor offenses (like loitering or stealing milk from Safeway), Boucher had to board Leadbelly with a friend when she finally found her way to the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center in San Francisco’s Mission district. “I wasn’t really looking to get sober,” she says. She extended her rehab with the nuns of the Good Shepherd Gracenter, where she began to understand her childhood trauma and to let it go.
Her devotion to animals in need expanded. She started volunteering with the late Helen Hill of Hopalong Animal Rescue in Oakland and with Laurie Burke, who went on to found Heartfelt Hound Rescue. “I had to let go of my weird-homeless-feral-girl persona and to be there for those animals,” Boucher says. Learning how to read dogs’ body language and positively manage their social interactions, she also bolstered her own self-awareness, “how to advocate for myself, how to be strong.”
Having started Rocket Dog in 2001 as a street corner adoption pop-up in San Francisco’s Castro district, Boucher evolved it into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a shelter in the Fruitvale neighborhood of Oakland. Her new enterprise and the community of volunteers and fellow service providers created and supported a sense of purpose she had lacked growing up. “I learned that the people along the path with me really, really were my only family,” she says. “My sister was gone, my brother was gone, my mom had died, my dad had died. I’d just been alone out there.”
Boucher was delighted to discover that country rock star Emmylou Harris had founded her own dog rescue, Bonaparte’s Retreat, in Nashville in 2004. Harris’s angelic voice and appearance had made her a favorite of Boucher’s and of her father, Paul, who passed in 1990. Harris and Boucher struck up an email correspondence, then met and talked for hours backstage at a concert in Santa Cruz. They committed to combining forces, including staging benefit concerts.
By phone from Nashville, Harris recalls her first meeting with Boucher. “Her body was covered with tattoos of her animals. But she was a lot more than just this unusual, interesting-looking person. Her story was amazing, because her life could have gone in a completely different direction. But I believe that once she discovered what Joseph Campbell called ‘following [your] bliss’—which was with animals—she never looked back,” Harris says. “Now, I’m so impressed with how many dogs Pali has been able to save over the years.”
Harris’s Bonaparte’s Retreat, on her personal property in Nashville, was named for the “goofy-looking” poodle mix she’d adopted and taken on the road with her. Over the years, Harris found herself drawn to bigger, older dogs, many of them with medical issues. One such dog was Bella, who inspired her to write and record “Big Black Dog” for the 2011 album Hard Bargain. She has performed the song locally at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival in Golden Gate Park and at the Bummer’s Ball. The ball is named for a legendary 19th-century street dog who roamed San Francisco with his sidekick Lazarus (Mark Twain wrote Bummer’s obituary in 1865). Performers have included Harris, Bob Weir, and Steve Earle, and proceeds benefit Rocket Dog. (The date of the next ball has yet to be announced.)
In the past decade, Boucher has gone global with her mission. Travel to international sheltering conferences introduced her to activists from places like the Philippines, Thailand, and Singapore.
She also connected with Animal Balance, an NGO founded in San Francisco that creates sustainable and humane animal-management programs in communities around the world. In May of this year, Boucher, Harris, and a couple of Harris’s grandchildren volunteered at Animal Balance’s spay-neuter and medical clinic in the Galápagos Islands, where people’s stray dogs and cats threaten the native species of the island. While Harris brought families antiparasitic treatments along with information about Animal Balance and an invitation to the clinic, Boucher and the kids worked in the clinic’s recovery division, guiding the animals out of anesthesia and providing them with collars and leashes.
Back in the Bay Area, Rocket Dog began sheltering dogs evacuated by SPCA International from the devastation in Palestine. Boucher identified with the animals’ anxiety when she met them at the airport. “It was like it had been for me, when I’d have to go to a new foster home,” she says. “People were being all nice to me, but I didn’t know where I belonged.”
“Pali comes from the heart first and from compassion for all species,” says Animal Balance founder and director Emma Clifford. “She doesn’t give up on any of the beings who come into her life.”
Nor will Boucher give up on herself, despite her rootless childhood and the scary detours of her life. She’s created a welcoming home of her own in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights neighborhood, where she planted trees in her spacious backyard, an ideal playground for her canine adoptees. The interior is decorated like a dream, with walls painted in radiant colors, artwork by her late ex-boyfriend Michael Roman, and posters from years of Bummer’s Balls, autographed by the featured musicians.
After more than 25,000 rescues, Boucher is envisioning a larger Rocket Dog shelter, “a peaceful place” outside the city where older dogs can mix with farm animals and Boucher can host vegan barbecues and nutrition courses and seminars and “just sit on the porch, thinking about how we’ll be helping for the next 10 years.”•
Jeff Kaliss is a San Francisco–based journalist, author, annotator, and poet focused on music and entertainment. He wrote about composer and conductor John Adams for Alta Journal Issue 5 and interviewed Linda Ronstadt for Alta Journal Issue 25.
