WALKING BETWEEN ARMIES

I often say that people who walk dogs are like the Post Office. Wind, rain, snow or sunshine, we’re out there, no matter what. In fact, there are a number of days in any year when it’s so inhospitable that the only people that are out and about are people who are walking their dogs. We wave and nod to one another behind hoods and scarves, strain to juggle a leash and a useless, upturned umbrella, and struggle to pick up poop in the midst of a blinding snowstorm or a torrential downpour. Like it or not, we realize that with any dog, there is a minimum amount of Dog Energy which must be burned up every single day, and failure to do so can only end in dire circumstances. And believe me, after more than 20 years of dog ownership on Cape Cod, I have been out in just about every kind of weather imaginable, with the possible exceptions of a tornado or a plague of frogs.

And so it was today. Nothing catastrophic, just a cold, wet winter day. The kind of day which, were it not for the dogs, would have been spent entirely indoors, warm and dry, with a bathrobe, hot beverages, and lots of foods containing sugar.

But like every other day, we pulled on the long johns and the blue jeans, the multiple sweatshirts and the gloves and the jacket and everything else, grabbed the leash and went out to walk the dog.

And today, in some small way, I am glad that I sometimes have to do things that I don’t really want to do, because today I not only went for a dog walk, but for a few minutes I was transported.

We walked over to the far side of Route 6, to the woods where I could let the dog off his leash to let him run around like a maniac for a while. (See previous remarks regarding Dog Energy.) We walked along a little-used corner of the bike trails near Bennett Pond, an area which doesn’t see much traffic at the height of Season, much less at this time of year. A thick carpet of fallen pine needles the color of old leather books covered most of the paved path, and that in turn was almost entirely covered by a thin layer of wet, slushy snow. The overall effect was that of a hastily frosted cake. There were no footprints in the snow at all, save mine and the dog’s, not even those of rabbits or squirrels and that was the first thing I noticed.

The weather had chased all the birds away except for the occasional hungry gull, so the only sound was the persistent typewriter rhythm of the rain. The patches of sky which were visible through the sparse, impotent winter canopy were devoid of color, a kind of grey-white which was nearly indistinguishable from the wet snow on the ground.

At times I thought of Sherwood Forest.

At other times I thought of Narnia.

After a while we stopped and turned around, and as we made our way home the mossy side of all the trees was facing us, so that they seemed clad in a flimsy, decaying armor of pale verdigris. At one point, I noticed that on one side of the path were all scrub pines, their skinny trunks bare but still green at the very top. On the other side were all beech and birch and other deciduous varieties, branches gnarled and exposed as they reached toward the sunlight. I imagined for a moment that I was walking between two mighty tree armies frozen in time as they stared one another down, waiting for the trumpet call to begin the battle, wooden swords against wooden shields.

Then I thought that they weren’t even frozen in time, it’s just that trees move so much slower than we do.

The branches of the two warring armies arched harmoniously and touched fingers above the path where I was walking, which made me feel as if I were approaching a grand country house, but the ghostly green-grey of the world around me and the sad silhouettes of the sleeping trees let me know that if there were a house around the bend, it was more likely either a ruin or a mirage.

Following your own footprints can only get you to one place though, so eventually we found ourselves right back where we started. The sound of traffic overtook the absence of birdsong. The wet snow became wet sand that kept getting stuck in the bottom of my shoe.