December 29, 2009. Tuesday.
Situation: Work this afternoon, and don’t get home till a little after 4. Still, Mwayla skulks around the kitchen, follows me furtively up the stairs: she expects to have an afternoon walk. I change into my walking clothes -- old jeans, a work shirt, and white socks that I only wear for the walk -- then put on my boots and snow suit. Mway paces around the table, her whines of anticipation building up into huffs of impatience.
State of the Path. The ground is frozen hard, not waxy like yesterday; it is only crunchy down by bug land where the mud, now frozen, had been whipped up and pitted by Mway walking over it on warmer days. Only in one spot is the mud soft: where a seep apparently keeps the mud from freezing. Because of the cold, I want to take a short walk, so I avoid both side paths, along the old orchard and by the failed skating pond; simply make the circuit down to the creek, along it for a ways, then up to the clearing and back to the house.
State of the Creek: Ice has crystallized around many of the rocks; in the deeper parts, a thin layer of ice has started to form, which I puncture in two places, with two or three thrusts of my walking stick. Because of the ice, the creek is quieter today, as it runs in fewer places, mainly at the cascade under the multiflora-choked oaks at the midpoint along the creek.
The Fetch: It seems that more of the dead goldenrod has been been beaten down by the weather and by Mway, and I think to myself that I can start to expand the area in which I throw Mway’s stick. I throw it mainly toward the poison-ivy covered pile of cement rubble and back toward the upper part of the clearing, but I don’t yet throw it much farther into the dead goldenrod still standing. My hands are already numb, and I don’t feel like thinking too hard. Mway has a little more energy than she did yesterday, but she still only fetches the stick under 10 times before she growls, chomps, and shakes the stick in her mouth, instead of dropping it at my foot, indicating that she has fetched the stick for as long as she wants.
3 comments:
Enjoyed your post – won’t say anything more. By the way, I’ve reread your intro, and I must confess some of it I don’t get. How is taking your wife’s dog for a walk and then writing about it afterwards nearly everyday an act of defiance, a protest? Seems there’s some steps in logic here I’m not following, although I suspect the missing premises might be found in the Camus essay, the last sentence of which you use an epigraph to your blog title. It’s been a while since I’ve read any Camus, and I never found his writing very engaging. There’s a promising moment in The Stranger in which Meursault describes his neighbor, Salamano, taking his mangy spaniel for walks, but in the context of the whole novel the incident is only minor, and skeletal in development. I might have to reread the essay, though, to appreciate fully what you’re up to. M.
Me again. I just wanted to add that, whatever the shortcomings of your content, the form is beyond reproach. In this, you even outdo the author of Travels with Charley, which book tends to constantly disappoint a reader’s expectations. Although Charley is as important to Steinbeck as Sancho Panza is to Don Quixote, the eyes of the man are constantly straying from what interests his poodle to the vaunted proffer of some vista upon America’s windmills, be it a hurricane, redwoods, Texas, whatever. You, on the other hand, structure your posts so they don’t betray what a walk is about, ending each at its appropriate climax. M.
Just one more thing. I’ve been thinking a little more about what you might be in search of. Still not quite sure what it is, but I really think you should consider pulling down that truism from Camus and come up with a subtitle in the fashion of Steinbeck’s book. The full title of his book is Travels with Charley: In Search of America. You could do yours as Walks with Mway: In Search of…. I’ll think about it some more and maybe come up with a few suggestions. M.
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