Winter Walk With A Stone Cold Killer
Winter Walk With A Stone Cold Killer
On dogs and possums and the nature of wildness
By habit and preference, I spend a lot of time in the company of dogs. We tend to understand each other, as our Maslovian Hierarchies Of Need bear strong resemblance: We both like salty meat, indiscriminate naps, and being overpraised for minor accomplishments, like taking our muddy boots off before entering the house, or shaking on command.
Therefore, I spend a lot of time walking my dog. Whether at high noon or after midnight, we don’t really discriminate. We go when we feel like it. Or when I feel like it, since he always feels like it. Even when he’s in a dead sleep, and he hears my exaggerated high-pitched register, rousing, “You wanna go for a walk?!!!!” he shakes off his drowsiness, heads for the door, and does a spin or three, ever the groggy/graceful dancer anticipating our next adventure. Solomon, who is not just a good Pyrenees, but a great one, as his breed’s name suggests, spends many hours per week walking side-by-side with me in pleasing muteness. He can’t speak, and I don’t have to. I don’t know if that’s a relief to him, but it is to me. Even if he had been endowed with the gift/curse of language, and was compelled, as we humans are, to form vowels and consonants around affection that runs deeper than anything that impotent words can articulate, there’s no conversation we could have that would bind us like our companionable silence as we move through the world together.
My favorite time of year to walk him is right now – winter. Don’t get me wrong, pumpkin-spiced nerds. Fall is the most beautiful season. I have sung its hymnody in these pages. But in autumn, you’re forever reminded of fading beauty - one that can’t last, and will die any day. With winter, the death is already done. Those technicolor leaves have fallen to their graves. So the stillness and spare beauty you find feel like they will last indefinitely. When you’re attuned to nature’s cycles – and as a year-round fly fisherman and kayaker, I have no choice but to be – winter gives you an excuse to lower expectations. Stuck indoors working, you no longer feel like you’re missing out on much. But when you bundle up and venture out into the frigid world, you don’t have to register all its motion, which has mostly come to a stop. Anything that halts the world for a while – even as it seems to spin ever faster– is a hard thing to be against. Winter is a keen reminder that nature rests, even when our minds refuse to.