I'm a dog shouter. I have gotten the shout down to a mere ehh to get the dogs attention but it has taken 2 years. I have conscienciously used 2 of Ceasar's bits of advice combined with athe facts from a National Geographic special on the 4 types of dog behavior,

We have the walking down but no fancy tricks to speak of.

Walking the dog

Everyday or night, rain or shine, freeze or bake, I walk the dog down to the trail that winds along Rock Creek. We start at the front door where the dog customarily celebrates by barking and taking the leash in its mouth until we hit the sidewalk when instantly the discipline of walking in polite tandem begins.
We pass by the rambler house of the divorcee who still shows signs of post traumatic stress of an abusive husband and cross the street to old Bill Sutherland's house. He volunteers all of his time to advance every cause of the GOP. If.. it takes a small man to carry a big grudge, he is your man. Next door is the family with kids the same age as ours but must have heard a rumor that our family has leprosy and that I was a retired hitman, so there are no hellos, just a scramble to get out of view. Maybe they have an illegal income. Now past the mysterious Russian's house. Beyond him is the black family who may smile but never make diversity a verb and keep to themselves.

We turn right and pass two more houses. Bob the engineer who might never sell his house and take their RV cross country since deregulation stole the economy. Opposite Bob's house is Madeline and her partner who have the most happy yard right next to the park. She has kayaks on a rack, benches, hanging gardens from a second story porch, enormous decorative boulders, deer feeding stations with flowers and everything else that smiles like a heart warming Norman Rockwell painting.
At the dead end of Oriental Street we pass through the guard rails and descend the path beside a storm sewer stream that emerges from a six foot high tunnel with an iron grate that swings from the top when the roaring water gushes out.

The forest is different from one day to the next. Sometimes four foot tall buzzards might be perched on nearby roofs and always the deer sharing every detail of their family while trying not to be too fearful of the dog.

The trail serpentines around Oak and Sycamore. The aroma in spring is like breathing candy air but usually the scent of methane wafts from the human sewer built 14 feet beneath the park's asphalt path. In winter the gas is so strong I have worried about any open flame.

A Rubik's cube is said to have 42 quadrillion different possible faces. The dog walk has many more. In the spring the tiny frogs start peeping when it gets above 60 degrees at 5 PM. As it gets warmer the chorus grows louder and more intense as mating day arrives. On that glorious day they sing in major thirds and build to augmented fourths that sounds like their version of Beethoven's ninth. I sometimes imagine what this place looked like 530 million years ago and of the asteroid that hit Chesapeake bay leaving all the great white boulders of shocked quartz today. What did it sound like, how did it smell? What creatures hunted this land? What would they think of me?

There is the screech owl at the edge of night in autumn and the black snake sunning in summer, the beaver busiest in spring and the fox passing through in winter. Every walk of course includes the dog sniffing historic canine urination, carrion and poo.

At night in the deep fog we walked down the path with the guidance of my small LED flashlight. The beam slices through the fog to reveal a black dog leash that disappears somewhere near an invisible black dog. Then a burst of green lighted dog eyes in the mist warn me that I am almost falling off the path. The dog can see 100 times better in the dark than I, and I have pretty good night vision.

By day I sometimes close my eyes as the sun's staccato bursts of brilliance syncopates the rhythm of the tallest leaves of trees. We even heard a baby cry in the woods only to discovery a fawn had just been born. Last week a runner was about ten paces in front of a blind bicyclist who smiled as he peddled along the path 10 feet above the drop off into the creek.

On weekends the bikes, dog walkers and stroller pushers could justify good business for a hot dog stand but most of the time there are but one or two encounters with other humans.
Those encounters are pleasant with the very old or very young but otherwise can be a territorial dispute with 30 year old males. Many people have earphones on, as do I when I am listening to interesting stories on NPR. Science afriday is the best.

Allen walks his elderly Labrador and makes mention of anything that smacks of godless liberalism.   He even criticized my listening to BBC until I reminded him they were part of the mother of all coalitions of pre emptive Bush wars. He said I sounded like a "LIBERAL" I told him "their is o such thing!".

I said, "Perhaps the northern founding fathers were liberals but the coinage of the words Commie, traitor, trouble maker, and now today "Liberal" has been completely forced on people by robber barons, rip off artists and megalomaniacs.

When Mine owners abused miners to death, the workers and wives organized, only to have Bosses hire Pinkerton Guards who shot them dead. Some of those abused miners wore red bandanas and were later called red necks.

When farmers lost farms and prices for their crops they organized and marched on the Capitol steps and were shot dead.

When Martin Luther King...you get the idea.

Whoever is getting the short end of the stick through no cause of their own, except for needing work, they get red baited, gooned, spied on or killed.

What ever we are being called, you can bet the name callers have a financial reason for making us their enemy.

If ya keep half the people distracted at church and the other half bein spit on and lied about, you stand a pretty good chance of exploiting the whole lot.

I don't hold to that kind of bullying, stealing and killing.
It takes more than guns to kill a man, sometimes they try to kill with names."

I tease him unmercifully about his Limbaughism to the point he once slogged through a swamp to avoid passing me walking the dog (do you blame him?). That is about as far as the war penetrates the forest but global warming effects every plant and animal here, moving scheduled hatching and fruiting as much as three weeks ahead or behind.

The dog is wonderfully happy and relieved exploring the path by the creek everyday except for the day it flooded and we walked through 20 inches of water that overflowed as much as 30 yards from the stream. On the way I am gently pulled by the leash and as time goes on, I go slower as the dog goes faster.

Some people have been traveling for hundreds of thousands of miles and have seen many things, while I've just been walking the dog watching the seasons change. The dog walk keeps changing and except for the neighbors and their homes . The path has more faces than a Rubik's cube. I imagine the people have many different faces deep down, but somehow they manage to show only one unchanging face reserved for defending themselves against another person who reaches out expecting nothing in return. The path doesn't worry. The dog walk doesn't care. It is not afraid.