Walking in Mind

A Trail of Thoughts

Tag Archives: Dogs


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Will You Take My Hand?

Seven weeks have passed since the Spanish Prime Minister first addressed the nation to announce the harshest of lockdowns. Seven weeks in which I’ve not walked as much as a kilometre for pleasure.

Do you need food, something from the pharmacy? Then make it quick, but don’t linger. Keep your distance, get your things, head back home.

You have a dog? Well OK, twice a day around the block.

A few people improvise, but it doesn’t last, and by the second week there are no more stories of cats or goats being walked on leads.

What persists is the confinement of children, whose developmental needs trail behind a dog’s need to shit in the street. I phone my friends with small children to see how they are doing, cooped up together in apartments with only a balcony for outdoor space. We’re getting by, they say.

I go out to buy bread and discover that childless streets are the saddest of places. After six weeks they are finally allowed out, not for long, but it is something, and it shows on the faces of young and old alike.

Now, on this first Saturday in May, it is our turn, an opening for those of us who wish simply to walk without purpose, to work up a sweat, to pedal like there was no tomorrow.

It is still early, a little after 8 when P. and I leave the house. The rules are as follows. As two people from the same household we are allowed to walk side by side, but if we’re venturing out to practise sport then we need to separate and go it alone. I wonder where the line is drawn. At what speed, or with what gait, does walking become something other than itself? And what about the fact that we have dressed for the occasion in our best outdoor gear? Do our trail shoes and hiking shorts place us in the world of sport, even if we keep to an amble? In the space of fifty days the absurd has become a topic of ordinary questioning.

We live near the edge of town and are soon making our way down a narrow path between dry stone walls. To the east the sun is already well above the line of hills beyond which lies the sea we are not allowed to visit. But there is more than enough to satisfy our longing. Grasses hang firm and free across the path, and give way gracefully to our passing shins. To either side the hedgerows are putting on a festival of spring flowers, none of which had emerged when last we walked this way. Is borage always this blue, are poppies always so red, or have my senses been altered by so much confinement? I bend down to pick a single poppy from a cluster and walk over to where P. is standing, lost in reverie as she gazes out across the vineyards. I hand her the flower, she smiles, kisses me once and slips the poppy into a shoulder loop of her little backpack.

From time to time we meet others along the way, and I greet them all with a Bon dia. Some return the salutation, others — invariably the maskwearers — glance at me in silence from the corner of an eye. People are afraid, wary of others. If I offer to lend a hand, will you trust me that it’s clean? L’enfer, c’est les autres. Sartre’s words echo across the years with a new twist in meaning. But it is not what I feel. Hell is not other people, it is being unable to embrace them, to laugh and cry together, to raise a glass in sickness and in health. So take off your mask, show your face, ready your lips. This is what I dream of now.

When we reach home again I stop in front of the gate and kneel at the kerb to inspect our new pavement companion, Diplotaxis muralis, the annual wall-rocket. Each day I am half surprised and full of joy to find the plant still there, standing ever taller where normally it would have no place, its yellow flowers a beacon of hope. I doubt it will make it through to summer. Sooner or later, it will be uprooted or stamped on by someone who sees it as an affront to normality rather than a reminder of what is possible. One hand flat against the paving stones, I reach out with the other and rest a finger against a delicate petal, and in that touching I remember something that Leonard Cohen wrote in a poem, a song: there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

I push myself upright and head indoors. The cat is asleep in her chair, the kitchen smells of freshly ground coffee, and all our things are where we left them. For an instant all is right with the world, but then it cuts through, the voice of the poet singer, his eye on the future, coming at me clear from the tower of song.

Things are going to slide

Slide in all directions

Won’t be nothing you can measure anymore.

 

Diplotaxis muralis, annual wall-rocket


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A Separation

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That late winter day, do you remember it still? The rain had passed, the sun was out and off we went, skipping work like a couple of truant teenagers, five or six miles up through the woods and back home along the vineyard trails.

We hardly said a word that afternoon, but later, when making some tea, you told me you’d kept your head high, your gaze wide. You talked to me about the sky that looked as if it had been painted by a young Yves Klein, about the little birds flitting in and out of the still dormant vines, about the light on the far-off sea. Only once, you said, did you kneel to ground, there where the white rocket flowers had colonized the field.

You were disappointed that I’d noticed none of these things, but courteous enough to listen when I compared the hole in the neighbour’s wall to the stoma in my belly — the Bocca della Verità, you said, shit will out. You carried on listening when I talked about how beautiful I found the still damp wood of the telegraph pole, the archipelago of algae on the rainwater puddle, the yolky lichen on the fallen mastic branch. Why didn’t you call me over? That was what you asked when I told you about the bitter almond flowers and the pawprint in the newly resurfaced track.

Not long after we went our separate ways. Your question haunts me still.

 

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In The Company Of Animals

It is the end of winter and I am out on the cusp of night and day. There is nothing of the frost of the last few mornings, and I know before I look that the stars will be tucked beneath a blanket of cloud. As I drop the latch on the front gate a familiar feral cat emerges from beneath a parked car and mews at me in hope. ‘You’ll have to wait, I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

I stride off towards the southern edge of town and soon I am crossing the bridge across the riera, the seasonal watercourse that forms a natural boundary between the last houses and the fields beyond. Along the dry streambank a line of leafless poplars stand like giant upturned besoms. If I could I would take one and sweep the sky clean.

Beyond the bridge the road becomes first a gravelly path and then a more rugged track that cuts across the fields between drystone walls. A daylight of sorts is beginning to unfold around me now, although the sky remains the colour of wet clay. I know what my Catalan mother-in-law would say: Cielo de panza de burra, agua segura. When the sky is the colour of a donkey’s belly, it’s sure to rain.

Of all the local walks I’ve invented since moving to Sant Pere de Ribes three years ago, this is the one I keep coming back to. Eight kilometres of familiar yet unexhausted paths that can lead me into the day, much as a favourite bedtime story would ease me into sleep as a child. If, back then, the reward for early to bed was an extra chapter, then the prize for an early start today is in sharing the morning with others: with the rabbit shooting across my path and into the carob grove for cover, with the pied wagtails breakfasting on bugs in the freshly tilled field to the west, and with the pair of peacocks.

I hear their plaintive call well before reaching the end of the track and the smallholding where they live, but it is not until I am parallel to the farmhouse that I see them perched atop the two chimneys like ceremonial cowls, their draping trains tickling the terracotta roof tiles below. As I stand there watching, one of them begins to shake its tail feathers from side to side, and I’m reminded of a news article I’d read about the work of two Canadian researchers, Angela Freeman and James Hare. They discovered that the train displays of peacocks produce infrasonic signals, sounds that cannot be detected by the human ear but which both male and female peafowl are able to perceive. Freeman and Hare speculate that these infrasounds have something to do with maintaining territory, and may also add to the visual power of the trains in attracting females. If they are right, then there is something tragic about these two peacocks dutifully calling out and shaking their trains, despite living here in a kind of avian exile, far from others of their kind who might listen with more than superficial interest.

Beyond the smallholding the stony track narrows and becomes earthy as it skirts around the edge of the hamlet of Puigmoltó. It is here that my spirits are lifted again as I gaze ahead at what might as well be a field of strawberry ice cream flecked with the last snowflakes of winter. The path ends at the stone wall which encloses the grove, and here, up close, the colour scheme shifts. I reach over the wall and snap a flower from each of the two species of tree, letting them rest side by side in my palm. Now I can see that although the bitter almond blossom is predominantly pink and that of the sweet almond white, the delicate flowers of each contain subtle tones of both colours. Strawberry mixed with snow.

I let the petals fall to the ground and climb the gentle incline into the scraggy woodland to the south of the almond grove. First I follow a broad and stony track, then veer off down a half-hidden mulchy path that cuts back and forth through an undergrowth thick with mastic, rosemary and dwarf juniper. The sides of this path are pock-marked with the scrufflings of wild boar. I find myself mumbling the words of a local huntsman I met a couple of weeks back. ‘Hi ha almenys cent senglars en aquest bosc.’ At least a hundred boar in these woods, yet in three years I’d never seen more than telltale disturbed earth. One day, perhaps.

Whether it is the thought of boar or the fact that it is cold here in the dummity wood, I quicken my step along the bifurcating path, trusting my sense of direction. This, I think, is how best I like to walk, without map or compass in hand, wandering the borderlands between strangeness and familiarity, with the possibility of getting lost not as threat but as an invitation to learn.

After five minutes or so the path deposits me at a junction of five trails, and here I choose the most direct route out of the woods. As I emerge from the trees onto a low ridge I look up in the hope of seeing a break in the clouds, but the donkey’s belly remains unruffled.

Where the ridge path ends I need to make a choice, since it brings me out on the back road that links Sant Pere de Ribes with the neighbouring town, Vilanova. I could road walk all the way home, but I decide instead to go only as far as the next bend and there pick up a tarmaced trail that meanders through the vineyards that fill the land to the west of town.

At this hour of the day the vineyard trail is alive with the song and flight of countless birds. Blackcaps tut-tut at me from the hedgerows, while down in the vineyards proper, other birds – probably buntings but hard to discern in this light – flit around the bare stumps or perch briefly on the cordon wires along which the new vines will soon be trained. Walking here is easy, and a joy, and before I know it I am dropping down towards town. The path I’m on wends its way through a final patch of woodland before emerging alongside the castell de Ribes, which dominates the landscape on this side of town. Although the origins of the small castle lie in the tenth century it is now little more than a Mediterranean manor house proudly hanging on to its fortified past, its circular defence tower as obsolete as the shaking train of a solitary peacock.

Just after the castle the path empties onto the back road that earlier I had chosen not to take, and here I must choose again. I can make a beeline for home through the centre of town, or loop my way back along the dry bed of the riera. Although rain is in the air today, the last two weeks have been dry with cold nights and warm, sunny middays, so progress across the polished stones and cracked mud of the stream bed is relatively easy. Scattered around me are discarded juice cartons, cans and plastic bottles, man-made erratics that sooner or later will be washed into the sea, adding to our problems.

A path of dry, compact mud opens up now to my right and runs in parallel to the stony bed. It is as I join this path that I see the hound. Black, enormous and alone, sniffing around beneath the carob tree that stands where the riera curves around to the right. I pull up, unsure about the wisdom of moving closer. The hound has caught wind of me and has shifted its position to one of preparedness, head cocked forward, back legs slightly spread, a gangly sprinter desperate to leave the blocks.

I lose sense of time in this moment of shared alert, although it can only be a matter of seconds before I see the woman coming along behind. As she reaches the carob tree the hound cocks its head slightly to the right, and then back again in my direction. I call out to her. ‘Està bé? Puc seguir?’ She calls back, letting me know that yes, it’s fine to walk on. The hound seems as liberated by its owner’s voice as I am, and we set off toward one another almost at the same instant.

When our paths meet, I stop again and allow the dog to explore me with its nose. With its head tipped back its muzzle brushes against my breastbone, although I no longer feel intimidated by its size. It fixes me with amber eyes, and I shudder. Whether there is truly something in those eyes or they are simply acting as a temporary mirror for my own self, I can’t say. All I know is that I sense something forlorn about this creature.

‘Sembla que tens un nou amic!’ His owner is with us now, and she’s right, I can easily imagine this dog as a new friend. ‘Ès un danès?’, I ask her. To my surprise, she not only confirms that the glossy giant is indeed a great dane, but begins to tell me something of their life together. While the dog continues to snuffle at my feet the woman explains to me how our encounter would have been very different had we met five months ago.

‘Ha sigut un treball molt dur, ens ha costat molt.’ It’s been hard work, she tells me, really hard. The dog had been abandoned by its previous owner and had ended up in the hands of a group that organized dog fights for a betting syndicate. I don’t press her on how exactly she and her husband had rescued the dog. It is enough to feel my spirits buoyed by her account of the training they have had to do, day after day, to get the animal to where it is now, a friend in the making. I feel the dog’s wet nose against the back of my hand, and looking down I find myself gazing into its eyes, as if by staring long and hard enough I might discover some deeper truth about this animal’s life.

The woman and I bid our farewells and set off in our respective directions, but after a few steps I find myself pulling up again and turning my head. ‘Bona feina’, I call out to her. Good work. The words sound trite, but I had felt the need to say something, to acknowledge openly that I was glad there were people like her in this world. She pays me the courtesy of looking back. ‘Gràcies’, she says, and walks on, the dog loping ahead of her into a different kind of life.