Tolerance

Anyone who has known me for more than about five minutes will tell you: I don't like people.

It irks me to no end that I have to share this earth with idiots who put heavy weights on their pitbull puppy's collar (so that it will have a big muscular neck when it grows up!). Or illiterates who can't read the "15 Items or Less" sign on the checkout lane at the grocery store. Or Illiterates who designed the sign in the first place to say "15 Items or Less" rather than "15 Items or Fewer."

 Or people who use poison nerve gas on their own people, or on anybody for that matter. Or, possibly worst of all, drivers who don't use their turn signals.

When I was a little girl, I used to tell people I wanted to be the little old lady whose yard none of the neighborhood kids wanted to enter, even if it meant losing their favorite baseball.

You get the picture.

Nevertheless, I have to live in this world with these other people. And so do they also have to live in this world with me. Furthermore, some of us are also responsible for raising smallish less-developed beings -- for them, children; for me, dogs -- to also peaceably coexist on our little rotating sphere. That's how society works. Or how it's supposed to. Nobody says you have to like it.

Furthermore, it could be argued that most of us don't even have a consistent target for our irritation; it shifts depending on where we ourselves are standing at any given point in time.

... This is a lot of babbling, is it not? What, pray tell, has inspired this vague and nebulous rant, O Blogger?

I'll tell you what: The bike trail in front of my house has opened a new connection segment, turning our peaceful little mile of paved trail from a nice evening walk, run or ski, into a mere intermediate blip on the bike superhighway connecting the neighborhoods of our fair city.

(Not Anchorage.)

(Not Anchorage, either.)

Hooray, some might say! Some (including my husband) would say it's a nice addition to our motorhead city which is otherwise borderline hostile toward cyclists. They might suggest a bike trail adds both safety and property value to our little neighborhood.

However, "they" didn't recently try to take our dogs out on a typical Tuesday night 3-mile jog, our normal course which conveniently starts and ends at our front door, and get run down at every turn by spandex-clad psychos who seem to mistake our little neighborhood for the home stretch on the Champs-Elysées.

Furthermore, in dramatic contrast to these speed demons, there's another trail-user subset appearing: the fitness-walker. Typically occurring in pairs (or more!), these typically elderly folks fan out across the trail and are usually so busy talking that they don't hear a courteous "ahem" or "excuse me" in an effort to pass without startling them; and you can forget the helpful "On your left!" warning, which merely causes them to jump a foot in the air, clutch their hearts, and land all over the trail: left, right and center.

Obviously, the next logical question is: Well, Blogger, what exactly is your perspective on this, then?

And so I have a confession to make: I am a runner, with unleashed dogs!

Yes, that's right, my two dogs run all willy-nilly when we're out on the trail: in the woods, on the trail, off the trail, ahead of me (most of the time), behind me (mostly never), left side, right side. I run three miles, they run nine. Works out great for all of us. (In my own defense, I have been working for nearly four years on leash-training Cashew, but she's a dumb dumb dog, and it usually results in her belly-crawling along next to me as if I'm going to stab her through the heart at any moment. Delightful for all parties, as I'm sure you can imagine.)



But here's the thing: my dogs, other than startling people with their unpredictability (which I totally understand), don't bother anybody. They dodge runners and cyclists with equal aplomb. They tend to regard leashed dogs as something to be avoided at all costs. OK, admittedly, Cashew does love little kids -- they tend to be sloppy and therefore always have something delicious on their faces (go ahead, tell me I'm wrong), but I'm aware of that and "On by!" them whenever there are kids around, and on by they go, leaving the treats behind.

Furthermore, I sympathize with people who don't know what my dogs are going to do -- or what I'm going to do, for that matter. I mean, who hasn't been told, by some idiot who doesn't know the first thing about dog behavior, that her dog is perfectly friendly as it's lungeing, snarling and snapping, at the end of its leash?

So I keep my dogs at a heel position as we run by.

Still, I could do without the dirty looks from all the cyclists and fitness walkers, especially in my own neighborhood where I've lived and quietly walked my dogs, no problem, for fifteen years, thank you very much.

Which is where today's topic of Tolerance comes in. (I know, it's a late reveal. Chalk it up to artistic license.)

I live in Alaska, so I tend to get out a lot. And I see a lot of different types of people out there, enjoying the trails. What connects us is that we all love being outdoors in Alaska and are willing to make some effort to get out there, whether that's on bike, foot, ski, or horse, we chose to include an adventure in today's agenda. Sometimes I think it's the only thing that keeps us from killing each other.

In spite of the signs, however, there's still conflict.

After all, who doesn't want what they want, when they want it? It's only human nature. When I'm in a car, I'm cursing the cyclist who didn't signal their turn & shoots in front of my car. When I'm a cyclist, I curse the motorist who's so busy talking on their cell phone that they didn't even look to the right before pulling out into traffic. As a runner, the huge piles of horse shit on the trail get to be a bit much in summer (but, hey, it cuts down on my dog food costs!). As a cross-country skier, I get miffed at the foot traffic that walks in my pristine XC ski tracks -- make your own trail! As a backcountry skier, I wish the snowboarders could find another way up the mountain instead of bootpacking our skin track. -- And I'm sure they all feel the same way about me: my dogs leave paw prints in the skin track; my foot traffic on XC trails, even off to one side, leave divots; my off-leash dogs are startling and unpredictable (but would it really kill you to back off from your 35mph pace through our neighborhood, Mr Armstrong?).

Nevertheless, we're all out there. And chances are, I find you just as annoying as you find me. Maybe you're talking on your cell phone -- WTF? Can't you just be out in Nature? You're talking about fabric softener, for chrissakes!

But there is hope: A couple of summers ago, I was running with my one dog (at that time) off-leash on a heavily used parks trail just inside city limits, and we came around a bend in the trail to find a traffic jam: dogs, people, and cyclists on either side of two women on horseback, and the horses were not happy! They were shying and rearing under a couple of pine trees, and the women were doing their best to get the horses back under control. Everyone else standing around just gave them the space and time they needed to do it. Nobody grumbled about "stupid horses" or "trail obstructions";  I think we mostly felt bad for these women, who did sort it out in a few minutes and we all each moved on in our own directions.

If only that attitude were more pervasive in the brief passings we all have on the trails. My dog didn't come anywhere near you. If you hadn't seen us, would you even have know we were here? -- Your bike didn't actually hit my dog. The pile of horse poop was easy enough to avoid and will break down with the first rainfall. I can still ski over your tracks.

If a misanthropic curmudgeon like me can learn to get along, we all can.

(I don't know who Tania Donald is, but she's got my number, for sure.)