It's not for lack of clothes. In fact on this wet and chilly morning, an extra sweater was needed. At around dawn the rocket dog and I walked in the little woods across the street from Nancy’s townhouse in Reston, VA.. We’ve been here for the holidays.
This district, West Market, has a series of green areas and walkways. This one leads to a “lake,” which is in reality a drainage catchment system prettied up with cattails around the shore and a fountain in the center that oxygenates the water to suppress unattractive algal growth. Reston has scores of miles of walkways and paths throughout, and this little bit is just part of a larger system.
The path to the lake is pretty and winding, with a bridge over a little creek and a fork that goes over to the community center and pool. There are native trees for as much as 30 or 40 feet to each side, and for all I can tell it’s just like virgin forest in there. In the fall we’d walk here and see squirrels, which would insouciantly hide on the other side of trees as we passed, at about waist level, and peek out at us just daring Daisy to give chase.
But Daisy has selective vision as will eventually come out in these tales, and she rarely “bites” at the chance to chase. After all, she has real squirrels to mess with, with much wider territory and a more finely crafted set of evasive tactics to contend with, back at the Farm. She doesn’t have much respect for these city squirrels, apparently. Or it could be that there are so many dog scents on the path, the trees, the sign posts, the concrete blocks, the cattails, the grass and anywhere else a dog could stream it’s own message, that she just doesn’t care for such flippancies as running after squirrels. Not when there is important canine business at hand. Dog owners know what I mean.
This charming glade is also the main dog walkway for West Market, so it gets a lot of canine wear and tear. In these precincts, Daisy seems highly energized as she walks at a barely suppressed run, tugging this way and that.
Yet she also seems tight and hyper alert. True, there’s a lot of dog communication in the air, but there’s something else too. She’s on high alert, poised and seemingly ready to dash like a runner at the starting line waiting for the crack of the pistol. Her nerves seem taut and strained. She reacts instantly to the slightest change such as a leaf falling to the ground near her, or other inputs only dogs can sense.
I’d puzzled about this acutely hyped-up behavior when we’ve walked here in the past. A glimmer came to me last night on another walk, when she was seemingly frantically looking for just the right spot, but each time she found one, something caused her to bounce out of her pre-poop trance and glance and spin all around.
We’d been walking along a berm and from the top one can sight down a little street full of Christmas decorations. A light wind was moving the air, and I spotted the visual culprit. A large inflated Santa was bobbing in the air, moving in an eerily menacing way. I could just barely hear it crinkle and scritch as its head lolled over the belly. No wonder Daisy couldn’t do her thing in peace. Yet even so, a fat inflatable doesn’t explain the whole excited state.
The answer fell into place as we were walking home. I’d paused, to breath in the cold night air, to get a bit of forest oxygen. All was peaceful and quiet, or so it seemed.
At Windmill Creek, when we go out at night, it really is quiet. You can hear the odd rustle of wind in the trees, the faintest tinkle of water over the stones in the brook, but that’s about all. To some visitors this degree of silence is a kind of aural vacuum which can be slightly unsettling at first. Most people have never heard it.
Here in this simulacrum of forest grace, it was the noise level, even at dawn. As if removing an invisible football helmet that normally blocks ambient noise, I mentally cataloged the sounds I was now aware of, that had been hitting Daisy's sensitive ears all this time: engine thrums and screams and tire swish from the nearby six lane, a distant harmonic of same from a distant multilane leading to the airport, aircraft engines shrieking on high as they approach and depart from Dulles, various motors and blowers from furnaces nearby, pumps, a siren chasing some wrongdoer, local street traffic, the hum of electricity from power lines, stereos on a score of stations from as many houses, and withal, a kind of energy buzz that both crackled and hummed in an eerie near-inaudible basso tone. To dog ears this must sound like an audio version of Dali. No wonder she was on high alert.
This audio waste reminded me of the great surprise I experienced years ago, thousands of miles away, in the Dutch Antilles. There, I’d done a little resort diving, exploring reefs and wrecks near Aruba. After peering over the gunwale at colorful fishes slowly swimming about in the gently wafting sea plants, I’d rolled into the water, expecting a graceful aquatic paradise.
Instead I found myself in a cacophony of constant and quite loud noise! Water is an excellent conductor of sound, and even in the relatively remote seaward waters of a small island, one hears the overlapping traces of deep sea ship engines, motorboats, pumps, screeches and tearing sounds, crunching noises, clanks and bangs of all kinds. It was like being tossed into the auditory equivalent of a smelly dump. Little wonder the whales sometimes go insane and beach themselves to get out of it.
Standing still and listening on our little forested path, I realized that the infrastructure of our technologically developed world, even relatively dispersed suburbia, emits a stunning quanta of vibrational energy on a vast array of wavelengths, from sub-audible sound to ambient noise to radio, microwave and light frequencies.
The immediate impact of this ambient incoming energy is usually filtered out by our brains, as many studies have shown. What no one seems to have counted is the energy and attention required to perform this constant filtering. And this cranial processing is only a sorting of priority, a suppression of awareness to keep the brain sane and able to process the most important inputs. It doesn’t stop the arrival of incoming energy as if our brain were some kind of force shield. Like our evolutionary mammalian cousins the whales, the ambient energy onslaught must affect the human organism, setting it on edge, trimming the nerves to a higher alert status unconsciously.
Merely by the contrast between how I feel at the Farm, cloaked in the surrounding natural silences and understood sounds, and the way I feel here, it would seem that the ambient waste noise of our highly energized urban society contributes to an unnaturally high level of tension and anxiety.
i had not realized how deeply such un-sourced anxieties and tensions had penetrated my own body-mind space, until I was in a rural setting for several months. Living in the stone farmhouse, built partially into the deeply reassuring ground, I gradually feel restored to a long-forgotten or perhaps never known normalcy. Again by contrast, some of the old anxieties return when we visit family in the Metro DC area, and are immersed in the sounds of civilization.
It has been estimated that the human organism evoloves naturally at the rate of about 5% every 100,000 year. Since most of the technology of our modern infrastructure is about 100 years old and almost all of it is less than 300 years old, it's obvious that we haven't had time to evolve and adjust to our own environmental handiwork.
It seems clear why Daisy is so wound up when we walk, why it’s so hard for her to relax enough to pee and poop naturally, and why she seems so happy when we get home.
And I better understand why I feel somehow penetrated and naked here, unable to evade ambient anxieties, noise and energies. And why I feel clothed by the familiar, and protected by distance and the absorptive power of the earth when we get home.
Even at home, we’re not entirely immune. Against the sunset, I can see the stark efficiency of our lone power line, its black directness stalking the vast complexity of nature’s own painting in the sky. Yet even technology is a little different here. When the weather changes that particular pole creaks and moans, like the bones of an elderly person warning of approaching rain.
