
Now we enter the dog days of winter, as it were, with no Thanksgiving warmth or Christmas joy to save us from the bitter cold, and no holiday of significance to pull us through to the warm promise of spring (no, Valentine’s Day doesn’t count).
We must go about our days as wayward ships cast into the icy sea of January, February and even March, sick more often than not, shivering in our flesh coats as we wait for the world to bloom, the days growing longer by imperceptible degrees, the weather warming in fits and starts, the first tiny buds appearing on skeletal trees.
This January has been especially brutal, with dirty snow hanging around well past its welcome and sub-freezing temperatures for more than two weeks straight. There’s no shame in riding out these frigid months indoors, burrowed under fuzzy blankets and watching Netflix specials, a small meaningless protest against temperamental Mother Nature, our once-nurturing parental figure turned distant and cold. After all of the abundance she heaped upon us in spring, summer and fall: now this? This turning oneself into a cardboard box and refusing to do anything is a reasonable response to what we’re up against outdoors. But what I try to do, I try to go out and walk. Against my better judgment, and with my cheeks burning from the chill, I go out and walk.
I walk all over, and usually I’m not alone. My dachshund/blue heeler mix (Dottie, 4) and chocolate lab (Bucklee, 10) accompany me. The cold doesn’t bother them much because their bodies are covered in fur. I’m covered in hair, too, we all are, but thin hairs that aren’t much for insulation. So I layer up, even though the heat I create from physical activity will force me to remove these layers as my body becomes a miniature steam engine. Our favorite spot in town (and I think I speak for the dogs here, too) is the Scout Trail at Montgomery Hall Park, which is a three-minute car ride from our home. It winds to the top of Black Dog Mountain, which is more hill than mountain. The tree trunks out there squeak when the wind blows.
I go right after lunch. The dogs always know what’s coming. I finish my food and fetch my boots, and this causes them to work themselves into an anticipator froth: they trail me around the house, moaning and stamping their feet. I shout hold on, just give me a friggin’ second as I collect their poop bags and their leashes, then pile the dogs into the back of the Buick Enclave. Dottie, young and spry as she is, can leap into our climate change-exacerbating SUV without issue. Bucklee, a lumbering old brown bear, needs some help: I say “paws up!” and he puts his front paws on the lip of the bumper. Then I wrap my arms around his bottom half and hoist him in. He makes an exasperated groaning noise every time this happens, like the wind is being abruptly forced out of his lungs.
These are the small moments I share with our dogs, who are a very good boy and a very good girl, all things considered. I don’t pay them enough attention on a daily basis. I get irrationally angry at them for the annoying dog-like things they do, things programmed into their DNA, like the way Bucklee’s hammer-tail pounds the floor at the slightest movement by anyone in the house. I often get so mad that I figure the only explanation is I’m an awful person with a soul like the innards of a rotten pumpkin. My only saving grace is this hour-long walk we take together, which reunites us like old friends missing each other in plain sight. I like seeing the dogs in their element: out of confinement, wild amongst the trees.
Winter walking is, in some ways, superior to summer walking. Summer walking is a sweaty affair, and the heat is tough on the dogs, especially old man Bucklee. He lags behind during the summer months, breathing heavily and foaming around the mouth. On a cold winter day, though, he is nimble, moving with the grace of a dog five years younger. I let both of them roam off-leash (even though this is a no-no), because dogs crave that sense of temporary freedom. They are, as I’ve mentioned, very good dogs, and will return to me at the snap of a finger. There usually aren’t many people on the trail anyway, which has always puzzled me, because it’s a nice little walk, one that makes you feel like you’re out in the country despite being in the heart of Staunton.
I back the Buick into a spot at the top of a hill that leads to the trailhead. The instant I open the hatch, the puppers leap out like they’re storming out of the gate at the Kentucky Derby. There’s no rhyme or reason to their movements. They’re so euphoric at their newfound freedom that they bounce every which way, hot happy atoms burning off their pent-up energy. They get so excited that they inevitably hunch over and unleash hot poops in the tall grass, casting ashamed looks at me as they go about their business. Once the frantic energy dissipates, the three of us reconvene and head into the woods, ready for our familiar trek to the top of the hill.
Walking has always been a passion of mine. That feels like a strange thing to say. Walking seems too mundane to inspire passion. It’s like claiming your passion is breathing. OK, then: walking has always been, I don’t know, a hobby of mine. The writer David Sedaris gets it: he walks at least 10 miles per day, sometimes way more. “I look back on the days I averaged only thirty-thousand steps, and think, honestly, how lazy can you get?” he wrote in a piece for The New Yorker. I don’t know where he caught the bug, but I got it from my parents. They live on acreage in rural Powhatan County, and as a kid I remember them taking numerous walks per day through the woods, down along the pipeline, around the nearby middle school, a simple twice-daily escape from it all. That urge to walk for walking’s sake wriggled its way into my constitution, by nature or nurture, and I find myself getting the itch anytime I’m indoors for too long.
The kind of walking I first fell in love with was fundamentally different from my parents’ style: their’s was an act of escapism, mine was an act of discovery. I preferred flaneuring around cities for hours at a time and taking pictures of anything that stood out. When we visited a new city, I’d make a point to take my digital camera and wander around at random for at least an hour, getting a sense of this strange place I’d found myself in. It was, in some ways, an act of meditation: the steady left-right left-right of my steps worked my mind into something approaching a trance, and the act of snapping pictures forced me to stay in the moment, always open to the next intriguing thing that might flash across my vision: like the words “Jix says love more” spray-painted on the side of an abandoned convenience store for unknown reasons.
Those were open times, free times, times before parenthood benevolently nailed me down. Nowadays my walking assumes a much more predictable routine. It feels less like an act of discovery and more like a thing that must be done to maintain a baseline level of sanity. This is especially true during the winter, when we’re all wilting away indoors from vitamin D deficiency, visions of poolside days floating through our minds like dreams we’ll never live again. The solution is to get out and do it. Not in the rain, I’ll never walk in the rain, and not when there’s six inches of ice-shellacked snow on the ground. But if the weather is relatively nice, I try to get out and do the thing, even if it’s sub-freezing, because although it’s not as pleasant as a poolside day in July, at least I’m under the sun and noticing things.
Sometimes I notice a lot. I notice a pink-and-purple beach chair that has been sitting in the middle of the woods for months now. It seems to move slightly every time I see it, this time facing north, the next time about three feet away facing south, with an empty water bottle in the cup holder. I notice the collection of large sticks that someone has tied together to form a tent-like shelter. I notice the gorgeous long-range view of the Blue Ridge mountains near the top of the trail. This is always where I stop, take a breath, say “yup, the mountains are still there,” then head back toward the trailhead. The dogs don’t follow me to the top anymore because they know this is my turnaround spot. Maybe they’re smarter than I give them credit for.
Other times I don’t notice anything. I get too wrapped up in my own puny sorrows, my grand schemes for life, the ways I’ve failed as a parent or husband or son. These are the phone-it-in days, the days when I enter and leave the trail with no memory of even being in the woods. It’s like that Annie Dillard quote, the one from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “I return from one walk knowing where the killdeer nests in the field by the creek and the hour the laurel blooms. I return from the same walk a day later scarcely knowing my own name.” I’m so in my head during those phone-it-in days that I convince myself there’s not even a world out there to see. Even so, I’m still happy to have walked, because at least I’ve used my body for what it was made for, at least I’ve allowed the small amount of skin not buried under fabric to absorb some of that sweet Vitamin D.
And the dogs, too: it makes me happy to see the dogs in their natural state, sniffing this patch of ground, pooping on that pile of leaves, phantom peeing on every other tree we pass. They’re often restless in our 1,000-square-foot bungalow. So am I. In that way we’re alike. Bucklee pounds his hammer-tail on the hardwood floor at the slightest movement. Dottie leaps off the recliner and wrestles with the cat every time he walks past. I stomp around the house like a brute, cursing about clutter and filth, never able to, as my wife puts it, just be. Things can get cramped in our little home, especially when it’s 28-degrees outside and we’re all half-sick, but out on the trail, the dogs and I are liberated, using our bodies as they’re meant to be used. This makes all three of us our own distinct versions of happy.
Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband and father based in Staunton. You check out more of his work on his Substack and Ourland Mag. He can be reached at [email protected]