chandrarueff1961-yasmb

My neighborhood is a bit sketchy. It’s old (circa 1897). My house was built in 1940. I and most of my neighbors probably have cockroaches as old as my house. Although it is not in the middle of town, it was just considered a different part of the town. Not a suburb – those came in the mid-1990’s. Now it’s considered fairly central, so it may not exist for long. I like the diversity of the area, not so much the noise, the drug-dealing, and the condemned buildings. The area about a half mile closer to downtown is slowly being taken over by high-end housing developments for students and young professionals. Just guessing, but I think I’m not that far from being taken over.

Even though the quality of the neighborhood is questionable, it does have one redeeming value that makes up for all of the condemned housing, crazy neighbors, and drainage issues.

There’s a trailhead to part of the city’s greenway about 100 yards from my house. The entire greenway itself extends through most of the concrete jungle of the city. But “my” part of the greenway is wooded and envelops a wandering creek. The woods are dense; old growth trees actually forming a canopy and a healthy understory that hosts wildflowers, saplings, small shrubs, ferns, and dogwood and redbud trees. There’s a railway running in the middle of it, and the trains run parallel to the path – irritating, but it is a city, after all. The creek is a typical urban creek, polluted, with all of the signs around it warning that we should not even touch it. But the good of that green part of the greenway cannot be denied.

My dog and I walk down that greenway every day, weather permitting. She knows what time we are supposed to go, and she jumps around, barking and bugging me to death to go for a walk.

She’s a coonhound, so she is hardwired to put her nose in every new smell she encounters. I, the mere human involved, have to give up any notion of getting real exercise until she has gotten enough sniffing done to let me do so. But this is the part of the urban wilderness that she enjoys as much as I enjoy the sights, the shade, and being close to nature. If I let her off the leash, she would take off through the understory and revel in a coonhound’s version of Disney World. You would think that she would be one of those stereotypical “squirrel!” dogs. But she has long since given up on catching one of those. Same with rabbits and birds. On the leash, she will jump away from some tiny sound in the understory – probably a bird scratching for food, nothing more. Once, we encountered a bird’s nest on the ground next to the trail, and it scared the hell out of her.

She wanted absolutely nothing to do with the deer that stood silently near the woods in front of us one day. The deer was bigger than the dog. Nope. She (no antlers, therefore a she to me) held her head high on a gracefully arched neck, perfectly still, ears high. She was a wondrous vision. Tawny fur with black and white accents, big dark eyes. I was so mesmerized that I never even thought about taking a picture. After a minute or so, she casually turned around, walked leisurely by the edge of the woods in front of us, ears slowly turning back towards us, and slowly slipped back into the woods. It was amazing how quickly she just seemed to disappear into the woods. I was a little disappointed that she didn’t run and jump and flip up her white tail and put on a more exciting show. But she was clearly not afraid of us. She was calm, peaceful, a portrait of gentle presence. A rare sight so close to the middle of the city, the doe was achingly beautiful. In those woods, she belonged, but she didn’t belong. I know there are plenty of deer here (they adapt to our clutter and noise, just like coyotes), but to see one up close! That was a special moment. Now I know that we are being watched while we’re on the greenway. There are big brown doe eyes on us, I just know it.

Those woods have had plenty of surprises for us. Squirrels and rabbits, *yawn*. But the chipmunks are fun. They dart across the trail, tails up, right in front of us and scrabble up the rock sides of the railbed, disappearing into some safe (but occasionally very loud) hole. We find fascinating feathers on the trail. I found a couple of large ones that resembled turkey feathers, striped away from the quill, but a reddish-brown stripe rather than dark grey. I took them home, not knowing that it is illegal to do so (yes, it really is illegal). I’m pretty sure it’s not illegal to take smaller feathers, but I don’t know what the cutoff point is in terms of size. As for what type of bird they come from, how am I supposed to know that before I take them home and find out? Weeks after we found them, a huge bird swooped across the trail in front of us and lit on a branch in plain sight. It was a barred owl, and clearly the source of those striped feathers. Very distinctive markings. Like the deer, he (all owls are he’s to me, not sure why) was completely unafraid. He was content to sit on his branch and stare at us. Owls are a rare sight in daylight. I did get a picture of him. If I could just figure out how to attach an image to one of these posts…

Last year, during the dry season of late summer here, we were walking towards a wooden bridge that crosses the creek next to the train trestle, and a young man who was leaning on the rail of the bridge caught my eye, smiled, and quietly said, “Otters!” No way. Not in THAT water. Skeptical, I climbed up on the bridge and followed his gaze. And there they were, two river otters, playing in a pool, bobbing up and down and occasionally swimming on their backs, curiously looking up at us. The dog saw them but thankfully didn’t bark. Coonhounds aren’t water dogs, so she had zero interest. When the otters swam underneath the water, they became mysterious dark torpedo-like shapes as they glided under the bridge. A young woman came jogging up the trail, and the young man gave her the same heads-up. She said, “Otters? Are they real?” I had to laugh. Clearly a Gen Z-er, raised on AI, her reaction was so different from my Boomer reaction. But they both possibly came from the same place; could otters possibly thrive in that filthy creek? As they played, they twisted and turned around each other and popped up on the shore for a brief wrestle, before they slid back in and gracefully glided away.

Did I get video? Well, hell no. I was too caught up in the moment. Probably that young lady did – I didn’t pay attention to that, either. Afterwards, I thought, “Nobody’s gonna believe me now.” It seems that Millenials and Gen Z-ers recognize that the instant that you get caught up in something, the camera’s got to come out. I don’t have that deeply ingrained reaction. I grew up in a different era. We didn’t carry cameras around in our back pockets, much less video cameras. In my analog young years, we didn’t get the instant gratification of digital photos and videos that we have now. And we definitely didn’t get to share them with anyone else just as quickly as we took them. We had to wait hours, days, or weeks. We had to wait until other people were in our physical presence. We were social in person rather than in media.

As it was, it took me all of 20 minutes online to verify the presence of otters in that creek. When I say, “verify,” I mean bypassing AI and social media.

There are some great things about this digital era that are great. But I’m burned out on social media, and I know way too little about AI except that it’s really creepy when Alexa starts talking back and tells me, “I hope you feel better soon!” after I ask her to put cough syrup on the shopping list. The news gives me the AI doomsday scenario without even coming close to explaining it, so there’s something else to verify, if I can find a reliable source.

Researching that? Not even close to as fun as looking up river otters, owls, white-tailed deer, and chipmunks.