Don't blow it - good planets are hard to find.

I went for a walk today.  I left Chicken Little with DH and took my first baby – the great big black four legged mongrel I affectionately call an oversized rodent (this stems from a mis-placed play on the R.O.U.S.’s  {aka *rodents of unusual size*}  - anyone get the reference?.. no, I am not talking about the rats in Central Park.. . ok.  well I won’t go into it  - you can Google it if you are interested.)  

So where was I?

I went for a walk today... with the dog.  I love my dog and she is still a puppy at heart and has been moping about the house lately and chewing on things... mostly her own toys but it makes me nervous. 

Oversized rodent...

My conclusion is she needs to get out more.  I used to walk her almost daily.  But then along came Chicken Little...   Not that I mind putting him in a stroller and making it a family affair but the trails I used to take my oversized rodent on are not stroller friendly  and the Snuggli is not conducive to our special brand of weather.   It rains.  It rains whole oceans on this small town and it's always cold and damp and filled with green moss and black mildew.   It's been sitting right at the almost freezing mark for months slipping into snow and reverting back to rain and mostly just slush.  A form of solidified liquid not unlike a margarita… upturned in a hurricane.  It's a very strange variation of the snow globe.  The wind howls the ice chunks and slush slash sideways, and garbage cans go rolling along.  

Don’t get me wrong.   I have great rain gear and several pairs of rubber boots… and I don’t mind gearing up for the miserable weather but it has become much more difficult to bundle up an infant for this special kind of torture.  The dog... well she’s half fish anyway - right down to her webbed toes and otter tail. 

But today I got to don my slicker gear and take her on the trail without Chicken Little.   A little trail, unmaintained and likely established early in this town’s history before they bothered to put the narrow little road in that connects us to the rest of the world.  ( Fascinating fact of the Day: We got rail service in 1912, it took until the second world war before the town was ever connected to the rest of the province via road way)

It’s a little piece of green space in the middle of town, a miniature forest that borders the salmon creeks that run to sea.  It could be a Jewel in our community.  A beautiful green world of dripping moss and gurgling brooks,  the smells of leaf litter and damp moss.  Light filtering down through the trees and the gentle dripping of water.  

a disgrace

But today in the harshness of winter, where the branches are stripped of their leaves, the foliage pulled back to expose the uglier side of the human condition.  I found a disgrace.  A child’s bicycle half sunk in the creek, a tractor tire, pop  cans, plastic bags, beer cans, McDonald’s cups, bits of Styrofoam and plastic Freezie  wraps, bits of plastic in a myriad of colours, things I couldn’t identify that my dog happily picked up and brought to me tail wagging, Bic lighters, and cigarette butts (no they do not biodegrade very fast)  used condoms and a disposable diaper...  so much for responsible citizens... Are some people  really too stupid to work out how to place their garbage in a bin thus happily leave broken glass, sharp cans, dirty food containers and worse on the ground for my dog to find ???

I did in fact  come across something rather neat... a fort of a sort.

 Or rather it would have been neat IF... 

IF - the lattice work lean-to made of trees  hadn’t been cut from the immediate vicinity leaving dozens of 2-3 inch diameter stumps broken off at knee height

IF-  the lattice work hadn’t been lashed together with plastic zip ties – many hundreds of which were also laying all over the ground.

IF-  an old tattered plastic blue tarp wasn’t hanging in shreds over one end of the lean-to

IF-  there were not several garbage bags worth of crushed beer cans and other litter strewn around

IF-  it looked a little more like people cared.

So Actually it wasn’t so Neat... who wants a fort if all it means is more litter, more garbage, more irresponsible partiers...

But despite my disgust and contempt at those littering slobs who would desecrate what could be a very special place I did manage to exercise my oversized rodent, and she is laying at my feet smelling like a wet dog as I type this many hours later.