As my children have gotten older and engaged in the process of driving legally, new wrinkles to parenthood have emerged: higher auto insurance costs (very wrinkly), and the worries that come with your kids and their friends being out on the roads (even more wrinkly).
Some things are disappearing, or already have: parental obligations to pick up or drop off, and those text messages that arrive suddenly and request a car in 5 minutes from destinations that are 15 minutes away. While I won’t miss those irritations, their absence comes with a cost—the elimination of the forced family togetherness that’s a by-product of kids being shuttled from one location to another.
As previous generations of drivers can attest, these rides are golden opportunities for ambitious parents to exchange more than a word or two with their children—or better yet, their kids’ friends, who often feel a responsibility to respond to inquiries from an adult other than their own parents politely and conversationally, and not as if they were suspects being interrogated by an aggressive sheriff or judge.
Another thing I’ll miss might seem a strange choice to some people: those times when, faced with an hourlong wait between the start and end of some sports practice or dance class, most parents would sit in a designated area, engaged with their phones or watching their kids. Instead, as my children got accustomed to—and eventually desirous of—a lack of direct parental supervision, I would bring along my dog, Ramona, and get her evening walk out of the way.
(I looked briefly for a nicer, more nature-friendly way to say that by accomplishing two tasks—dog-walking and child transportation—I “killed two birds with one stone.” That search yielded a list of sincere but absolutely awful suggested substitutions for anti-animal language, courtesy of PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). Birds are great and all, but my appreciation for clarity will not allow me to cast aside the idiom “beat a dead horse” in favor of “feed a fed horse,” replace “bring home the bacon” with “bring home the bagels,” or exchange “take the bull by the horns”—to act bravely and directly when confronted with a difficult, undesirable situation—for “take the flower by the thorns,” a string of words that merely implies carelessness or stupidity. Thus, I will not write that I “fed two birds with one scone,” as PETA would suggest, but simply that I accomplished my two tasks while expending less energy than if I had performed them separately. If artificial intelligence is going to write more like humans, I guess I’ll start writing more like a robot.)
These evening dog walks took place at strange locations—apartment complexes, deserted office parks, nearly deserted actual parks. Ramona and I had covered every inch of our own neighborhood, and the change of scenery was welcome to us both. I usually let her lead the way, and sometimes I’d get lost while exploring a new path, requiring GPS and a bit of running to get me back in time for pickup.
It was a nice diversion from watching TV, which is what I’d probably have been doing if I’d been at home. Even in denser population areas, the streets were surprisingly dark and empty, especially during the winter months. Sometimes there were so few indications of activity that I’d think, “Boy, this would be a great place to get mugged.” But then I’d remember that I was in the suburbs, and everyone was inside watching television, so there was nobody around to do the mugging.
It doesn’t get much quieter than a remote park, blanketed in snow, at night, except maybe an over-55 community, blanketed in snow, at night. Every once in a while, something creepy would happen, like the time I walked past a wooded embankment and could have sworn I saw an active laptop screen shining in the darkness thirty feet away. Do homeless people work remotely, I wondered? After yelling a greeting several times with no response, I waded into the trees and brush to investigate, and saw it was just a blue mylar balloon reflecting a streetlight’s glare.
Sometimes I’d be the one delivering the scares, though not intentionally. Several ground floor office employees working late have been shocked to see a man with a hood, vintage 2015-era wired headphones, and a dog breeze past by their cubicles’ floor-to-ceiling windows at night.
In these environments, the absence of other sounds only emphasized any that did emerge, like the loud buzzing of a high pressure sodium bulb streetlight. It’s probably not a sound we’ll hear much longer with use of LEDs on the rise, though the silent, desperate flickering of an outdoor LED fixture near the end of its life is another kind of horror. And nothing is more disturbing than when your dog suddenly stops and looks into the distance at something you can’t see or hear, and starts barking or growling.
Despite the occasional creepiness, the quiet solitude was appealing, and it afforded some unforgettable opportunities that PETA might frown upon. Once, I walked into a graveyard to investigate a distant red light. It turned out to be a decorative grave marker, but as we walked along the paved path, Ramona noticed movement in the dark off to my right and pulled in that direction.
Given the foreboding setting, it was a relief to find that we were in the midst of a huge herd of deer, almost invisible in the blackness, and we proceeded to chase them from one side of the cemetery to the other for the next twenty minutes.
Another time, Ramona stopped on an empty street, turned toward the trees on one side, and watched silently as a tiny baby deer stumbled out of the woods. Dog and deer were equally confused, and as I pulled Ramona away, the fawn decided it should follow us. I spotted its mother observing the situation from the tree line, and got us far enough away to watch as she finally emerged to reclaim her progeny.
One recent foray took me through the abandoned AMC theater parking lot in Hamilton. Though the theater’s closing was a loss for moviegoers, and for Hamilton economically, the area is an oasis of isolation despite its proximity to a busy, sprawling shopping center. Stormwater retention basins line the property, and on my visit, I saw two busy beavers swimming happily and attending to their dam, ignoring the warnings of pesticide treated waters.
Nature has its appeal, but human nature wouldn’t naturally lead me to drive 20 or 30 minutes to a different location just to walk the dog. I suppose nothing’s stopping me from occasionally seeking out random places in search of new adventures, like I did a few times during the tedious span of Covid lockdowns. Most of the time, though, I’ll probably be one of those hidden suburbanites, sitting in my house watching television. Maybe for old times’ sake, I’ll put on a nature show—or a horror movie.
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