Double Poop

It’s amazing how some of the most prosaic of undertakings can stir the human mind into a gears-turning, smoke-pouring-out-of-the-ears, parallel-drawing frenzy, and maybe slightly less amazing, given the fact that it’s my gears that are doing the turning, how such heightened prefrontal cortex activity can manifest itself as a rant. Like the one that follows.

It goes down like this…

Holly, my de facto beagle, likes to go for early morning walks with me along the narrow, wilderness trail-like public streets (they’re not wide enough for two cars, and they all have “Trail” in their names) that wind themselves in seemingly aimless fashion throughout the lakeside hamlet of Michiana Shores, the place that Holly and I call home. Dwellings of varying style and size, accompanied by varying amounts of land, line these “trails”. Fake log cabins, Wright-ish approximations, pedestrian ranches and split-levels, two and three-story palaces, and others face the paved terrain upon which Holly and I travel, and we are presented with the opportunity for assiduous visual inspection, which, periodically is unavoidable. Mostly, our route is meandering, but it invariably leads us to the brand new paved bicycle/walking/running path that hugs the northern length of Old Grand Beach Road (a larger and busier throughway than any of the residential trails), which serves as the southernmost boundary of Michiana Shores. Near the very end of each of our daily walks, Holly and I use a short segment (I, begrudgingly, and Holly, who detects the passage of dogs who’ve gone before, happily) of this brand new path as the link back to the Trail where our house awaits.

As intrinsic to our walks as our use of this short section of bike path as a journey’s almost-final leg is Holly’s penchant for pooping twice (the second event typically occurring around 10 minutes after the first). This binary defecatory phenomenon has remained an immutable element of our walks since Holly first came to live with me. The event is as inevitable as the sunrise, the coloring of autumn leaves, and… the presence of yard signs in front of certain fake log cabins, Wrigh-tish approximations, etc.

As you’ll shortly read, the bike path, the yard signs, Holly’s craps… my own fevered neuronal firings have detected a relationship among them.

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I’ve carried two plastic poop bags with me since the day Holly first acquainted me with her bathroom habits, and I found myself faced with the choice of unknotting the sole, initial-shit-filled plastic bag in my possession, opening it, holding my breath, and picking up Holly’s second, albeit smaller, fecal work, or leaving it in front of the house with the out of state-plated vehicles parked in the driveway and the “Black Lives Matter” sign sticking out of the ground in the front yard. (Second home owners, and a second home, to be sure.) My admittedly dim sense of moral rectitude ultimately took the choice out of my hands and replaced it with a much fuller, now slightly shit-smeared dog poop bag. Lesson learned. It would be two bags from that day forward.

And something else…

An inescapable parallel was drawn that day, and it’s remained with me, coloring my perception, and, existing now (with the passage of time and the accumulation of both my random observations and Holly’s two-shits-per-walk events) as something only slightly less than a precept. As I looked first from the facade of that big, expensive second home, then to the out of state plates on the SUVs parked in the drive and the sign in the front yard, and, finally, to the plastic bag laden with not one, but TWO piles of crap, and which remained clutched gingerly in my barely-clenched fist like an unholy talisman, I knew, beyond the shadow of any doubt, that to live in Michiana Shores, with Holly as my charge, was to live with the inevitability of dealing with double piles of both tangible and only slightly more nebulous, metaphorical poop.

Let me explain. I’ll start with the big second home…

The first pile of poop, the bigger one, has to do with the yard sign. The “Black Lives Matter Sign”. Let me stop anyone right there who thinks I’m going to come off with some racist slant. Nope. I’m not. I’m not racist in the least. What I’m griping about here is the hypocrisy of the white second home owners who opted to purchase, as their home-away-from-racially-insulated-suburban-out-of-state-home, a seven-figure monstrosity in one of the least racially diverse upper middle class areas in the country, and then trumpet their support of the black community with a feckless yard sign. All of this happening, of course, while less than 10 miles away in neighboring Michigan City, ample housing stock remains available in the far less affluent, predominantly black neighborhoods where the symbol of the purported advocacy and ersatz humanitarianism of these wealthy second home owners would never be seen by anyone who matters to them, and any genuine effort at advocacy for the black community would be most acutely effective. Why couldn’t these phonies have moved into a house in one of those neighborhoods where legitimate community activism would have a real impact? Are they only compassionate while their rich friends are watching? That’s poop number one, and it’s an even bigger largesse than Holly’s daily principal deposit. (Hey, I told you right up front that this was gonna be a rant.)

The second, slightly smaller pile of poop is a metaphor for the unfortunate presence of these out of state invaders themselves. In “Eastward ho!!!”, I lamented the effects that the actions of those second home owners with no real ties (beyond their investments in summer weekend-use real estate) to this little Indiana burg have on those who truly call the area home. From blasting loud music, to littering, to speeding down one-and-a-half-lane residential trails and running over wildlife, to forcing hypocritical, fallacious ideologies down the throats of year-round resident neighbors seeking only to enjoy the right to the quiet enjoyment of their domiciles… for the two or three days a week that they’re here, they piss off everyone from year-round residents, to grocery store clerks, to law enforcement officers. Poop number two is almost as big and almost as stinky as poop number one. It’s definitely bigger than any second poop that Holly can muster.

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Note to readers: Before I get started on the $7-million-plus bicycle/walking/running path and its associated twin shit piles, take a breather here, and relax. My rant today is filled with sound and fury, yet it signifies nothing. This, for the most part, is offered tongue in cheek. It’s true there are some boneheads here in MS, but most of my neighbors, including those of the second home owning variety, are generally really cool. (I rib them all the time, and no one’s creased my skull yet.) When I wrote this, I was really just looking for an excuse to write about Holly’s uncanny daily double poop/single walk sessions. (To you Freudians out there, this piece says a lot more about me than it does about anyone else, no?) In any case, I thought that what you’re reading right here might make for a suitable vehicle.

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Ok, on to the brand new $7 million bike path. I’ll paraphrase.

The path winds through towns in both eastern Indiana and western Michigan. In New Buffalo, Michigan (where the idea for the path purportedly found its genesis), a bridge is being re-built to accommodate the path. In both states, a huge amount of work has been done and a huge amount continues. And as far as the cost goes, seven big marching bands buys a lot of gravel and asphalt. I’m not aware of any notice or referendum that would have solicited my vote for or against the project, and as I understand it, its construction and ongoing maintenance is being funded at least in part by Indiana and Michigan taxpayers. I mention that New Buffalo was where the plot to build this thing was hatched: evidently, a comparatively small cadre of business owners there believed that its presence would increase commerce. Apparently, the thought here was that the hot and sweaty cyclists, runners, and walkers that would surely follow the path into the heart of New Buffalo’s shopping district would also surely purchase a bunch of expensive goods and services, strap those expensive goods and services to their backs, then pedal/walk/run themselves back out of Dodge. (Making sure to come back the next day and repeat the process.)

The first of the two poop parallels here manifests itself in the fact that a small group will theoretically receive benefit from the path’s existence while a large group pays for it, and goddamn it, I don’t know anyone living in Michiana Shores who voted for this thing, or was ever given an opportunity to vote for it. It’s a short and sweet gripe, but it stinks just as bad as the first and historically larger of Holly’s poops.

The second fecal analogy concerns the fact that the path is rarely used, and when it is, those who use it frequently take the opportunity to adorn its $7 million surface and sod-planted borders with fun-sized personal refuse of virtually every sort, including staggering numbers of unbagged dog poop piles left to dry in the sun like clusters of outsized, fetid raisins. (This last item manages to drift back from the metaphorical into tangible poop territory. Inadvertently stepping in one of these ensures that this is so.) I’ve included a few pics here to celebrate the happy use of this costly micro-thoroughfare by its appreciative targeted audience.

And that, my friends, brings me to the end of my rant. Double piles of poop, both real ones and their metaphorical counterparts, admittedly do not make for glamorous subject matter. But in this particular instance, for both dog and man, exorcising their respective brands of noxious juju has proven to be cathartic as hell.

See you next time.

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