The Dog Park As a Synchro

I’m beginning to think that the dog park is a synchronistic reflection of the larger world, an immediate picture of a collective mind. Here’s why.

On October 1, the first day of the government shutdown here in the U.S., I took Noah and Nika to the park by myself because Rob was finishing up something he was writing. When Noah is with Nika, his wild side emerges. He does stuff he wouldn’t ordinarily do if it was just us and him. But Nika is his X factor, her little voice whispering, Let’s go get us some squirrels.

 As soon as they were out of the car, they were tugging and straining at their leashes so hard that I had two choices – be dragged face down across concrete or let them go. I released their leashes and they took off at the speed of light.  I kept walking toward the gate, the dog park, and eventually they both circled around and joined me.

We were there for perhaps five minutes before a man arrived with his pit bull and a puppy of another breed.  The pit immediately went for a white German shepherd – or the shepherd went for the pit, depending on whose story is true – and suddenly the park was a cacophony of barking, snarling, the kinds of sounds that dogs make when they are genuinely pissed off.

A bunch of owners moved forward to separate the dogs. The pit’s’ human snapped a leash on him and then lounged against the fence, as if just daring the unleashed dogs to come around. He and the owner of the white shepherd started yelling at each other – You’re dog is just as aggressive as mine, your dog is a schmuck…. Then Cody, an Alaskan husky who belongs to Karin, tried to mitigate the disagreements as he usually does, but got ticked off by something and went after the pit. I left. Too much doggy and human aggression.

Two days later Rob and I took Noah and Nika to the park. The pit and his owner were there again, but we had just missed a confrontation between him Karin. Apparently the pit’s owner, let’s call him Joe, had shown a video to some other dog owner that supposedly proved that Karin was carrying a gun and that when she reached into her bag the other day, it was to withdraw her weapon.  

When I heard this, I burst out laughing. Karin with a gun? Karin, a gun-toting’ Annie Oakley? Hardly. This woman can’t stand confrontation of any kind. She, like most of us, goes to the dog park because it’s usually peaceful, her dog has fun, it’s a social event.

Well, Karin went over to Joe to set him straight, and when Joe got into her face, she called the cops. We arrived about ten minutes after that happened. Cassie quickly herded us to the far end of the park and brought us up to speed on what was going on. The cop arrived a while later, obviously not in any mood to deal with dog stuff. He spoke to Karin, then to Joe, then to Karin and some other people. He was the same cop who had pulled into our driveway one morning in June after a neighbor and Rob had a confrontation over Nika barking at his dog.

As we watched all of this unfold, it occurred to me that the dog park drama bore eerie parallels to what is happening in the larger world, where Democrats and Republicans bark at each other, point fingers at each other, blame, blame, blame. And the government shutdown wasn’t resolved until the 11th hour, on October 16.

Joe told the cop he wouldn’t ever come back to this dog park. The cop told Karin that he thought Joe was a wacko, but that he couldn’t really do anything because Joe was a city resident and the park is open to all city residents.

In other words, an impasse just like Congress dabbled in for nearly three weeks.