Walking by the Lake with Mask

Across the street from our house is a social path that leads down to the shore of Lake Washington.  When I first came here over thirty years ago, it was a narrow bushwhacked cut that led down from the bluff our street sits on. Ordinarily you would have to loop a quarter mile or so north or south to reach the shore path, but here it’s a straight shot, less than a hundred yards. In years past I laid gravel and mulch on it to keep it from getting too muddy in the rains, but now much foot traffic has widened and compacted it so I don’t have to. The path is three feet across now, steep but not treacherous, and dug out a foot and a half below grade. A social path is what planners call a route chosen not by experts but by regular folk seeking a shortcut. Unlike the smashing of windows, is an example of how anarchy generates social benefits.

When the pandemic arrived in Seattle and the gyms closed, I started to walk a mile south on the shore path and back again, a reasonable approximation of the cardio I used to do at the gym, and of course, enormously more satisfying, even with the goddamn mask on.  I wear a mask even though the odds of picking up an effective dose of COVID in the lake’s breeze, under a sunny sky, are extremely small.  The odds are not the point. Posted signs say ‘Mask Up’ and advise social distancing.

Not every person I pass is masked. Old people like me are typically masked as are a good number of the younger walkers. Runners are almost never masked. The city closed Lake Washington Boulevard to vehicular traffic in the early summer, providing a broad boulevard for recreational walking and biking, but there is a breed of runner who chooses to run on the narrow pedestrian pathway, and so I am overtaken from time to time by sweaty folks blowing out air from the depths of their lungs, so close I can smell their scent through my mask. Coming toward me, the maskless seem either defiant or shamefaced, apologetic. The path is a tiny model of America now, with some clinging to “I’m free and can do as I please,” while others are “I’m a member of society and follow the rules.”

Occasionally, I get a nasty look from the maskless  young, and I suspect that there’s an element of resentment against the older generations involved in the refusal to mask up. (Die, Boomer! ) Well, soon enough, nor do I blame them at all. They want our hoarded fortunes released, and while they may like Mom, either they only see her in the hols, or they live in her basement, and would be a lot better off if Covid sent her away. Also, boomers are still in charge; the current Hellscape is on our watch. Still, I wish they would run out in the road.

I walk a mile out and back every day. I choose this route because there are seven benches in this mile, so if my body throws a rod I can sit and recover. When I was younger I sought novelty and traveled. Now, I like to focus on a tiny portion of the world. It doesn’t even have to be ‘interesting’ in the conventional sense;  in fact, it’s okay if it’s dull to the casual eye, like this mile through a neglected park.

The park is surely suffering from the pandemic too. The city is strapped, of course, and park maintenance is easy to cut. At worst, it is unlikely to kill anyone.  They send in a mower on occasion but not the weed-whackers and pruners. As a result the verges of the path are entering the first phases of the local climax succession.  Brome grasses usually trimmed to a few inches now grow to shoulder height. Trees, like the cherries and willows along the lake shore send up suckers and turn into hedges. The decorative plantings get smothered by weeds.

Then there are the blackberries. The Himalayan Blackberry is what the Northwest has instead of kudzu. Rubus armeniacus is a plant of epic invasiveness. It can throw a cane twenty feet into the air, in a parabola that can cross a roadway. When the tip hits the ground, it can burrow in, root itself, and move cross country underground. And, of course, it produces copious fruit, and so can spread even farther using the digestive tracts of animals. Yet it has a peculiar stinginess with its fruits. On any cluster of a dozen or so berries, only one or two will ripen at any one time, and even when they look black and bulging, they are not really ripe yet.  Bite into one and you immediately spit it out. This must be part of its fiendish plan to cover every square inch of real estate with itself.  Ripeness, when they melt in the mouth and deliver that sweet fruity taste, exists for at most half a day, after which they become stiff, inedible raisins. Why so mean, Rubus? And what’s with the thorns? If you wanted to deliver fruit to animals, why is your every inch covered with recurved thorns? That break off and burrow into the skin?  Yet another mystery of creation, like mosquitos and cancer.

As I began my walks, the blackberries became obvious. They hung down from the trees and got in your face. The runners left the strips of soil east of the path and began to cross the path itself.  In the Before Times the appropriate response would have been a stiff note to the Parks Department. But now, instead, I started carrying a Felco 4 pruner and cutting back the blackberry myself.  As everyone knows, the is a hopeless task. Given sunlight and water, blackberry canes can grow a foot a day; you can’t eliminate blackberries by pruning them. They have to be grubbed out by the roots, a semi-industrial operation requiring heavy machinery. But I wasn’t interested to getting rid of the berry. I was just interested in keeping it off my miles of path. Which I did.

It turns out that even the Plant from Hell can’t defeat an animal, if that animal puts in an hour or so each day. Along my mile, the browned, spiked cuttings I have kicked under the overhanging foliage form an almost continuous windrow under the berries, like rustic fencing for pixies. If I miss a day, there are canes falling from the sky and running out over the asphalt of the path. (I didn’t venture out during the week of the Big Smoke, but the berry didn’t like the smoke either, and so I was pleasantly surprised when I resumed.) My theory is that blackberries have a sort of consciousness. The plants are all connected, their roots intermingled and communicating via a vast array of chemical signals. By trimming every frond that ventures west, I’m conditioning the mega-plant to send more energy in other directions. Along certain stretches of the path, this seems to be working. The majority of the canes are moving toward where they don’t get cut; there are fewer canes trying to invade the path. The goal is to bring the blackberry into the discipline of a hedge. I get that this is impossible, like social democracy in America, but it engages me to try.

I’ve found that this assiduous pursuit of a hopeless task makes for a paradoxical happiness. This is not an original insight: Camus wrote a whole book about it. I don’t think about the absurdity much. It’s probably more absurd to lift weights in a gym or pump pedals on a bike that goes nowhere; at least my exercise regime is useful to others. Another advantage is invisibility. When we were kids we used to argue about what superpower was best—super strength, flying, x-ray vision, etc.—and I always went for invisibility, the only superpower that’s achievable in real life. There are a number of ways to be invisible in America, but being an old guy stooping over a horticultural task is a pretty good one. Perhaps one person in a thousand notices and understands what I am doing, and thanks me. The others drift by in the narcissistic bubble of the Americans, many sharing their thoughts at top volume into the air. 

People think of anarchy as fires and broken glass. But this is anarchy too, picking up a government function, unasked and unsupervised. I’ve noticed that some person or persons unknown is picking up trash, or at least the strewn trash doesn’t seem to be getting much worse, so maybe others are quietly, invisibly maintaining this public space.  Trivially speaking, it’s something to do instead of golf. More profoundly, it could be a key to reorganizing society as the fiscal crisis of the state kicks in for real.