Hyper vigilante

“Sit, Oscar!” Mom yelled, only she didn’t really say sit. “Run! Run! Run!” She didn’t need to tell me twice. I shot down the trail as fast as I could go without losing the ker-plopping of Mom’s steps

“But you didn’t see the view because you were too chicken to get close,” I thought back.
“Still counts,” her smile said as she tromped away.

By the time we returned to the stream, neither of us hesitated before wading in. My belly, booty, and all four of my legs were already covered with rust-grey mud and the white dirt had soaked Mom’s jeans to halfway up her thighs. I even stopped in the middle for a drink, just to show the stream that I wasn’t scared.

“It’s funny how solving one problem can make another problem go away,” I said. “You never cross the same river twice.”

Mom was just opening her mouth to make my wisdom her own, when a sound like a bowling strike in reverse cracked the air and rumbled through the valley. It rolled in my ears for too long to be a gunshot, and had too many new sounds inside of it to be an echo.

“Sit, Oscar!” Mom yelled, only she didn’t really say sit. “Run! Run! Run!”

She didn’t need to tell me twice. I shot down the trail as fast as I could go without losing the ker-plopping of Mom’s steps behind me. Close on my heels, Mom sprinted like a much faster human than she actually was.

We ran until the last pebbles of noise fell out of the air, and kept running until the noise didn’t start again. When the air was finally silent, I paused to take stock. I swiveled my eyes in one direction and my ears in the other. “What was that?”

“It sounded like a rockfall somewhere nearby. Like, really nearby,” Mom said, looking in the direction that the noise had come from. But we were already deep enough into the valley that the scenery was all close-ups.

“I knew it!” I said. “The whole world is falling apart! No hot bar at Ho Foods, you can’t sit at McDonald’s anymore, escaped veterinarians are wandering the streets, rivers are washing away the trails, I don’t even know where America went, and even the mountains are coming down around us!”

“The world’s not coming to an end,” Mom said, as if she weren’t still out of breath from running for her life. “Natural disasters, civil unrest, celebrity deaths… they happen all the time. They only seem to bunch together because once you notice the first one, you're more likely to notice the second and believe it matters just as much.”

“A wise dog always notices what matters.”

“It’s not supposed to be a good thing,” Mom corrected. “It means that your stress-o-meter doesn’t go back to 0, so all the scary things pile up on top of each other until they seem much bigger than they really are.”

I couldn’t be sure the mountain wasn’t about to come down on my head, so I kept Mom to my mountain-side to catch any chasing rocks. I thought I would be safer with Mom at my back, but suddenly a monster lunged from behind a rock and threw itself across the trail at my feet.

I porcupined my hackles and shrieked my most ferocious bark.

The monster reared up to look me in the eye. “Come at me, bro,” it challenged. It held its ground, waving its hackles to block my way.

“Now you’re really asking for it!” I screamed, strategically jumping backward toward Mom so I could hide heroically behind her if the monster made its move.

“It’s a log, you dummy!” Mom said, not quite not-laughing. She must have been hysterical with fear.

“Don’t you touch her, you evil snake-bear-dragon-beast!” I bellowed as Mom walked past me.

She strolled within inches of the creature as if she didn’t have a care in the world. The beast’s leafy talons swayed a little as Mom walked by, but it kept its menacing stare fixed on me.

Now I had a new problem: the Thing was between me and Mom, and Mom was calling me. I weighed unthinkable options. I didn’t want to fight the monster to the death, but I didn’t want to live on this crumbling mountain waiting for the earth to swallow me like Saint Bernardino either. I decided that getting gobbled up by a leaf-serpent was better than a life in isolation and screwed up my courage.

I ran wide, never taking my eyes off of the monster and keeping as much distance between me and It as the trail allowed. It glared at me as I passed, but I must have looked as fierce as a cannonball with my ears back and my tail between my legs, because It didn’t pounce when It had the chance.

Once Mom was again between me and danger, I went back to barking and backed away aggressively. No matter what belittling things Mom said, I didn’t quit barking until the horrible creature couldn’t see me anymore.

Suspense may be fun in movies, but it’s a heavy burden in real life. When the villain could be hiding behind every rock, tree, and gas station door, even your own farts can startle you. If the danger’s invisible, you never can tell if it’s real or just a bad feeling inside. And if it is something inside of you, is it better to let it eat you up inside or unleash it on the world?

“I can’t believe you would let me get eaten by that thing,” I said when it was safe to stop screaming.

“We might even have time to drive to New Mexico before sunset,” Mom said in a different conversation.

“How can you think about sunsets at a time like this?” I whimpered. “What about that monster?”

“There was no monster. You were so afraid that the sky was falling that you let yourself get spooked by a silly log. I swear, you’re afraid of your own shadow sometimes.”

“Look who’s talking,” I said. “You’re the one who’s always forgetting what’s real and what’s imaginary. You think running out of cream for your poop juice is danger.”

“I guess that’s the difference between danger and anxiety. You can put danger behind you, but you carry anxiety from one problem to the next. Danger made us run from the rockfall, but anxiety made you misplace your fear onto that log.”

“Monster,” I corrected her.

“Log,” she lied.

“I know what I saw.”

“Anxiety is real too, even if what you’re worried about isn’t,” she said to even the score.

As we slopped through the last muddy killmometer back to the car kennel, the wee-woo sound of a shrieking ambulance filled the valley. Usually, a hysterical ambulance will run away to cry it out in private, but this wailing didn’t fade away. Instead, it stayed put just when you expected it to shrink.

We couldn’t see the road until the trail made the final turn into the car kennel. Just beyond the entrance, a herd of flashing cars with doors still open were scattered willy-nilly in the road. Men in uniforms were peeking over the edge of the bridge that straddled the ravine beside the car kennel. The people in the dammed traffic behind them also got out to watch them watch.

“Oh. Dog doo,” Mom said, slower and more carefully than she does when she realizes that she forgot her wallet.

“What?” I asked. “What’s with the party?”

“I don’t see a car accident, Oscar. Do you?”

I looked again. All the cars stood on their wheels, and the ones that weren’t flashing were lined up neatly without so much as a fender out of place. “Nope. Phew! I was afraid that someone got hurt.”

“I’m afraid someone did…” she said. She wouldn’t say any more.

Mom shooed me into the Wagon in a voice that said now was no time to ask for pats from strangers. She turned to a man wearing a sunscreen kabuki mask. “Do you know what happened?”

“Maybe someone sprained an ankle or had a cardiac event on the trail,” the sunscreen guessed.

I’m a dog, and even I know that they don’t send a stampede of police and fire trucks for someone who sprained their ankle. This was definitely the kind of guy who made his poop juice with fuzzy water. “Go back to Ho Foods where you belong!” I shouted through the closed window.

“There were no first responders on the trail.” Mom gestured to the uniform-free car kennel behind us. “And why would they block off both sides of the bridge if the emergency were back here?”

The mask stopped doing goofy and did confused instead. We all looked back at the scene, where the noses of all the cars and people were pointed at the same spot—the empty space next to the bridge where the fence was twisted and broken like finish line tape.

“I’m afraid it was a jumper…” Mom said.

Everyone was quiet for a moment before the man walked wordlessly toward the trail, and Mom remounted the Wagon without wishing him a fun hike.

“Wait, what’s a jumper?” I asked. “Mom? What’s a jumper?”

“You know how sometimes you feel like you’ve had enough? You’re slogging uphill through snow, and then all of a sudden you hit one more obstacle and decide you just can’t take it anymore?”

“No. Don’t change the subject. Was he scared for his life?”

“Maybe, but I doubt it. Most of the time it doesn’t even take that much effort to get past whatever obstacle is in front of you. But knowing that there might be another obstacle, and another one after that, makes you too tired to go on.”

“How can you be tired from things you haven’t done yet? And why won’t you tell me what those Law-men are looking at?”

“Believe me,” Mom said. “It’s just one damned thing after another, and you get so you can’t imagine yourself ever reaching the top of the mountain.”

“That’s when you’re supposed to keep going. So you’ll see that it does end, and you’ll get to look down from the top of the mountain at all the things you conquered. Speaking of looking down, what are those Laws looking at? Is someone sleeping in their wagon down there? Now? In the middle of the day?”

“Sometimes it’s not the pride of overcoming the mountain that sticks with you, but the fear of what you survived that has you jumping at logs,” Mom went on. “The imaginary fears pile on top of the real ones until you forget what’s real and what’s imaginary. Then you’d do anything to get away. Rather than waiting around for something else to go wrong, people gather up all their desperation and do what they think they have to do to make it stop.”

“Did someone turn back before they got to the top? Is that illegal now?” I guessed. “Is that why they called the Law?”

“Some things can’t be turned back,” Mom said. “When you know where you’re going, every step feels like progress. But when obstacles block your path in life, every step you take in a different direction feels harder than it actually is. It’s not that you can’t handle the moment you’re in, but the idea that it might never end makes you want to give up.”

“Ah, I understand. You’re talking about how changing your plans feels like danger again,” I said in a life-coachly way. “It takes courage to change your plans when you don’t know if it’s going to work out.” I was starting to figure out what had happened. The mountain must have been too much for someone today. They were probably too tired to walk back down, so they’d taken a shortcut. “But Mom, people are hardly ever lost when they’re not where they expected to be. There’s a difference between being lost and just needing to take a different path than you planned on. Where’s this Jumper fellow? I’ll tell him myself.”

“I don’t think he can hear you,” she said. She gave the bridgetop party one last searching look, pleading for a way to make it better. Then the Wagon turned away toward the open road.

Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.