But if moiself did publish such a book, it would have a chapter titled, “The Girls of Summer.” Said chapter would be devoted to describing the elaborate role-playing [1] games my grade school friends and moiself played, in my backyard and/or garage, during summers, on the three-point-five days a week when we were *not* at the beach.
The games we played on a regular basis included
* Dracula
(we were – surprise! – vampires, although no one ever played the titular Count. [2] );
* Haunted House
(we transformed my family’s garage – in which my parents did not park their cars because doing so would have taken away a vital part of our play space – into a haunted castle, wherein we would haunt [read: terrorize] our younger siblings, aka “The Little Kids ®,” who were so desperate to play with us Big Kids ® that they’d do anything we’d say);
* Leopards
(we were a family of leopards, living harsh lives on the African plains and forests)
* Amazonian Women
( explanation forthcoming)
.
* * *
Department Of The Hitherto Unexplained Connection
Between Barbies And Nuns
First, the Amazonian Women game explained, or at least outlined.
My childhood home’s backyard was a vegetation paradise, particularly during summer. Our fruit-producing trees and shrubs included a lemon tree, a peach tree, a plum tree, a pomegranate bush, several banana trees, [3] and five apricot trees. A huge, great-for-climbing pine tree of some sort (the sort that produced so much sap my mother kept a jar of Crisco, soley dedicated to sap removel, by the kitchen sink) was behind the garage. The pine tree provided a good access point to the garage roof, which we kids were technically forbidden to climb onto, due to our (read: *my* ) tendency to play WWII paratrooper and jump off of the roof holding an umbrella. [4] Summer night bonus: If you climbed far enough up in the pine tree you could see the halo at Anaheim’s Angel Stadium light up when an Anaheim Angel hit a home run. The view was definitely worth the sappy hands, arms, elbows, knees….
The perimeter of our yard’s back and side fences was lined with a variety of shrubbery. Cascades of bougainvillea flowed up and down and around the backyard fence, and the vines’ vibrant magenta-colored flowers provided the perfect tropical aura for our Amazonian game: we would drape a garden hose at the top of one of the vines and adjust the hose’s sprayer to the finest mist setting, which provided the proper, lounging-by-the-waterfall atmosphere, and also kept us cool. You could work up quite a sweat in the summer as an Amazonian warrior, canoeing from island to island, hunting and fishing and gathering tropical fruits, fighting off dangerous wild animals, and planning excursions to either visit or plunder neighboring islands.
Our brothers and other neighborhood boys were welcomed for the tag games [5] my girl friends and siblings and I played on balmy summer evenings, but with the exception of having one boy join the Dracula or Haunted house game on a few occasions, the other games were all-female. There were no literal male occupants of our Amazonian island; there were a never-specified number of men that we’d taken from neighboring islands and whom we kept in captivity. My friends and I knew enough about mammalian reproduction to know that our species could survive as a single gender, so we kept these imaginary male captives for “breeding purposes” – the ultimate meaning of which was lost on us, but somehow, we knew we had to acknowledge that aspect of our culture.
My notes for my SoCal girlhood memoir have gathered dust; moiself hadn’t thought of the Amazonian game in ages, until Monday, when friend CC and I saw the Barbie movie. During our après-cinema lunch when we were discussing the movie, [6] I told CC about the Amazonian game, and how it fit into my theory of why so many girls (especially those whose girlhoods were 40+ years ago) – girls who would either then or later identify as feminists – liked playing with Barbies, and also sometimes pretended to be nuns.
Hold on to y’alls wimples: it’s the long-awaited for, Barbies-Nuns Connection. ®
Like all the girls I knew when I was in grade school, my sisters and I were given, and played with, Barbie dolls. I never received, nor wanted, a Ken doll. [7] I did have a few male dolls: I asked for, and received for Christmas one year, a G.I. Joe doll and a Johnny West cowboy doll (which came with a palomino steed, and a plastic vest and chaps and spurs wardrobe for Johnny!). But as I discovered, a boy’s G.I. Joe was not to be called a doll, but an “action figure.” You’d best not refer to any of a boy’s male play figurines as what they were – dolls – lest the boy’s little dingus shrivel up and snap off at the mere suggestion that he played with a kind of toy commonly associated with girls.
Like many most of same girls with whom I played let’s-pretend we’re _____ games, we also played the We Are Nuns games. This was not a The Sound of Music fantasy thing, [8] and with one exception these friends were *not* from Catholic families. But there was a similar appeal to the world of Barbies, Amazonian island women, and nuns.
It’s not a complicated connection, not in the least. The appeal was that those worlds (Barbies; Amazons; nuns) were composed solely of females. Thus, girls got to do *everything.* This was not the case when we played games with the neighborhood boys.
One of a bajillion examples: One summer day I agreed to play “The Smith’s Home” (or some other family name) with my younger sister and our next-door neighbor boy. Next Door Neighbor Boy and I were The Smith Family. We were a recently married couple, with a dog and a cat and two hamsters and no children. After we’d discussed the game parameters, NDNB announced that he was leaving our house (a fort we’d built in my backyard) to “go to work.” I wanted to head out as well, but NDNB boy-splained to me that things didn’t work that way: as the wife, I had to stay home. When he insisted on taking the family pet, a German Shepard (played by my sister), to work with him, I in turn explained to him that things didn’t work that way. Husbands do not take the family pets with them to work – name one husband in the neighborhood who does that?! And that was the end of The Smith Family game.
Now then: NDNB was a nice boy, of whom I was genuinely fond re his gentle disposition and kind heart. But he, like the other neighborhood boys and the brothers (whether older or younger) of my friends, always tried to take over during the few times we let them join our games. If the girls were starting a game of Blackbeard’s Buccaneers you didn’t want the boys to join in because they’d insist on being all of the pirates and you had to be…something else.
Who you callin’ a scullery maid?
As young females, we grew up seeing a world where males were in charge, of just about everything. In television and movies men were the primary (if not the only) protagonists, with the women there as domestic/romantic supporting players. I was no fan of Catholicism and steadily (if secretly) came to despise almost everything about any religious doctrine (including my own family’s moderate Lutheranism); still, nuns held a peculiar attraction for many girls such as moiself . [9]
A convent, while admittedly mimicking the patriarchal structure of a hierarchical society, was an all-female world. Nuns did everything in their society; being a nun was one of the few options for women wherein they could leave their parents’ (read: their fathers’) homes without having to go to another man’s home; i.e., marry and have children. Women could have a “calling” – an occupation, a life’s work – that did not involve (and in fact precluded) tending to the needs of a husband and children. Nuns (seemed as if they) had a life outside The Home. ©
Sure, nuns were “cloistered,” but at least a nunnery was a cloister of choice. Girls grew up seeing few-or-no female counterparts to the much-envied, free-livin’, swingin’ bachelor: whether by choice or circumstance, females who remained single were portrayed as objects of pity. “Spinsters” and “old maids” were the only terms for women who remained single and childfree.
Similarly, when you played with Barbie dolls, you could be the good egg, the louse, the protagonist and the hero and the side player and everything in between. Our Barbies ran the house, earned the paychecks, planted and harvested the crops, designed fantastical machines, drove the stagecoaches between the OK Corall and Santa Fe, flew to the moon in shoebox rocket ships – whatever you wanted them to do, with no Ken to tell you that you couldn’t, or yeah, maybe just this once but you gotta ride…
“Sidesaddle my PVC ass, Ken.”
* * *
Department Of Wait Wait Wait Wait Wait A Minute…
“The battle over legacy and donor admissions to college — the practice of giving special treatment to family of alumni and contributors — is about to heat up in California as critics take aim at what they see as a long-standing barrier for less privileged students to access elite institutions.
State Assemblyman Phil Ting (D-San Francisco) plans to renew efforts to deny state financial aid to any college or university that gives an admissions advantage to such applicants, who research has shown are overwhelmingly white and affluent.”
( “Battle over legacy and donor admissions preferences to heat up;
USC, Stanford could take hit.” LA Times 7-31 )
What the….
Moiself is, of course, *highly* in favor of such a bill, even as I’m stunned (naive? ) by California’s need for it. Since when did state financial aid go to private universities?
* * *
Department Of And In A Related Story…
A long time in a galaxy far far away: In the summer after son K’s junior year of high school, he began the first of several rounds of visiting colleges he was interested in applying to. Moiself accompanied him on the first three campus visits, which were in California. [11] It was late June when K and I flew down to Sacramento, rented a car, then in the next three days toured UC Davis, Stanford, and UC Santa Cruz.
My Oregonian born and bred son, who was known to complain when the temperature rose above 72°, seemed to have had an weather-influenced relationship with the colleges we visited on that trip: the closer we got to the coast, the more he liked the school, inversely conflating the temperature of the area with what his academic experience would be.
When we deplaned in Sacramento the heat blast hit K in the face, and I remember thinking, “Yep, this is familiar…” I am a UCD alum. A couple of summers I stayed in Davis to work expanded hours at the student job I had during the school year. I assured K that if he went to UCD he would probably not be staying during the summer, and that Davis had winters an Oregonian would appreciate. Nevertheless, looking back, I think all he “saw” of UCD was the heat.
Neither MH nor I were the kind of parents who lobbied (nor even encouraged) our offspring to consider attending our respective alma maters. But in the fall of K’s junior year, one winter weekend afternoon when he and I were hiking in a local nature preserve, K mentioned his interest in studying entomology. I told him there were not many colleges which offered an entomology major, and of those that did…things may have changed, but when I was at UC Davis it had the top-rated entomology program in the nation (when we returned home I did an internet search and confirmed that that was still the case).
I forget the reasons K had an interest in Stanford (his aunt, my younger sister, was a Stanford alum, but I don’t know if that was the influence); he was curious about UC Santa Cruz for its connection to the Human Genome Project. So: we planned our trip, signed up for the campus tours of and presentations by the respective colleges, and moved from east to west, starting with UC Davis, then Stanford, then UC Santa Cruz.
As moiself mentioned, I don’t think K saw much of Davis but the heat. UC Santa Cruz – he liked many things about it, although he agreed with my observation, as we did a bus tour around UCSC’s verdant campus, which is situated in the forested hills of the Santa Cruz Mountains overlooking the Pacific Ocean and Monterey Bay, that it might be like going to college in summer camp.
As for Stanford, our visit there provided the most indelible, visiting-a-campus story.
We both enjoyed the Stanford campus tour, which was led by an enthusiastic student who was personable and articulate and knowledgeable and proud of his campus. K was quite keen about Stanford after that tour. Next on the agenda was a sit-down presentation for prospective students and their parents, given by Stanford’s Director of Admissions. In 20 minutes K went from, “Wow, I really like this place; it’s definitely going to be on my application list,” to, “I wouldn’t go to this snobby, elitist, self-aggrandizing institution if *they* paid *me* to do it.”
One of many statements the Dude of Admissions made which K found off-putting was a dyad of contradictory statements, which he kept repeating:
” *Any* person can get into Stanford! “
(After saying this, he would give examples of students from lower income, and/or nonwhite and/or non-big city backgrounds who were Stanford alums)
” Stanford, as one of the top rate universities in the United States,
is very selective, and has one of the, if not THE, lowest acceptance rates
of any college in the world! “
Several times during his presentation Admissions Dude said that he wanted parents or students to ask questions at any time, about any Stanford-related subject. After AD’s third repeating of his anyone-can-be-here/almost-no-one-gets-in couplet, a student raised his hand and asked how he might increase his odds of getting accepted to Stanford. AD answered with what he obviously meant to be a humorous story: “First of all, don’t do this….” He proceeded to tell how a high school senior had marched into AD‘s office, unannounced, hours before the admissions deadline. The student dismissively flung an admissions packet onto AD‘s desk and said, “Take care of it.”
I looked around the room, noting that both parents and students were snickering with “Oh, can you believe that arrogant wiseass?!” amusement. Moiself raised my hand, and when AD called upon me I asked him, “Was that student a legacy?”
Admissions Dude turned an impressive shade of white. [12] In a Very Serious Voice he stammered, “I can’t give any names; I can’t – uh, we can’t reveal any personal information about an applicant…”
To which I perkily replied, “I didn’t ask for his name; I asked if he was a legacy.”
Admissions Dude was quite flustered that I’d brought up an apparently taboo subject – as if no one present in the room had ever heard of legacy admission preferences before the big-mouth Oregon lady brought it up. He squirmed with discernable discomfort – I thought he was in danger of pissing his Trussardi trousers. The more the AD tried to act “plussed” the more nonplussed he became. As he strove to change the subject, several parents seated in front of K and I turned around and flashed me knowing, sympathetic, and/or incredulous looks.
K ended up applying to six of the seven schools he visited that summer. He was accepted at all six, and chose to attend the University of Puget Sound. He did not apply to Stanford.
Stanford LegacyGuide (The Koppleman Group)
* * *
Department of Employee Of The Month
It’s that time again, to bestow that prestigious award upon moiself . Again. The need for which I wrote about here. [13]
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [14]
“If 50 million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”
( Anatole France 1844 – 1924, Parisian poet, journalist, writer )
* * *
May you have fond memories of your own childhood summer games;
May you be mindful of what popular foolish thing you believe;
May you enjoy your own reign as Employee of the Month;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] No, not today’s RPG. It meant something different back then.
[2] For us, Dracula was synonymous with vampires.
[3] Probably akin to the Blue Java varietal, which we never let come to full ripeness before we’d pick (and ruin) them.
[4] Which did nothing to slow my descent.
[5] “Green Monster” was the favorite.
[6] As were three women sitting next to us at the sushi train bar counter…from what I could hear of their conversation.
[7] One of my friends was given a Ken doll by her parents, and she brought him to a few Barbie play sessions, but he stayed mostly on the sidelines.
[8] We were never, ever, singing nuns.
[9] One that was romanticized, of course, but what other options did we see?
[11] MH did the next three visits with K, to colleges in Washington, British Columbia, and Minnesota. And K and I later made an overnight trip up to Tacoma to visit the University of Puget Sound, which is where he decided to go (as did his sister, Belle, three years later, and for similar reasons: they both had the experience, upon touring the campus, of “Oh, this is my place.”)
[12] Made even more impressive by the fact that he was not white.
[13] Several years ago, MH received a particularly glowing performance review from his workplace. As happy as I was for him when he shared the news, it left me with a certain melancholy I couldn’t quite peg. Until I did.
One of the many “things” about being a writer (or any occupation working freelance at/from home) is that although you avoid the petty bureaucratic policies, bungling bosses, mean girls’ and boys’ cliques, office politics and other irritations inherent in going to a workplace, you also lack the camaraderie and other social perks that come with being surrounded by your fellow homo sapiens. No one praises me for fixing the paper jam in the copy machine, or thanks me for staying late and helping the new guy with a special project, or otherwise says, Good on you, sister. Once I realized the source of the left-out feelings, I came up with a small way to lighten them.
[14] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
The Classic TV Sitcom Identity I’m Not Hiding
August 25, 2023
Robyn Parnell are we having fun yet? (Women & Men & Feminism), community, current events, extended family, family life, freethought/humanism, Holy Shit!, Isms (religion), nature, Oregon, politics, Recreation, travel, TV, Wow, Yikes! aggressive dogs, batshit loony commenters, Bewitched, bogus class warfare, dogs and runners, Gladys Kravitz, hippies, illegal camping, nature loving hypocrisy, The Classic TV Sitcom Identity I'm No Longer Hiding, van life 1 Comment
Department Of, Curses – My Cover Has been Blown!
According to a rather irrelevant and batshit crazy deranged, ad hominem attack/comment someone made about moiself on a Facebook group…
Can you believe it – someone said something nasty on social media?!
…I am…(gulp)…Gladys Kravitz. [1]
(Which makes MH, Mr. Abner Kravitz. Yep, I’ve been having fun with that all week).
Left: Gladys Kravitz; Right: Samantha Stevens
For those readers younger than 50, Gladys Kravitz was the nosy neighbor of the TV series Bewitched‘s protagonist, Samantha Stevens. Gladys was convinced that there were extraordinary goings on in Stevens’ household, and was exasperated to the nth because she couldn’t prove her suspicions to her husband ( “Abbbnnneeeerrr!” ) [2]
Background to this startling revelation about my heretofore secret identity: Dateline, Tuesday morning, circa 7:30 am. I was at the coast, out for a morning walk…
But first, a relevant digression. A long time ago…oh, no – here it comes again…
From my late high school years until my late twenties, I ran [3] between two to five miles, every day. As recreational runners know, unleashed dogs and runners are not a good combination. [4] Every runner I’ve met has stories of being confronted, harassed and/or attacked by an unleashed/unaccompanied-by-its-human, aggressive dog. The stories, and the avoiding-being-a-dog-bite-victim advice runners receive and pass on to other runners, are mostly similar, but sometimes divergent.
A person running triggers the prey instinct in many dogs; thus, the common wisdom shared amongst runners: when approached by a dog whose posture and behavior…
* stiffening or freezing of the body;
* forward-leaning, hunched down, hunting/stalking posture;
* “whale eyes” (wide, with a lot of white showing);
* teeth baring; tense mouth/curled lips; wrinkled nose;
* ears laid flat against the skull or stiffly held straight up (not relaxed);
* barking, growling; “air-snapping”….
…indicates aggression, and there is no dog owner in sight, you should:
* stop running
* stay as calm as you can
* avoid eye contact (which can be seen as aggressive);
* speak to the dog in a calm, firm, but non-threatening voice; [5]
* remain upright;
* don’t scream (or flail your limbs or panic or jump up and down);
* back into a corner or against a wall so the dog can’t get behind you;
* look for a tree or car to climb [6] and hope to f***’s sake the owner appears…
I faced the aggressive dog situation many times when I was running for exercise. Those strategies worked for me, as they did for other runners…except when they didn’t. I heard too many stories of someone who did everything right and got bitten anyway.
Fellow runners also shared the WTF?!?!? confusion of hearing sure-fire advice from so-called experts which contradicted advice shared by other experts. As in: ignore the dog; *don’t * stop running. Continue what you’re doing, because some dogs will pay you no mind when you walk or run past them but if you stop, they “think” (okay, no human really knows what a dog thinks, we are trying to guess/interpret) you are a threat to them.
In other words, encountering an aggressive dog is situational and dog-specific: sorry, but there is no sure-fire, works-every-time, strategy. But, human nature being what it is, there is this sure-fire reality: there will always be some person who will tell you that, whatever you did, you should have done something else.
Back to the future background to the Mrs. Kravitz revelation: Dateline: the Oregon coast (Manzanita); Tuesday morning, circa 7:30 am; out for my morning constitutional. On that day I decided to walk north along the imaginatively named Ocean Road, which parallels the beach, then splits into two roads, one of which (Beulah Reed Road) continues along the coast and up into the streets winding around the base of Mt. Neahkahnie.
I walked along the road, noting the increasing number of vans and other vehicles I’d been seeing in my early morning walks – vans and campers parked alongside Ocean Road which look as if they’ve been there all night (as opposed to the vehicles whose drivers pull over, watch the waves and savor their morning coffee [7] before driving on to their jobs, or what/where ever). Those been-there-overnight vehicles are situated in such a way to indicate that the occupants are camping there, despite the fact that it is illegal to do so, and despite the “No Parking between 11pm – 5am” signs posted along the road.
As I turned up Beulah Reed Road I saw two more looks-like-illegal-camping vehicles parked on the west side of the road. Safety-conscious pedestrian that I am, when I am walking along a sidewalk-less road, I always walk facing traffic; thus, I passed close by both of the vans, whose occupants were presumably still inside/asleep (the vehicle’s windows had shades and other objects blocking the windows and windshields). One of the vans stood out due to its color and décor: a green van festooned with white and yellow flowers, sporting a Nebraska license plate and a message – “love mother nature and she will love you back” – painted on the van’s rear window.
The Green Van was in the same spot on the west side of Beulah Reed Road where, in the past few months, I’d walked past other camping vehicles one of which provided moiself with a memorable visual a couple months ago. The naked man who’d emerged from that vehicle and began urinating by the side of the road just as I was passing by was an unpleasant sight, but a minor startle compared to what happened Tuesday am.
I continued walking up Beulah Reed Road for a few more minutes, then headed back to Ocean Road. As I neared the Green Van (this time, walking on the far side of the road) I saw a husky/malemute dog lying in the sand by the right rear of the GV. The dog had not been there five minutes ago, when I’d first walked past the GV, and there was no sign of any humans (other than moiself ) about. When I was about thirty feet away from the GV the dog’s eyes fixed on me; it got up and slowly began to cross the road toward me.
Oh, shit. It takes minutes to type what flashed through my mind in nanoseconds Some of the nicest dogs I’ve met, and some of the meanest, have been husky/malemutes – and those two breeds consistently rank high on the Biting Dogs lists…. [8]
The dog was obviously not going to be one of the nice ones. It slunk toward me, in a crouched position (the classic hunting posture – have you ever seen footage of wolves or other carnivores stalking their prey?). Its approach was menacing, but silent…which I found more disturbing than barking. [9] If it had been barking, that would have (hopefully) alerted its owner.
“How’d ya like to see these teeth up close?”
I stop walking and spoke softly but firmly, remembering not to make eye contact. I did all the “right things,” which had no effect on the dog’s aggressive body language and approach, so I slowly began to continue my walk. The dog circled in front of me, blocking my path. It growled, bared its teeth and walked stiff-legged toward me, then began to snarl and bark. I put my walking poles between me and the dog and called out loudly: WHOSE DOG IS THIS – COME GET YOUR DOG. I did this several times; finally, a woman appeared from the west-facing side of the van. She had long, reddish hair and looked to be in her late 20s – early 30s. She made no apologies for her menacing dog, but unenthusiastically attempted to
(1) assure me that her dog was not aggressive (“He just has a lot to say” she said,
as her dog began barking even louder, flattened his ears, and raised his hackles)
(2) get her dog under voice control.
She failed at both (1) and (2).
She held no leash (and with the dog’s thick fur I couldn’t tell if it even had a collar to which a leash could be attached). She kept calling to the dog, which would turn to look at her, take two steps toward the GV, then turn around and bark and take three steps toward moiself. As the dog continued to ignore the anemic “suggestions” of his owner to return to her, I swung one of my walking sticks at him, which temporarily stopped his advance (at that point he was less than two feet from me).
Oh, for some pepper spray, I thought – not for the dog, but to use on that pathetic excuse for a human being. GV lady may make van-decoration-declarations on loving Mother Nature but she obviously doesn’t give an oyster’s ass about walking responsibly through Mother Nature’s land while respecting and protecting *all* of Ma Nature’s creatures, including bipedal ones.
This brand only works on German-speaking dogs.
I made firm, aggressive eye contact with the woman when she repeated her, “He’s not mean/he has a lot to say” bullshit excuse. I replied, “Yeah, he’s saying a lot and none of it is nice – I’ve been bitten by a dog; I know when I’m being threatened. You need to get your dog under control, RIGHT NOW.” The insolent look on her face reminded me of a pouty adolescent whose parents had threatened to ground her until she cleared the dinner table. “I am going this way,” I pointed toward Ocean Road, “and your dog needs to go that way.“ I pointed toward her van.
Which eventually happened. After the woman and her dog disappeared behind the other side of the van, I took a picture of the back of the GV.
I was seething when I got home (and really hungry). I posted the GV picture on my FB page, along with a very brief description of the incident. As I was doing so I remembered that on my way back I’d passed an elderly couple walking on Ocean Road, headed in the direction I’d come from. Damn, I chastised moiself – should I have warned them about staying away from that van? With that thought in mind I posted the same photo and incident description, with an “FYI” warning/introduction, on a FB page where locals post pictures and info about items of North Oregon coast interest.
I knew I should report what had happened to “the authorities.” As I fixed my breakfast and mulled over whom to call (The town? The county? ) I was contacted by my Friend and Neighbor ®. F&N had seen my post, and urged me to report the incident. I called the police non-emergency number; the dispatcher who finally answered said that Beulah Road was under Tillamook County jurisdiction, and that she’d have a TC deputy contact me.
The TC deputy took down the details of my report, and then…oh my my (“Officer Chatty Cathy,” my mind soon nicknamed him). He had a lot to say about what had happened to me, and about related incidents he had been/was currently dealing with. I was apparently a sympathetic ear into which he unloaded his and his law enforcement colleagues’ frustrations with similar incidents and with “what’s going on in the county,” including:
* increased illegal camping
* increased reports of aggression between illegal campers and county residents
* illegal campers’ aggressive/unleashed dogs (who go after both people and other dogs)
* the overload of reports the county has to investigate without the staff to do so….
He said that TC had a backlog of *hundreds* of calls about illegal camping and other violations, but that because what happened to me involved menacing, he could prioritize my report, and would head for Beulah Road. I thanked him, and noted that the van had probably moved on. Actually…probably not, he said. And, in his experience, if it did move it would likely move to somewhere nearby, and a green van with Nebraska plates would be easy to spot. Should he find the van, he said he’d have an in-depth conversation with the van/dog owner. How he handles these cases, he explained, is based on the dogs’ and or vehicles’ owners’ demeanor and response. If they listen respectfully and are forthright and apologetic, he tries to educate them and lets them off with a warning. If they are unapologetic and insolent, and even (as some people have done) go so far as to assert that they have no intention of abiding by the _____ (leash, parking/camping/trash disposal, etc.) laws, he’ll give them “as many citations as possible.”
He asked me to spread the word: please tell people to report these encounters, even as he acknowledged the perception that “They (law enforcement) will do nothing,” and so most incidents go unreported. It’s true, we (local police/sheriff departments) are understaffed, he said, but people need to know that the reports, even if they cannot be immediately investigated, help them gather statistics in general, and make records in particular for individual menacing dogs and their owners, so that if (or as he put it, “unfortunately, when“) the dog harasses/attacks another person or pet, the dog owner can’t get away with, “Oh, he’s harmless/he’s never done that before….”
At one point in our conversation, I told him how I’d began my walk thinking about the increase in illegal parking/camping, and asked if he knew if that is indeed the case, or just my anecdotal impression? And is this uptick (in illegal beach camping) related to homelessness? He told me the increase in numbers wasn’t my imagination, but that my assumption about the cause was incorrect. He then asked me something which led to an “aha” turn to the conversation: “Have you heard of the website, ‘vanlife’?”
“You’ve seen the hype around #vanlife. You’ve seen the stunning photos on social media. Now you want to throw everything to the wind, quit your job, build out a camper van, and live a carefree life of adventure….
This page is designed as a jumping-off point for your personal vanlife journey. We go over the pros and cons of this lifestyle, the reasons why full time van life is awesome… We answer the most frequently asked questions about living in a van – everything from bathrooms and showering…to finding sweet camping spots.”
(excerpts from the intro to Van Life How To: Complete Guide to Living in a Van Full Time,
my emphases )
“After we’ve posted this cool picture of ourselves can we go back to our penthouse and order takeout sushi?”
I said I knew of the site, but had never visited it. I thought it was similar to other sites I’d heard about, where people share information about RVing and/or traveling and living in trailers and vans. It is that, Officer CC said, but has become so much more: it has become a source of the increased “incident” calls faced by local law enforcement. He proceeded to express his frustration re the influence of the van-lifestyle sites, where people post info for others who’ve chosen to live in vans, sharing tips about where to travel and camp “for free” (but not necessarily legally).
More and more, Officer CC said, the people he speaks to and then warns and/or cites for illegal camping are mentioning (in some cases, boasting) that they were “referred” to the Oregon coast by vanlife and similar websites and online bulletin boards. And, he stressed, these people are *not* homeless– they seem well-funded (trust fund babies?) and/or are working remotely. For whatever reasons, they have romanticized the idea of public urination and defecation [10] life on the road. They…
* find it glamorous to be house-less by choice;
* take pride in ridding themselves of the bourgeois trappings of consumerism:
* receive positive feedback from like-minded folk when they post
cool pictures on Instagram of their adventures in livin’ on the road;
* believe that dogs also “need freedom” and so they ignore local leash laws;
* tell him that they love livin’ “for free”…
which – surprise! – turns out to be anything but free for the people in the communities who pay the taxes that fund the services to clean up after those freedom lovin’ van lifers, who leave their trash and toxic waste behind as they move on – and the damage these love-nature-and-she’ll-love-you hypocrites do to natural habitat areas frustrates him to no end…
As he described his dealings with these voluntary nomads, more than once he referred to van-life enthusiasts as, “hippies.” I could tell from Officer CC’s voice that he was much younger than moiself; it took all of my maturity (ahem) to refrain from correcting him:
“Actually, they aren’t hippies – that was an older generation. Any surviving hippies are at home rubbing patchouli and/or CBD oil on their aching joints…I think y’all need to come up with a more contemporary epithet for the younguns whose lives and values you find disrespectful, or just fruity.”
I’m not criticizing or mocking the deputy. He was amiable, empathetic, and eager to articulate the frustrations of law enforcement officers who cannot adequately fulfill their oath to serve and protect when they are overwhelmed by calls they cannot address.
Our talk turned to what people can do to protect themselves against aggressive dogs (Officer CC said his wife is a runner, and that she and her running buddies frequently deal with unleashed and aggressive dogs). I said that, due to my afore-mentioned, bitten-by-a-dog incident, I’d done my research, and ordered a cannister of citronella spray [11] and an air horn, for self-defense. Before I could tell him I’d ruled out bear sprays/pepper sprays, he strongly advised that I tell my friends *not* to carry pepper sprays, because
* Unless you’re an expert who practices with pepper spray on a regular basis you can end up inadvertently spraying yourself, particularly when you’re under duress;
* At the beach, where gusts of wind can arise seemingly out of nowhere, pepper spray can backfire, as in, get blown back on *you.*
He said that while he hated having to recommend it (“Nobody wants to hurt an animal,”) carrying a club might be called for (I said thanks/no thanks, and mentioned my walking poles). He expressed admiration for the air horn strategy: “What a great idea!” he enthused, noting that the loud noise would both startle the dog and alert nearby humans.
Yeah; okay, are we ever gonna get to the Gladys Kravitz connection?
After my conversation with the deputy I drove to Hillsboro, where I had business to attend to. While driving I received a voice mail from my Friend & Neighbor, and pulled over to return her call. F&N said that my local/beach group FB posting had spawned a comment firestorm: most were from people relating their own/similar incidents, and/or expressing sadness re what happened to me in particular and what they saw happening to their community. Other posters engaged in unfounded and unsolicited second-guessing, reframing the incident, and even claiming to know the dog’s intentions, despite having not been there. [12] Several of those I-wasn’t-there-but-I-know-what-really-happened posters also opined on what I *should* have done to avoid being menaced by the dog.
( Ladies, does this sound familiar?
“If you’d only done this/said that/worn that/walked this way,
you wouldn’t have been assaulted.” )
I’d read a few of the early comments, including two which asserted that “people should mind their own business” and “stop caring about who parks where or does what.” [13] The MYOB theme was picked up by a few other unbalanced strident posters. How that became a thing, considering the context, was a mystery to moiself. Translation: I found it bewilderingly irrational. The afore-mentioned Gladys Kravitz remark came from one such poster, who addressed her remarks to moiself and fumed about why I was being Gladys Kravitz, and that I should have minded my own business….
Say what? Minding my own business – exactly what I was doing. I did not approach the dog and try to determine whether he was neutered. My business, which I was minding, thanks for your concern, was walking. I was out for a walk on a public road, enjoying the scent of the briny coastal air and minding my own beeswax, when an aggressive, unleashed canine decided to make his threats my business.
F&N and I had a giggle about how comments on my post had spiraled into many tangents. I said that, after violating the never-feed-the-trolls rule (I corrected one unhinged commenter, who seemed to be reading comprehension-challenged and tried to rewrite my story to fit her outrage at…whatever), I’m not going to read any more comments on that group. F&N said she’d keep me apprised of the more entertaining (read: whackadoodle) posts…although, I told her, the Gladys Kravitz epithet would be hard to top.
The next morning my phone rang: it was F&N’s update call. Apparently, by the end of the previous day, “things got nasty,” as she put it. She’d checked the FB local/beach site before bedtime: there were “248 or 258” comments, including a thread where people posted pictures of when they’d been bitten by an unleashed dog, and others posted either support or criticism for the bite victim. Then a man mentioned that he might carry a gun when he goes to the beach, and lawdy mama, it took off from there, with about 40 more posts related to carring concealed weapons on the beach. In the morning when F&N rechecked the site, about 40 of those packing-heat-on-the-beach posts had disappeared, taken down by the group moderator (or perhaps, I posited, by the posters who’d developed cooler heads overnight?). F&N said the nastiness also included some posts which made blatant or tacit references to class warfare, claiming that heartless “rich people” at the beach hate “the rest of us” and harass people who have no choice but to live in their cars…in sharp contrast with the deputy’s testimony that the majority of the people he and his fellow deputies encounter and warn about/cite for illegal camping are neither destitute nor homeless, but self-obsessed, “van life” adventure seekers, whose idea of freedom is mooching off of public services they can well afford to pay for….
And moiself? Oy vey. I’d not even considered filing a report about illegal camping.
I just want to go for a walk, anywhere it’s safe and legal to do so, and not get bitten.
* * *
Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [14]
* * *
May you enjoy any/all outdoor activities free from dog (or human) harassment;
May you delight in observing online trolls but not in feeding them;
May you enrich the public discourse by coining a better word than “hippies”
to describe Gen Z…hippies;
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
* * *
[1] Or at least, channeling her spirit.
[2] And of course, Gladys Kravitz turned out to be spot on: Samantha Stevens *was* a witch. Despite promising her mortal husband Darrin that she would *not* use her powers, just about every episode of Bewitched involved Samantha using witchcraft to create unusual happenings, or to try to undo the wacky situations created by her witch and warlock relatives, who would make mysterious arrivals and departures and mess with the mortals. Mrs. Kravitz witnessed just enough to have her suspicions, which would always be explained away by Samantha or others. Yep, Mrs. Kravitz was a nosy neighbor, but her suspicious were correct, and she was gaslighted.
[3] Or I could say, “I was a runner,” but I never took my identity from that; I ran for enjoyment and exercise, as opposed to training for the Olympics or whatever.
[4] Unless the dog belongs to the runner and is also running because…well, it usually isn’t the dog’s idea.
[5] This is not to make yourself the alpha or assert dominance, but to get as much control of yourself and the situation as possible, and to make any cues you give the dog – “sit; down; stay; go home” as understandable as possible.
[6] The strategy used by one elderly gentleman, in a neighborhood I used to live in, when he was attacked by two free-roaming dogs when he was doing his early morning neighborhood rounds, delivering advertising flyers. The man and I had greeted each other when I went out for my morning run, and I was able to rescue him when I returned and saw that the dogs had treed – carred? – him.
[7] Or sometimes, doobies…as I notice when I pass the vehicles and they have the windows down.
[8] Which I learned in my training for the animal rescue organizations for which I volunteered, and I confirmed this when I returned home, by searching for dog bite statistics.
[9] Many a person who has survived a dog attack says that the silent ones, who approach you steadily, are more dangerous than the barkers.
[10] That was my snarky thought, not his.
[11] The smell of citronella is irritating/offensive to dogs, but not harmful.
[12] Perhaps there is a Canine Psychic Intentions website I am unaware of.
[13] Those comments seemed to be related to other posters who focused on the illegal parking and camping situation, not the aggressive dog.
[14] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org