Photo Walks with Harley the Dog

Harley the Dog wants walking twice a day. This is, perhaps, more walking than a lot of dogs get and I tell Harley this when he seems sad.

“Harley,” I say, “you get more walkies than many dogs I have met and you get company all day long and maybe you could take a minute and ease up on your blues because little man, your life is pretty good now.”

Harley rarely answers, he just looks at me with his root beer colored eyes and then, we go for a walk and almost immediately, he gets a little skip in his step and his tail goes up and he is cheerier.

“Less talk, more walk,” Harley would say, if he could say anything.  Also, he’d give me that handout about shelter dogs and how they take a while to become themselves and maybe their owners could just chill and let them be sad because that was a tough time, man.

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It is good to go for a walk twice a day; I have been enjoying it tremendously. Seattle is a rainy city so it would be a lie to say it’s always pleasant, but walking twice a day, rain or shine, has made me look at what is happening in my neighborhood in new ways.

When Harley the Dog stops to get his nose well into a grassy plant — he has an obvious preferences for grassier vegetation — I look around at the way the water is beading up on the leaves of a rose bush or the pattern of lichen growing on some tree branches or, over the last few days, the embellishments on the gravestones in Eugene, Oregon’s historic Masonic Cemetery where many of that city’s founders are buried.

While Harley’s sniffer is deep in a scrub of dandelion, at the other end of the lead, I am fussing with the focal point on my phone because I want those little beads of water along the serrated edge of the leaf to be sharp. Harley is usually done before I am at which time we move either several blocks or a few feet up the road until one of us finds a thing we need to study, either with our nose or our eyes depending on where we are on the leash.

In this way, we are weirdly suited to each other. It takes me forever to get anywhere, I am always stopping to look at something. Sometimes Harley speaks to me when I am taking too long, or he pulls at the lead and shakes my hand and the shot is ruined. Sometimes, I speak to Harley when he is taking too long, and I say, “Let’s go,” and start walking, breaking his concentration on that one spot underneath the rosemary bush and his research his ruined. Fair’s fair.

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Harley does not have a Instanose feed (he is on Instagram, here), but I have been taking a lot of photos of little details while we walk and posting them to Instagram.  I should probably start carrying a better camera than my phone, but I’m all about using what’s in my pocket. Harley’s treats are in there too. He gets yummy things for being patient and I get some decent photos.

It’s not a bad arrangement.