Tethered to the neighbourhood

... a different kind of grounding

We passed Olga and her dog Noah, a seven-year-old pittie, on a quiet street on one of our smaller walking loops first, where groups of three or four dogs swarm out of gangs (lanes) just as you pass their entrances, then one barks to summon all their mates to rush to the tops of their respective gangs, too. I recommended vinegar spray to her when she told me how bad they could get along this particular stretch.

We passed each other a few more times, and the other day started chatting from opposite sides of the road about where we like to walk. Aldo took a load off, panting after a few kilometres, while Noah edged to the end of his leash, hoping to continue his walk. She told me about a rice paddy walk starting from a gang along our big-loop walk. I checked it out the next day with Skye, and though pretty, passing stubbornly still cows and paddy in various stages of growth—as well as a multitude of construction sites violently carved into the green—it didn’t seem quite long enough. It ended on a little bamboo-shaded island created by two intersecting subak streams, with no way of continuing on. The next day I took Aldo, and realised that I had taken the wrong gang; we cut across paddy to find the right one, and bumped into Zeto, a two-year-old tan Doberman, and his walker Alik (who walks him from 8-12 and 2-4 each day—no wonder we see them everywhere!), whom Olga had mentioned she also passes regularly. The six of us, a little community, tethered to our dogs and the land we crisscross with them again and again, day after day, saying a quick hello and trudging on, dogs on short leashes eyeing each other uneasily. There’s a certain window of the day especially good for walking, when the street dogs have curled up out of view, ready for the worst of the heat or have not yet re-emerged, but the streets are not too hot to walk on bare-pawed. Rain is okay; cloud is better.

***

We have got in the habit of jumping on our motorbike to drive about a kilometre or so from home before we start our various street walks, originally to avoid our next door neighbour’s dog but, now he’s gone, just to avoid the worst of the area’s street dogs. Needing to walk Aldo every day has created a different relationship between the neighbourhood and me. I say hello now to the group of women and single man who sit outside an open-air shopfront, assembling canang, the Balinese decorations laid out around the home and streets every day. The man at the pool pump place, which never seems to close, always nods a greeting if his head isn’t bowed over a mysterious chunk of metal. Aldo ignores the scruffy dog perpetually sleeping outside the supermarket, but likes to bark back at a grumpy beagle who is sometimes behind a fence, sometimes outside with his owner. One day I stopped at one of the two vet clinics we go to, and asked if I could pop Aldo on the scale to be weighed, while no other dogs were around. It had been a while between visits. He clocked in at 39 kilograms. A woman at one of the laundries we seem to pass every 200 metres—their fabric softener perfume mingling with incense, remnants of a morning’s mosquito fogging, and petrol fumes—chatted with me one day when she saw Aldo straining to chase a cat. She told me not to worry; she knows cats and dogs who have become friends. One of the streets we walk along is predominantly Muslim, so there are fewer dogs than usual Balinese neighborhoods, but cats have slunk into the vacuum. They sit atop piles of dirt pooping, sip from water bowls left outside minimarts, sleep next to craftspeople threading bamboo blinds on the floor of their tiled shops, and crouch waiting for Aldo outside nail salons.

The baristas at our favourite coffee shop bring out Aldo’s water before my pineapple blueberry juice. Sometimes I order bacon for Aldo; the staff bring it on a plate plus a takeaway container, like they are rationing it out for him. We say hello to the Qatari man wearing headphones who is here almost every day. He’s just adopted a Chihuaha, but used to have a Rottweiler. A woman who works on a construction site a few blocks down from the cafe and comes here every now and again married her husband with their Dobermans in attendance—they have since passed away. A tattoo artist sitting outside her studio nearby asked for advice on getting her dog to stop leash pulling; a couple eating lunch here told me they wanted to adopt a dog, but were trying for a baby first.

***

We’ve had our moments. The floppy waving balloon man outside our butcher, where we get Aldo’s beef heart and liver, petrified Aldo the first time we passed him. He flinched and tried to lunge away bang onto the busy road, getting nicked by a bike. He was surprised by something outside a wet market, whacking his muscular tank of a torso into my knees, flinging me to the ground. I’ve had leash burns from sudden lunging at dogs that have emerged from nowhere, cats that have fallen from the heavens, and squirrels that have metamorphised in front of our eyes on electricity wires. I’ve had walks where Aldo has refused to go further, collapsing onto the grass and rolling to one side, looking at anything except me to make himself invisible. It was outside the canang-makers shop—they liked that one. We know where all the taps are to stop and get a drink of water. We know the best strips of grass for sniffing and the stretches of semi-broken concrete where I can let the leash out long so he can trot along at his own speed instead of mine.

We reduce grown motorcyling men to five-year-olds who point and shout, “Big dog!” when they speed by, or “Go the Rotties!” even though he’s a Doberman/pitbull. Fair enough; even the vet thought he was one at first. We pass a clothes shop on a street where lunatics like us are the only passing foot traffic, but a woman stands with brochures and asks us to come in to try something on. We’ve seen cafes close and refurbish and reopen, we’ve seen ordinary gang entrances transformed with intricate decorations of white and gold and colourful flowers for weddings, we’ve made use of new footpaths installed on some streets, and stumbled over muddy paths cracked beyond repair on others. You can’t let the world’s headlines get to you when you’re worried about spraining an ankle or being rushed by a pack of snarling teeth-bared dogs.

***

So a new offshoot on a regular loop is a find. An extra kilometre to wander along, unfinished car-free asphalt with only an occasional dog to get by. The green is marred by box-style villas plonked onto the paddy, with alang-alang awnings and gleaming new rubbish bins outside. Most are unfinished, covered with gangs of labourers sweating in the heat, their handwashed laundry hanging in semi-finished rooms. They work barefoot on bamboo scaffolding soaring meters above us, shovel dog-pee stained sand into concrete mixes, and manoeuvre wheelbarrows around muddy tracks. I think we will be able to cut across 50 metres of paddy to join up with one of our other walking streets, adding “falling into mud” to our list of accomplishments, perhaps.