The I’mbarkadero
- Oscar the Pooch
- Jan 5
- 8 min read
She couldn’t help it. It was in her nature to get annoyed, and I was the only one around.
After the Law didn’t hassle us for driving to My Trail or the Haunted Highway, we got bolder about visiting other trails in My Hometown. Pretty soon, we were patrolling a different trail every day of the week. It was a dangerous job braving the poisonous air, but it would be more dangerous to be trapped in the Stuck House with a restless Mom. As long as I kept feeding her fresh air and sunlight, she didn’t get all wrong in the head like a zoo resident that plucks out his fur or grinds his tusks to nubs on the wall.
As we got used to our new routine, I figured out that I had to take Mom on patrol each morning before she laid fingers on the laptop or else it would never let her go. Once the screen was open, she could stare into its warm glow forever as her poop juice went cold and the windows went dark behind her.
Over time, even the boogeyvirus’s tyrannical rule started to feel normal. As the weeks went by and wilder-ness took back over what used to be America, Mom’s legs, men’s faces, and the trails all became shaggier than I’d ever seen them. Weeds and poison oak swelled into places where no one had let them grow before, until the trails began to disappear altogether. Despite its pavement, even My Trail became overgrown as the GO AWAY signs multiplied.
I’d always doubted whether people existed when they weren’t with me, even before everyone disappeared. Now I knew that people folded into laptops and disappeared into The Cloud until Mom clicked on them again. As time stuck still in our boogeybunker, I began to worry that my friendshapps were getting out of date. If the boogeyvirus ever ended, I might reemerge into a world that had moved on without me, like Rip van Tinkle.
As much as I liked running on trails every day, I missed the excitement of our runs in the City before work. We used to arrive so early that the City still twinkled as we came off the freeway for a landing. We’d leave the car in the loving care of the man who always raised the gate to the kennel as soon as he saw us coming. The car-nanny protected our windows and the change in the cup holder from thieves while Mom and I ran around the City, watching the sunrise behind the Grey Bridge and Alcatraz. When we were done, I’d watch the car while Mom took the packpack into the building attached to the car-daycare. When she came back, wet and smelling like soap, we’d walk to the office together. Back when there was still an office to walk to.
One morning, around the time when the sun started waking up as early as us, Mom pulled out more clothes than usual. She put on her running clothes and packed the extras into a packpack just like she used to in The Before. She carried the packpack out to the car, and this time, instead of turning its nose downhill into My Hometown, it turned uphill toward the stream of roads that all dumped into the City.
We hadn’t made this drive in dog-years, and the surprise was too exciting to ruin it by asking where we were going. All that mattered was that we weren’t stuck inside a laptop. I sat in the back seat watching the old sights go by and tried to fill the empty world back up with memories. I imagined other cars on the freeway slowing us down and people walking in the crosswalks when it was supposed to be our turn to go. I imagined the silhouettes of people on the empty train that chugged beside the road for a few blocks, and let my imagination paint more silhouettes in the dark windows of the shops and office buildings.
I pressed my nose to the glass as we came in for a landing, anxious to sniff everything that had happened since my last patrol.
“You missed the car kennel!” I wagged. My nose left a smear on the glass as I tried to make sense of the metal curtain covering the entrance.
“Can’t go there anymore, Spud,” Mom said. “It’s closed.”
She landed the car in a spot across the street, where anyone could break its windows to steal the precious empty cans under the copilot’s chair.
“Not here!” I squeaked. “The car might get covered in meter-maid droppings or beat up by a stray.”
“I know, but the garage was owned by the gym, and the gym closed for good a few months ago. They’ll be tearing the building down any day now.” She looked longingly at the car kennel, without whose shelter the car never would have survived alone on the mean City streets. “We’ll have to take our chances with break-ins, but at least they’re not ticketing.”
I knew that the boogeyvirus had changed things, but I didn’t know that they were that bad. Meter maids may be pests, but they were also the only people in the City that you could count on to show up on time. If cars could park for two hours and one minute with their wheels pointing any which way, who knew what chaos would follow.
“What do you mean they’re tearing it down?” I asked. Imagining the whole City crumbling into the earth reminded me of the last thing Mom taught me before the world closed down. “Is it gonna be like Saint Bernardino?”
“San Bernardino?” Mom asked. “God, I hope not. What put that idea in your head?”
“You said they were tearing the City down. I thought you meant now that everyone lives inside laptops they’re gonna throw the City into a hole, just like Saint Bernardino.”
Dogs aren’t sentimental, but I was glad Mom had brought me back to run our old route again before they chopped down all the sparkly buildings, leveled the hills, and plowed the gingerbread houses into quicksand.
Back when this was America, the first few blocks of our run used to be when we practiced synchronized leashing. In our glory days, we used to impress everyone we knocked out of the way as we ran upstream through the flesh flood pouring from the train station. We would dart between the business bros making googly eyes at their witches and leap over napping strays without disturbing either one.
On this morning, the sidewalks felt king-sized. Only a few stale-smelling people wandered the streets, arguing through their muzzles with invisible ghosts and lamp posts. They built colonies of igloos on the empty sidewalks and landscaped their yards with cardboard. They fenced in their property with shopping carts and bicycle parts. Even before the boogeyvirus, Mom used to hold her breath against the smell of shame and wildness in the damp, shady spots under the freeway. Now we couldn’t hold our breath for long enough to get away from the poisonous air in the suburban igloo sprawl.
“Know what the weirdest part is?” Mom gasped when we reached the clear air behind the baseball stadium.
“I can’t pick, there are too many.”
“Even the homeless people are wearing masks.”
“Just because they have a healthy fear of baths doesn’t mean their safety isn’t important,” I reminded her.
“Of course. All I’m saying is that someone who takes a crap on the sidewalk in broad daylight probably doesn’t care about manners or hygiene. Each one seems to be missing some critical piece of clothing, but somehow they’ve all kept track of their masks.”
“But they’re wearing them over their eyes,” I pointed out.
Mom ran wide to keep out of the snore cloud of a man napping on a bench. “Do you know how pervasive a cultural norm has to be for someone to follow it even when they don’t notice that they’re only wearing one high heel?”
“How are you going to keep your muzzle up against all the tourists?” I asked. A few days before, the mailman had brought Mom a packet of neck sleeves that she could pull up and down as she ran. Mom needed the sleeve because, as she explained to me, she would drown in her own sweat, spit, and snot before we got back to the car if she tried to run with a veterinarian’s mask. She still hadn’t figured out how to make the sleeve stick in place for longer than a breath or two before it fell off her nose and scrunched uselessly around her neck.
“I’ve been wondering the same thing,” Mom said. “But I have a feeling there won’t be as many tourists as we’re used to.” She tried for the gazillionth time to hang her muzzle on her nose in preparation for the crowds as we ran onto the I’mbarkadero.
I’mbarkadero is just a fancy word for a crowded sidewalk with cars passing on one side and boats on the other. It gets its name from a handsome and mysterious dog whose real name no one knew, yet all who met him said they loved him the moment they set eyes on his stumpy little tail. Not knowing his name, they called him the I’mbarkadero after the dashing way he used to run around the waterfront, barking at tourists, and scooters, and snakeboarders, and other dogs. But that was in the days when this was America, when you could introduce yourself to someone without them running from you in fear.
Back when this was America, runners would come to the I’mbarkadero from all over the City to run an adventure race that had no official start or finish line. We used to race around clumps of tourists wandering in S’s on the sidewalk. We ducked under pointing arms that shot out of crowds, and dodged photographers who backed up without a warning beep. We feinted around farmers carrying crates of vegetables to the market and sidestepped commuters dismounting the boat-bus with their snouts in cups of poop juice, all without being squished by bikes, scooters, or snakeboarders, and keeping a nose out for bad dogs to bark at. On top of all that, there was always another runner a step ahead or behind, competing for the gaps in the crowd and hogging the best lines. It was great fun, and unlike any other run.
But that morning, when we rounded the baseball stadium and slingshotted onto the I’mbarkadero, the race course was deserted—or what passed for deserted in the City, anyway. There was no farmer’s market blocking the sidewalk in front of the Furry building, nor men carrying precarious pyramids of peaches through the absent crowds. No poop-juice-snouted commuters hustled up the half-bridge from the boat stop. The lady selling tickets to Alcatraz sat in her tardis playing with her witch.
It was quiet when we reached Fisherman’s Wharf, where the tourists used to be so thick that all locals must turn back on pain of torture. Now, the only sound in the air was the clanging of flags wagging their tails against flagpoles as they flapped in the wind. Mom tapped the usual turn-around pole and we about-faced to check on the car.
I rushed back the way we’d come, pulling the leash to urge Mom to hurry. From the moment we turned around, every step would bring me closer to my new collies. I still joined every meeting from under the desk like I used to, but these days only Mom’s paw reached down for pats and no one could see how cute I was from inside a screen. I could hardly wait to see the joy on their faces when they met me in real life.
I pulled Mom the whole way back to the car, too excited to be patient with her two-legged pace. When we reached our finish line, Mom took the packpack out of its hiding place in the trunk and unlocked a door I’d never walked through before. Still wearing her running clothes, Mom led me up an unfamiliar stairwell, down an empty hallway, and straight to a door that looked just like all the others. Somehow, I knew that whatever was behind this door belonged to me. I pressed my nose into the corner below the knob and waited for it to open.
Want to keep reading? Grab Oscar’s book, No Place Like Alone on Amazon.
