The hard thing about today was that it was really, really windy. Mom said that the sustained winds were going to be about 25mph, with gusts up to 50 mph. “That’s an exaggeration!” I said. “It’s never THAT windy. You just think it’s that windy because you want people to know you were miserable.” But then she showed me the weather report, and now I owe her a freeze-dried liver treat because she was right!
The wind had rocked our car-house like a cradle while we were sleeping. If it could move our great, big car-house, what would it do to a medium dog and his little human? “Are you sure that you want to run along the world’s most famous cliffs when there are winds strong enough to pick us up like a couple of kites?” I asked. Wind can be scary, but the other thing about wind is that it is stressful. Everything you do takes more effort, and things fly into your eyes and nose and mouth. For someone like Mom who has long fur right next to her eyes and nose and mouth, it can be a real problem. But just like the cold, the wind turned out to be more scary from inside the car-house than outside.
We didn’t look at the scenery much in the 9 miles we ran because Mom said that looking off in the distance might trick us into focusing on the wrong thing while we ran right into thin air like Wile E Coyote. We had to concentrate very hard on the trail directly in front of us and not look away for even a nanosecond, and never, ever, ever look down.
When we did finally stop and look at the canyon I wasn’t as excited by it as I am whenever I cross the Golden Gate Bridge to see Bodie. “It looks like it’s painted there,” I told Mom.
“No, it’s definitely fake. See? The cliffs in the foreground are real because I can see them in high def. But when you look off in the distance it’s all low def and smudgy. That’s an old movie trick…”
“That’s just because your brain doesn’t know how to handle the scale. That’s why it’s one of the natural wonders of the world.”
Yesterday the mitten-god looked far away even though it was close. Today the canyon looked close even though it’s far away. Things sure are different in the desert.
After our run we got in the car and drove all day without getting out except a few potty breaks. I was glad. I didn’t know that there was such a thing as too much adventure, but there is. Mom is one of those people that when she finds something good, she wants more and more of it every day until she’s had so much of it that it makes her unhappy again. But I need to take naps and let each adventure soak in and then dry out of me like a sponge. If I don’t get time to rest, I can’t absorb the next adventure and it just runs right off of me and I forget. That’s why I don’t like the idea of “vacation.” Why should you save up all of your fun and have it in one big blow-out? I think it would be much better to spread your fun out in tiny doses throughout the year so that you can soak all of the fun out of each adventure and not waste a drop.
-Oscar the Pooch
#GrandCanyondogs #GrandCanyonRunning #southrimtrail #vertigo
