Sunday afternoon, I walked our dog Bodie along a rough road just east of Salida. It starts by the stockyards at the site of Cleora and goes downstream for about a mile between the idle railroad tracks and the river. It seems to be a public right-of-way, but it doesn’t have a county road number, nor any county road maintenance, even in an election year.
It’s a good place for Bodie because he loves to chase cars. Vehicles on this road must proceed so slowly that I have time to grab him long before they come into view. Cars on the other side of the river zip along U.S. 50, and he can chase them to his heart’s content from our side of the Arkansas. That’s fine by me; the more exercise he gets, the quieter he is in the evening.
In warm weather, there are often anglers and campers at various wide spots and pullovers, but by late Sunday afternoons, most of them have returned to civilization. There might be a runner or two, or another dog-walker.
That’s what we met on our return leg. Bodie tried to persuade the two small dogs to go running with him, but they stayed near their owner. He was a fellow about my age, and he took off the earphones of his portable music device to ask me a question.
“See any rattlesnakes ahead?” he asked.
I replied that although I have heard many accounts of rattlers in the area, I have never seen one myself.
But he had. “A few days ago, I was walking around here, and one of the dogs started acting peculiar in the brush. I couldn’t see why, though. I finally took off my headphones, and I could hear the rattle, and then I saw it, only 3 or 4 feet away.”
We chatted a bit more, then he put on his headphones and ambled away while I strolled in the other direction.
The encounter made me wonder why anyone would walk outdoors with headphones. It’s not that this route was pristine, where you would hear nothing but sweet warbles of song birds while enjoying Thoreauvian inspiration.
Instead, there’s traffic on the highway, as well as the noise of the river swollen with snowmelt. A pickup might be growling along our back road, and that’s information I need for the dog’s health. Thunder in the sky generally means lightning somewhere nearby, and that’s another factor to keep in mind. The booms and thuds of target shooters indicate places to avoid. Deer thrashing through the brush, bighorns dislodging rocks on the canyon wall above me, and of course the rattles of serpents – all things I should know about, all conveyed by sound.
That’s what our senses are supposed to do: inform us of our environment, so that we can react. And here was a guy who was deliberately shutting himself off from that information. Even after he might have suffered a painful or deadly snakebite, he was still strolling with his headphones.
This bothered me more than it otherwise would have, on account of our delayed train ride between Seattle and Eugene, Ore., three weeks earlier. Our train sat at Olympia for more than two hours because all rail traffic was halted on account of a fatality on the tracks near Centralia, Wash.
A 33-year-old woman was wearing headphones as she walked up the tracks. The northbound passenger train came around the bend from behind her. The train hit its horn, but she never knew what hit her, thanks to her portable music device.
Many years ago, when I worked for a wretched weekly newspaper in Longmont, I made the acquaintance of a young lawyer when he tried to talk me into joining the Jaycees. He went on to become city attorney. One day he was out running on a county road with headphones on. He spent a lot of time recovering after an encounter with a vehicle he never heard coming.
Some poking around the Internet turned up dozens of stories about people getting killed by cars, trains, trucks and buses while wearing headphones, although there was nothing about rattlesnake bites.
One could see this as a Darwinian force for the improvement of the human gene pool. Others might push for a law restricting the use of portable music devices, justifying it on the same grounds as seat belt and helmet laws.
But we don’t need more laws, which merely serve to shift responsibility from citizens to peace officers, and then burden our courts and enrich lawyers. We need people to realize that their ears have a function other than providing entertainment.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
