An Open Discussion of Dog Park Idea

Reprint of Martinez News Gazette article, August 26th:

Last October at a lay leadership conference in Sacramento the keynote speaker opened with a news story out of Long Island. In February, 70 year old Vincenzo Ricardo was found sitting in front of his television set, dead. The point wasn’t that he was dead or even that he was found dead in front of his television, but that Vicenzo had been sitting there for over a year. News reports talk of neighbors routinely seeing this blind man walking through the neighborhood, some mentioned being frightened he’d step out into the street and be struck by a passing motorist. But when mail began piling up, no one thought to question why.

The speaker’s point highlighted one unintended consequence of the Internet: we’re all becoming more and more isolated. Personally I love auto bill pay and auto deposit and if I had my way, I’d never set foot in my local bank branch (sorry, Pam). But this is just one example of how, if we’re not careful, we can become too autonomous. Just ask Vinny’s neighbors.

Aside from not being healthy for the individual, social isolation isn’t healthy for a community. Take Friday night for example, I’m where I usually am, down by the beaver dam and I strike up a conversation with a group of women. One of the women, Andrea, lives south of Hwy 4 and readily admits that she doesn’t identify with being a resident of Martinez but of Pleasant Hill. Now I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who sees this as a problem. But she, along with many others, is rediscovering their Martinez citizenship because of a bunch of ‘water dogs.’

In addition to the ease of online shopping and bill pay, urban sprawl plays a significant role in creating social isolation. But maybe we can counter the trends with a little innocuous social engineering. The beavers have already shown they’re more than environmental engineers given the way in which they’ve transformed strangers into neighbors; however this transformational power doesn’t solely rest with one species.

There’s another four footed friend with an innate ability to create instant neighbors out of strangers and that’s a dog. We have two at my house, Baron and Snoop, both pound puppies. When we first brought Baron home I’d take him for walks downtown; often I’d hear whispers of “oh my gawd, get a load of his feet!” as we passed. Well at ninety-five pounds he’s grown into them. Both he and Snoop are a handful to walk so I don’t walk them nearly as much as I should. Instead they take themselves for a run up the hill behind our house whenever someone’s forgotten to shut the gate. They love to run.

So where – within reason – can we take our dogs and let them run off leash? Keeping in mind that in addition to exercising our dogs, we want to enrich our sense of community and the answer is nowhere.

Now I’m aware of the parcel of the parkland behind the horse arena that supposedly allows dogs to be off leash. However, one downtown resident who often walks his Jack Russell by the dam was recently fined. And because he couldn’t produce proof of the rules that said it was allowable under certain conditions, the judge upheld the citation.

Perhaps with the upcoming Park Bond Measure, we could take a look at including more people in the discussion, make our parks even more meaningful to the community on the whole and set aside off leash space for our dogs. It doesn’t have to be as wonderful as Point Isabel (although that’s a great model), but it should be something that creates an environment where neighbors can get to know each other just a little better.