Dog Harness

Canines were the first animals domesticated by man (some would argue they domesticated us), and continue to be used more commonly than any other animal for companion and service. Dog mushing is a very climate specific phenomenon. It historically has occurred mostly north of the 45 parallel.

I met my dog Irwin very close to the 45 parallel, in northeastern Vermont (The North East Kingdom) but he was from Montreal. He is a mixed breed of hunting dog and mountain (sled) dog. He pulls against any collar, harness or contraption by nature and seems, by all accounts to enjoy it. Recently we have immigrated south to Los Angeles, where the warm climate in summer makes his long double coat and big paws and head hot and tired.

A few unfortunate encounters with hot concrete, glass and asphalt has led me to use the urban skateboard sled harness in the late evening and at night with lights. I have spent many hours, researching, using, seeking out and building different collars and harnesses. After a few different designs, I feel somewhat comfortable with the current incarnation of two weight lifting belts riveted together with copper studs and two goat reins. 

Can you guess what this is? It is a map, a map of the bike paths in Los Angeles county. What is it missing? A central connection. There are 4 main arteries that come towards downtown Los Angeles from Northeast, northwest, southwest and southeast. They all stop short of being functional beyond a recreational element. Downtown Los Angeles is a broken bottleneck of freeways, choking on it's own excess concrete and smog, failing to yield to new ideas beyond the realm of the automobile. Investing billions into a subway that barely puts a dent in traffic, the only other viable options are walking and bicycling more. Investments put into human scale infrastructure are much more valuable and pay back more rapidly, but to whom? The payback goes to the community, in the form of higher quality of life, which is usually the sacrificial lamb in the name of construction jobs, car jobs, and maintenance crews. So how do we make a lucrative situation for the city businesses and governments to consider more bike paths and safe bike lanes? If industry is the only answer they will accept, should we put huge banner billboards up along the bike paths to fund them? Line it with ATMs, vending machines and hot dog carts? Make people pay a toll to ride their bikes? How about tax gasoline to fund bikeways? Hmm doesn't seem like a popular idea right now. But people ride bikes anyways on the street, so is it really dangerous? Yes, a drunk driver hit 6 people at once about 2 weeks ago less than a mile from my house. This is not an uncommon occurrence. Cars hit bikes all the time, Some even do it intentionally. I have been hit, i have seen people being hit and the driver running off, luckily I've never been witness to a really bad accident, many people walk away, but the fact is, bikes and cars were not particularly designed to coexist on small streets with fast speed limits as is the case in Los Angeles. While there are 527 miles of bike lanes, it scarcely compares to over 22,000 miles of streets in Los Angeles County. Many of these bike lanes have been nick named "death lanes" due to cars being parked on one side, while traffic zooms by on the other. With people pulling in and out of parallel parking spaces and opening their doors right into the bike lane, there is often not enough room or time to react, and it is one of the most common types of bicycle accidents.

The LA River Expedition

Since it dawned on me to pursue any and all possible options of getting around in Los Angeles, one of the first ideas I had was to navigate the Los Angeles River, which is technically not a river but a seasonal creek by flow volume. It is under the jurisdiction of the Army Corps of Engineer, which controls all waterways in the US deemed navigable. Since no vessel larger than a canoe or kayak has ever successfully traveled the river, this poses an interesting question, as the Army's decision has impacted the water in such drastic ways, channelizing it with concrete after the severe flood of 1937. So yesterday, I bought a kayak and a waterproof video camera.

As a distant goal of this project is to eventually lead tours with different modes of travel to showcase environmental, social and economically sustainable businesses, communities and how they interact with natural features. So it behooves me to introduce someone who is a little ahead of me, already beginning to offer expeditions on the river. Here we have LA River Expeditions whose mission is to "lead guided recreational/educational canoe/kayak excursions down the more pleasant, soft-bottomed stretches of the LA River".