Boxer vs. Boxer

Of these two warriors, IntangibleArts' own GOMEZ is the slightly smaller one. Motley has the white patch on the back of the neck...It's a tender ballet of joy, as performed by a pair of spastic knuckleheads.

CRASH of the TITANS!

It unfolded like one of the great Viking Sagas, I tell you...

The greater DC area Boxer Meetup for February was today, at a fenced dog park in Annandale, Virginia. It was a long haul for us DC folks, but not bad. Gomez wasn't driving anyway, so he had no reason to complain.

Some 37 members of the meetup group had sent a positive RSVP through the website, so I figured if even a decent percent turned up, it would be a swirling vortex of BOXER MADNESS.

But they came. A polite trickle at first, and then.....


Xerxes (the fawn) came from nowhere, it seemed, and he had chosen Gomez (the brindle) for the great smackdown of the century.


Gomez snapped into action at the first hint of challenge: Put yer paw on ME, eh fawnie? I'll have your nose for lunch! Bwah!


But no! Xerxes deploys the great Kung Fu Freakout Paw technique, in an attempt to stun Gomez with rancid Kung Fu extremism! It is like a puppy-toe that points to the moon...

NO, I shout to Gomez: Don't look at the puppy-toe, or you'll miss ALL THE HEAVENLY GLORY!


Gomez gets the Enter the Dragon reference right away and snaps out of his stupor just in time to deliver a Johnny Sokko/Flying Robot-style superpunch that sends Xerxes reeling back, smashing several of Tokyo's office buildings to rubble! Oh the humanity!


Panting with fatigue, the warriors nod to each other; a wordless agreement of stalemate. We are boxers. We are awesome. This fight cannot be won. This is a total, like, mutually-assured-destruction trip we're on, man, yeah...


NO! Super-uncool fakeout technique! Xerxes signals to his henchman Boxer X (didn't get his name), and the two overwhelm Gomez in a shocker flipout wrestling move! I shall call it The Flying Fungus! What will become of Gomez now?!!?


He laughs at the sunlight in total idiotic glory: What the hell were we fighting about again?

Shirlington Dog Factory

This amounts to a sequel of my recent report on the DC dog park situation. Several people had suggested Shirlington Park as an alternative to Wheaton... In fact, we were pummeled with enthusiastic Shirlingtonian propoganda. It sounded like there was a mad hoarde of dog owners out there, who believed this Shirlington place was the BEE'S FREAKIN' KNEES, and we'd be idiots to report on the scene without visiting that place.

And so we did. Even though it's on THAT side of the river.

We just had a solid week of rain, and poor Gomez was completely insane with cabin fever. He hadn't had a decent walk in ages. So the plan was to let him explode at this Shirlington place, and then settle back at home while he died on the floor in a puddle of exhaustion. Maybe we'd finally watch that Netflix copy of The Usual Suspects.

[No spoilers in the comments, please. Marian hasn't seen it yet. Not as of this writing, anyway.]


The park is a huge stretch of fenced property behind South Four Mile Run between Shirlington Road and South Walter Reed Drive. For us, it's a simple hop down North Capitol Street to NY Ave and 395, off at the Shirlington exit, and we're practically there. It runs along a shallow stretch of water, which is fenced off, so the humans have some control over whether the dogs have access to the water.


Gomez leaped and porpoised in the water like the wicked banshee monkey-faced cocaine-riddled freak-puppet he really is, and made some new friends in the process.

But here again, the real Dog Park Experience has as much to do with the humans as the facility itself. The place is so incredibly spread out, some folks simply trust their dogs to behave, whilst they sit on benches and read books or flirt with each other. For the most part it works fine, but the occasional aggressive dog can ruin the party for everybody, while the owner is off somewhere...

So the final grade for this place is very favorable, but peppered with caveats... The facilities are amazing, with ample room for billions of dogs. The steep embankment on the other side of the stream is not fenced, and one couple told us they DID witness a dog scale that side and vanish. But it would take a very determined, obsessive, neurotic dog to do that; I'd call it a minimal risk. Poo-bags are provided, as are sturdy benches and a few picnic tables. The place is well-shaded, and people clearly know about the park: We arrived at 11am this morning (Sunday) and the place was hopping with activity.

But for overall nice-nice vibes, the winner is still Wheaton Regional Park. It's hard to describe, and granted, this was our first visit to Shirlington. But the typical, random gathering of dog owners at Wheaton tends to be more open and conversational than the crowd we experienced at Shirlington. And that's an important dynamic to have in a dog park when, uh, excuse me, your black lab is mauling my little japanese pipsqueak, could you remove it please, before I kick it's miserable face in? Thank you, lovely...


But no matter! Gomez dug it like a superstar, and he crashed immediately upon getting home, as planned.

I figure that's the prime motive for doing the Dog Park thing. It's all a conspiracy to wear the suckers out. And on that score, Shirlington wins by a drippy nose.

The Quest for Dog Parks

We have a thriving dog population in the neighborhood. Just around our block, I see about a dozen every day, being walked in the after-work hours. Dupont, Mt.Pleasant, and Capitol Hill all seem to have happy, thriving canine citizens. Clearly, a demand exists in DC for a few dog parks, yeh?

The fenced dog-run in Maryland's Wheaton Regional Park is old news already. It's a magnificent place; We've been taking Gomez there for about a month and he's even made some friends who aren't afraid to wrestle with Full-On Boxer Enthusiasm (e.g., Bella, the pit/boxer mix in the pix above). But even with a Saturday morning's relaxed traffic, it can take 30-45 minutes to crawl up Georgia Avenue from our place. I've been thinking about all the pups in our 'hood who could use a caged, leash-free environment to kick out the jams like champions...

TO THE INTERNET I went. I found a short list of things called "dog parks" and we set out with that list, notebook, and camera. FINALLY, a bit of "service journalism" for this wretched blog.

Clearly, there was a confusion of terms. Wheaton's facility is a "dog park," whereas the places listed in DC were actually "dog-friendly" parks which have no fencing and simply allow dogs, on-leash, to exist there. As long as they scoop up after their humans.

So as we traveled from one "dog park" to the next, a pattern emerged which left us looking at the drive to Wheaton as our only hope. So here follows a very incomplete rundown of the dog-park scene in DC, as gleaned on a recent Saturday morning drive:

Glover Park:


Located at 39th and W Streets NW at Rock Creek Park, this turned out to be a large, open meadow with a picnic table and water-fountain. It was a great space actually, but we were ignorantly still looking for the dog park. After crossing it and delving into the hiking paths, we figured the meadow must've been it. We spotted a man at the picnic table, brushing out his golden retriever and asked him, nicely:

"We've heard there's a dog park nearby; would this be it, or are we hopelessly lost?"

He returned none of our pleasantness, evidently sensing that we were from the nastier side of town. This is the park, he spat. We carried on like happy humans, saying that we were looking for a caged, leash-free dog park for our bouncy lovely happy boxer, oh what a delight, whee, etc...

The man informed us, with elevated and flaring nostrils, that we aught to consider "training" so as to have a civilized animal and make use of such a facility as they have there... And with that, he gathered his exquisite retriever and his delicate sensibilities and swam away in a cloud of his own angelic semen...

Holy Shit, has it come to this? I hate it when stereotypes come true, and here we had a west-park type talking to us as though his family owned ours as slaves for thousands of years.

To hell with that neighborhood anyway. It's too far. It may as well be Ohio.

Next, we hit Lincoln Park (11th and North Carolina Ave., at Mass), which proved to be yet another "dog friendly" but definitely leash-needed spot.

Then Marion Park, further down Mass Ave (6th and E Streets SE), which was the same as Lincoln. No use in even photographing these two; we kept driving southeast on Mass, towards Congressional Cemetery:


Right around the SE terminus of Massachusetts Avenue at the Anacostia River is one of the most beautiful cemeteries I'd ever seen. I'm almost sure I'd been there as a kid. John Phillip Sousa is buried there...hell, J. Edgar Hoover is buried there, along with 60,000 of his closest dead friends. AND it was on our list of dog-friendly facilities, so we went...

It was huge and protected by a massive black iron gate, filled with headstones of every age and description; everything from humble Army-issue headstones to mausoleums, obelisks, and massive memorial statues. And a few dogs freakin' out, in the middle of it all.

Congressional Cemetery isn't, strictly speaking, either a "dog park" or a "dog-friendly" park, but it has been made available to dog-owning patrons who pay a membership fee. And of course the place is off-limits to dogs when a funeral is in progress.

Now, even with the membership dues and the gorgeous facility grounds with it's incredible gate, it still wasn't a good fit for Gomez. The cemetery is absolutely HUGE. I suspect we'd spend all day just trying to FIND him, once we let him go.

This left Adams Morgan's Walter Pierce Dog Run.


Located just north of the eastern end of the Duke Ellington bridge. We knew about this one, but hadn't tried it before. It seemed a bit small and dingy, with a fence that could use some repair, and the odd bit of broken glass on the ground, etc. But clearly, it's a labor of love for the group that maintains it. Without local government support, it's really up to concerned citizens to do their bit. And so the place isn't as spotless as Wheaton, but it's local, it means well, and dammit, it's all we've got.

Thus, it deserves respect, and a visit from Gomez the Boxer God himself. And he loved it. As long as he has a running and wrestling partner in the park, Gomez couldn't care less if the fence needs repair.

So we'll likely divide our visits between Adams Morgan and Wheaton. But DC could certainly do more to support the need. It can be argued (and I do) that a dog park shares equal importance with kids' playgrounds. Children are something of a luxury item, if you consider their cost and "elective" status, same as dogs (though dogs are far cheaper in the long run, I'll give you that). We choose to have these companions, and once we have them, we want to provide them with the best lives possible. Children, dogs, iguanas, whatever.

As it happens, DCist scooped me on this whole subject with a report (via the Examiner) that certain regulatory restrictions on "dog parks" in DC may be lifting. This would ease the introduction of new caged, leash-free dog-parks in the city.

And THAT, my friends, is a fine and beautiful thing. I mean, think of the children...