This Week, Down Moanery Lane… I'm Holding My Water, As They Say

Cops, robbers and negligent neighbours

I’ve started taking walks around mine and the adjoining neighborhoods. These estates are the only walking tracks available to me unless I want to get in the car, and I don’t – I want to go for a walk. Getting in the car is a different thing.

When I get in the car, I am, inevitably, going to do a chore or other. I’m going to drop the two enormous boxes of crap I’ve been hoarding for the past six months off to Goodwill; I’m going to Discount Tire, to investigate the slow leak in my back tire (“it’s too close to the nut to patch, and actually you need to replace all four tires. Hmmm… probably $1,200? Do you want to do that now?”); I’m driving to the mall, a little north of downtown, to try on runners because I’m sick of ending up with shoes that are too short, too narrow, too unsupportive, too something, all because I refuse to shop away from my phone.

What I’m not doing, when I get in the car, is going for a walk.

I think this is — say it with me now — a cultural thing. In Ireland, walking is not just a form of exercise but also a way of getting places. Here, walking is exclusively a form of exercise, unless you live close to downtown and can walk to the Friendly Fox for coffee, or to Foster Park, or, if you’re feeling cultured, to the Botanical Gardens.

For the vast majority of people living in Fort Wayne, if you’ve somewhere to go, you get in the car.

This is part of the reason the whole place gives ghost town vibes, at least to me (again, cultural!). Dallas was the same; I remember visiting Beatrice in her house there and taking the kids for a walk in her estate, where I would encounter not a single other pedestrian. Sure, I’d see cars, the majority of which have tinted windows; some days, I’d go a full day without seeing anyone’s face (outside of my own family).

In mine and the neighboring estates here, it’s rare you’d encounter anyone else walking. Yesterday, I saw a man bring his dog out to do its business in his front garden. I waved enthusiastically at him. “Hi! I live here too!” I was saying with my one, slightly deranged, wave, the performance of which caused me to push the buggy into the grass, so I immediately had to right myself and the buggy, then start back into the kind of push-shake motion that seems to instantly soothe the baby back to sleep.

Sometimes I try to take photographs of people’s gardens. There’s one particular estate, a 10-minute walk from mine, in which people have made a great effort with their landscaping, more than just a tiny box hedge and two rose bushes. I want to bring the photographs home and show Brandin – “look! We could do this!” (We will not be doing this; I’ve done enough with the garden, quite aside from which, I want to move house in the next five years, so any further horticultural effort feels like a waste.)

In the era of the Ring doorbell, though — and in the land of the second amendment — I feel incredibly nervous, photographing people’s front gardens. I imagine them running out of their houses, Glock* in hand: “What are you doing? Show me that photograph!”

It’s not illegal to take a photograph of someone’s house — unless you’re on their private driveway, peering in their private front window, trespassing on their private property — but that doesn’t always seem to matter. When it comes to protecting one’s home, it often feels like it’s “shoot first, ask questions later”.

Between the Ring doorbells and the guns, I don’t know how anyone gets a crime committed in the year of our Lord 2025. But they do. I know, because a recent crime wave has (almost) reached our front door. I know, because our neighbours caught it on their Ring doorbell. I know, because they shared it in our housing estate’s Facebook group. (You can’t get away with anything these days.)