I was walking my dogs along the river path one early morning, and as usual, we had the path to ourselves. It had rained hard overnight, and the river was swollen, rolling along faster than normal. The trees along the path dripped steadily, and the air was thick. Coming toward me was another dog-owner, a man I’d seen a few times before. He had a German shepherd, like one of my two dogs, though his appeared less energetic and perhaps older than mine. The man and I exchanged a nod. Then, as my dogs and I passed, his dog lunged, snapping and barking—not wildly, not out of control, but in a performative, halfhearted way, more show than substance. Still, it was enough to set my dogs off. They pulled hard against their leashes, barking back with genuine annoyance, real heat. I braced to hold them. The man muttered something. He was embarrassed maybe, or just resigned.
I kept walking, but the whole encounter stuck with me. The weather, the river, the dogs—what had happened? What did it mean? I started thinking about how people sometimes behave like that dog. They suffer sudden paroxysms of fury—flashes of anger that pass through them like storms across a landscape. A person who might normally be calm, even kind, becomes unrecognizable for a moment. I’ve known people like that. In truth, I’ve been a person like that. This person, I usually think, whether myself or another, is behaving badly. But for a moment that morning, I glimpsed a different understanding: that of someone as part of the weather, overtaken by something bigger, the way a tree, branches lashing, looks when assaulted by terrible winds and blinding rain. I thought of someone I know—someone I used to care about—who once, in a moment of pure rage, kicked something and broke his foot. What a jerk, you might think. What kind of person does that?
A psychologist might point to any number of personality disorders to explain such behavior. But the words applied—bipolar, paranoid, borderline, or narcissistic—can seem like tidy labels for behavior that resists easy explanation. They describe the pattern, yes, but they don’t really explain the person. I mean, think of it—think of the weather. I do, and I imagine a celestial prairie with a herd of cattle moving across the landscape above us, sometimes quietly grazing and sometimes thundering along, hooves striking hard. Could a person, suddenly overtaken by the herd, really do anything but run with it—still themselves, yes, but swept up in a surge that grows from a thousand tiny acts: a steer tossing its head, a calf brushing past its mother, a cow letting out a long, low moo as she runs? All these small acts and gestures unite to be one unstoppable movement. The stampeding herd. The raging person.
That morning, I had set out alone with my dogs, as had the other dog-owner with his pet. And yet, we were never alone. His dog, like mine, was both responding to the weather but also a part of it. There we were, the five of us—two people and three dogs—no more free than sticks swept down a swollen river, bobbing, twirling, sucked under, then momentarily resurfacing, as the water runs its course.
