My interest in running ebbs and flows. I know it’s good for me, and it’s a low-threshold activity: All I need do is throw on some running shoes and go. Well, and pants, too. Gotta have those.

A decade-plus ago, I was running a lot. Just like Northeast Bend, the growing southeast area is home to a number of subdivisions, which are like regular, old-fashioned neighborhoods but turned inward to face themselves. Often their front yards face interior streets, and their backyards back up to more arterial roads.

Frequently, they will have trees bordering the front and back of the property, which means they line the sidewalks developers must put in, thank God, because if there’s anything worse than having to drive everywhere, it’s driving to run somewhere, which kind of removes the easy access part of the equation.

Several years back, I noticed that someone had gone down one of the streets I frequently ran and trimmed many of the low-slung branches that forced pedestrians to duck or go around them. I didn’t witness his or her labors. I saw the aftermath: neatly clipped branches no longer growing smack dab across the sidewalk. Now, they lay on the sidewalk or nearby mulch, as though a gentle windstorm took care of business those responsible — yes, responsible — for the trees were unwilling or incapable of handling themselves. If you, too, used these sidewalks, you’d know exactly what had happened, and why.

I was more than sympathetic to the perpetrator. Years ago, running in the half-light of morning, I hit my head nice and hard on a fairly dense pine branch growing horizontally across the sidewalk at head level — mature enough of a limb it was capable of making me fairly dense, too, evidenced by the on-the-spot rage pruning I committed: I reached up and wrestled the offending branch over the slightly lower fence, back into the yard from whence it emanated. There it stayed, unnaturally bent, for several years.

So when I saw the branches lying on the ground, I assumed someone like me, perhaps someone who had hit their head even harder, or simply annoyed by constantly having to duck around branches that shouldn’t be there, had trimmed the branches themselves.

The limbs hadn’t been on the ground the day prior. As I ran safe from head injuries down the sidewalk, I conjured a hero in my mind: The Night Trimmer, a vigilante who strikes at night lest a homeowner or occupier finally take an interest in those trees growing across the sidewalk, contingent upon seeing a stranger trimming them.

I don’t know if I approved of the Night Trimmer’s vigilante ways, but just as some apparently do not intervene in nature when it begins to block public sidewalks, I do not intervene when people unblock public sidewalks. Apathy is a two-way sidewalk.

I don’t think the trimming was done by a landscape company, because the furtive yard work wasn’t limited to one house or subdivision, nor was it disposed of properly. I think it was the act of an individual who did not have a column at his disposal in which to spout facts.

Yes, facts. Bend city code 3.30.40 states that “Property owners shall trim vegetation on their property so that it does not extend into the area above any public sidewalk from the surface of the sidewalk to a point 8 feet above the sidewalk level.”

Eight feet! I’d have happily accepted 6.5 feet.

Maybe the abundant sidewalk-blocking overgrowth is due to mere old-fashioned ignorance. It happens to all of us. Even though I knew they should be trimmed so they do not extend into the area above any public sidewalk, I didn’t know till I looked it up that vegetation should be culled to a glorious height of 8 wave-your-hands-in-the-air feet of clearance.

Since our prolonged winter weather finally made itself scarce, my wife and I have begun running a little. And once again, I’m noticing that property owners either don’t know or don’t care — or possibly never walk or roll down a sidewalk — that they are harder to use when the foliage takes over.

Earlier this week, as we jogged side by side ducking branches, I noticed how the maple trees on Parrell Road are more neatly trimmed on one side, because they’re constantly pruned by passing traffic.

Not so the side of the offending trees reaching over the sidewalk, poised to slap the next unwitting passerby.

At least, that is, until the Night Trimmer strikes again.

Good grief, losing a pet is hard

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