Dog duty

A neighbor of mine is a man of many names. Years ago, when I first encountered him on Missoula’s Mount Jumbo, I called him the Vigilante. To others, he is known as the Poop Guy. He calls himself, more charitably, the Bag Man. As for his real name, well, he asked me not to use it.

“I don’t want to become a target,” he confided to me recently on the phone. “There’s always people who get some weird hair up their butt.”

The Bag Man is in his 70s—balding, bearded, a little curt—and he walks (others say “stalks”) the “L” Trail five to six mornings of the week in an oversized jacket, armed with multi-colored rolls of plastic pet poop bags he buys by the box on Amazon. He doesn’t have a dog.

Even if you frequent this trail, you may not have seen the Bag Man—he’s shadowy like that, and crepuscular—but you will have seen his droppings. After every walk, he leaves a printed note at the Cherry Street trailhead surrounded by bags of dog shit in red, orange, blue or green. The color changes daily.

“These are feces left on this trail yesterday, bagged by your neighbor today,” reads a typical note, printed on white office paper and formatted to reveal an above-average command of Microsoft Word. 

The Bag Man grew up in Wisconsin and fled to Montana on a student deferment during the Vietnam War. He’s an active Missoulian now—he bikes, does yoga, swims and goes to the gym to repair a hamstring he tore while water skiing. He started hiking regularly on Mount Jumbo when he retired, about eight years ago. The more time he spent on the trail the more disgusted he became.

“It started off just having to step through and around and smell all the poop,” he said. “So, I just started picking it up. There was a lot more than I realized every day. It’s amazing.”

A routine was born. Each morning as he walked, he scanned one side of the trail on the way up the mountain, and the other side on the way down.

“It doesn’t take much,” he said. “If you’re ready to notice it, it’s there.”

In the 23 years since he bought his home in Missoula’s Lower Rattlesnake neighborhood, the Bag Man has watched the “L” trail get busier. He lives near the trailhead so he can see people and their dogs arriving. He estimates 10 percent of dog walkers don’t pick up their dog’s poop—a “gross guesstimate,” he acknowledges, but one apparently backed by some data.

Over time he’s become something of an expert on excreta. He knows most dogs will poop within 100 yards of the trailhead. He’s learned that people are more likely to pick up their dog’s poop in the summer, when the trail is busier and people are watching, than in the winter, when hikers are scarce. Winter poop is easier for him to collect, though, as it’s usually frozen. “It is much more pleasant than when they’re warm and squishy and fresh,” he said.

“I think a good number of the people who are leaving their dog waste where it lands, they know exactly what they’re doing.”

Like a tracker, the Bag Man can even infer the behavior of the trail users by reading the clues in the poos. If the poop is spread out in a line, rather than in a pile, he knows the dog’s owner was running and the poor beast was doing its business while trying to keep up. 

The Bag Man estimates he picks up 1,800 abandoned piles of poop every year. “I think a good number of the people who are leaving their dog waste where it lands, they know exactly what they’re doing,” he told me. “They’re going up there and deliberately leaving it, because they don’t want to pick it up. They don’t think they have to.”

Occasionally people will pass the Bag Man walking down the hill, harvesting the day-old shit at the trail’s edge. 

“They almost always say something positive,” he said. “They thank me. They complain about people leaving dog poop. But usually, they thank me. I’ve only received positive feedback from people who happen to see me.”

It’s a sympathetic image—the community uniting in gratitude behind a civic-minded poop-scooper—but, reader, this is not the full story. 

I first met the Bag Man four years and two dogs ago, on a spring morning on the “L” Trail, not far from my home in the Lower Rattlesnake. I had already seen his handiwork. 

This was before the notes and trailhead displays. At this time, the Bag Man would pick up the shit in brightly colored bags and leave it in the center of the trail in what I understood as a middle finger to dog walkers like myself. If he saw you walking a dog without a leash in a leash zone, he’d call you out for that, too. 

To my wife and friends I’d begun calling him the Vigilante, for the way he took the law into his own hands, seeking out off-trail dog shit that in my opinion wasn’t affecting anybody. The stress of the oncoming pandemic is probably partly to blame for my mounting irritability. 

In those days I would lie awake in bed at night, listening to grim podcasts about the virus wreaking havoc in Italy, then in New York. The siege was coming. Public health officials were pushing masks and social distancing but not everyone was listening. In Montana the danger was still abstract.  

The Bag Man, on the other hand, was as immediate as a klaxon horn in your ear. If there’s one thing I don’t like—one thing nobody likes—it’s being chastised by a stranger. I would spend entire runs on Mount Jumbo ruminating on his apparent sense of moral superiority. I’d play out dialogues in my head in which I would render him speechless with biting remarks like, “How’s the haul today?” or, “Having another shitty morning?” Sometimes I’d test the lines out loud, my words whisked away on the Hellgate Canyon wind. 

At the time we had a black Lab named Annie, inherited from my wife’s parents. She was a regal dog, too dignified to poop in our yard, so regular walks were important. I always bagged her poop. I mean, almost always. You know how it is. If I didn’t have a bag, I would flick it off the trail or hide it under a rock. If she went off the trail to poop on the hillside, I’d leave it. No one would step in it, and going off trail would be breaking another rule. I felt positive the Bag Man wasn’t picking up after me. Still, his actions felt personal, like I was in the crosshairs of his shame campaign. 

I am not a confrontational person. I can count on one hand the times that I have expressed irritation with a stranger. Among those times was the day I jogged around a corner and found the Bag Man, knee-deep in the brush beside the trail, bagging poop. Sweating, I pulled up alongside him. 

“Do you really think that’s bothering anyone?” I huffed. “No one’s going to step in that. It’s just going to decompose. Don’t wild animals poop all over these mountains every day? And aren’t you just creating another problem by throwing these bags on the trail? Isn’t that littering?”

The Bag Man told me it was the rule to pick up after your dog, and he wanted to show people what they had left behind. He said he sometimes sees footprints in the dog poop, proof that it is being stepped in. And he said the poop of wild animals is incomparable to the pathogen-ridden feces of domestic dogs.

Even in the heat of the moment I could concede some of his points. But what he was doing affronted me on a deeper level. There was something about his hunting out dog shit in the grass and bushes that I wanted to expose as pathological and vindictive. So, I resorted to poetry.

Bagger’s gonna bag, I told myself. Let that shit go. The mountain was big enough for us both.

“Two men look out the self-same bars,” I recited, misquoting the motivational speaker Dale Carnegie. “One sees the shit, the other the stars.”

The line didn’t land as I imagined. The Bag Man looked perplexed. Unsure of what to say next, I put out my hand and introduced myself in a spirit of strained neighborliness. Then I leashed Annie and ran home. His was the last hand I shook before the pandemic shut the world down.  

My habit after an exchange like this is brooding introspection. In calling out the Bag Man, was I guilty of the same self-righteousness I was decrying in him? I am, after all, no stranger to sanctimony. I champion unpopular opinions about the uselessness of dishwashers, the incompatibility of raspberries and chocolate, and the appropriate winter setting of our household thermostat (never north of 62 degrees).

I am equally familiar with obsession. I zealously uproot dandelions in our yard. In morel season, I become so fixated on scouting for mushrooms beside the trail that I am scarcely aware of the forest or my family. I once had an assignment to write a story about beachcombing in Holland which I took so seriously that I scoured the beaches until I found an actual message in a bottle. 

By reputation, I am a rule follower, too. I never got in trouble at school. I find it abhorrent when people change lanes without indicating. On family hikes, I make sure we do not leave so much as the corner of a Hi-Chew wrapper behind. My respect for protocol is why I’ve found success in baking—I take instruction well and my measurements are precise to the gram. 

But I also like to break rules. I think I inherited a streak of oppositional defiance. I go in doors marked “out.” I don’t always declare my fruits and nuts at customs. There is a certain turn on Highway 35 on the east side of Flathead Lake in which I steer our hail-damaged Nissan Versa into the opposite lane because it makes me feel, for one thrilling moment, like I am driving a European sports car in the Dolomites.

Through my reactive self-analysis, I was learning about myself, and for a time I knew peace. Perhaps inspired by our conversation, the Bag Man stopped leaving the bags in the middle of the trail and started piling them at the trailhead. Their containment made them easier to overlook. Bagger’s gonna bag, I told myself. Let that shit go. The mountain was big enough for us both. 

About a year later I noticed the Bag Man had started leaving notes next to the bags. It felt unfairly one-sided, the way every trail user was subject to the berating of one anonymous crank. Annoyance growing in me anew, I started dreaming up ways to respond. Should I sneak down in the dead of night and leave a deposit of my own on one of his notes? Would that be a criminal offense? I settled on a neutral act of resistance. At the end of my walk, if no one was around, I’d collect his bags and his note, and I’d put them in the garbage. Negativity erased. 

Then the notes got meaner. Instead of the usual, “These are feces left on this trail yesterday,” the notes now read, “Filthy people left these on the trail yesterday.”

Filthy people? My blood warmed. Others noticed the shift in tone, too. One day I arrived at the trail and found someone had left the Bag Man a note of their own.

“Please seek therapy,” it read. “I hike this trail every a.m. and don’t see shit everywhere. Look for shit—you’ll find it. Stop looking for shit and calling people filthy.”

It was signed with a heart.

To be clear, the Bag Man’s cause is universal. Recently, in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles, small flags have appeared in piles of uncollected dog poop. The flags are inscribed with messages such as: “NO,” “Who raised you?” and “Must be nice to be such a lazyass.”

In 2014, a 68-year-old man from Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, grew so tired of seeing dog poop on his favorite trail that he collected several pounds worth in a paper bag and deposited it on the desk of his county commissioners during a municipal meeting.

Across the pond, a private investigator and father of two in southeastern England set up high-end surveillance cameras on trees and in cans of Coke to catch negligent dog walkers. Tabloids dubbed him “the poop snooper.” Elsewhere in England, a man was asked to refrain from spray-painting white circles around dog poop on a public asphalt footpath.

Nothing beats the response in Spain, though. In 2013, residents of the town of Brunete, a suburb of Madrid, grew so tired of uncollected dog poop that they organized an undercover poop patrol. When a pet owner walked away from their dog’s poop, members of the patrol would approach and strike up a friendly conversation. Once they learned the name of the person and the dog, they returned to city hall to cross reference their address in a pet registry. Then the volunteers delivered the poop to that person’s doorstep with a note saying, “Lost property.” The program led to a 70 percent decrease in offenses, according to the town’s mayor. 

It’s easy to understand why the issue stirs people up. Dog poop is vile. “A little bit goes a long way,” as my Aunt Sarah says. A typical sample can contain salmonella, E-coli, giardia, tapeworms, roundworms, hookworms, whipworms, parvo, campylobacter and even coronavirus. These pathogens stay in the soil years after the poop has decomposed. The Environmental Protection Agency classifies dog waste as a nonpoint source pollutant, in the same category as pesticides, oil and toxic chemicals.

“There’s over 2 million particles of bacteria in one ounce of dog waste,” said Marie Nelson, stormwater program specialist for the city of Missoula. “It spreads diseases to pets and humans.”

In order to keep Missoula compliant with its municipal stormwater and sewer systems permit, Nelson conducts public outreach about pet waste at the farmers’ market, at the university, wherever anyone will listen. She’s found people have a lot to say on the subject.

“You could stop anybody at any point and ask, ‘What do you think about dog poop?’ and you’d have a half-hour conversation,” Nelson told me.

The national scale of the issue is staggering. There are as many as 89 million dogs in the U.S., collectively manufacturing about 24.4 billion pounds of poop each year—more than the weight of 33 Empire State Buildings. It makes you wonder what madness moves us to care for these animals. 

“You could stop anybody at any point and ask, ‘What do you think about dog poop?’ and you’d have a half-hour conversation.”

Proper poop disposal is critical in Missoula due to the number of dogs, Nelson said. According to one survey, 80 percent of Missoula households have at least one dog. There are about 31,000 licensed dogs in the county. Many more are unlicensed.

Missoula also has an abundance of trails next to rivers and creeks. It even has a dog park, Jacob’s Island, in the middle of the Clark Fork. Picking up dog poop keeps it out of waterways, Nelson said, where the nitrogen and phosphorus contribute to algae blooms that deplete the water’s oxygen. What’s more, when dog waste ends up in the untreated stormwater system, it can leach through Missoula’s rocky soil and into the aquifer from which we draw our drinking water.

Nelson, who has a 10-month-old Cavapoo named Watson that “looks like a teddy bear and a chicken tender had a baby,” said it’s hard to get people to do the right thing.

“Nobody wants to pick up poop,” she said. “Of course, nobody wants to step in poop, either. And the myriad of other issues that people don’t really think about.”

One of the most effective ways to encourage dog cleanup, Nelson has found, is positive peer pressure. When I told her about the Bag Man, her response was mixed. 

“The name-calling I don’t think is the best route to go,” she said. “There’s a certain amount of calling attention to the behavior that needs to happen, but I think there’s a way to do it in a more positive aspect. You catch more flies with honey.”

In a community-minded town like Missoula, picking up your dog’s poop is one of those rules that almost goes without saying. At the Cherry Street trailhead where the Bag Man leaves his notes, an innocuous brown Parks & Recreation sign reminds trail users to stay on designated trails, to not pick wildflowers and to dispose of their dog waste. I can’t imagine anyone reads it.  

Holli Hargrove, Missoula’s animal control manager, said dog poop collection laws are almost impossible to enforce. In Missoula, animal control and police can issue criminal misdemeanor citations for people who don’t pick up after their pets. The offense carries a fine of up to $500, but citations are rare, given the amount of evidence needed to prove an offender guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

“I wish you could find that magic solution,” Hargrove said. “It’s so frustrating on so many levels. It’s so disrespectful to own a pet and not clean up after it.”

Hargrove has spent many late nights on the internet, reading 40-page reports on how other communities have tackled this problem. Some have deployed clever signs that say, “You’re on duty when they go doody,” or, “Free yoga! Bend over and pick up your dog waste.” Towns have held competitions between neighborhoods on trail tidiness, and hosted parties for the winners. Other towns have paid bounties in the form of lottery tickets when people bring in their dog’s poop.

Hargrove has a 10-year-old dog named Cash, a stray that no one collected. She talks about his poop collection with the solemnity of an Army Ranger. “I can honestly say I’ve never left a pile behind,” she told me.

Sometimes, when Hargrove is off-duty, she’ll see someone walking away from their dog’s poop. “I’ve jumped out of my car and said, “Hey, do you need a bag?,’” she said. “I’ve never had anybody be rude about it. They’ve always cleaned it up.”

To Hargrove, one of Missoula’s greatest strengths—the extent of its trails—is also one of its weaknesses, all the more area for people to not clean up after their pets. This negligence soils the next user’s experience.

“Instead of being out there and enjoying the view and scenery, you’ve gotta watch your feet so you don’t step in any of those little land mines,” she said.  

When Hargrove tells people what she does for a living they assume she must love animals. She does. She fosters litters of kittens and dogs who’ve had surgeries. Even after a long day at work, she’d rather watch a litter of puppies play than TV. But in truth, Hargrove spends most of her work hours with humans, and those are the most baffling animals of all.

Jeff Gicklhorn, conservation lands program manager for Missoula Parks & Recreation, is “very aware” of the Bag Man, having seen his signs and poop piles. To the staff-members tasked with cleaning up that trailhead, the Bag Man is like a guerilla hero.

In lieu of public shaming, however, Gicklhorn favors a principle the U.S. Forest Service uses, called the “authority of the resource.” In that model, people communicate first about how a behavior affects the resource (in this case Mount Jumbo) rather than how they personally feel about it.

Missoula has almost 5,000 acres of open space and more than 70 miles of recreation trails with 144 separate access points. Parks & Rec services 53 trash cans at trailheads all around the city. In the last fiscal year the city spent $50,000 providing plastic “Mutt Mitts” for people to clean up after their pets at trailheads or in city parks. 

One ubiquitous trail transgression is the dog walker who bags their pooch’s poop only to leave it on the side of the trail, perhaps to collect later. Many of these bags are abandoned. To address this, Parks & Rec has started buying conspicuous pink and yellow bags that are harder to forget. 

There are as many as 89 million dogs in the U.S., collectively manufacturing about 24.4 billion pounds of poop each year—more than the weight of 33 Empire State Buildings.

For the last six years, the City of Missoula and the U.S. Forest Service have partnered to employ a front-country trail ranger to patrol conservation lands and educate users on proper trail use, including dog waste collection. But one ranger can’t be everywhere at once, and Gicklhorn appreciates the public pitching in. “I would say anything that individuals are willing to do to help us as managers and to help the lands, is inherently positive,” he said.

So, I asked, is there any wiggle room? If you’re miles along a trail, is it better to leave your dog’s poop to decompose rather than contain it in single-use plastic destined for a landfill? To Gicklhorn, no. “I would expect and request people pick up every single dog poop,” he said. When he walks his Shetland sheepdog, Mac, Gicklhorn will bag his shit and then stash the bag in his pocket, so he can reuse it later if Mac takes another dump.

“Yes it can be smelly,” he said, “but it’s part of picking up after your dog.”

Gicklhorn’s black-and-white take is understandable, given his job. But it didn’t illuminate to me the nuanced relationships many people have with rules. Gicklhorn used words like “trash receptacle,” “cumulative impacts,” and “fecal coliform.” I recognized it as the virtuous diction of a born-and-bred rule follower. To Gicklhorn, not picking up after your pet is a violation of ordinance MMC 6.07.430. Pure and simple. 

To me, the story of the Bag Man is about more than poop. It’s a story about obsession and the mysteries of human behavior. It’s a story about the rules we write down and the rules that go unspoken. It’s about community, shame and our delicate social bonds. Almost all of us have been on both sides of this. We’ve all felt the chagrin of being called out for breaking a rule, and at some point, we’ve all wanted to call out others for their bad behavior. Most can agree: People should pick up their dog poop. But the story of the Bag Man is about what we should do when they don’t. 

Martha Newell lives near the trailhead, too. She can see the Bag Man’s house from hers. Newell walks the trail twice a day and also picks up poop, in an old bread bag, which she puts in the dumpster at the end of her walk. She told me she appreciates the Bag Man’s labor, even if she doesn’t always condone his tactics. 

“My only issue with it is he uses a fresh plastic bag with every poop,” she said. “I know he’s making a visual point. I just think it’s insane to put poop in fresh, separate bags.”

Sometimes Newell hikes the trail in the evening to sweep it for poop so the Bag Man won’t use as much plastic in the morning. “Maybe I’m obsessed, too,” she admitted. 

Often, though, she’s surprised when the next morning the Bag Man has eight bags at the trailhead. “He really must have to look around to find those,” she said. “I think it’s fascinating. As a guy without a dog, he spends a lot of time thinking about this stuff.”

Newell said it takes tolerance to share a town and a trail with other people. “We’re all adults,” she said. “We come down different ways on issues.” Like it or not, the Bag Man is a figure in her life. By now, if a few days go by and Newell doesn’t see any bags or notes, she wonders about him, if he’s sick, maybe, or out of town.

So, what about those of us who follow the rules, most of the time, and chafe when a neighbor polices our trail use? After all, it wasn’t just me who was perturbed by the Bag Man’s finger-wagging. What about the note at the trailhead, the one that told the Bag Man to “stop looking for shit and calling people filthy?”

The day after that note appeared, the Bag Man responded. He photocopied the note left for him and typed this message above it: “Thank you for your note. It is nice to see someone appreciate the removal of the daily dump of dog feces. And, you are correct. I should not call people filthy, when leaving feces lying around is more characteristic of a sociopathic behavior.”

The gloves were off.

The thing about dogs is they’re an extension of yourself, much like children can be. Rightly or wrongly, the public will judge you on their behavior. Wherever your dog goes, there you are. 

I was on the fence about getting another dog after our old one, Annie, died. I’m generally wary of acquiring more responsibility in life. A dog would hamper our freedom to travel. And yet, some of the best things in life require an exchange of some freedom for responsibility—my children are Exhibits A and B in this regard. Two Christmases ago I relented and drove with my family to the Thompson Falls shelter to pick up a Blue Heeler puppy. 

Today that puppy is a year-and-a-half and 40 pounds, with Yoda ears and a merle coat that brings to mind a snowstorm over a wheat field. We call her Agatha. She’s scrappy, loyal and when she presents her belly for a scratch, she smells to me of cooked rice.

“She’s friendly!” I shouted at the UPS man at our door the other day as she ferociously yapped at his shins. This is among her flaws: the vigilance with which she protects our home. Another is her appetite. When she feels underfed, she will scavenge from the counter loaves of sourdough bread, sticks of butter, our children’s Easter candy or, once, a Costco-sized block of parmesan cheese. She’s not perfect. Loving her is learning to take the good with the bad. 

We’ve all felt the chagrin of being called out for breaking a rule, and at some point, we’ve all wanted to call out others for their bad behavior. 

I work from home, glued to the computer writing stories about dog poop and other subjects, and during this time, Agatha sleeps on the couch in what I can only describe as a state of absolute despair. Sometimes she’ll sigh deeply, her body draped across the cushions like the heroine in a Greek tragedy, and I am struck by the absurdity that humans ever decided to invite wolves into their homes. That’s when I know it’s time for a walk.

As domestic as she is—she sleeps on our bed—Agatha is also wild, a side of her that comes to life outside, on a trail. To create the blue heeler breed, Australian ranchers bred sheep dogs with wild dingoes. When she’s on the mountain it’s as if a part of Agatha remembers being a dingo again; she is invigorated by the smells, the wind and the meadowlarks. Being a herding animal, she is good at staying close and she’ll patiently shepherd me up the mountain without the need of a leash. It feels like cathartic healing for her long hours on the couch.

Last month, Agatha and I were spending more time on the mountain because I was looking for the Bag Man. I’d been thinking about writing this story and I knew I needed his side of it all. I wanted to hear why he did what he did and how he got started. I wasn’t sure if he remembered me from our confrontation four years ago, but I knew approaching him would take some tact. 

Finally we crossed paths. I stopped and said hello, all smiles, and explained that I wanted to write about dog poop on the trail and what he’d been doing about it. I wanted to hear his side of the story. The wonderful thing about humans is that, given an opportunity, they’re almost always willing to talk. If the Bag Man recognized me, he didn’t mention it. He suggested I call that afternoon, when he got back from the gym. So I did. 

At first I asked about his life. Then I turned to the note someone had left for him, from the person who walks the trail every morning but doesn’t see poop like he does. What was it like for him to see it?

“It was a bit of a shock,” he told me. “But you can’t help but laugh.”

The Bag Man said the reason the note leaver didn’t see poop was because he had been picking it up. “It wasn’t really a mean kind of note,” he said. “Whoever did it left a little heart on the bottom, which was nice.”

Reaching for common ground, I told him that when I’m hiking in the spring I’m similarly focused on the sides of the trail, looking for morels. Remembering the satisfaction of finally finding one, I asked the Bag Man if he felt similarly each time he noticed another pile of poop. 

“There’s no thrill,” he bristled. “This is not a pleasant task. I don’t enjoy picking up feces. No. This is not fun. I am not obsessed with poop, and no, I don’t need therapy.”

The Bag Man said his real motivation is public service. “It’s doing my part,” he said. “I get to use a beautiful mountain, so that’s what I have to do. To pay for it.”

I pointed out that his behavior might make some people defensive, as the note-leaver had made clear. “Well that’s their problem, isn’t it?” he said. “If they’re offended by it, should I really care? Who’s misbehaving, the person leaving the dog waste, or the person picking it up?”

Still, he seemed to have taken some of the note’s message on board.

“I don’t enjoy picking up feces. I am not obsessed with poop, and no, I don’t need therapy.”

“I don’t need to call people names,” he allowed. But he defended his use of the word sociopathic in his response. “There are rules in every society,” he said. “There’s lots of rules that we’re expected to comply with in order to get along with people around us. One of the rules we’ve thought important enough to codify in ordinances is that you are required to pick up your dog’s waste.”

I was feeling a little implicated, because just that morning Agatha had taken a small poop beside the trail that didn’t seem to warrant the thick plastic Mutt Mitt I had tied to the leash. I looked around. Spying no one, I put a rock over it. The Bag Man didn’t see me do this. But he has seen me with Agatha off-leash, following the spirit of the law, if not the letter. Enforcing Missoula’s leash ordinance (6.07.618) is another pet project of the Bag Man’s. He’s well-versed in the specifics. During the winter closure period on Mount Jumbo, he reminded me, dogs are expected to be on-leash at all times. During the summer, the first 200 yards of the trail are a leash zone and afterward dogs must be on voice control.

“If you read what that means, under those nasty little rules, voice command also means your dog needs to stay within 75 feet of you,” he said, something he sees many dog owners flagrantly ignore.

The Bag Man compares his work on the mountain to clearing weeds. “You’re never gonna get rid of leafy spurge on Mount Jumbo,” he said, “but you can do things hopefully to keep them under control. I was hoping people’s behavior would change with my little sign, but,”—and here he broke into a dry laugh—“people are people.”

The Bag Man’s contempt for the average person’s untidiness could be traced back to his former career managing a building at the University of Montana. “You have to realize,” he told me, “I spent 35 years supervising a custodial crew. So yeah, I’ve been picking up after people for a long time.”

“So, in a way, you haven’t really retired,” I ventured.

“Oh, shut up,” he said. I’m pretty sure he was joking.

Our conversation was already teetering on tetchy. But something about his answers wasn’t completely satisfying to me. It was like he wanted it both ways. He wanted to leave embittered notes at the trailhead and yet claim the mantle of a humble public servant. He wanted to chuckle at people’s behavior, and yet he seemed enraged by it. So I pressed him once more. Was he having a worse experience on the mountain because he was searching for shit? 

“That’s not what happens,” he protested. “That’s not what I’m doing.”

He paused, seemingly considering something. 

“It kind of sounds like you’re parroting the person who left the note,” he said. 

And then, on reflection, “The handwriting seemed like a woman’s.”

The handwriting was a woman’s. I know because the other day she called me.

After seeing the correspondence between the Bag Man and this other trail user, I decided to leave a note of my own at the trailhead. “I’m a journalist writing a story about dog poop on this trail,” my note read. “Call or text if you’d like to share your thoughts!”

A couple days later I got this text: “Hi Jacob, My name is Denise and I am the one who left the note to the poop guy that stalks the L trail. Are you really writing a story about it?” Then she called.

Denise is 57. She lives in the neighborhood and regularly walks the “L” Trail with her 5-year-old mutt, Bofur. She knows who the Bag Man is. She says hi to him on the trail. Her friends and family have heard all about him.

“This is gonna sound so weird,” she told me, “but he’s really been a good example of a bad example for me. I understand people need to pick up their poop. Totally get it. Especially if it’s right off the trail or on the trail. But most dogs don’t go right on the trail. They go off the trail. He’s actually walking, looking for poop. That is insane to me. Who does that?”

He hasn’t always bagged it, either, Denise told me. When he first got started, he would flick the poop to the center of the trail. “Next-level passive aggressive,” Denise said. One day another trail user, a man with a big, beautiful dog, “had it out with him,” Denise said. (The Bag Man denied ever doing this.)

Denise is a house cleaner, so she’s accustomed to picking up after people, too. She doesn’t mind the disorder. “People are living their lives,” she said. “Of course their houses are gonna be messy. My house is messy, too. We’re all just trying to do our best.”

Denise told me that she views people as mostly good and when the Bag Man started calling other trail users “filthy,” she couldn’t stay silent any longer.

“Believe it or not, the Poop Guy story has gone around my recovery circle quite a bit.”

“Some people can barely function,” she said. “They don’t have enough wherewithal, they just have a dog. They’re walking a dog. Maybe they’ve lost somebody. Maybe they’re depressed, or they’re anxious, or they have substance abuse. Why are we calling people filthy if they don’t pick up their dog shit?”

Denise acknowledged that telling the Bag Man to seek therapy “probably wasn’t the nicest thing to say.” But she wasn’t being flippant. Denise told me she’s in a 12-step recovery program, which is why she asked that I not use her last name. She knows what it’s like to be flawed, to be judgmental and focused on the negative in the world around her. And she knows what it means to get help. 

“Believe it or not, the Poop Guy story has gone around my recovery circle quite a bit,” she said. “The guy is like a metaphor for me. If I’m gonna spend my life looking for bad things and negative things, I can certainly find them.”

She said the topic has also come up when talking to her 86-year-old mother, who remarried in the last 10 years and now watches too much Fox News. “She’s always like, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s so much crime,’” Denise said. “I’m like, ‘You’re fine! You’re upper-middle class and live in Connecticut. You’re not affected. Stop looking for the poop!”

Her annoyance with the Bag Man notwithstanding, Denise said people often connect with his quest. 

“Honestly, people have sympathy for him,” she said. “He’s a sympathetic figure. And in a weird way, he is to me, too. There is a type of person that is so earnest and righteous that I have sympathy for them, because it’s a hard way to be in the world.”

This made me think. The Bag Man is sticking his neck out, albeit anonymously, to do what he thinks is right. He could ignore the poop. He could dispose of it with pious invisibility. Instead he is looking at something that he thinks is wrong, and he’s speaking out. Surely a similar zeal ran through the changemakers of history. The holy can be hard to handle, though. 

“There are the rule followers, right, and then there’s the rest of us,” Denise told me. “I put my grocery cart back, but I don’t always have my dog on a leash. Maybe that’s it. I don’t like being reminded that I’m not a rule follower.”

When Denise saw the Bag Man’s response to her, the one that called the behavior more “sociopathic” than “filthy,” she said the fight left her. She left the Bag Man one final message. “You win!” she wrote. “Enjoy a life of looking for shit.”

The other day I took a walk on the Milwaukee Trail to pick up a car that was in the shop. In the decaying leaves and melting snow at the trail’s edge, not far from the Clark Fork, I saw pile after pile of soggy dog shit. By comparison, our “L” Trail was clean enough to eat from. I might bemoan his methods, but the Bag Man’s results are clear to see. 

As I walked, I considered what the Bag Man had told me, and what he hadn’t. He said he only gets positive reactions on the trail, which I know to be false. He said people are funny, but I don’t think he’s laughing. He said he doesn’t enjoy it, but I suspect with every pile he picks up he feels gratified to be proven right, that people are arrogant and incorrigible, and but for him we would be swimming in the refuse of our own pets.  

He’s a rule man. OK. Maybe, like Denise, I don’t want to be confronted with my moral inconsistencies. Maybe I want to be understood as more than the rules that I break. Maybe the Bag Man wants to uphold the rules lest everything else fall apart. Rules are an approximation of the values we share. They’re one way of saying, “Look, this is what it’s going to take to live together.” I get that. But grander notions govern us, too. 

When we spoke on the phone I was struck by the relentlessness of his labor. I thought of the demoralizing life of Sisyphus, whose wearisome labor is undone each day. I asked the Bag Man, does he ever just take a day off?   

“When there’s a brand-new snowfall, overnight, it covers the previous day’s stuff,” he said. “It’s a vacation day. It’s nice to have a vacation.”

In the eight years he’s been doing this, the Bag Man said he hasn’t seen any change in people’s behavior. But I have. I’m now more vigilant about Agatha’s poop, lest I give the Bag Man more evidence for his conclusions about people, about me. I aim to be unassailable. Recently—and reader, I know this is rich—recently I have started picking up other people’s dog poop to deny the Bag Man the satisfaction of finding it the next day. In the end, the Bag Man reveals more about us than about himself.

“I’m not going up there searching for poop like they say,” the Bag Man told me. “I probably would need therapy at that point. I go up there to enjoy the mountain, man. I go up there and get that first jolt of Montana in my face every morning. It’s a great way to start the day.”

I want to believe it. It’s the same reason I go up the mountain, the same reason we all do. But he is looking for poop. For better or worse, this is the battle he has picked, the line he’s carved in the mud. When I asked the Bag Man how collecting poop has affected his opinion of people, he let out a mirthless laugh.

“Oh, people are fun,” he said. “Their behavior can be awful bizarre, but benign. People are usually more entertaining than not, even when they’re doing something you disagree with.”