In Dogged Pursuit of a State of Serenity

By Libby Copeland
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Sometimes, while she is raking dog do off people's lawns, Debbie Crowe achieves a meditative state.

What she's going for, she says, is the Zen doctrine of "no-mind," which she describes as "kind of a whiteout." Her hands are busy but her mind is blank, like the mind of a Buddhist monk. Her shoes get dirty but she, Debbie Crowe, remains clean.

She walks methodically in rows, "like a police line when they look for evidence." Every few feet . . .

"Watch out," she says. You freeze and look down.

She positions her dustpan. Tines scrape across the grass.

Occasionally, Crowe will pass a spot and see nothing, but on a return sweep, something changes -- the light? the leaves? -- and lo! There is a mound. There's one yard where this happens a lot, and Crowe considers the place "mystical." For a somewhat convoluted reason, she likes to compare it to an Incan temple she visited once in Peru.

"Now this is the sneaky part," she says, as she stares at the ground in the mystical yard, which happens to be on Dolomite Hills Drive in Ashburn. "I always miss something right around here."

She does a U-turn and comes back.

"There! There you go! I was just here . See this?"

The poop-scooping profession has been around for at least 17 years. There's a trade organization ("Welcome to the Association of Professional Animal Waste Specialists!") The companies tend to have names like Poop Masters.

DoodyCalls has five franchises; the main one operates in Northern Virginia with five employees. (Voice-mail message: "When nature calls, we answer.") It is run by a former technology consultant and his wife, a former nurse, and they charge, on average, $15 per yard per week. The pay starts at $12 an hour. The employees include Lenny, who's originally from Siberia and has an old-country degree that's most certainly not in animal-waste removal, and Kaled, an animal lover who reads Cat Fancy and puts treats in his pockets when he goes to work. Kaled is on a first-name basis with Bam Bam, a nice pit bull in Reston, as well as Anna in Vienna and Morgan in Centreville.

"Kaled says he doesn't even think about it anymore," Crowe says, and by "it," she means what they spend their days picking up. "That's like no-mind."

Her tongue is hot pink from diet Kool-Aid.

Crowe has two dogs and two cats. She believes she knows animals well, "like the crocodile hunter guy," offering as an example the time she predicted a dog was going to poop after it ate a fish at a picnic, and it did.

Years ago, Crowe dropped out of college to live among Buddhist monks. She went to Woodstock, although she didn't really intend to; it just kind of happened, she says, as if some big communal consciousness was leading her there. She and her former husband bought some mountaintop land in West Virginia so they could live out their fantasy of living on a mountaintop, but it turned out they could get up there only on foot or by helicopter. In the '80s, they bought an oyster farm but a blight killed the oysters.

For a while, Crowe arranged window and store displays for Sears, then she started working for the post office. She sorts mail between 5 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. five days a week. About a year ago, she decided to add a second job to pay for the renovations on her house in Manassas. Now she wakes up a few hours after she has gone to bed and pulls onto Sudley Road at daybreak, trying to beat the traffic. The back of her truck has a happy mustard-colored dog and the words, "GOT POOP? WE SCOOP!" At a red light, the woman next to her makes a disgusted face.

Crowe doesn't seem to care much what people think. One time, she gave a rude guy an evil stare, like this , she says, lifting her cowboy hat and making her eyes all hard.

In her downtime, Crowe directs her creative talents at her yard, which she is determined will look better than her neighbors' during the holidays.

One year, she says, she bought so many Christmas lights, her electric bill "was like 1,000 bucks for that month." She had to pay it in installments.

"I always get really extremely competitive Christmastime," she says.

Crowe approaches a house and puts a We've-Been-Here tag on the front door. The houses she visits this morning are all new, mostly beige with short little trees. Ratty dog toys lie limp in the dirt. Sometimes, homeowners watch her through windows and point out spots she's missed, though much of the time they're not home. Sometimes, when the temperature gets below freezing, Crowe has to use a shovel to get it off the ground. (At Christmastime, Crowe can tell when the dogs have been eating ornaments again.) Sometimes she has to share her space with the "lawn people," who are "nuts."

Sometimes, Crowe ponders koan, the unanswerable Buddhist questions. Instead of the more traditional ones, such as "what is the sound of one hand clapping," she makes up her own. As she struggles to open a fence held closed by a taut bungee cord, she says, "How come people don't fix their gates when they have such nice homes? That's a koan."

She sees a beautiful bird nest in a yard and it makes her think of all the dead frogs she saw in lawns this summer. She saw something on television about how dead frogs might be connected to pollution. She wonders if these homeowners ever come out and see their dead frogs and their bird nests.

"These guys, they have people coming in doing everything for them," she says. "Do they enjoy their property?"

Not that she blames them. They're not lazy. "They're busy making money," she says. Theirs are households in which both adults work. She wishes she were part of a two-income household, which is why she got a second job.

Now she drags a heavy garbage bag to her pickup, which bears a faint occupational aroma. Sometimes she puts it in a garbage can. Sometimes she takes it to the dump.

Funny thing -- those little dirt plugs people extract from their lawns to keep them aerated? They look just like dog do. After a while, you start to see the stuff everywhere. That's no-mind.