Author: Geoff Ziezulewicz

Before she got into it, Sonja Tengdin thought her kids could scoop dog poop for money. “We started talking about it at the dinner table,” she recalled, winding around Lake of the Isles en route to her kids’ school one recent morning. “I said I’d pay them ten bucks. They refused. Then I thought, I’ll pay myself. How many can I get in an hour?”

A year and a half later, Sonja is one half of Scoopy Poo, a dog waste-removal service. For twelve dollars a week, Sonja and her partner Dan Myers will come to your lawn and do the job your stubborn kids will not do. Both have left the professional world for something a little, ahem, closer to the ground.

“I would never say this to a customer, but it isn’t that bad,” Sonja confided. “Two days outside, it’s dried up. You get maybe one or two fresh ones that are disgusting.”

Business is at its best (worst) in spring, when the snowdrifts bare the fruits of winter. “We’ve taken up to two hundred pounds out of yards,” Sonja said, alluding to the vernal harvest. “We have thirteen to fifteen bags of at least ten pounds each. And these are little Southwest Minneapolis yards! The dogs are working hard,” she said. “So are we.”

Scoopy Poo customers get a bag left on their doorknob that contains a couple of tootsie rolls, a dog biscuit, and a “poo haiku.” (Scoopy’s website has dozens, including such nuggets as “I watch where I step/Determined not to mash poo/Ugh, my cross trainers.”) Company stickers are printed with the slogan, “Always on Dootie.”

Southwest Minneapolis has become the business’s profit center. Sonja said she is chagrined that her Kenwood neighbors don’t use the service. She has some ideas why, though. Kenwood residents don’t get poopy lawns because they are aggressive dog-walkers: As a rule, they are self-scooping down at Lake of the Isles or Kenwood Park.

By contrast, Southwest Minneapolis dogs are more apt to poop where they live. Are their owners just lazy? “Well, they won’t walk across Xerxes to go to Lake Harriet,” Sonja allows. Other than Southwesterners, she said they have identified another prime demographic for their business: “The gay population, because dogs are extremely important to them, they have disposable income, and they are extremely particular about the way the yard looks,” she explained, after dropping the kids off and easing her Chevy Suburban out of the parking lot.

Sonja said the company tends to pursue the more upscale customers, and it shows—she wears a nice skirt and stylish jean jacket. “We try to project a certain image,” she said, scooping a few logs. “It’s not like it’s a hick from Hodunk, pulling up in a Gremlin with a cig in his mouth.”

Dan took the lead and Sonja followed, as they baby-stepped their way to a clean lawn. The first yard was heinous, but the next few on the route were relatively benign.

After they’ve walked the last yard following a thorough grid pattern, Sonja hangs a gift bag on the client’s door and Dan sprays off his boots. They hope to grow the business to the point where they don’t have a lot of contact themselves with the raw materials.

“We are interested in eventually franchising it and setting up around the country,” said Dan. Sonja added that Columbus, Ohio, has a flourishing scoop service. Why can’t Minneapolis? “They have seven hundred scoops a week!” she said. Scoopy Poo currently picks up about fifty yards a week.

“Our goal is for Dan and I not to be scooping,” she said, throwing a partially loaded bag into the garbage. “Obviously, we have to put in the elbow work first, you know, whatever you call it, the hard work.”—Geoff Ziezulewicz

For years, Como Zoo has been the cheapest way to kill a Saturday afternoon. The zoo is one of the last vestiges of free entertainment in the cities. While enjoying this last ember of civic-minded fun, concerns inevitably arise about the welfare of the zoo’s inhabitants.

It has long been fashionable to worry about the conditions at Como, and things haven’t changed much in recent years. The other day, I took special note of the compulsive, repetitive acts of many of the zoo’s attractions. For starters, the polar bears and seals were swimming in endless, mindless circles. This behavior seemed to me to scream mental deterioration.

Dr. Petra Mertens of the University of Minnesota’s Veterinary College said the animals were exhibiting something called “stereotypy.” A product of confinement and sheer boredom, stereotypy results in abbreviated versions of an animal’s normal habits in the wild. Some claim such a coping mechanism releases endorphins, or is like meditation. Mertens said stereotypy is similar to obsessive-compulsive disorders in humans. “We don’t say ‘obsessive-compulsive’ because we don’t know if they obsess,” Mertens noted.

Seeking an explanation beyond science, The Rake hired animal communicator Mary Stoffel. Stoffel claims to be an animal psychic. I asked her to join me at the zoo to see if she could sort out what is on the animals’ minds. For a dollar a minute, Stoffel utilizes a technique called “extreme empathy.”

“I am not reading the animal’s mind, I am dependent on what the animal chooses to tell me,” said Stoffel, who has been a professional animal psychic for ten years and a “communicator” all her life.

Approaching two seals in an indoor pool, Stoffel picked up their natural seal names but was unable to pronounce them. “It’s like a series of whistles and clicks,” she said, squinting and bending down toward a seal that looked like a spotted, plump bratwurst. “The large one is very appreciative of the fact that we are at least asking for information, that we’re not making assumptions about them.”

As Stoffel conveyed this line of thought, the seal known as “Click Click Whistle” stopped his constant swimming and hovered near the bottom of the pool. He was apparently embarrassed by such a frank discussion of his emotions.

“He definitely knows we’re here and asking,” Stoffel said as we approached Tango (human name), a young seal in his own pool. As she squinted at him, Tango repeatedly came up and shook his head. Stoffel felt something was amiss with Tango’s ears or eyes. She asked him to come out of the water so she could see his head. Ten seconds later, Tango obliged. He heaved his slick, serpentine body onto a foot-wide ledge between the pool and the glass. He held his head, and Stoffel examined him. “Yeah, something is bothering his face,” she said.

Down the corridor, Neal the polar bear splashed on. He swims ceaselessly, sticking his head out of the water, gliding back, and doing a spot-on imitation of an Olympic swimmer hitting the wall and executing a flip turn. Neal does a full somersault before pushing off the wall with his big yellowed paws. The big guy exudes captured regality; he’s as graceful as Esther Williams.

“What I’m getting from him is mind-numbing boredom,” Stoffel said gravely. “He is totally zoned out and into his behavior. With this guy, we’re insignificant unless we’re feeding him.”

In the cat building, two lions slept on the cement floor like newlyweds, aware only of each other and oblivious to their humble dwelling. The male’s paw lay gently on the female’s face, and their other limbs entwined. “They feel good and are well fed, and they are aware of the fact that people care about them,” Stoffel said. “Out in the wild, there’s a very good chance they could both be injured or have festering sores.”

Normally, Stoffel does her animal communication by telephone, with the owner serving as the psychic conduit. The zoo can be hard. “I find it pretty distressing,” she admitted. “However, a lot of animals in the zoo have chosen this as their life mission.”

Stoffel dismissed the contention that being captured and hauled to St. Paul hardly seems like a choice for the animals. “Animals come into this world with a mission, same as people,” she maintained. “If they find themselves in a situation where it is intolerable for them, they find ways to check out. They either live, or check out by becoming ill, escaping, or dying.”—Geoff Ziezulewicz

As heads bobbed lazily in Cedar Lake, the Mud Man hopped along, letting the regulars at Hidden Beach know, “It’s ready.” He greeted late arrivals with a formal welcome: “Good afternoon!”

On the right day, when there’s just the right amount of water in the mud, the mixture sucks your feet in and produces hilarious flatulent noises. Mud fights among the willing are inevitable. After some nonpolitical mudslinging, the facial war paint is applied, like they do in Lord of the Flies and Fear Factor. This is followed by a full-body mud bath, a complete drying, and a final glorious dive into the water, leaving behind a wake of redistributed silt.

The mud at Hidden Beach could be a noxious brand of urban glop, containing sticks, rocks, and the sort of trash that proliferates in Minneapolis parks. But the Mud Man wouldn’t have that.

Stephen Vasseur is a landmark to regular beach dwellers. He speaks with a dramatic severity that instantly makes you think you’ve done something wrong. “I started coming down here more or less in the summer of ’93, but I started what you would call the caretaker assignment on a seasonal basis the following year, ’94,” he said, with an odd, unsolicited precision. Vasseur constantly monitors the pit for foreign objects, mostly sticks and beer cans. He is proud of the relative cleanliness of the mud, and he has a strong sense of ownership.

“I have never had any problems. There are some who have very sensitive body chemistries and who get what you would call an allergic reaction after playing in this stuff,” he said, diplomatically alluding to the occasional mud-transmitted rash. A friend of mine claimed that a bullhead in the mud pit once nipped him, but Vasseur had no knowledge of any bullheads in his domain.

“We occasionally get small sunfish and perch in here, but that’s only when the water levels are high,” he assured me. We waded in together. By way of conversation, Vasseur schooled me on the clearing of some trees leading up to the beach last year.

“In Aught-two, that’s when the Park and Rec forestry department had to clear the buckthorns, mulberry, and standing dead trees.” Now he was really getting warmed up. Words flew out of him in an abrasive but informative torrent. “But they had a problem. They only had five days on site, and that wasn’t enough time to do everything they wanted. That one big dead tree down there,” he said, pointing vaguely to about a half-acre of heavily wooded parkland, “the five days were up before they could get to that!” Vasseur looked and sounded like Dr. Emmett Brown in Back to the Future, but with thick glasses, shorter hair, and a beach cap.

The Mud Man is a resident of the Beltrami neighborhood, but he hops the bus (number 25) to the lake, “time and weather permitting.” As the season winds down, he will gear up for his wintertime vocation: He is a scoreboard operator and announcer for boy’s high school hockey.

Summer was fading around the edges, and a toddler squealed hysterically as her mother lowered her into the goop. Vasseur scooped up a handful of the good stuff and showed it to the child, who was soon chucking mud with gusto. Vasseur is not only a caretaker, but in a lazy, summertime kind of way, he’s an educator too. “This is something that God has given me to do on a seasonal basis,” he said. “And I will do the best I can.”
—Geoff Ziezulewicz