What’s got me so grumpy is that I took a walk the other day through some beautiful countryside and had it spoiled by a philistine (that’s about the nicest thing I can call him). East Montpelier Trails is a nonprofit organization that’s slowly and with a tremendous amount of backbreaking labor developing a trail system through the forests and fields of this 32-square-mile town. There are parking pulloffs at the trailheads, a map showing the various routes, and little plastic markers to guide first-time hikers. I’d never tried out any of the trails; so yesterday, a bright, sunny one between the mud and the mosquitoes, I asked Mother if she’d like to trek a couple of miles. About two in the afternoon we drove the truck to our chosen trailhead. And shortly after that I began to go through all the bad names we have for lowlifes.

I’m frequently amazed at what a catalog – what a thesaurus! – we carry in our heads for people who offend us: neanderthals, apes, numskulls, oafs, hammerheads, vandals (that one’s been around since Roman times), huns (ditto), and knuckle-draggers.

A few rods into the woods, we spotted the trail registration box fastened to a tree. The reason it’s a few rods into the woods is that, if it were at the parking area, it would be ripped off or destroyed in no time at all by lazy louts who perhaps think hikers elitists who need to be frustrated. As we approached the box, we could see that some playful primate had shot at it. There were bullet holes right through the box and the logbook inside, and into the tree behind. Something a little peppier than a .22, most likely. Upset me a lot. That chowderhead is just the kind of nimrod that gives us law-abiding gun owners a bad reputation and gets land posted by its offended owners. I entered our names on a perforated page, noting that others before me had commented on the intelligence of the nitwit with the rifle.

About 150 yards farther on, Mother suddenly lurched to her left and gasped loudly. I thought perhaps a partridge had frightened her – they’ll do that – but when I looked, I spotted what she’d seen: a dead coyote, a bullet hole in its shoulder, buzzing with flies and displayed beside the trail. It looked so much like the dog we buried not long ago that the pain of seeing it was visceral. “Why?” asked Mother. “Why would anybody shoot it?”

“Probably because it happened to move. Some idiots shoot anything that does. Or maybe it’s some sort of righteous crusade against competing predators. The imbecile that shot it was probably upset that it was eating the field mice he was saving for Thanksgiving.”

You see how easily a catalog of derogatory terms scrolls through our consciousness? Those last two – idiot and imbecile – are internationally recognized; they’re French. (I hear them often when I drive over there.) There are others – Dummkopf, Halunke, and hoodlum, from the German; Infamato from Italian – but all of them fall short of describing what we feel at seeing such reflexive, slack-jawed malignancy. All we can do in the face of it is fume and regret the darkness that’s fallen over an otherwise sunny day.

We had a sneak thief in our neighborhood a few weeks ago, who went into garages, rifled through vehicles parked in driveways, took whatever portables were of value to him, and tossed the rest into the snow. He got nine bucks’ worth of quarters out of the cup holder in my truck. The cops caught the malignant moron. My nine bucks is but minor history, but the larcenous lout stole much more than that; he stole peace of mind. We’re now installing alarm systems and motion-sensing yard lights, locking vehicles and doors, and lamenting our loss of innocence and trust.

It’s amazing how many more negative terms we possess for our fellow humans, and – to paraphrase the Bard – how trippingly on the tongue they appear, especially when applied to those we consider for various reasons different from or beneath us. Thus, during the great wave of Irish immigration, we started calling the rabble hooligans (from Houlihan); amid the eastern European immigration during the Industrial Revolution, the corpse-robbers after the great Johnstown Flood were all “Hungarians”; and lately we’ve developed pretty vicious sobriquets for immigrants from Central America and the Middle East – as if we weren’t ourselves all descendants of immigrants.

Still, passing a bright yellow road sign peppered with shotgun pellets, or coming upon a pile of beer cans and McDonald’s containers in a ditch, or spotting a mailbox smashed to smithereens, it’s difficult not to think we’re going backward as a species. All we can do, I guess, in response to those yahoos (another great epithet, from Jonathan Swift) is just keep picking up after them – I’m going to go out and drag the dead coyote farther off into the woods – show up for the cleanup on May Day, and hope that eventually my great store of derogatory terms will be rivaled in size and quality by a positive one. But somehow “sweetheart” isn’t as much fun to say as “nincompoop.”