On Walking

There are dozens of people who are more fit to talk to you about walking than I am.  I'm thinking of Thoreau, whose title I stole--actually he just calls his popular essay "Walking" as if he were an expert on the practice--which he was.  Part of what his radically simplified life earned him, both during and after Walden, was time to walk the woods and wetlands and fields around Concord, so that he created one of the first portraits of an ecology before that word even existed.  As he was dying of tuberculosis at 44, he made tables out of his extensive journals so he could tell you with a great deal of accuracy when the skunk cabbage bloomed in the spring or when you could safely walk across the ice of Walden Pond in early winter.  While Louis Agassiz still believed that woodlands spontaneously erupted, Thoreau could explain to Concord's farmers, who held a meeting just so they could ask him about it, the succession of trees:  why, when they cut down a pine forest, oak sprang up.  Or when they cut down oaks, pines replaced them. He knew intimately the creatures who were forests' midwives, so he could imagine squirrels burying acorns in a pine forest, for example.  

I had to walk for my health.  Anyone advising you on how to keep your physical, mental and cognitive health in old age will tell you to walk.  So on January 1, my New Year's resolution--one of two--and I always keep my resolutions because I always make resolutions that will make my life better--was to become a woman who walked.  Little did I know that my health would make that more difficult, more painful, and more necessary. But after 74, the less I say about my health, the better.  It's quite boring, actually, especially since I'm largely healthy.  But in April, if you spread the number of steps I walked three or four times a week over seven days, I was averaging about 1200 steps a day--a paltry amount.  How did it come to this?  How did old habits disappear and new habits inveigle their way into my life so that I stopped walking the marvelous creek bank just a block from my house?  Avoid inveigling habits, those subtle changes to your routines that have outsized effects on your everyday lives! 

Now I'm averaging the recommended 4000 steps every day of the week and remembering why I love it, in spite of the fact that it was often painful and dispiriting. Maybe one reason writers are also walkers, especially poets, is that our lives in our studies, reading and writing, mostly take place in our heads.  If the sky is grey and if I think another hour in front of the computer is going to give me a day's writing that's worth something, I won't be tempted to walk, particularly since in the early days I was weak and my feet felt full of hot bees.  But even on grey days, it's more luminous outdoors.  And soon I got into that human rhythm of putting one foot (mostly but not entirely) smoothly in front of another. My vertigo was another issue, but I decided that a white-haired woman who walked with energy and a cane was more youthful than a white-haired woman who was stooped and hesitant. Just the air and light and movement were a tonic.  I felt as if I was practicing freedom.

When you are living in your head, what constitutes an event?  I honestly don't know.  I suppose it's a surprising moment of inspiration or some kind of breakthrough.  Certainly there's joy:  in my case the joy of getting up each morning and trying to get words to beautifully do my bidding, which might happen once or twice a day.  But at its best, this is flow, not event.

Whereas if you are crossing College Avenue, cane in hand, and a young man speeding down Garnet Street on a skateboard--there's actually a hill there!--yells "Are there any cars coming?" and you look both ways very carefully and holler back "No!" that's an event. You're a tiny part of someone's delight.  Or there is a husband and wife living on Cameron Street close to the bridge over the creek that maintain the most magical garden (which is where the photographs above come from).  One day as I was walking by, the gardener put his finger to his lips and then crooked it to draw me closer.  A bird was warbling in the trees.  "An American Goldfinch," he whispered to me.  "They come this time of year for the sunflowers." Or the time I crossed the bridge to find a pack of four or five dog owners introducing their dogs to one another, a couple of the dogs not sure whether they liked each other.  They were right in my path, but I thought walking into uneasy dogs was not a good idea.  I had time.  It was a beautiful day and I was glad to be outside, an observer to this social occasion.  Soon someone noticed me waiting and there were apologies all round, to which I responded "That's okay.  I got my own private Westminster Dog Show."  This cracked them up:  the dogs were all mutts.

But the more I walked, the more "events" became smaller, subtler.  Like the fact that on a windy day, every plant or leaf or sheaf of grass responds differently, has a different relationship to air.  Or the sounds of crickets or cicadas, and the rhythms they sometimes made together. Or the dragonflies, their iridescent shades of gold and blue and rust and wine red.  I'm so aware of their eyes, how they have a 360 degree view of the world that echoes mine when I feel overwhelmed. Or a single golden aspen leaf would see-saw down a current of air, redefining event altogether.  The march of time became drifting leaves.

I bought my house on College Avenue partly because of the creek bank.  The more I walked this summer, the more I realized there is a kind of community there.  You actually meet people out for a walk, not trying to get quickly from A to B but to immerse yourself in natural beauty--from the roses that fragrantly line the northern bank in the spring to the goats that trimmed those roses late this summer.  So we make eye contact or say hi. There's a kind of code because we are here for the same reason.  Sometimes we'll have seen someone often enough to start a conversation. There's one elderly man who walks his small dog who stops and faces you so to go past him is simply rude.  So you stop.  Last week he told me that he should be the one on the leash since "she" decides where they're going.  "No," I told him.  "This is perfect.  A dog is serendipity on a leash, and at our age we need serendipity in our lives."  He threw back his head and laughed.  "We sure do!" he crowed.

I'm a cat person who loves dogs, so if a dog is going to tug on its owner to take a sniff of my jeans, I'm likely to give it a good scratch.  When I did this last week, the owner asked if I had a cat or a dog at home.  I have two cats, I told him, and I'm lucky enough that one of them is a nursemaid cat who knows if I'm depressed or sick. I don't know why I told him that, except that cat people are inclined to brag about the abilities of their cats to dog walkers. "Are you depressed or sick now?" "No," I told him.  "Fist bump!" he said, raising his hand.  What gave him permission to ask that intimate question and celebrate the answer by grazing fists?  Katherine Arbuthnott tells me that when we're in nature, we're "pro-social," which is to say we're our best selves.  (This may not be true when we're at political rallies or in voting booths.)  That would explain something that happened about a month ago.

The weather ap on my phone told me that rain was coming in 42 minutes, and I needed to get my walk in, so I raced out the door and scurried up the bank:  twenty minutes out and back would give me the number of steps I needed.  Once on the bank, I could see the dark clouds in the southeast that glimmered occasionally with lightning.  As I was passing a low space to the east of the bank where dog owners often play with their dogs, I watched one man throw a frisbee improbably far.  His dog dashed for it so fast that he spent most of the time horizontal--all four feet off the ground.  Despite promontory rumbles, I stood to watch the two of them for a couple of minutes, calling down "A happy dog is a beautiful thing."  He nodded and then gestured toward the storm.  "I hope you're close to home," he said.  "I'm going the wrong way for home, but I needed to get a walk in," I told him.  "I get it," he said before whirling the frisbee again.  

 The lightning shifted and trembled more along the dark clouds in the southeast. I got to my halfway point, checked my pedometer, and turned homeward. By then I was alone on the bank. There had been that one very human touch--hope that I would be safe--and then I was alone with the weather. Now I couldn't see the lightning, but the thunder rolled along the dome of clouds and crackled along the edges.  It knocked on my skull, wanting in.  Then it knocked again, wanting out.  The aspens were agitated, but the grasses shifted serenely in the direction of the wind.  

To be honest, I've felt like an awkward three-legged troll with my cane and my awkward gait, but the weather didn't care and I had the landscape to myself. Turning into my back garden, I gathered up a handful of parsley, oregano, and marjoram for tonight's tomato sauce and got in the back door just as the skies opened.  How does my weather ap get the time just right?