This Pace Is A Mode Of Being
On walking.
In the past few months I’ve forgotten how important walking is to me.
This might be surprising to hear, if you know anything about me, or if you’re one of the subscribers here who came to this newsletter after reading my book about walking a really long way.
But it’s true. You know how when you’ve had the fan above the stove on for a long time and you’ve sort of forgotten it’s on but your senses are all prickly and agitated? And then you finally remember to turn it off and this little wave of relief just washes over you? It’s sort of like that. Lately I’ve finally had the chance to take some new and interesting walks and it wasn’t until I was done with them that I realized how much better I felt than I had in a long time.
Moving from Seattle to Detroit has brought some wonderful new things into my life; make no mistake, I’m still very excited about this transition and the opportunities it continues to present. But while I had (correctly) anticipated badly missing the mountains and the old forests and all the hiking I could do in the northwest, what I had not foreseen was just how badly I’d also miss living in a place where you could just sort of walk everywhere if you wanted to.
If you’ve got some outdated1 notions about Detroit you might think I mean this from a “safety” perspective or whatever. What I really mean is that Detroit is so sprawling and so diffuse that nowhere I want or need to get, save for the houses of friends in my immediate neighborhood, is really in reasonable walking distance.2 What’s more, half the time there isn’t even really a sidewalk or any kind of direct path from A to B that you could access on foot. For the most part I’m learning that everything here is a ten-to-fifteen minute highway drive apart, even if A and B are both firmly within the city. In a place that was built not just for but literally by cars, perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. But it was to me.
Anyway, back to the walking. Over the weekend, back in my hometown for the holiday, I was able to go out and take one of those restorative walks, a hike with my wife and dog. It was lightly raining, which is not ideal if you have to be out there long-term but is perfect if you’re going to be warm indoors again in a few hours and want to be able to walk and think and experience a new side of things. I will obviously never complain about getting a chance to walk through the woods on a clear, sunny day. But there is something to be said about going to those same places in the rain.
Kim Stanley Robinson, in The High Sierra: A Love Story, writes:
There is time enough for a stream of consciousness that flows at the pace of walking. All the parts of your life, all the time scales, smoosh together. This pace is a mode of being: the walking pace, pedestrian and prosy. Thinking is pedestrian.
This is doubly true in the rain. It slows you down and forces you to think and be present. The rain changes the personality of the forest in very concrete and identifiable ways. The ferns in the undergrowth really seem to shine; their green gets a little brighter, and they seem to take on enlarged dimensions as they stand out gleaming from the litter of the forest floor. Fruiting bodies of mushrooms push through that same litter, sometimes almost fast enough to measure with your eyes, and add color and texture to the landscape.
Animals change their behaviors, too. Some shrink away and hunker down until the storm has passed, or at least seem only to be enduring it—see the crow on the branch preening and fluffing and preening and fluffing his damp feathers. But in the rain-loud woods other animals seem to thrive. You are never likelier to get close to a deer than you are when all other sound is muffled or erased by the rain; elk, too, you might walk right up on accidentally. Something about the woods feels safer in the rain and the animals seem to feel it, too.
The thing that’s hardest for me about all this walking in the woods is all the driving I have to do to get there. I have never minded driving but as various pathways solidify with age in my brain I have become more and more cognizant of how dangerous it is. I mean you are really counting not just on your own ability and reaction time but that of every other person behind the wheel in your general area. Lately I’ve been on the road a lot and it is just staggering how many people seem to be out there operating heavy machinery at high speeds while their eyes and attention are pointed at their phones. I have never taken a defensive driving course but my own anxiety and awareness of this phenomenon mostly seem to make up the difference.
And you have to develop frameworks to cope with this world of cars that’s been foisted upon us. I’ve lately been reminding myself that every time an accident slows traffic down and creates a minor annoyance for me, that same event is in some other person’s life the dividing moment between a “before” and an “after” from which they can never return. (It would be nice to get around in this country without bearing that existential responsibility, but alas.)
This is not to say I’m a misanthrope. As a seasoned road-tripper I have come to love the highway rest stop,3 the random intersections of people’s lives that these places create. People who were potential agents of one’s own demise or disaster a few moments ago are now standing around you in line at Burger King or wherever, reminding you—and hopefully themselves—that everyone in those other cars is also a person, with hopes and dreams and likes and dislikes. And that exact grouping of people will never be together on this planet again after each departs the stop. So each time I’m at one it’s something like a little cosmic party, one that I try to privately celebrate with each of them, even though they’ll never know it.
The days continue to grow colder and shorter. In the absence of warmth and sunlight the only thing that really makes me feel good is to get out on foot and go places, whether it’s to the woods or just to the coffee shop down the street. If you get bummed out and cranky this time of year maybe forcing yourself to walk a little each day—unrelated to your job, unbound from as many external needs as possible—might help you, too.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.
-Chuck
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To put it kindly.
And I would humbly submit that my definition of “reasonable walking distance” is somewhat longer than most people’s, so you can tell it’s a real issue here.
It should be noted that the thruway rest stops of Upstate New York kick the asses of every other place in this department. (Comparable but still slightly inferior are the onRoute stops along the 401 in Canada.) You don’t even have to exit I-90 to get all your needs met. In the summer some of them even have farmer’s market stands out front. Why other states haven’t instituted this system is beyond me.