The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker
“Walking (also known as ambulation) is one of the main gaits of locomotion among legged animals, and is typically slower than running and other gaits. Walking is defined by an 'inverted pendulum' gait in which the body vaults over the stiff limb or limbs with each step. This applies regardless of the number of limbs - even arthropods with six, eight or more limbs.”Wikipedia
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“So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank side in autumn.” Henry David Thoreau
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People walk. It’s the natural way to reach from one point to another. We have legs, we move them and so we create a movement. This is very different though from walking with a goal in mind, walking with determination, walking for long distances. This kind of walking is nestled in a much deeper place. It has to do with the mind more than it has to do with the body. Some people walk for health reasons, or so they’ll tell us. Others for the challenge and the ability to say “look, see what I did, look where I was”. But I am talking about walking as a spiritual act when the body serves the soul.
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I don’t know her very well or for any length of time. And I will not use her name, not only because I never got her permission for that, but mainly because I believe it is not really important. What is important here and I find fascinating is the process in which a person changes over a lifetime and can be so many different things to himself and others. What is significant here is how with the years we learn to listen to our inner self and focus on things we did not value earlier. How we move so fast when we are young but learn how to extract meaning from the slower pace of walking, maybe even limping, when we get older.
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She is a long distance walker, she started being one only three years ago when she turned fifty seven and her marriage and professional life crumbled. Then she tackled her first long distance walk, the Appalachian Trail, one third of the Triple Crown of long distance hiking in the United States. Walking gave her her piece of mind back, she told me, and since then she is a dedicated walker. Always walking by herself she is carrying the necessary gear on her back, covering the miles until she reaches her planned destination.
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Is it lonely, I was wondering, spending days on the road with only oneself as a company, only the sound of your footsteps tapping the ground and the rhythm of your breath in and out. No external distractions to surround you and help you bar the flow of thoughts in your head and protect you from your own fears.
She just smiled at me and invited me to join her on her next walk.
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When she was getting ready for her last three walking expeditions I was there to observe. Amazed how while all of them were long distance walks they differ so much from each other. One was following a well known pilgrimage trail, the other tracking an almost unknown urban trail and the last one climbing up a mountain in a foreign country. I was watching how she zealously practiced every day, studied the maps and purchased the necessary gear, being so particular about the quality of every item and even more so of the weight. Amazed at how the practical bit of getting ready while interesting, did not even came close to the mental aspect.
Each walk presented a whole array of mental challenges ranging from the spiritual ones to the physical ones. While some of them required her to confront the limitations of age others demanded standing up to the primal fears of walking through the inner city streets being completely exposed.
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I did not join her by walking but I followed her on her walks through her online blog that I helped posting. I was there when she returned from each one of her walks, sharing the experience comparing the before and after. Telling me about new friendships that sprouted on the trails and new insights revealed while facing the varied challenges of the road.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Walker is but a myth she told in one of these occasions. There is nothing more lonesome then being unhappy in the midst of the crowed, comparing yourself to others, forever competing in the race that cannot be won. I listened to her and thought about the similarities to writing. While not physical in nature it can be just as demanding and complex. The loneliness of the long distance writer, I should adopt it as my new motto.
I'll be thinking about this and commenting over the weekend. For your interest, I've included in two posts a piece I did on walking for another course, and for 262, week 11 will offer another piece on long-distance walking.
ReplyDeleteUltra-marathoner Bernd Heinrich tells us in 'Why We Run' that humans are built not for speed but for endurance. We've evolved to be hunters of fast animals, but we don't capture them by being fast ourselves. The fast animals we like to eat--deer, antelope, and so on--sprint off at a speed we can't match, but then they stop for a bite of grass and a look-around.
Meanwhile, the slowpoke primate is jogging along, jogging along. When the antelope sees us coming, it chuckles at our foolishness and sprints off again, leaving us in its dust. Before too long though, the human with his sharpened stick appears, and it all happens again. Eventually, that naked human with his puny stick wears the antelope down, and gets his shot in.
We've evolved, Heinrich says, to be distance-runners, slow and steady. It's no accident that the fable of the tortoise and the hare still survives, and that the winner is the plodder, not the flashy speedster.
My running days aren't quite over, but I certainly am losing speed each year, not that I was ever likely to burn up a course. But I don't really worry about my speed. What I worry about is my soundness. If I never run again, it would be okay with me, and I would stop running in a second if by doing so I could save my knees and feet for the activity I really care about: walking.
My ancestors may or may not have been naked hunters with spears, but my grandfather definitely was a rag peddlar shoving a pushcart through the streets of East Boston, and even when he got prosperous, he still walked 7 or 8 miles into work every day. So walking is in my blood.
Ever since I can remember my answer to anything was to take a walk. Even before I can remember, that was apparently the principle I lived by. My mother liked to tell a story about me getting angry with her one snowy day when I was about three years old. The next thing she knew, a pounding came on the front door: when she opened it, there I was, wearing only my pajama tops and in the arms of a motorist who'd seen me floundering through the snow. The motorist shouted, "You aren't fit to be a mother! You're lucky he doesn't have frostbite! And do you know what he told me? He said he was going to walk until he found 'the little o'phans' home!"
I never did find it, but I'm still walking:Walking....walking the dogs two, three, four times a day--racking up nearly two hours of dog-walks on a good day. One reason I get along with dogs is that we see eye to eye on the importance of this vital activity. We four just got back from a walk a half-hour ago but if I stood up now and said, 'Hey guys, let's go for a walk!" I'd have three eager customers, whose only question would be why it took me so long to get some sense in my head.
Walking....walking on vacations. On my vacation I don't care to lie on a beach or to see the sights or to have a thrill a minute. My idea of a vacation is an eight-hour, sixteen mile slow walk from one English village to another, over hills, down dales, across fields, through woods, along the beach, and with a quick stop for lunch at a pub and for a peek into a thirteenth-century church. Let me do that for a week and I'm refreshed deep in my spirit.
ReplyDeleteWalking...walking off the blues. Any therapist worth jack will tell you to get some exercise, get outdoors, get your body working. My faith is that we don't need therapists very much at all--we need more hiking boots instead. When the woman I loved slipped away from me through my own foolishness, I began tramping the streets of Boston, hour after hour after hour.At first: Every happy face reminded me I'd never be happy again, every glimpse of my toe caps reminded me that there was no turning back because there was no place that ever could be home without her. The parks gave me no rest, the skyscrapers gave me no lift, the noise of the streets did not interrupt my furious dialogue with myself. My legs kept pumping, my feet kept beating the street.Eventually, I pounded pavements enough to find some calm (or maybe it was just physical exhaustion extinguishing those agitated thoughts) and to make things right with my sweetie, and for the past 35 years now she and I walk together (with the dogs usually.)
Driving home on a perfectly nice day, I see people checking their mail boxes from inside their cars, rather than parking in their driveways and walking twenty yards back to the road. I'm sure they are fine human beings, but, for the dogs and me, this is one of the great imponderable and unsolvable mysteries of the universe--people who don't walk.
Is it lonely, I was wondering, spending days on the road with only oneself as a company, only the sound of your footsteps tapping the ground and the rhythm of your breath in and out. No external distractions to surround you and help you bar the flow of thoughts in your head and protect you from your own fears.
ReplyDeleteShe just smiled at me and invited me to join her on her next walk.
I thought that was the key moment in the piece, the most writerly moment--I admired it all, especially the last sentence; that shows a writer confident in her ability to shape material and to avoid the obvious with a remark a bit surprising but immediately seen as right.
The whole production is both controlled and smooth--but thin as a profile. My model had the same problem: not really enough information. So you are thrown back on speculation, not a bad strategy and your thoughts, your switch from walking to writing, from physical to spiritual, from activity to observing are all well done, very reader-friendly; you are very much in charge.
But the walker in me yearns to know what mountain she planned to climb: Kilimanjaro? Fuji? (Some mountains are for walkers, others are for climbers....) And what urban trail? The Thames Walk? Which Pilgrimage Way--Santiago de Compostella? North Downs Way to Canterbury? St Cuthberts to Lindisfarne?
And what did she practice? How much prep walking was she doing, what kind of maps, what equipment?
I think at a certain point my dissatisfied curiosity as a walker becomes dissatisfaction as a reader and would even for a nonwalker. Too much not quite nailed down.
So, my thoughts about this are mixed!
Thank you for what you wrote about walking, it was facilitating. I am ashamed to admit that I am not much of a walker or any type of sport that demands moving. Sitting on my couch and reading a good book is probably as I close as I will ever get to all these people who conquer the world with their legs.
ReplyDeleteIn my defense, I am and always was, totally fascinated by images of roads and journeys.
When through my yearly physical I am asked time and time again if I walk I usually respond “sure, through my friend, the walker, blogs” nobody except me ever finds this even slightly amusing.
This piece however was very exciting to me. I did not have to write it since the assignment was done but I kept thinking of another possible profile. I worked on one all week only to decide it will not do and then the word – walking- just got stuck there and wouldn’t leave. Had no idea where to go with it or even if I have anything to say but then it was there, for better or worse. I am always completely taken back when this happens; it’s like magic, no more like an enigma.
So, yes, obviously, I am not a real walker, just one in theory, and really I think that the part that interests me.
You are correct there is some meat missing on the bones.
My next big qustion will be then, had I added all the information, names distances etc' how much of it before it would turn out to be too technical and boring.
fascinating...
ReplyDeleteHard to talk about the piece you didn't write! So I don't know if the tech stuff would have made it boring--it would have been boring to you and, no doubt, that would convey itself to the reader. I think I could write about tech stuff to a certain depth in a way that could be interesting--but then it interests me.
ReplyDeleteMy week 11 piece is about expertise and touched on walking--see for yourself whether it works.
"This piece however was very exciting to me." I should have remarked on this in my comments--clearly it was a piece that enlivened you, where your enthusiasm was high, and maybe that's the real answer to the tech talk question: whatever you decided to write about was probably the right thing to write about, that and no other and nothing else.
"Facilitating" worked for me! For a minute I thought I had facilitated a change and inspired you to go buy a pair of hiking boots.
ReplyDelete