Thinking back on my last post, I realize that not only have I not developed a habit of walking in the rain in any other place that I have lived, but I have not developed the habit of
walking in any other place that I have lived.
Here, I walk for the sake of walking. I walk to clear my head, to remember my body, to remind myself that all I need to be elsewhere is the desire to move my body. I don't need a car, or a train or an airplane. Just some shoes that will protect the bottom of my feet from the hazards of walking around a place where people discard the fragmants of their lives onto the side of the road.
I walk when I'm angry. I just walk out the door and go until I have sorted out the inside of my head well enough to want to go back, and then I walk a little further just to be sure, and then I turn around and walk back, usually a different route. My dad once said, when I was very young, that you should not retrace your steps on a walk, you should just go forward to get back where you came from (he said it in words that made sense to me as a child, but that was the gist of it) and that is a sentiment I have carried with me. Not that there are rules for taking a walk, but the idea of narrowness in simply turning around and going back the way you came.
I have a fantasy in which I pack a small back with a couple of changes of underwear and a couple of tee shirts and pairs of socks, and just start walking one day. Right now it's the northwest that calls to me, but who knows what it may be on the day I start. Like the characters in the fantasy novels that carried me through adolesence, I will just start walking. Perhaps I will create a quest for myself, perhaps the journey itself is all that I need. L and I used to dream of walking to Alaska. Maybe someday we will do it. Just... start walking.
I did walk some in Greensboro, especially in the woods, but there is something incredibly depressing about walking in tamed wilderness. I guess when comparing the Guilford woods to Rocky Mountain National Park there will be a bit of a disconnect. I didn't walk the streets because Greensboro obviously has no value for its pedestrian traffic. Sidewalks were an afterthuoght, and drivers seemed oblivious to the world outside their steel casings. But i did walk, occasionally in Greensboro.
I walked some in Israel, if for no other reason than that it was my only option. I swore that I wouldn't ride buses, and I didn't have a car, and at some point cabs just became, unreasonable. But walking was rarely an enjoyable experience in Israel. It was the way to get from one place to another. Thats a lie. I walked aimlessly on the beach, and through both Tel Aviv and Haifa. But I did not walk aimlessly around Jerusalem. It made me nervous, and I felt intimidated by the neighborhood in which I lived. I suppose that's very little excuse, in the long term, since I try not to live a frightened life. But it seemed like common sense at the time.
In Viginia I didn't walk because there was no place to walk. No sidewalks, and careering cars. And it was so hot. So goddamn hot all of the time. L told me that she used to go into DC to walk around, but we never did that. With grad school on the horizon I look forward to living in actual DC and walking around there.
Whenever I would drive back from the East Coast I would wait anxiously for the first glimpse of the mountains. They look like low clouds on the horizon at first. And they get bigger and bigger. And I take a moment to look at them, as their full scale finally hits me, and wonder what it must have been like for the early pioneers who went west, in their covered wagons and on horseback, or simply on foot. I think about the Native Americans who traversed the land for generations leaving barely a mark upon it. And I am intensely jealous that I will never get to walk, leaving barely a trace, upon this land, to be able to honestly wonder if I am the only person to have looked at a particular tree, or stepped on a particular patch of ground.
It seems that our movements are scripted, as much as we work to defy them.
