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In the heady Oregon spring of my senior year of high school I embarked on a grand experiment: for 30 days, I would not ride in an automobile. I was curious to see if life could be lived, and what life might be like, on my own two feet (and occasionally on the two fat wheels of my one-speed Schwinn). School was six miles away by road, but four by shortcut through woods and fields, and that part I liked. A little extra time in transit was rewarded by a zesty hike and the scenic wonders of buttercups and barbed wire. I remember practicing my choir numbers in the forest. And I loved the sense of my home being connected to school in one, steady, bodily motion. For the last few yards I strode through a large and thoroughly needless parking lot; I was already there, with nothing to encumber me. For the 30 days I quite literally paced myself and managed to get to my various obligations in due time.
The only problems I remember were with the women in my life. My mother asked me to rush down to the grocery store to buy some eggs for a recipe she was baking for some company that was soon to arrive. I calmly informed her I would ride my bicycle down to the store, but not drive. That, she said, made no sense at all. She was mad. And I seem to recall that my girfriend and I may have broken up that fateful month. Her house was eight miles from mine, and I showed up less frequently and sometimes asked for a shower when I got there. Evening dates became difficult, as did making out in the nonexistent front seat of the nonexistent car.
As it turns out, I married a woman who likes to walk, though unfortunately her natural pace is about twice the speed of mine. I have heard that in some parts of India the husband walks 20 paces in front of his wife. In our own progressive but pedestrian marriage, this arrangement is reversed. Just a couple of summers ago we spent a week in Tuolumne Meadows to celebrate our 20th anniversary, scrambling up some of the peaks we had first climbed on our honeymoon. On the way down Mt. Dana, only just recovering from the aerobic trauma of our ascent, I told my wife I was thinking of writing a novel called In Her Steps. She was far enough ahead of me that she didn't quite hear what I'd said.
"Isn't that the one that asks, 'What would Jesus do?'" she said.
"I think Jesus would walk more slowly," I told her.
To say, as the warbling soloists of my childhood often did, that "I walked today where Jesus walked" is to equate walking with living. That we have in recent centuries invested walking with particular cultural significance is the fascinating thesis of Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking. And that in relatively recent decades Americans have impoverished themselves by subtracting walking from their living is Solnit's prophetic word. City planners, she informs us, now calculate "walking distance" as one quarter mile or less. Anything more is a hop in the car. Beyond a quarter mile, apparently, our legs, our patience, our time, and our imagination give out. I drove today where Jesus walked.
Solnit is eloquent in suggesting the advantages of engaging thought and place through our feet:
Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.
For Solnit, "a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind." One of the most alienating experiences to be had, she says, is watching a film on a jetliner at 35,000 feet—doubly removed from the earth. She also holds special contempt for the fashion of the exercise treadmill. Such simulated walking suggests that space itself has disappeared: "The treadmill is … a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go. Or no desire to go."
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