On walking, and why we aren’t.
An act dwelling in the margins, an almost hidden narrative running beneath the main vehicular text. Indeed, the semantics of the term pedestrian would be a mere curiosity, but for one fact: America is a country that has forgotten how to walk.
If you didn’t catch Tom Vanderbilt’s terrific 4-part series at Slate on “America’s Pedestrian Problem” (quoted above), I urge you to do so. Thanks to being 6 months behind with my Evernote queue (I grab web articles in Chrome via EverRead and send them to my phone) I’ve only just caught up with them…and curiously, it’s happened at exactly the right time.
It’s not just America, Mr Vanderbilt.
Wherever I am, I often tell people I’d rather walk. They tell me where the buses are, they offer me a lift in their car, and I say, “I like walking. It’s fun!” This is usually followed by an awkward silence, as if I’ve just announced I plan to join Starfleet or the Avengers, or that I bought this album and really enjoyed it.
In short, walking is increasing seen as either ill-informed (“why? There’s a bus!”) or eccentric. The practical value of having a car – keeping us warm, carrying our shopping and so on – has erased from our heads the thought that in some situations, walking might be the most meaningful way to get around.
Many of the most engrossing travel experiences I’ve enjoyed were on foot. Walking across the North York Moors, for example. Walking out of Kirkwall, Orkney, to sleep rough in a field. Walking right across Berlin early in the morning. Crunching my way over frosted, iron-hard ground along Hadrian’s Wall on the way to Twice Brewed. Walking along the Holderness coast as, overhead, the Flamborough lighthouse threw its beam a quarter of the width of England.
And this has been nagging at me for over a year.
I don’t drive. I enjoy cycling, I adore train travel – but walking is my most comfortable state of motion. It appeals to my desire to experience as much of the world as I can firsthand, and to really feel I’ve earned my destinations. It’s better for the knees than running, and it’s a steady cardiovascular workout that doesn’t leave you a sweaty, beetroot-coloured creature that lays in front of the TV for hours after you get back home. Yes, it’s slow. There are few slower journeys you can take (apart from my long-treasured dream of crossing Britain on a Space Hopper). But it’s a journey you take at your own pace — literally, at your own pace — and you have complete freedom to get off the road and go exploring, or wind your way around obstacles, in the same way a bicycle partly allows and a car never does.
In 2013, I’m returning to Hadrian’s Wall with the intention of walking the full 73 miles of it. That’s a good start. But that’s not enough. I want to MacFarlane my way around Britain’s most ancient tracks, or Thubron my way right round Cyprus. These are the adventures that really call to me . . .
. . . and so I’m thinking, hard.
Bonus: did you know there are scientists who can determine where you live from your walking speed?