Today I took my first walk around Lake Anne in more than a month. The ice was thinning and the path was clear. I spied sand containers on sloping sections of the trail, do-it-yourself ice remedies.
My ice remedy is to stay off the paths. Now that our second snow has melted and our third has yet to fall, I took advantage of the mild weather to circle Reston’s oldest lake.
Unlike three weeks ago, when I snapped this shot, there were puddles and bird song and a sense of movement in the landscape.
Spring isn’t fully awake yet, but it’s beginning to stretch its arms and legs.
Yesterday I had coffee with a trail watcher, someone who lives near a Reston trail and knows its condition. “I’ve seen people walking their dogs on the trail,” she said. “I think it’s plowed.”
Did I speak too soon yesterday when I moaned about being trail starved? After all, I haven’t been driving around to all the trailheads in the area, checking their status. The Franklin Farm trails are certainly not plowed, and the Reston trails near Lake Anne were unreliable when I tried them last week.
So after we parted, with the odd snowflake flying in a blustery gray sky, I went in search of a nearby path to wander. And sure enough, one that wasn’t cleared last week was down to pavement.
How good it felt to amble among the trees again! There were a few stretches of black ice to avoid, but other than that, I was in business.
These are long days for walkers in the suburbs. Yes, we can walk on the roads. We can and we do. We can use ellipticals or treadmills in gyms or in our basements. Some of us (my neighbor, in fact) traipses around her house when everything else fails.
But what we cannot do (unless we have snow shoes) is walk on a trail. My neighborhood and many of the developments around me have no sidewalks. What they do have, though, are paths, often paved.
Finding these and using them has lifted my heart and put a skip in my step. Trails have given me what I didn’t think was possible when we first moved here — a walking life. A way to make my way on foot from one place to the other.
But for almost three weeks now the trails have been off limits; more ice rinks than paths, and I’m logging miles on the main street in my neighborhood. I’m still putting one foot in front of the other, propelling myself through space. But I’m trail starved. I can’t wait to be back.
(If I’m going to imagine a trail walk, I might as well make it summer.)
The snow bricks are shrinking, the berm crud is thinning, and the road is widening. But not enough. Motorists still hesitate to cross the yellow line. Sometimes they can’t, because there’s a car on the other side. Other times, they just don’t.
Walking in the suburbs has never been more fraught. The trails I frequent are a slick, icy mess. Which means I’m forced to do all my walking in the neighborhood, along the side of the road. Some drivers seem reluctant to move over to give me a safe-enough berth.
I think it’s just rule-following, of which I’ve been guilty, too. But as a walker in the suburbs, I’m hoping cars cut us more slack these winter days. The gravelly stuff along the road is like quicksand, and walkers can’t exactly hop out of the way when they’re striding alongside a five-foot-tall mountain of snowcrete.
The cars that do cross the line have my fervent thanks and appreciation. As for the rest of them, I’ll paraphrase Robert McCloskey and say … make way for walkers.
(The cover of Make Way for Ducklings, from which I borrowed the title of this post.)
No time to walk yesterday until almost nightfall., but it’s light enough now that I could leave my house at 5:30, stroll through the gloaming, and be back before 6 without walking in the dark. A good reminder that spring is on its way, even though the groundhog saw his shadow.
At this point in the season 6 p.m. is still a hard stop. With no shoulders due to snow boulders, and no sidewalks or street lights, it’s better to be safely inside by this hour. But that I could amble abroad at all after 5 was a surprise and a delight.
It’s such a pleasant time to wander, yellow porch lights beacons of warmth in a frozen landscape. I saw a single doe jump from the snowy woods over the road, her white tail flashing.
Yesterday, as an experiment, I tried one of my regular walks at an irregularly slow pace. It wasn’t easy, but I promised myself I would do it, so I did.
The route was a familiar one, just two miles round trip. It took me most of an hour — that’s how leisurely I was ambling. It was the pace of a hiker struggling up a mountain, but my trail was mostly level ground.
A pair of young runners rushed by, then a lone jogger in a white jacket. Everyone passed me. But I plodded on at my slow gait.
Being a Kentucky girl, I remembered that the term “slow gait” can be an official one for the artificial gait of the American Saddlebred horse. It means that each of the horse’s feet strikes the ground separately in a measured, steady and highly stylized way. Not at all the way that I was moving!
Though my feet dawdled, my mind roamed far and wide, an inverse relationship. Maybe “not so fast” should be my walking mantra more often.
I noticed it last week — a break in the fence, right at the place I used to scale it. An absence, a window, an opening. How long have I waited for this break? Or, at the very least, for a stile across the fence?
At first, I thought I was seeing things, but I when I walked up to investigate, I noticed the discarded planks. Will there be a gate here someday, to preserve the opening, or will it once again be fenced?
Taking no chances, I strode through it, avoiding the longer and more circuitous route to the Franklin Farm meadow that I’ve taken ever since I stopped climbing fences.
It seemed a fortuitous New Year’s omen. An opening. An invitation. I embraced it.
My music of choice for yesterday’s walk was Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, the first chorus, “Auchzet, frohlocket, auf. It’s a peppy piece that exhorts listeners to celebrate the season and the creator. I discovered it four years ago and have loved it ever since.
Here’s the scene: A gusty wind that made temperatures seem colder than they were, an empty parking lot, sun rapidly sinking. I was tired from hours of shopping. I was tempted to drive straight home. A bowl of chili was calling my name.
I could have walked in silence but needed sound. And what a sound it was! Timpani, recorders, trumpets and strings. And at a 12/8 time signature, a most peppy beat. Most of all, there was the human voice. “Shout for joy! Rise up! Glorify the day.”
Those were my marching orders, so I did as I was told.
(Yesterday’s path at an earlier time and on a milder day.)
The front-page headline caught my eye, and I couldn’t stop reading. In 1999, Britain’s Karl Bushby decided to walk an unbroken path around the world. He sketched out the route on a piece of paper and started his journey of … what, a million steps, ten million, I have no idea.*
It began with a bar room bet and became an obsession, and now his 27-year, 31,000-mile expedition is in its final months. He just entered Hungary and has less than 1,000 miles to go. If all goes according to plan he will reach his hometown of Hull, England, next September.
Bushby started his walk in Punta Arenas, Chile in 1998, when he was 27 years old. Now 56, he’s given a huge chunk of his adulthood to this project. But from the sound of it, he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“You need to see how the world really is, and the people who are living in it,” he told the Washington Post. “It’s one of the best educations you’ll get.”
Bushby’s journey has taken him from the southern tip of South America, through the treacherous Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama, through North America to the Bering Strait. He crossed this on his first try, navigating ice and frigid water, only to be arrested in Russia for entering at an incorrect border.
In another leg of his journey, he swan across the Caspian Sea to avoid entering Russia again. That took 31 days. He rested at night on support boats. (Although he began the trip with only $500, he gained notoriety and sponsors along the way.)
“I’ve had to do every inch of this thing by either walking or swimming,” Bushby said. “Every time I stop, I have to start from that point and continue.” When he began, he walked 19 miles a day. Now he walks 15.
Bushby said the main lesson he’s learned is that the “world is a much kinder, nicer place than it often seems.” Over and over again he’s been rescued by the kindness of strangers. “The world will wrap itself around you and help you achieve things and keep you moving,” he said. “It’s been absolutely astounding.”
*That would be 13.5 million to 16 million steps, AI informs me.
You’re born to walk. I’m born to walk. All humans are born to walk. Not a revolutionary statement, right? But it is. Because too many of us sit for most of the day. We sit at work. We sit in our cars as we drive to the office and run errands. We sit during our leisure time, consuming entertainment.
I walk in the suburbs — but I sit in the suburbs too. In fact, I’m sitting right now, writing this post. But at least I’ve already walked this morning. How could I not after reading Mark Sisson and Brad Kearns’ book Born to Walk: The Broken Promises of the Running Boom, and How to Slow Down and Get Healthy–One Step at a Time?
Sisson and Kearns primarily address runners in this pithy and persuasive tome. Walking can give us the cardio hit, can help us burn fat, can do most everything a hard run can do, but it’s much easier on the old bod.
“Walking makes you supple, mobile and flexible—unlike chronic cardio, which makes you creaky, achy, stiff,” Sisson and Kearns write. They urge us to “regard walking as much more than a fitness to-do list item: rather, it is a big part of what makes you a healthy human.”
Walk first thing, the authors say. That used to be my routine. When I lived in Manhattan I’d roll out of bed and walk to work, three blissful miles through Central Park and into midtown. I’ve gotten out of that habit through the years. Not out of the walking habit, but out of the walking-first-thing-in-the-morning habit. I remedied that today, left the house before my first cup of tea, before writing a word. It felt good to be out and about early. And why not? After all, we’re born to walk.
(Central Park was part of my route when I walked to work in Manhattan.)
