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Category: walking

Headlamp Stroll

Headlamp Stroll

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Wearing a headlamp on this morning’s early walk with Copper, I felt like a Cyclops treading my suburban lane. It’s a strange sensation to emit light from your forehead — both convenient and powerful, even vaguely godlike.

But mostly, it’s freeing, which means I can better juggle leash and doggie bag and still have one hand tucked in my pocket because, well, it’s freezing cold out there.


In this season of light, when homes are decked out in garlands of white and colored bulbs, when my eyes search the darkness for the faintest trace of dawn, it feels good to emit light, as if within my own frail human self I carry what hope and heart I need. This is not true, of course. I know how much I need others. But for a moment, in the dark, it felt otherwise. 
Walking and Looking

Walking and Looking

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It was a skill I perfected when I lived and walked in New York City: When faced with a pedestrian barreling right at me, I learned to quickly glance down. To keep eye contact meant we’d likely find ourselves in one of those awkward dances where one heads right thinking the other will head left, only he heads right too. Looking down breaks the cycle and avoids collisions.

This behavior would not surprise Alexandra Horowitz. In her book On Looking, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, she describes pedestrian behavior as quick, fluid and fish-like. It depends on three basic rules (alignment, avoidance and following the person in front of you) plus a series of quick calculations made because we pay attention to each other.

Most of the time, people look where they are going. So the gaze is the giveaway. You can even follow someone’s head, because people actually incline in the direction they want to go.

The one type of pedestrian that breaks this rule: the phone talker. “Their conversational habits change the dynamic of the flowing shoal,” Horowitz writes. “No longer is each fish aware, in a deep, old-brain way, of where everyone is around him.”

And this means that my looking-away skill doesn’t work as well anymore.  Which is something I already knew, in my deep, old-brain way.

Drip Drip

Drip Drip

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I was already writing another blog post for today … and then I stepped outside.

It was the very definition of a “misty moisty morning,” warmer since yesterday’s cold rain, but still delightfully soggy with cloud swaths and drip-drips and absolutely no reason to be outdoors. Unless, of course, you have a dog who needs a walk.

And because I do, I was thrust out into this watery world, there to admire the droplets of water that grace the tips of each weeping cherry bough. They glittered, these droplets; they looked like the tiniest of flashlights, or maybe the ends of lighted scopes.

Undoubtedly there is physics at work here, surface tension perhaps, or maybe even something that involves an equation. All I know is that each droplet seemed so fabulously close to bursting that the sheer improbability of that made me smile.

Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash

Moonset

Moonset

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I woke early yesterday, as I do these days. Woke to a bright world, a full moon, and a persistent one. Even though the sky was lightening in the east, the moon was hanging on, slightly mottled with a haze of clouds, but still there.

It was strong enough to throw shadows on cars and houses — but soft enough to preserve the pre-dawn hush. It shined on a sleeping suburban world, utterly still, with frosted leaves that glittered in the grass.

In much of the world, moonlight matters. It’s the difference between seeing and stumbling. I thought about that as I walked west, into the moonset.

Listening In

Listening In

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While I consider myself a law-abiding citizen, I do enjoy eavesdropping. The act of listening in on a conversation is usually not criminal, of course, but it can be. I like to think I keep the habit in check.

Nevertheless, if I’m out to dinner I sometimes listen harder to the conversation at the next table than I do to my own.  This is not an admirable trait, but I can’t help myself. Maybe it’s the writer in me, the observer. But maybe that’s just an excuse.

This morning I realized how much I eavesdrop while walking (walks dropping?), having harvested two juicy bits of dialogue just on today’s stroll from train to office:

“It was real Louisiana gumbo,” said one camo-clad soldier to another as a group of them breezed past me as I emerged from Metro.

The other was uttered by a top-coated, loafer-wearing man who was striding beside me down a Crystal City street.  “Yes,” he said into his phone. “Northern Macedonia.”

Ah, the tales one could spin from these tidbits. But alas, I have other work to do, so for now, these snippets will remain … just snippets.

White Stripes

White Stripes

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Crosswalks in my neighborhood are getting a facelift. A set of them on a road I drive every weekend have new paint, flashing lights and big signs in neon yellow to remind motorists to stop.

In my work neighborhood I’ve started taking a new route to the office, one that involves a crosswalk and the forbearance of drivers.

It’s interesting to be on either end of crosswalk etiquette — as a pedestrian on weekdays and a driver on weekends. It helps me see how important it is to share the road, to look out for the errant ambler or the distracted driver.

More than anything else, a crosswalk encourages engagement. Those white stripes on the road can be a walker’s — and a driver’s — best friend.

Knowledge Workers

Knowledge Workers

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Like most “knowledge workers,” I spend a lot of time sitting. This is made painfully clear at the end of work days when I move stiff muscles up and out of the building, onto the streets and sidewalks of Crystal City.

A standing desk and an office to stand in has improved this a little. But I still get into my rut, which is too much time on my behind and too little time on my feet.

Of course, those of us who wax rhapsodic about standing desks might sing a new song if we were street cleaners, baristas, or letter-carriers. Too much sitting is a problem of affluence, and that’s something we knowledge workers shouldn’t forget.

Still, I regularly remind myself of the power of movement. Even a quick stroll down the hall for a glass of water can rejigger brain cells. This is also a good time to be thankful for … a job that lets me sit down.

Our Only World

Our Only World

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In his essay collection Our Only World, Wendell Berry writes of the “deserted country” that results from farmers displaced by progress, whether it be Big Coal or industrial machinery and chemicals.

The result is an emptiness most modern people think normal because they’ve never known it any other way. But Berry, who is 85, remembers a richer, fuller, more peopled countryside. A countryside that included farmers who “walk don’t run,” Berry writes.

“The gait most congenial to agrarian thought and sensibility is walking. It is the gait best suited to paying attention, most conservative of land and equipment, and most permissive of stopping to look or think. Machines, companies, and politicians ‘run.’ Farmers studying their fields travel at a walk.”

It’s one of the reasons I walk, too, because it is the gait “best suited to paying attention.” And though the remnants of a once-rich countryside lie ruined all around me, suburban neighborhoods named for the farms they’ve displaced, there is a point to walking even here.

Because when we walk, we feel just a little more like we belong. And when we feel just a little more like we belong … we care a lot more about the place we live.

The Kindness Trail

The Kindness Trail

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I saw the chalk drawings from a distance, hearts and flowers and smiley faces. They made me think of when my girls were young and would cover the driveway with chalk art, too.

But the closer I came to the drawings, the more entranced I was by them. There were words with the illustrations. “Put the ‘I’ in kindness,” “Say hello to your neighbor.” “One kind word makes all the difference.” The neighborhood paths were filled with these sayings, each batch headlined “The Kindness Trail.”

The installations were signed “By Hailey and Maddie.” Was this a project for school? Was there a hidden camera gauging the reaction of each passerby? There were cups of chalk along the way, too. Were we supposed to chime in with our own cheerful responses? I thought about it, but decided to show my gratitude another way.

So Hailey and Maddie … if you’re out there now, I want you to know that the Kindness Trail put a smile on my face and a spring in my step. It made my day.

Back to Slow

Back to Slow

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Our little doggie has injured himself again. Like many of us who are getting older, he doesn’t always recognize the limits of his strength and endurance. We found him whimpering at the bottom of the deck stairs Monday night. Once again, it seems, the darkness and the stairs have done him in, and he now has his second torn ACL.

When he walks slowly, I walk slowly. So we strolled a few houses down and back this morning, taking in the fine new smell of the morning and getting a sense of the day.

As he sniffs, I look around. There was a fox, not more than 50 feet away, staring at us. Could Copper have possibly missed him? I think he did. Maybe the fox is why I woke to the sound of a crow caw. Was it a warning from one bird to his flock?

Closer to home, we ambled beneath the weeping cherry, now sparsely leaved. It was dripping pink petals the last time Copper was injured. We are charting the seasons with our strolls. I inhale deeply, ponder the dearness of this doggie, and walk on.

(Speaking of foxes, I snapped a photo of this one a few months ago in the backyard.)