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Category: walking

As Morning Unfolds

As Morning Unfolds

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I left the house before six today, walked into a misty morning with piled clouds and a chorus of birdsong. The air had a pastel fullness to it and the light was worthy of Bierstadt.

On mornings like these I leave the music at home so I can better observe the day as it wakes, stretches, waves his arms and opens its eyes.

Today, though, the morning clouded up as I strolled, and fat drops fell. But before they could gain too much traction, the day reversed course once again. Now it’s gloriously sunny and green.

It’s what I’ve wanted to do every day this week as I sat five stories up in a shell of glass and steel — watch the morning unfold, and be inside it as it wakes.

Free!

Free!

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It must be spring cleaning time, because Folkstone Drive has become a bazaar. Within the last few weeks, you could have scored a kitchen cabinet, bathroom vanity and a grill — all sitting on the street, absolutely free!

It’s hard to drive by this stuff without picking it up. It’s that hunting-gathering impulse honed when I lived in New York in my 20s and practically furnished an apartment with pieces drug in off the sidewalk.

But with much internal dialogue (“do you really need a broken grill? don’t you already have one sitting on the deck?”) and a modicum of self-shaming, I’ve managed to ignore this free stuff and act like I’m above it all.

I concentrate instead on the backdrops into which these items are placed and what lies just beyond them — the woods, the flowers, the dogwood, the redbud! What’s always free is the stride and the vista and what I see along the way. Everything else is just gravy.

Opportunities for Awe

Opportunities for Awe

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Yesterday’s walk took me along a Reston trail. It was late afternoon, balmy and blooming, with crows cawing in the swamp.

I thought about the name of this blog, “A Walker in the Suburbs.” I thought about how if you didn’t know my suburb, you might envision streets of sameness, void of nature and texture.

You might not imagine this immersion in a natural world: stream gurgling, peepers peeping, smell of loam in the air. You might discount the opportunities for awe.

Georgetown Stroll

Georgetown Stroll

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A Georgetown walk can be full of stops and starts. Crowds bustle and churn. Sidewalks narrow and buckle. Cars jockey for spaces.

This is one of the oldest parts of D.C., and it does not always hum to a modern pace. You can’t drive fast here; the four-way stops see to that. And you can’t walk fast here, either — at least not on a crowded Sunday afternoon.

But if you hit a lull, and the gods are with you, you can at least stroll. And if you do, this is what you see:

Enough

Enough

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These days I take walks whenever and wherever  I can find them. On busy days, around the block is all I have time and space for.  Yesterday was one of those days.

I pushed open the heavy glass door, slipped on my sunglasses and turned right at the Cosi Restaurant to reach the service road.

Usually it’s quiet back there but yesterday there was enough traffic to keep me on my toes, skirting puddles while steering clear of delivery trucks.

At the end of the block there’s a fitness park, which is where I snapped this photo. Many of flowering trees took a hit in last week’s frigid weather. About half of Washington’s famed cherry blossoms were nipped, the first time this has happened in the trees’ century-old history.

But this little guy survived. And seeing him there with a background of blue made me feel like it was truly spring, not just March 20.

It was a short walk. But it was enough.

Name That Path

Name That Path

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A recent walk through the Folkstone woods led me past a shady glade and creek curve where the girls used to play. They called it Brace Yourself. Maybe there was some feat of derring do they had to perform there, walking across the creek on a log or picking up a crawdad. I’m unclear why they gave it that name, but the point is that they did.

Brace Yourself got me thinking about the joy of naming places. I remember doing that when I was a kid. There was the Valley of Eternal Snows — a sheltered cove in the Ware Farm field behind our house, a place where I had once found some dirty snow late in the season.

And then there were the Block-up Boys — not exactly a place, I know. They were the bullies on the street who wouldn’t let me ride my tricycle to the top of the hill. (So there was a place involved, sort of.)

When we name a place we make it our own.  We look at it with fresh eyes; we see it whole. Why do we stop doing this as we get older? Do mortgages and responsibilities drive it away, this penchant for staking imaginative claim to the places we love?

I made a tiny vow right there at Brace Yourself. I decided to start naming the bridges and paths, the springs and glades. Even if no one else ever hears or knows these names — I will.

Staying on Track

Staying on Track

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Yesterday, a return to a favorite hike, the Cross County Trail between Colvin Run Mill and Georgetown Pike. The path was busy with mountain bikers, runners, families with grandparents and kids — including one grandpa who stepped off the fair-weather crossing into this stream.

He righted himself quickly and kept on walking. That’s the spirit: staying on track!

I hope I do that when I’m a grandparent (which, with a married daughter and son-in-law, may not be too far in my future). The key with the hiking and the crossing is the keeping-on part.

Yesterday made it easy: a springlike day that made an unexpected step in the creek not the worst thing in the world.

Urban Trail

Urban Trail

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Ellen and I met for brunch in Bethesda yesterday — our favorite meeting place between Annapolis and Reston — and afterward I slipped on my tennis shoes, took off my scarf and jacket and walked four miles on the Capital Crescent Trail, one of my favorite urban walks.

It was 70 degrees, and the path was clogged with joggers and strollers and bikers and dogs. A carnival atmosphere — and everyone in amazement that we could wear shorts and t-shirts instead of parkas and gloves.

What to say about such an amble and such an afternoon? Only that it was filled with the life force, was virtually overflowing with it. And everyone I saw — whether zooming by on a bicycle or being pushed in a wheelchair — seemed to feel the same way.

Perpetual Motion

Perpetual Motion

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A walk yesterday to Long Bridge Park, which is a bit of a misnomer since there’s not really a bridge and barely a park. But who’s counting when it’s 70 degrees on February 7?

What Long Bridge is, though, is window on the perpetual motion of a busy American city.

The walk adjoins the train tracks, and yesterday, in just 10 minutes, I saw a freight train, Amtrak and the Virginia Railway Express commuter express all chugging along.

East of the train tracks is the George Washington Parkway, where I would later spend close to an hour inching my way home. But at 1 p.m. the traffic is moving, and the cars are like flies skimming the surface of a pond where stately swans (the trains) hold the eye.

Finally, there are the planes taking off and landing at National Airport, just across the way. The low jets fill the sky as they roar heavenward.

It’s an invigorating stroll. I’m moving, the trains, planes and cars are moving. I try to catch all three in my gaze at the same time, to savor their motion and amplify my own.

Mappiness

Mappiness

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In a few minutes I’ll bundle up and take to the streets. It will be my lunch break and I’ll spend it walking in the suburbs. No surprise there. But what is news, at least to me, is how much scientific evidence there is to back up my hobby/exercise/obsession.

In 2010, a British environmental economist named George MacKerron created an app called Mappiness that allowed him to check in with 20,000 volunteers several times a day and ask them what they were doing and how they felt about it.  The data he collected showed that people are significantly happier when they’re outdoors — even when other variables are accounted for.

Great news, right? Unfortunately, he also found that people are indoors or in vehicles 93 percent of the time. So even though we’re happiest outside, we spend most of our time inside.

What to do? Another researcher, Timothy Beatley of the Biophilic Cities Project at the University of Virginia (which I’ve just been reading about and will definitely discuss some day in a separate blog post), says we need daily doses of nature: everything from New York City’s High Line to the little park around the corner. We can’t let the perfect (a hike in Yosemite) be the enemy of the good (a walk around the block).

It’s always tough to parse the value of the walks I take, to figure out how much of their benefit comes from moving through space and how much from the space I’m moving through. All I know is that the woods and trails around my home and the parks I frequent in the city are far more than backdrops; they are mood-enhancing and soul-stirring. They are the stars of the show.


(Thanks to Ellen for sending me the Wall Street Journal article where I learned about this research.)