Browsed by
Category: walking

Commuting on Foot

Commuting on Foot

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday I walked once again from the Wiehle Metro station to my car in a parking lot four miles away. Why is this worth mentioning? Only for this — that I am, finally, commuting on foot in the suburbs.

This is not an accomplishment to be shrugged off. And I don’t mean it’s my own personal accomplishment but an evolution in the way we live. That I can step off the train and travel on my own steam to the next destination is a marvel, given the way I started living here 25 years ago.

Then I couldn’t leave the neighborhood on foot because of cars barreling down narrow, un-shouldered roads. Now sidewalks and bike lanes take me to the grocery store and pharmacy; let me tap into Reston’s trail system, which used to be a tantalizing but unreachable distance away.

So to all forms of walking I celebrate here  — ambling meditatively through the woods, running pell-mell through the meadow, strolling briskly through the city — let me add the walk which is not a destination in itself but which has a larger purpose. It not only takes me out of myself; it takes me home.

Canopy Walk

Canopy Walk

Comments 0 Comment

As walks go, this was a short one, only about 80 feet. But it was 25 feet above ground — and it swayed as I moved. Up there amidst the live oaks and cabbage palms, I was not just in the foliage but of it.

Florida’s Myakka River Canopy Walk was modeled on canopy walks in the South American rain forests. It’s humble and natural and sturdily built (or at least I pretended that it was).

A 76-foot observation tower on one end let me climb up through the trees to glimpse a panorama of forest and river. I was above the canopy rather than under it.

My knees quivered and I thought about the fear that comes not just from height but from exposure. I felt a kinship with creatures that hide under rocks or brush.

Enclosure is safe. Exposure is dangerous — and exhilarating.

A Commuter in the Suburbs

A Commuter in the Suburbs

Comments 0 Comment

I dreamed all day of walking home from the new Silver Line station. I plotted the way before my feet found it. And when I began, it was just as I imagined — segments of trail, mostly paved, with clear markers of distance gained.

Strolling south across the highway, I meandered through the leafy association campuses and a golf course, its wide greens calling. A short tunnel took me to parkland paths with benches and a bridge, then up a steep dirt path to a shopping center.

I passed golfers putting, teenagers dawdling, dog-walkers walking, crepe myrtles blooming. Ambling south out of the center, I strolled past a community garden and pool to the lot where I parked my car in the morning.

One day I’ll add those two extra miles and walk all the way to the house. But for now, this is bliss: to make my way home (mostly) on foot.

Test Walks

Test Walks

Comments 0 Comment

Metro’s new Silver Line opens in six days. Over the weekend I attended a ribbon-cutting for the new station and came home with bus schedules and maps and a plan in my head. On days when I’m not driving or biking to the new station (and there may be many of those!), I may bus the five miles to the new station — then walk home.

I tried out half the new route Saturday, Reston trail map in hand. I felt like a tourist in my own community. And in a way, I was. Like anyone else, I’m a creature of routine. I must be drug kicking and screaming from my well-trod trails and sidewalks.

But change is coming to this suburb, and I want to experience it feet first. So I parked in the Hunter’s Woods shopping center lot and picked up a Reston trail that took me to a park, then a golf course and finally to within a 10-minute stroll of the new station. Today I’ll amble the southern half of the course, from home to the shopping center lot.

So while Metro is doing test runs, I’m doing test walks. Soon we’ll both be in business.

Most Walkable

Most Walkable

Comments 0 Comment

The facts are in — and they’re surprising: Washington, D.C., is the nation’s most walkable city!

Yes, that’s right. I thought the same thing: What about New York (just for starters)? Turns out, it’s Number Two.

 I heard a fleeting mention of this yesterday on the radio and looked it up today thinking I had misheard. But according to a report prepared by George Washington University’s School of Business, Washington has more Walkable Urban Places (WalkUPs) than New York City, Boston, San Francisco or Chicago.

Having lived and walked in three of these top five (and not owned a car in two of them),
I’ll admit I was scratching my head. But then I started reading
the report. WalkUPs are based on the amount of office and retail space and a Walk Score, which looks at how easy it is to run errands without a car. New York comes in second because although Manhattan earns an 89-percent WalkUP score, the other boroughs aren’t quite so walkable.

The most amazing nugget: The D.C. area has the most balanced walkability ratio between city (51 percent) and suburbs (49 percent). Really? The George Washington University researchers must be strolling in Arlington or Bethesda, not Oak Hill. Still, there are more paths here than there used to be, and Metro’s Silver Line (4 and a half miles from my house) opens a week from today.

So I’m optimistic about walking in the suburbs. It’s nice to know I’m not alone.

Tread Well

Tread Well

Comments 0 Comment

Yesterday’s walk began in the woods, late afternoon light slanting in through the canopy. Copper and I crossed Folkstone Drive, strolled down Treadwell, a street I love not just for its name (perfect for walkers) but also for its length and lack of traffic and for the calmness I feel when I’m on it.

Treadwell ends in a pipestem with houses tucked deep in the forest. Before you reach it, though, there’s a path back into the woods. We took it, picking our way through some sticker bushes and crossing a creek that required my first sitting down on the bank (a hesitation Copper didn’t understand) before launching myself forward to the other side.

Once across the tributary, we could wander from one trail to another. I noticed the silence, interrupted only by the caws of a crow and the hum of a distant airplane. Was it the silence that freed my mind to appreciate the beauty, the jewel-green moss atop the decaying log, the ferns waving slightly in the breeze?

Nothing is not beautiful here, I thought: the weeds, the stumps, the whole trees uprooted and left lying where they fell, their root balls like the inside of giant umbrellas. All of it a pleasure to the eye.

As we grew closer to the exit, the woods became noisier. It was a landscaping crew grooming the yard of a nearby house. Two mowers and a weed whacker. Welcome back, they seemed to say with their jangle and bluster, welcome back to the world.

The Beaten Path

The Beaten Path

Comments 0 Comment

Sometimes I’m on it, sometimes I’m off it. But I always have a responsibility to it. For who will keep the path beaten if not the walker? Who else will clear it of weeds and stones? Who else will smooth it out, will wear it down to dirt?

On woods walks it’s easy to spot which paths are well trod and which have banished from neglect. Animals do their part; there are deer runs in the woods, too. But humans blaze the widest trails.

I find this thought comforting: That the forest needs me just as I need the forest. That in passing through I create the possibility of further passage. That each amble makes the next one easier. That each foot fall is creative.

This is more than just “use it or lose it.” It’s organic, symbiotic. It’s proof, once again, that we’re all in this together.

The Iris Garden

The Iris Garden

Comments 0 Comment

I’ve been walking in these suburbs for years now — long enough to see not only what is but also what used to be. On my way home Thursday, I passed a five-acre plot once home to an old farmhouse and iris garden. The house is gone now, bulldozed last month. In its place, a sprinkling of straw, a county sign, notice of hearing. The land will be rezoned R1 to R2. Instead of the iris garden we will have Iris Hills, nine single family homes.

Gone is the mint green farm house, the crumbling old shed covered in wisteria, the eye-popping iris and day lilies that made people
pull off the road to see what all the fuss was about. Gone are the
painters who would set up their easels there in the spring and summer. And gone most of all is Margaret, the garden’s owner, who died a few years ago.

For years the place sat in limbo as the “Friends of Margaret’s Garden” tried to save the flowers by turning the space into a park. But finally all options were exhausted. Now “Margaret’s garden” joins a parade of places named for what they have displaced. On the same block of West Ox Road are Robaleed, a neighborhood named for a farm whose horses still hung their heads over the fence when we first moved here, and Blueberry Farm Lane, where we once picked — you’ve got it.

It’s a strange, sad sort of duty to bear witness to the past, but it’s also a privilege. Walkers see the world at four miles an hour. We notice a fresh coat of paint, a “For Sale” sign, a new car in the driveway. And because we notice, we belong.

Trespassing

Trespassing

Comments 0 Comment

Sooner or later you have to do it, to skulk down a private driveway because it leads to a path in the woods, to slip between trees in a stranger’s yard.

To walk in the suburbs and stay only on the paved path is to miss the crumbling fences, the fern-banked creeks, the land as it was before.

I’ve been trespassing a lot lately. Looking for my own “northwest passage,” a quick route to the bus stop in anticipation of Metro’s new Silver Line (more on that in upcoming posts). On my Thursday walk home, looking for the thread of a trail I knew would take me behind the houses across the street from my own, I spied the owner of the brick colonial whose land I was perilously close to.

I looked at him, he looked at me. He was just far enough away that I could pretend he hadn’t seen me, to continue picking my way gingerly through the fallen trees and prickly bushes in my work clothes,  a big bag stuffed with papers on my shoulder. I felt like an errant deer. And strangely enough, I ran into one of those just a few steps later. I stared at him, he stared at me.

Two stare-downs within five minutes. What else is a trespasser to do?

Taking the Long Way Home

Taking the Long Way Home

Comments 0 Comment

If the car is in the shop, then the driver rides the bus and walks home from the corner … which is two miles away. This is fine, this is good, this is necessary, even. One should always walk the routes (or part of the routes) one drives. It’s a good way to stay humble behind the wheel.

But yesterday’s stroll wasn’t humility-provoking. It was liberating. It was divine. Late afternoon, perfect summer weather (hot but not unbearable), sweater over my shoulders, music in my ears. I crossed the busy road early in the stroll (whew! worst part behind me) and hit a good stride as I ambled beneath the hedges that lead to Fox Mill.

Here’s what I never would have seen from the car: A shy pudgy girl with some sort of instrument in a padded case on her back; we traded smiles. Was it a cello? I think so.

Two workmen mixing cement for the fence posts they were installing. Beside them, almost hidden in the grass, was a microwave plugged into a long extension cord and a couple of empty Tupperware containers. Lunch!

The last leg of my walk was along a little dirt path that I don’t usually walk in work clothes. There was a bracing incongruity to it all, and most of all to sauntering up to the house — arriving home on my own steam — that made the rest of the day a breeze.

There’s a lot to be said for taking the long way home.