Browsed by
Category: walking

Out of the Woods

Out of the Woods

Comments 0 Comment

I just finished reading Lynn Darling’s Out of the Woods: A Memoir of Wayfinding, a book about discovering a sense of direction in midlife.

When her daughter left for college, Darling moved to an off-the-grid house near Woodstock, Vermont. The woods were cool and inviting, a place to sort herself out. But Darling always became lost in them. So she took a survival course, learned to use a compass, acquired a topographical map. She found landmarks, charted distances from her house to a neighbor’s. Gradually she learned the nuances of wayfinding, when to trust herself and when to trust the map:

“Maps, I know now, are not static. Walk in a place long enough and you see all the mistakes that have yet to be corrected, the disconnect between the three-dimensional reality on which you walk and its two-dimensional representation. Walk in a place long enough and even the most accurate maps fail to represent what is actually there.”

As I read her book — on my Kindle — I pondered my own wanderings, the paths I’m following and the ones I am not. I thought about how important it is to stay limber as we grow older, to keep pushing ourselves in directions we have not gone before.

It took three-quarters of the book, but I finally performed my own little bit of technological wayfinding: I learned how to highlight the passages I enjoyed so I could find them later. A small achievement, but an achievement just the same. So, courtesy of Kindle’s “highlight” feature, here’s Darling again:

“Getting older is largely a matter of getting over yourself, of stepping out of your own way, the better to see the world through a wider lens than the narrow preoccupations of self had ever provided.

I wasn’t any of the things I had strived to be, or tried to escape. I was just a walker in the woods, who had learned a thing or two perhaps about finding her way, one who would get lost again and again.”

Body in Motion

Body in Motion

Comments 0 Comment

Here is a brief hymn to the body in motion, a passage from the memoir Winter Journal by Paul Auster. I read the book a few weeks ago and marked this page:

Your body in small rooms and large rooms, your body walking up and down stairs …

leaning back in chairs with your legs propped up on desks and tables as you write in notebooks, hunching over typewriters, walking through snowstorms without a hat …

feeling the different sensations of putting your feet on sand, dirt, and grass, but most of all the sensation of sidewalks, for that is how you see yourself whenever you stop to think about who you are: a man who walks, a man who has spent his life walking through the streets of cities.

To which I will add … and along woodland trails, suburban lanes, the paved paths that run beside busy roads, the strips of sidewalk that show up unannounced when I least expect them — and across streams on cylinders of concrete, the water rushing beneath my feet.

Stretching

Stretching

Comments 0 Comment

Packages are unwrapped. Christmas leftovers are dwindling. Must be time for New Year’s resolutions.

One of mine is stretching.

I usually carve just enough time out of the day to walk or run. No extra minutes for cooling down. 

I’m trying to change that. To come inside, keep the music in my ears and give my muscles time to soften and pull back into place.

There’s only one problem. I walk to think, too, and if the ideas have been bubbling, I need to jot them down before they slip away. So the other day I came up with a solution: writing and stretching at the same time. Sounds crazy, but it works.

Stretching the body, stretching the mind.

Deep Currents

Deep Currents

Comments 2 comments

Temperature extremes of the last week have us reeling. I walk in shorts and t-shirt one day, in sweat shirt and jacket the next.

A few days ago, in a t-shirt, I walked through air as changeable as water, as strange to the touch as those warm and cool spots you swim through in a spring-fed lake.

It occurred to me then that not only was the air like the water, but the weather was, too. Alternating puddles of days, as mysterious in their origins as those deep currents.

Walking Lake Anne

Walking Lake Anne

Comments 0 Comment

The other day, looking for some adventure, I ambled around Reston’s Lake Anne. I started at the landmark Heron House, the
16-story condominium building that was the epicenter of Robert Simon’s bold bid
for urban density in suburbia. Lake Anne Plaza doesn’t feel very urban today — or
very dense for that matter — but I know it’s a work in progress. I find a path that hugs the lake, cross a little bridge and walk past town houses adorned with native plants, witty sculptures and small fountains.

In the distance, I hear the clang of
a metal ladder as it’s leaned against a house. Someone is painting. I stroll
along South Shore Drive, steel blue water winking between the trees, and imagine what it must be like to live beside a lake, to take a daily measure
of its moods and colors. From the looks of the canoes and kayaks
along the shore, this lake is not just observed; it is experienced.

Before
long I’m at the far end of Lake Anne — and Wiehle Avenue, which I thought was
farther east. Foot travel often surprises me this way, showing me connections
that car travel cannot. As I swing around to the
northern shore, I catch a whiff of simmering grains and the sharp-sweet scent
of cinnamon. Rice pudding? My stomach rumbles, and I walk faster, back to my car. It’s never far away in
the suburbs.
Reentry Walk

Reentry Walk

Comments 0 Comment

Low skies and gray clouds made for a tough reentry yesterday. The pleasures of the table, of family and friends, of long sleeps and easy afternoons — all reverted to workaday tasks and tedium. Even the knowledge of more holidays in the near future, of how much there is to do between now and Christmas — even those thoughts didn’t move me.

So when I left the house at lunchtime, I made my way to the meadow. I needed the sweep of open land, of a path running through it, of birds on the wing.

And that’s what I found: quiet fields asleep for the season, a pair of robins (so soon? ), and a still pond without last week’s thin skin of ice — a still pond that is liquid once again.

Familiar sights, easy on the eye and stimulating to the brain.

Yesterday’s walk that did what the best walks do: send me cheerfully back into my day.

The Great Pause

The Great Pause

Comments 0 Comment

It’s almost December, trees are bare. Paths that seemed endless in summer green are exposed when winter comes. The community forest is not the leading edge of a wilderness; it is a parcel of land that didn’t perk.

But that’s not all. It is also is a landscape stripped to its essence. I take out my earphones and listen. I can almost hear the silence. The great pause. A momentary intake of breath before the hard exhale.

The fields are
empty; the nights are long. Early winter is peaceful, muted. It asks nothing
of us now.

Rhythm of the Amble

Rhythm of the Amble

Comments 0 Comment

Lately I’ve been running as much as walking. This may be good for my physical well-being but I’m missing the measured thought that comes with slower foot fall.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth more rumination. My theory has been that running requires enough effort that there is little left for anything else.

But the other day, on an especially soothing woods walk, another possibility presented itself: It’s the rhythm of the amble — left, right, left, right — allowing each step its own percussive moment. It’s trance-inducing after a while. And very conducive to cogitation.

Then again, it may have been the autumn color and the deepening dusk that worked its magic.

Walkable City

Walkable City

Comments 0 Comment

“Walking is a simple and a useful thing, and such a pleasure,
too. It is what brings planeloads of Americans to Europe on holiday, including even some of the traffic engineers who make our own cities so inhospitable.”  — Jeff Speck, Walkable City
 It would take far more than a single post to describe all the ideas in this book, thoughts about walkability from one of the nation’s foremost experts on it, the city planner Jeff Speck. For now here are Speck’s “Ten Steps of Walkability”:
 Put cars in their place
Mix uses
Get parking right
Let transit work
Protect the pedestrian
Welcome bikes
Shape the spaces
Plant trees
Make friendly and unique spaces
Pick your winners
Speck mentions European cities throughout the book. Here are places where pedestrians rule, where public transit safely transports people to and from their destinations, where bikes are welcome and buildings create human-scaled places.
What all these features combine to create is a walkable environment, one people want to stroll through and be part of.  We need to value “moving under one’s own power at a relaxed pace through a public sphere that
continually rewards the senses,” Speck says. “We need a new normal in America, one that
rewards walking.”

Running and Walking

Running and Walking

Comments 0 Comment

I can’t really explain it, did not set out to do it, but lately I’ve been running more than I’ve been walking.  My knees seem up to the task, and there is the mood-elevating aspect of the endeavor, the “runner’s high,” which encourages the habit.

I can’t help but compare the two, though. Running is about the pace, the accomplishment. At least at this point of my re-entry into the activity, I find myself thinking more “hey, I’m running!” than anything else.

Walking, on the other hand, frees the mind for wandering. The pace is natural, conducive to wool-gathering along the way.

All of which is to say: the ideal day would include time to run and walk. Ah, if only I didn’t have to earn a living!