A Walker in the Suburbs

It was my first time so I wanted to make a good impression. I parked the car at the high school and hiked to Metro. At the office I made more trips to the water cooler, mailbox and colleagues’ offices. At lunchtime came the big kahuna — a fast walk to the mall and back. At the end of the day I was well over the 10,000 recommended steps. But come on, I’m a walker in the suburbs. What else could I do? Which is why I must wear the gizmo again. Wear it and forget about it.

I push aside questions of motivation and ambition — what kind of person shows off for a tiny gadget attached to her waist, something that no one else can see? I give myself a break. It was my first time. The pedometer made me do it.

Photo of Sportline ThinQ pedometers from Slippery Brick

It is a day of clouds and sun, of wind and flower. I have yet to walk; I’m about to now. But I can tell from the weather that the wind will challenge, the sun will warm and maybe the rain will fall, too. It will be a walk that is not unlike life.

I found in my photos a snapshot of a small windmill, a decorative one, I think, but suitable enough for illustration. It makes me think about how much a day can buffet us and how important it is to have a compass, something that helps point the way, that keeps us on track. Something that keeps us heading down our own truth path, steady to our own true north.

Among the many advantages of walking in the suburbs is this one: It is difficult to read a newspaper while doing it. Am I the only one who feels that there is almost too much bad news to absorb these days? Chaos in the Mideast. Nuclear peril in Japan. A humanitarian crisis in Darfur.

Today’s only good news (Kentucky’s two-point win over Ohio State in the final seconds of the NCAA “Sweet Sixteen”) happened too late to make it into the Washington Post. And so, I close the newspaper, lace up my walking shoes and take to the pavement. It’s my way to make things make sense.

I walked this morning before the sun rose. It was cold, and the flashlight in my hand was heavy enough to double as a weight. The moon was bright but waning. I heard an owl in the woods.

To walk in darkness diminishes landscape but broadens possibility. I could be a walker in the city or the country instead of the suburbs. I could be almost anywhere.

But because the traveler takes herself wherever she goes (Montaigne?), I was most of all in my own thoughts. I was pondering the freedom of darkness, how not knowing what lies ahead can liberate us from the here and now.

The correction came when I walked into exercise class Thursday, and the instructor, the jolly British Maureen, said she noticed my posture as I walked toward the gym. “You’re leaning forward, ” she said. Of course I am, I think to myself. This is how I barrel through life.

“Pull your shoulders back, tilt your hips forward,” Maureen said. “Walk as if you have a pillow on your head.” So yesterday, as I did my three miles, I righted my shoulders, felt a plumb line stretch from my head to the sky. My chest filled with air. I felt taller and a little uneasy, as if I was on stilts. As if I was pretending.

One of my walking routes requires that I hop a fence. I’m not trespassing (though I’ve been known to in search of a good path). But I am saving myself a few steps by clambering across the fence rather than looping around it. I climb over as quickly as possible, since I can only guess how a middle-aged woman in such an ungainly position must look. What I need, I was thinking today, is a stile, “a wooden device used to cross a wall or a fence on a walking path.” (I found that definition and a lovely blog post on stiles here: http://www.jedword.com/2010/10/16/stile-a-wooden-device-used-to-cross-a-fence-or-wall-on-a-walking-path/ )

The absence of stiles — in fact, the very absurdity of even imagining them here — is proof of how the suburban world, despite its paved trails and paths, is not designed for walking. It is built for the automobile. The roads are wide and car-scaled, and many neighborhoods (ours included) have no sidewalks. It is not the English countryside, with narrow lanes, paths from village to village and stiles across the hedgerows. It is fenced and paved, every walker for herself.

Still, you can’t keep a walker from dreaming. I may be strolling down a suburban street, but in my heart I’m ambling from Upper to Lower Slaughter in a fine English mist.

She carried a flashlight, so I could spot the goal-setter a mile down the road. It was my neighbor, Nancy, another walker in the suburbs, though a more regular one. It was well before dawn but she was already pounding the pavement.

About 12 years ago Nancy started fast-walking in earnest. She started, she said, because she had to use it or lose it. She keeps going for the same reason.

I caught her late one afternoon on her second walk of the day and asked her why she was out again. “I was two miles short of my goal,” she said. “Twenty miles a week.”

We talked some more, about routes and roads, suburban stuff, but all the while I’m thinking about goals. Setting them, keeping them, how they work to keep us young. How goals of distance are more weighty and tangible than goals of time. Twenty miles a week is a thousand miles a year. That’s from here to Kentucky and back. It’s a lot of miles to walk, a big goal to keep.

I don’t keep track of my miles. Maybe I should.

Yesterday afternoon after work I walked to the containment pond. It was cold and calm, and once I reached the pond, I pulled the earphones out of my ears. I wanted to walk without distraction.

The pond was so full of life in the spring and summer, buzzing with insects. Now it is clogged with cattails that have dried and turned brittle. There was a seasonal lesson here I could better contemplate in silence.

I’ve always thought it would be boring to exercise on a track, to walk in circles, but yesterday I saw the point of it — because each round brings a new revelation. There is a peacefulness that comes from such repetitive movement, a cleansing.

I only made one loop yesterday. But I’ll go back to the pond soon to search for its quiet center.

The winter walk is full of sounds: the cawing of crows, the whir of a distant chainsaw, the crunch of frozen ground underfoot. Along the woods path are pockets of crunchiness, where leaves have splintered and crumbled, become packed and moistened and are now brittle and fun to pop.

I think of winter as a silent season — and it is. But try as hard as I might, the fall of foot on land is never noiseless.