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.
The ghostly white on suburban streets is the residue of salt from a snow storm that wasn’t, a phantom blizzard. Rock salt crunches underfoot as I walk. The wind blows into my face, makes my eyes tear and my nose run. Other than that, all is frozen hard.
It’s a bleak landscape, unadorned by snow, wind-gouged and silent. Just being outside is an accomplishment, and walking through the cold reminds me that we have to keep going or freeze. Extreme temperatures are a great motivator. Besides, in my ears is a most unusual version of “The Four Seasons” by Vivaldi, full of strumming and thumping and trills. I could hear the birds singing, the streams gurgling. I listened, I lowered my head, I walked as fast as I could till I got home.
Head bowed, hands stuffed in sleeves, I pushed my way yesterday through the strong west wind. After the balmy strolls of a lingering autumn, the power of this “arctic air” (as the weather people like to call it) took my breath away.
I’ve never minded exercising in still cold. You start off shivering but heat yourself up quickly. The body is a furnace.
But cold windy days are another matter entirely. Every bit of exertion-stoked warmth flies away in the breeze. You are at the mercy of the elements. A part of the landscape, bent but not broken.
One of the world’s greatest walks is the pedestrian path of the Brooklyn Bridge. Stroll across it at sunset on a balmy late fall afternoon and see the city at its finest.
If you’re walking toward Brooklyn, on your right is South Street Seaport, lower Manhattan and, once you’re out far enough, the Statue of Liberty. On your left is midtown, with the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Ahead of you is this view, the towers and cables of the bridge itself, built six times stronger than it needed to be, built for the ages, and now 127 years old. A bridge that has inspired poets and madmen and ordinary citizens who need to believe in beauty.
The phrase jumped out at me from the page, in this case a review of Tony Hiss’s new book In Motion in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review. I was reading the paper in the car, and the sunlight fell over my shoulder and onto the words. The letters seemed to glow:
Solvitur Ambulando. “It is solved by walking.” An adage beloved by pilgrims and monks and wandering scholars. The belief that there is wisdom in stepping out the door, putting one foot in front of the other, leaving the world as we know it behind.
Had I heard it sooner, I might have named my blog Solvitur Ambulando. Too late now. There is already a blog called Solvitur Ambulando.
But I move forward in the spirit of this phrase: that when the mind spins, when the spirit sags, it never hurts to lace up the old shoes, grab the Walkman (ancient technology though it is) and take to the road. “It is solved by walking.”
I took the path along the Fairfax County Parkway the other day, a road that didn’t exist when we moved here but is a major thoroughfare now. A road we first heard about from our sheepish real estate agent, who only acknowledged it when we asked her about those ominous-looking orange-flagged stakes at the corner.
It was a house off Thompson Road, a lane that retained a hint of its country charm then but one I’m glad we don’t live on now, so close is it to this busy highway. I like how our neighborhood is tucked away from the traffic and surrounded by woods. I appreciate the quiet of the place, the birdsong.
Walking along the parkway I studied the different varieties of meadow grass. One is cattail-like, another is taller and skinnier. I should know the names of these grasses, but whatever they’re called, they look good together, waving in the wind. Their movement was like so many flags flapping, a brave and jubilant salute.
Sometimes when I have a free moment I browse the pages of The Footpaths of Britain by Michael Marriott. It’s an old tome I picked up for a dollar at a library book sale and worth a hundred times that amount. It has sentences like this: “In many respects, indeed, the Ridgeway is the best route for aspiring distance-walkers wondering where best to open their account.” Or this: “The Pennine Way, the first of Britain’s long-distance paths and still claimed by many as the toughest, grandest and most romantic of them all.” How can you fail to write lyrically when your country has place names like the Forest of Bowland, North Wessex Downs or Edenhope Hill?
Illustrated with mostly black-and-white and the occasional stunning color photograph, The Footpaths of Britain is charmingly out of date, with a chapter on equipment that long predates today’s pricey synthetic fabrics. Of course, this only makes me like the book more.
In short, it makes me want to travel, to hoist a pack on my back and take to the hills. But more than that, it reaffirms why I write about walking. This is from the foreword by John Hillaby: “Walking is a way of reviving a very old way of life once shared by mendicant friars, beggars, bards, pilgrims and traveling artisans. As Henry James remarked, landscape is character and walking — which is a form of touching — is like making love to the landscape and letting it return that love throughout your whole body. … Long-distance walking, I maintain, is a fine art…”
The wallet was lost, so we went to find it. We started at Hunter Station, an old crossroads. Confederate troops passed through here on the way to Antietam; Union troops on the way to Gettysburg. As skinny-tire bikes blew past us (“passing on the left”), we walked briskly toward the Cross County Trail, turned left and entered an alternative universe of creek and fern.
That there is such a thing as a 40-mile ribbon of green in a place as crowded and over developed as ours is cause for jubilation. Sometimes paved, sometimes dirt or gravel or mulch, the trail meanders along stream valley parks and across hidden ridges, gladly using rejected land, the leftovers, the crumbs. Put enough crumbs together, though, and you have passage from the Occuquan in the south to the Potomac in the north.
We walked a small stretch of the trail, just enough to stretch our legs and convince us that the wallet probably was at home after all (and of course, it was). But the point wasn’t the wallet; it was the walk.
I start today with a word I love. I think of it this morning because the sun, as it sinks lower in the sky, strikes trees and leaves slantwise and leaves behind pools of dappled light. How lovely is the air of almost-equinox, how balanced and beguiling. It transforms the hot and dusty world of summer into something airy and delicious. Something begging to be walked through.
I took early to Thomas Hardy novels. I’ve never understood why, have always hoped it wasn’t some incipient fatalism at work. Because I never much cared for the tragic endings. It was the landscape and the pacing; it was rural England, rustic characters, the weaving of maypoles, the quaffing of mead. I could imagine I was far, far away from Lexington, in another place and time.
Walking to Metro this morning, staying close on the heels of the man in front of me, made me think of fellow travelers. Hardy novels seem to open with two lonely souls falling into step together and making their way across the moors. With their chance meeting the novel begins and all the wondrous words that follow come from those first shared steps.