A Walker in the Suburbs

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with mostly black-and-white and the occasional stunning color photograph, The Footpaths of Britain is charmingly out of date, with a chapter on equipment that long predates today’s pricey synthetic fabrics.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.

When a writer can’t write, she has writer’s block. When a walker can’t walk, does she have walker’s block? Or what if the walker only has time for a quick walk, a walk around the block, but she doesn’t have a block to walk around?

Such is the case here in the suburbs. Because most people don’t want to live on cut-through streets, we have plenty of cul-de-sacs but precious few connectors. Instead of walking around the block, with the pleasant circularity that entails, we walk up one side of the road and down another.

To get around this linearity, I’ve come up with loop walks. I cross West Ox, a busy, four-lane road at the west end of our neighborhood, down a slight hill, left into Franklin Farm, through a meadow, along a paved path in a small woods and eventually back to West Ox and into Folkstone again. It isn’t a block, but it is a walk. A walker’s block.

Walking in the city, on the trudge to and from Metro or at lunchtime when I stroll around the Mall, I can’t help but listen in. “We only have two months.” “I said 15 not 50.” “Do you think she’ll be able to pull that off?” Everywhere I walk there are conversations to be overheard. I’ve come to think of it as “eaveswalking.” It’s not as intentional as eavesdropping but it’s almost as satisfying.
Then what of the walker in the suburbs? My eaveswalking here is a mostly silent affair. But still, the houses talk to me. When I walk through our neighborhood each house has a story. Sometimes the story is about the people who live there now, but other times it’s about people who lived in that house five, ten years ago.The family with four boys who used to play football in the front yard. The boys grew up; the family moved away. The man who planted a beautiful perennial garden. His wife once admitted, “I don’t love gardening but I love the gardener.” The gardener died three years ago. His wife moved back to California. But the flowers still bloom every summer.

On a walk yesterday I spied a path I’d never noticed before. I followed the trail, let it take me across a bridge, past clumps of skunk cabbage and a forest floor carpeted with violets and spring beauties.
As I walked I wondered what it is about paths that so appeal to me? “There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,” the poet Byron wrote. “There is a rapture on the lonely shore.” Though I, too, love the wilderness, I also love the sight of a beaten dirt track curving around a bend. Do all humans share a hard-wired appreciation for this parting in the forest, for this passage through the briars? Or am I the only one? To me a path is proof that others have gone before us, that there is a way through this tangled treescape, which, lovely though it may be, is still not our home, our yard, our world.

Prescribe walking to a walker in the suburbs and she will put in the miles. Yesterday I took two walks, a short one in the morning and a long one in the afternoon.
The short one, which happened on the way home from the post office, meandered through Horsepen Run Stream Valley Park, across a stream, under a road (through a tunnel) and up along a rise on the other side. It was still chilly and the air was crisp and clear. Morning walks are full of promise.
The long walk took me from my house all the way to the Reston Trails and back. I took my camera and snapped this photo of the small farm in the neighborhood behind us. Every time I walk there I marvel at what a treasure it is. There are five-acre parcels for folks who like horses, and if you use your imagination a little, you could be a hundred miles away. It was just what the doctor ordered for a soft spring day.

This weekend’s walks were as much liquid as solid. Moisture clung to my hair and face. My breath came in clouds, and my skin felt clammy and alive. It was invigorating to walk in the mist, to feel heaven and earth as one. The weekend’s weather brought to mind a nursery rhyme that begins, “One misty moisty morning, when cloudy was the weather, I chanced to meet an old man, dressed all in leather.” I’m not sure leather was the best garment choice this weekend.