By the conclusion of Mildred Lissette Norman‘s 2,200 mile hike on the Appalachian Trail in 1952—the steep snow-covered peaks of New Hampshire’s White Mountains; the autumnal cacophony of Massachusetts’ brown, orange, and red Berkshires; the verdant greens of New York’s Adirondacks and Pennsylvania’s Alleghanies; the misty roll of Virginia’s Blue Ridge; the lushness of North Carolina and Georgia’s Great Smoky Mountains—she would wear down the soles of her blue Sperry Topsiders into a hatchwork of rubber threads, the rough canvas of the shoes ripping apart at the seams. “There were hills and valleys, lots of hills and valleys, in that growing up period,” Norman would recall, becoming the first woman to hike the trail in its entirety. The Topsiders were lost to friction, but along with 28 additional pairs of shoes over the next three decades, she would also gain a new name—Peace Pilgrim. The former secretary would (legally) rechristen herself after a mystical experience somewhere in New England, convinced that she would “remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace.”
Peace Pilgrim’s mission began at the Rose Bowl Parade in 1953, gathering signatures on a petition to end the Korean War. From Pasadena she trekked over the Sierra Nevada, the hardscrabble southwest, the expansive Midwestern prairies, the roll of the Appalachians and into the concrete forest of New York City. She gained spectators, acolytes, and detractors; there was fascination with this 46-year-old woman, wearing a simple blue tunic emblazoned in white capital letters with “Walking Coast to Coast for Peace,” her greying hair kept up in a bun and her pockets containing only a collapsible toothbrush, a comb, and a ballpoint pen. By the time she died in 1981, she had traversed the United States seven times. “After I had walked almost all night,” she recalled in one of the interviews posthumously collected into Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, “I came out into a clearing where the moonlight was shining down… That night I experienced the complete willingness, without any reservations, to give my life to something beyond myself.” It was the same inclination that compelled Abraham to walk into Canaan, penitents to trace Spain’s Camino de Santiago, or of the whirling Mevlevi dervishes traipsing through the Afghan bush. It was an inclination toward God.
Something about the plodding of one foot after another, the syncopation mimicking the regularity of our heartbeat, the single-minded determination to get from point A to point B (wherever those mythic locations are going to be) gives walking the particular enchantments that only the most universal of human activities can have. Whether a stroll, jog, hike, run, saunter, plod, trek, march, parade, patrol, ramble, constitutional, wander, perambulation, or just plain walk, the universal action of moving left foot-right foot-left foot-right foot marks humanity indelibly, so common that it seemingly warrants little comment if you’re not a podiatrist. But when it comes to the subject, there are as many narratives as there are individual routes, for as Robert Macfarlane writes in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, “a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.” Loathe we should be to let such an ostensibly basic act pass without some consideration.
Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking that “Like eating or breathing, [walking] can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.” Walking is leisure and punishment, introspection and exploration, supplication and meditation, even composition. As a tool for getting lost, both literally and figuratively, of fully inhabiting our being, walking can empty out our selfhood. A mechanism for transmuting a noun into a verb, or transforming the walker into the walking. When a person has pushed themselves so that their heart pumps like a piston, that they feel the sour burn of blisters, the chaffing of denim, so that breathing’s rapidity is the only focus, then there is something akin to pure consciousness (or possibly I’m just fat). And of course, all that you can simply observe with that consciousness, unhampered by screen, so that walking is “powerful and fundamental,” as Cheryl Strayed writes in her bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Coast Trail: an account of how Strayed hiked thousands of miles following the death of her mother, and learning “what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets… It seemed to me it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild.”
Maybe that sense of being has always attended locomotion, ever since a family of Australopithecus pressed their calloused heals into the cooling volcanic ash of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania some 3.7 million years ago. Discovered in 1976 by Mary Leaky, the preserved footprints were the earliest example of hominoid bipedalism. Two adults and a child, the traces suggested parents strolling with a toddler, as if they were Adam and Eve with either Cain or Abel. Olduvai’s footprints are smaller than those of a modern human, but they lack the divergent toe of other primates, and they indicate that whoever left them moved from the heel of their feet to the ball, like most of us do. Crucially, there were no knuckle impressions left, so they didn’t move in the manner that chimpanzees and gorillas do. “Mary’s footprint trail was graphically clear,” explains Virginia Morell in Ancestral Passions: The Leakey Family and the Quest for Humankind’s Beginnings, “the early hominoids stood tall and walked as easily on two legs as any Homo sapiens today… it was apparently this upright stance, rather than enlarged crania, that first separated these creatures from other primates.”
The adults were a little under five-feet tall and under 100 pounds, covered in downy brown fur with slopping brow and overbit jaw, with the face of an ape but the uncanny eyes of a human, the upright walking itself transforming them into the latter. Walking preceded words, the ambulation perhaps necessitating the speaking. Australopithecus remained among the pleasant green plains of east Africa, but by the evolution of anatomically modern humans in the area that is now Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia, and walking became the engine by which people disseminated through the world. Meandering was humanity’s insurance, as Nicholas Wade writes in Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, that as little as 50,000 years ago and the “ancestral human population, the first to possess the power of fully articulate modern speech, may have numbered only 5,000 people, confined to a homeland in northeast Africa.” In such small numbers, and in such a circumscribed area, humanity was prisoner to circumstance, where an errant volcano, draught, or epidemic could have easily consigned us to oblivion. Walking as far as we could was our salvation.
Humans would walk out of Africa into Asia and perhaps by combination of simple boat and swimming down the Indonesian coast into Australia, across the Bering Strait and into North America, and over the Panamanian isthmus and into South America, with distant islands like Madagascar, New Zealand, and Iceland waiting for sailing technology to ferry people to their shores millennia after we left the shade of the Serengeti’s bulbous baobab trees. We think of our ancestors as living in a small world, but there’s was an expansive realm, all the more so since it wasn’t espied through a screen. Partner to burrowing meerkats peaking over the dry scrub of the Kalahari, nesting barn owls overlooking the crusting, moss-covered bark of the ancient Ciminian Forest, the curious giant softshell tortoises of the Yangtze River. To walk is to be partner to the natural world, it is to fully inhabit being an embodied self. Choosing to be a pedestrian today is to reject the diabolic speed of both automobile and computer. Macfarlane writes in The Wild Places that nature is “invaluable to us precisely because… [it is] uncompromisingly different… you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share.” Sojourn into a world so foreign was the birthright of the first humans, and it still is today, if you choose it.
All continents, albeit mostly separated by unsettlingly vast oceans, are in some form or another connected by thin strips of land here or there, something to the advantage of Scottish Victorian explorer Sir George Thompson who walked from Canada to Western Europe, via Siberia. More recently there was the English explorer George Meegan who from 1977 to 1983 endeavored to walk from Patagonia to the northern tip of North America, which involved inching up South America’s Pacific coast, crossing the Darien Gap into Central America, circling the Gulf Coast and walking up the Atlantic shore, following the Canadian border, and then walking from the Yukon into Alaska. Meegan’s expedition covered 19,019 miles, the longest recorded uninterrupted walk. Effected by the nervous propulsion that possibly compelled that first generation to leave home, Meegan explains in The Longest Walk: The Record of our World’s First Crossing of the Entire Americas that “once the idea seemed to be a real possibility, once I thought I could do it, I had to do it.” Along the way Meegan wore out 12 pairs of hiking boots, got stabbed once, and met peanut-farmin’ Jimmy Carter at his Georgian homestead.
Meegan’s route was that of the first Americans, albeit accomplished in reverse. The most recent large landmass to be settled, those earliest walkers observed a verdant expanse, for as Craig Childs describes the Paleolithic continent in Atlas of a Lost World: Travels in Ice Age America, the land east of the Bering Strait was a “mosaic of rivers and grasslands… horizons continuing on as if constantly giving birth to themselves—mammoths, Pleistocene horses, and giant bears strung out as far as the eye could see. It must have seemed as if there was no end, the generosity of this planet unimaginable.” A venerable (and dangerous) tradition to see America as an unspoiled Paradise, but it’s not without its justifications, and one that I’ve been tempted to embrace during my own errands into the wilderness. Raised not far from Pittsburgh’s Frick Park, a 644-acre preserve set within the eastern edge of the city, a bramble of moss-covered rocky creeks and surprisingly steep ravines, a constructed forest primeval meant to look as it did when the Iroquois lived there, and I too could convince myself that I was a settler upon the frontier. Like all sojourns into the woods, I found that my strolls in Frick Park couldn’t help but have a bit of the mythic about them, especially at dusk.
One day when I was a freshman, a friend and I took a stack of cheap, pocket-sized, rough orange-covered New Testaments which the Gideons, who were standing the requisite constitutionally mandated distance from our high school, had been assiduously handing out as part of an ill-considered attempt to convert our fellow students. In a pique of adolescent blasphemy, we went to a Frick Park path, and walked through the cooling October forest as twilight fell, ripping the cheap pages from the bibles and letting them fall like crisp leaves to the woods’ floor, or maybe inadvertently as a trail of Eden’s apple seeds. No such thing as blasphemy unless you already ascent to the numinous, and as our heretical stroll turned God on his head, a different pilgrim had once roamed woods like these. During the Second Great Awakening when revivals of strange fervency and singular belief burnt down the Appalachian edge, a pious adherent of the mystical Swedenborgian faith named John Chapman was celebrated for traipsing through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Briefly a resident of the settlement of Grant’s Hill in what is today downtown Pittsburgh, about several miles west of Frick Park, and Chapman’s mission was to spread the gospel of the New Church, along with the planting of orchards. Posterity remembers him as Johnny Appleseed.
Folk memory has Johnny
Appleseed fixed in a particular (and peculiar way): the bearded frontiersmen,
wearing a rough brown burlap coffee sack, a copper pot on his head, and a
trundled bag over his shoulder as the barefoot yeoman plants apples across the
wide expanse of the West. I’d wager there is a strong possibility you thought
he was as apocryphal as John Henry or Paul Bunyan, but Chapman was definitely
real; a Protestant St. Francis of whom it was said that he walked with a tamed wolf
and that due to his creaturely benevolence even the mosquitoes would spare him
their sting. Extreme walkers become aspects of nature, their souls as if the
migratory birds that trace lines over the earth’s curvature. Johnny Appleseed’s
walking was a declaration of common ownership over the enormity of this land. Sometime
in the 1840s, Chapman found himself listening to the outdoor sermonizing of a fire-and-brimstone
Methodist preacher in Mansfield, Ohio. “Where is the primitive Christian, clad
in coarse raiment, walking barefoot to Jerusalem?” the minister implored
the crowd, judging them for their materialism, frivolity, and immorality.
Finally, a heretofore silent Johnny Appleseed, grown tired of the uncharitable
harangue, ascended the speaker’s platform and hiked one grime-covered,
bunion-encrusted, and blistered black foot underneath the preacher’s nose.
“Here’s your primitive Christian,” he supposedly declared. Even
Johnny Appleseed’s gospel was of walking.
“John Chapman’s appearance at the minister’s stump,” writes William Kerrigan in Johnny Appleseed and the American Orchard: A Cultural History, made the horticulturalist a “walking manifestation of a rejection of materialism.” Not just figuratively a walking embodiment of such spirituality, but literally a walking incarnation of it. The regularity of putting one foot after the other has the rhythm of the fingering of rosary beads or the turning of prayer wheels; both intimately physical and yet paradoxically a means of transcending our bodies. “Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned,” writes Solnit, “as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord.” Hence walking as religious devotion, from the Australian aborigine on a walkabout amidst the burnt ochre Outback, to the murmuring pilgrim tracing the labyrinth underneath the stone flying buttresses of Chartres Cathedral, and the Hadji walking over hot sands towards Mecca, or the Orthodox Jew graced with the gift of deliberateness as she walks to shul on Shabbat. Contemplative, meditative, and restorative, religiously speaking walking can also be penitential. In 2009 the Irish Augustinian Fr. Michael Mernagh walked from Cork to Dublin on a pilgrimage of atonement that he single-handedly took in penitence for the Church’s shameful silence regarding child sexual abuse. Not just a pilgrimage, but a protest, with Fr. Mernagh saying of the rot infecting the Church that the “more I have walked the more I feel it is widespread beyond our comprehension.” Atonement is uncomfortable, painful even. As pleasant as a leisurely stroll can be, a penitential hike should strain the lungs, burn the muscles. If penitence isn’t freely taken, however, then it’s no longer penitence. Especially if there’s no reason for contrition, then it’s something else—punishment. Or torture.
“The drop outs began,” recalled Lt. Col. William E. Dyess. “It seemed that a great many of the prisoners reached the end of their endurance at about the same time. They went down by twos and threes. Usually, they made an effort to rise. I never can forget their groans and strangled breathing as they tried to get up. Some succeeded.” Many didn’t. A Texas Air Force officer with movie-star good looks, Dyess had been fighting with the 21st Pursuit Squadron in the Philippines when the Japanese Imperial Army invaded in 1942. Along with some 80,000 fellow American and Filipino troops, he would be marched the 70 miles from Marviales to Camp O’Donnell. Denied food and water, forced to walk in the scorching heat of the jungle sun, with temperatures that went well over 100 degrees, it’s estimated that possibly 26,000 prisoners—a third of those captured—perished in that scorching April of 1942.
Bayonet and heat, bullet and sun, all goaded the men to put one foot in front of the other until many of them couldn’t any more. Transferred from the maggot and filth infested Camp O’Donnell, where malaria and dengue fever took even more Filipinos and Americans, Dyess was able to escape and make it back to American lines. While convalescing in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va., Dyess narrated his account—the first eyewitness American testimony to the Bataan Death March—to Chicago Tribune writer Charles Leavelle. Prohibited from release by the military, Leavelle would finally see the publication of Bataan Death March: A Survivor’s Account in 1944. Dyess never read it; he died a year before. His P-38G-10-LO Lightning lost an engine during takeoff at a Glendale, Calif., airport, and rather than risk civilian casualties by abandoning the plane, Dyess crashed it into a vacant lot, so that his life would be taken by flying rather than by walking.
Walking can remind us that we’re alive, so that it’s all the more obscene when such a human act is turned against us, when the pleasure of exertion turns into the horror of exhaustion, the gentle burn in muscles transformed into spasms, breathing mutated into sputtering. Bataan’s nightmare, among several, was that it was walking that couldn’t stop, wasn’t’ allowed to stop. “It is the intense pain that destroys a person’s self and world,” writes philosopher Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, “a destruction experienced spatially as either the contraction of the universe down to the immediate vicinity of the body or as the body swelling to fill the entire universe.” Torture reminds us that we’re reducible to bodies; it particularizes and universalizes our pain. With some irony, walking does something similar, with the exertion of moving legs and swinging arms, our wide-ranging mobility announcing us as citizens of the universe. Hence the hellish irony of Bataan, or the 2,200 miles from Georgia to Oklahoma that more than 100,000 Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, and Choctaw were forced to walk by the U.S. federal government between 1830 and 1850, the January 1945 40-mile march of 56,000 Auschwitz prisoners to the Loslau train station in sub-zero temperatures, or the 2.5 million residents of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, forced to evacuate into the surrounding countryside by the Khmer Rouge in 1975. These walks are as hell, prisoners followed by guards with guns and German shepherds, over the hard, dark ground.
Harriet Tubman’s walks were also in the winter, feet trying to gain uncertain purchase upon frozen bramble, stumbling over cold ground and slick, snow covered brown leaves, and she too was pursued by men with rifles and dogs. She covered similar distances as those who were forced to march, but Tubman was headed to another destination, and that has made all the difference. Crossing the Mason-Dixon line in 1849, Tubman recalled that “I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such glory over everything; the sun came like gold through the trees, and over the fields, and I felt like I was in Heaven.” But she wasn’t in Heaven, she was in Pennsylvania. For Tubman, and for the seventy enslaved people whom she liberated on thirteen daring missions back into Maryland, walking was arduous, walking was frightening, walking was dangerous, but more than anything walking was the price of freedom.
Tubman would rightly
come to be known as the Moses of her people (another prodigious walker),
descending into the antebellum South like Christ harrowing Hell. The network of
safe-houses and sympathetic abolitionists who shepherded the enslaved out of
Maryland, and Virginia, and North Carolina into Pennsylvania, and New England
and Canada, who quartered the enslaved in cold, dusty, cracked root cellars and
hidden passageways, used multiple means of transportation. People hid in the
backs of wagons underneath moldering produce, they availed themselves of
steamships and sometimes the Underground Railroad was a literal railroad. One
enterprising man named Henry Box Brown even mailed himself from Richmond to
Philadelphia, the same year Tubman arrived in the Quaker City. But if the
Underground Railroad was anything, it was mostly a process of putting one foot
before the other on the long walk to the north.
Familiar with the ebbs and flows of the
brackish Chesapeake as it lapped upon the western shores of Dorchester County,
Tubman was able to interpret mossy rocks and trees to orient herself, navigating
by the Big Dipper and Polaris. Her preferred time of travel was naturally at
night, and winter was the best season to abscond back, deploying the silence
and cold of the season as camouflage. Dorchester is only a scant 150 miles from
Philadelphia, but those even further south – South Carolina, Georgia, even
Mississippi – would also walk to freedom. Eric Foner explains in Gateway to
Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad, that “Even
those who initially escaped by other means ended up having to walk significant
distances.” Those nights on the Underground Railroad must have been
terrifying. Hearing the resounding barks of Cuban hounds straining at slave
catchers’ leashes, the metallic taste of fear sitting in mouths, bile rising up
in throats. Yet what portals of momentary grace and beauty were there, those
intimations of the sought-after freedom? To see the graceful free passage of a
red-tailed hawk over the Green Ridge, the bramble thickets along the
cacophonous Great Falls of the cloudy Potomac, the luminescence of a blue moon
reflected on a patch of thick ice in the Ohio River?
During that same decade, and the French dictator Napoleon III was, through ambitious city planning, inventing an entirely new category of walker – the peripatetic urban wanderer. Only a few months after Tubman arrived in Philadelphia, and four thousand miles across the ocean, something new in the annals of human experience would open at Paris’ Au Con de la Rue – a department store. For centuries, walking was simply a means of getting from one place to another; from home to the market, from market to the church. With something, like the department store, or the glass covered merchant streets known as arcades, people were enticed not just to walk somewhere, but rather to walk everywhere. Such were the beginnings of the category of perambulator known as the flâneur, a word that is untranslatable, but carries connotations of wandering, idling, loafing, sauntering.
Being a flâneur means simply walking without purpose other than to observe; of strolling down Le Havre Boulevard and eyeing the window displays of fashions weaved in cashmere and mohair at Printemps, of espying the bakeries of Montmartre laying out macarons and Pain au chocalait; of passing the diners in outdoor brasseries of the Left Bank eating coq au vin. Before the public planner Georges-Eugène Hausmann’s radical Second Empire reforms, Paris was a crowded, fetid, confusing and disorganized assemblage of crooked and narrow cobblestoned streets and dilapidated half-timbered houses. Afterwards it became a metropolis of wide, magnificent boulevards, parks, squares, and museums. Most distinctively, there were the astounding 56,573 gas lamps that had been assembled by 1870, lit by a legion of allumeurs at dusk, so that people could walk at night. If Hausmann – and Napoleon III – were responsible for the arrival of the flâneur, then it was because the city finally had things worth seeing. For the privileged flâneur, to walk wasn’t the means to acquire freedom – to walk was freedom.
“For the perfect flâneur,” writes poet Charles Baudelaire in 1863, “it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite… we might liken him to a mirror as vast as the crowd itself; or to a kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness.” Every great city’s pedestrian-minded public thoroughfares—the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and Cromwell Road; Fifth Avenue and Sunset Boulevard—is the rightful territory for the universal flâneur. Writers like Baudelaire compared the idyl of city walking to that other 19th-century innovation of photography; the flâneur existed inside a living daguerreotype, as if they had entered the hazy atmosphere of an impressionist painting, the gas lamps illuminating the drizzly fog of a Parisian evening. For the 20th-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who analyzed that activity in his uncompleted magnum opus The Arcades Project, the flâneur was the living symbol of modernity, writing that the “crowd was the veil from behind which the familiar city as phantasmagoria beckoned to the flaneur.”
I often played the role of flaneur for the two years my wife and I lived in Manhattan in a bit of much-coveted rent-controlled bliss. When your estate is 200 square feet, there’s not much choice but to be a flâneur, and so we occupied ourselves with night strolls through the electric city, becoming familiar with the breathing and perspiring of the metropolis. Each avenue has its espirit de place: stately residential York, commercial First and Second with their banks and storefronts, imperial Madison with its regal countenance, Park with its aura of old money, barely reformed Lexington with its intimations of past seediness. In the city at night, we availed ourselves of looking at the intricate pyrotechnic window displays of Barneys and Bloomingdales, of the bohemian leisure of the Strand’s displays in front of Central Park, of the linoleum cavern underneath the 59th Street Bridge, and of course Grand Central Station, the United States’ least disappointing public space.
Despite gentrification, rising inequity, and now the pandemic, New York still amazingly functions according to what the geographer Edward Soja describes in Thirdspace as being a place where “everything comes together… subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable.” Yet Manhattan is perhaps more a nature preserve for the flâneur, as various economic and social forces over the past few decades have conspired to make our species extinct. The automobile would seem to be a natural predator for the type, and yet even in the deepest environs of the pedestrian unfriendly suburbs the (now largely closed) American shopping mall fulfilled much the same function as Baudelaire’s arcades. To stroll, to see, to be seen. A new threat has emerged in the form of Amazon, which portends to end the brick-and-mortar establishment, the coronavirus perhaps the final death of the flâneur. If that type of walker was birthed by the industrial revolution, then it now appears late capitalism is his demise, undone by our new tyrant Jeff Bezos.
The rights of the flâneur were never equally distributed, with scant mention of the flâneur needing to be hyperaware of his surroundings, of needing to carry keys in his fist, or having to arm himself with mace. While it’s not an entirely unknown word, flâneuse is a much rarer term, and it’s clear that the independence and assumed safety that pedestrian exploration implies is more often than not configured as masculine. Women have, of course, been just as prodigious in mapping the urban space with their feet as have men, with Lauren Elkin joking in Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London that many accounts assume that a “penis were a requisite walking appendage, like a cane.” She provides necessary corrective to the male-heavy history of the flaneur, while also acknowledging that the risks are different for women. Describing the anonymity that such walking requires, Elkin writes that “We would love to be invisible the way a man is. We’re not the ones to make ourselves visible… it’s the gaze of the flaneur that makes the woman who would join his ranks too visible to slip by unnoticed.”
As a means of addressing this inequity that denies more than half the world’s population safe passage through public spaces, the activist movement Take Back the Night held its first march in Philadelphia, after the 1975 murder of microbiologist Susan Alexander Speeth as she was walking home. Take Back the Night used one of the most venerable of protest strategies—the march—as a means of expressing solidarity, security, defiance, and rage. Andrea Dworkin stated the issue succinctly in her treatise “The Night and Danger,” explaining that “Women are often told to be extra careful and take precautions when going out at night… So when women struggle for freedom, we must start at the beginning by fighting for freedom of movement… We must recognize that freedom of movement is a precondition for everything else.” Often beginning with a candlelight vigil, participants do exactly that which they’re so often prevented from doing—walking freely at night. So often paeons to walking that are penned by men wax rhapsodic about the freedom of the flaneur, but forget how gendered the simple act of walking is. Dworkin’s point is that women never forget it.
Few visuals are quite as powerful as seeing thousands of women and men moving with intentionality through a public space, hoisting placards and signs, chanting slogans, and reminding the powers that be what mass mobilization looks like. There is a debate to be had about the efficacy of protest. But at their absolute most charged, a protest seems like it can change the world; thousands of feet walking as one, every marcher a small cell in a mighty Leviathan. In that uncharacteristically warm February of 2003, I joined the 5,000 activists who marched through the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Oakland against the impending war in Iraq. There were the old hippies wearing t-shirts against the Vietnam War, the slightly drugged out looking college-aged Nader voters, Muslim women in vermillion hijabs and men in olive keffiyeh, the Catholic Workers, and the Jews for Palestine, the slightly menacing balaclava wearing anarchists, and of course your well-meaning liberals such as myself.
We marched past Carnegie-Mellon’s frat row, young Republicans jeering us with cans of Milwaukee’s Best, through the brutalist concrete caverns of the University of Pittsburgh’s campus, and under the watchful golem that was the towering gothic Cathedral of Learning, up to the Fifth Avenue headquarters of CMU’s Software Engineering Institute, a soulless mirrored cube reflecting the granite gargoyles blackened by decades of steel mill exhaust who were watchfully positioned on St. Paul’s Cathedral across the street. Supposedly both the SEI and the adjacent RAND Institute had DoD contracts, developing software that would be used for drone strikes and smart bombs. With righteous (and accurately placed) indignation, the incensed crowd chanted, and we felt as a singular being. On that same day, in 650 cities around the world, 11 million others marched, history’s largest global protest. It felt as if by walking we’d stop the invasion. Reader, we did not stop the invasion.
Despite those failures, the experience is indicative of how walking alters consciousness. Not just in a political sense, but in a personal one as well (though those things are not easily extricated). There is a methodology for examining how walking alters our subjectivity, a discipline with the lofty and vaguely threatening name of “psychogeography.” Theorist Guy Debord saw the practice as a means of reenchanting space and place, developing a concept called dérive, which translates from the French as “drifting,” whereby participants “drop their usual motives for movement and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there,” as he is quoted in the Situationist International Anthology. Sort of a hyper-attenuated version of being the flaneur, psychogeographers perceived familiar streets, squares, and cities from an entirely different perspective. Other psychogeographical activities included tracing out words by the route a walker takes through the city, or mapping smells and sounds. The whole thing has an anarchic sensibility about it, but with the whimsy of the Dadaists, while just as enthused with praxis as with theory.
For example, in his travelogue Psychogeography the Anglo-American novelist Will Self journeys from JFK to Manhattan while on foot. Sneakers crunching over refuse alongside the Van Wyck, the metropolitan detritus that exists in those scrubby brown patches that populate the null-voids that exist between somewhere and somewhere else. Nothing can really compare to entering New York on foot, as Self did. It’s fundamentally different from arriving in a cab driving underneath the iconic steel girders of the Manhattan Bridge, or being ferried into the Parthenon that is Grand Central, or even disembarking from a Peter Pan Bus in the grody cavern of Port Authority. Walking is a “means of dissolving the mechanized matrix which compresses the space-time continuum” Self writes, with the walker acting as “an insurgent against the contemporary world, an ambulatory time traveler.” For the psychogeographers, how we move is how we think, so that if we wish to change the later, we must first alter the former.
So it would seem. Writing in the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarked in The Confessions that “I can only meditate when I’m walking… my mind only works with my legs.” In his autobiography Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche injuncted, “Sit as little as possible; do not believe any idea that was not born in the open air and of free movement…. All prejudices emanate from the bowels.” Meanwhile, his contemporary Søren Kierkegaard wrote that “I have walked myself into my best thoughts.” Most celebrated of the walking philosophers, Immanuel Kant, had daily constitutionals across Konigsberg’s bridges that merchants set their watches by him. Wallace Stevens famously used to write his poems as he stomped off across the antiseptic landscape of Hartford, Conn. He walked as scansion, his wingtips pounding out iambs and trochees with the wisdom that understands verse is as much of the body as it is of the mind, so that “Perhaps/The truth depends on a walk.” Walking is a type of consciousness, a type of thinking. Walking is a variety of reading, the landscape unspooling as the most shining of verse, so that every green leaf framed against a church’s gothic tower in a dying steel town, both glowing with an inner light out of the luminescence of the golden hour, is the most perfect of poems, only to be seen by she who gives it the time to be considered.
Image Credit: SnappyGoat
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