Walk. Walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk.

Posted on 23 September 2018

“It’s fascinating, the things you see when you’re on foot.”

To mark World Car-Free Day this past week, the Guardian ran a series called Walking the City, exploring “the joys (and trials) of urban walking.” The quote at the top of this post is from their first piece in the series, an essay by David Sedaris on his lifelong habit of walking places, all around the world and one of numerous pieces that had me thinking about walking this week.

For my money, the best way to explore a city is on by bike — the combination of speed and flexibility gives you the best of walking and driving — but there’s a joy to walking, as well, especially if you’re with someone else.

On our first trip together, in our early twenties, my wife and I went to Havana. We stayed somewhere in the suburbs and walked long distances because we couldn’t afford that many cabs. Over a decade later I still remember the streets out of our hotel room to a nearby ice cream place, and recall the heat of getting to a beach in a way that I wouldn’t had we driven. I remember the texture of Wuhan, Hong Kong, Wellington and other cities from foot-based explorations.

My wife is the one who got me back into the habit of walking for the purpose of getting places in day-to-day life. While I was inclined to walk in the woods but drive to the store, she sees no reason not to combine the two. As Fran Lebowitz puts it elsewhere in the Guardian series, “People who drive everywhere ‘take a walk’, but for me its a form of transportation.”

An essay that’s stuck in my mind since I first read it is Drew Magary’s “Walk: A Message to the Class of 2017.” It is a 2,000 word piece urging, cajoling, pushing people to, in Magary’s words, “Walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk”:

“I have never regretted taking a walk. Every time you walk, a bunch of cool shit happens. You burn calories, for one thing. You think of cool ideas. You also get an immediate sense of the layout and vibe of wherever you happen to be. It’s a cheap shortcut to feeling like a local. I walked around downtown Atlanta for two hours once, which was long enough for me to realize, ‘Oh hey, this is the part of town that sucks!’ Then I went and walked around a cooler part.”

Here’s an example of why walking places is great. When we visited Turkey we went to a place called Uchisar Castle, a place in the desert where homes were built into a mountain. To get there we took public transit which meant that unlike the tourist buses, we were dropped off a few blocks away. The walk there took us down a residential street where we saw some strange things.

I have no idea why there were piles of mannequin legs and squashes on the same street, but there they were. Anyways, we went to Uchisar Castle and it was as amazing as it sounds and probably moreso, and then we had to walk back to take the bus. We took a different street and as a result passed a house where grape juice was flowing from the roof into a barrel where a young man and his little brother were collecting it. We spoke with them in a combination of broken English, French and Turkish and were invited up to their roof where the father was crushing the grapes for juice, and given a sample. It is one of my favourite memories, and one that wouldn’t have happened if we’d just driven to the tourist spot and then gone back to our hotel.

But this applies just as much at home. I regularly walk around downtown during my workday just to see what new things I can find. This week, it was this, which brought me no shortage of joy.

Another walking discovery was this in a tiny little alley in Smithers a few years back.

If you like to find the Easter eggs people leave throughout their community, walking is a must.

In England there’s something called “The Right to Roam.” It’s amazing. You can take foot paths through private property connected to public roads– walking from village to village through farmer’s fields. We spent a few days getting almost lost in a place called the Cotswolds, which looks exactly like a storybook. You can listen to an episode of 99 Per Cent Invisible about how this law came to be here.

Just this past week we were out walking our dogs and we cut down an alley I am not sure I’ve ever been through, in the neighbourhood I’ve lived almost the entirety of 33-year life. I saw greenhouses and dogs and garbage cans I’d never seen before, which is more revelatory than it sounds.

Walkers get it. Will Self wrote about this in the Guardian series, as well: “If you know your way around it (or are prepared to get lost), you can always find a vista that’s been overlooked, or an under-recognised corner of a familiar neighbourhood.”

Like me, Self lives in the same neighbourhood he grew up in and walking, he says, “loops me back in to my own lifecycle.” Sometimes when I’m going down a street, I’ll have memories of walking the same path when I was 23, 16, six-years-old. This is an underrated part of returning to where you’re from and it becomes more interesting with age.

You can also observe other walkers to figure out where to go. Tristan Gooley suggests, “Watch for someone who doesn’t pause before crossing the road – the better we know an area, the less time we spend at the pavement’s edge.”

Or follow strangers. Debbie Kent writes about, “handing over control of exploring the city to someone else,” in the words of artist Phil Smith.

“The Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs varies the recipe with his continuing work The Doppelgänger: every time he goes to a new city, he finds someone to follow based on feeling that they bear a resemblance to himself in some way.
“Meanwhile, for those too anxious to follow people, there is an alternative: Morris has tried following dogs – although that usually means following their owners, too.”
“‘Flies, birds, cats,'” suggests Smith. ‘I’m more interested in following animals these days.'”

Finally, I just want to share Ashleigh Young’s take on walking as something that contributes to “unwanted social encounters“:

“I was once walking on Wellington’s beautiful south coast, along a long footpath – empty but for an old housemate of mine with whom I’d badly fallen out years earlier. We walked towards each other on that path by the sea, as though in chilling slow motion and after approximately 100 years, we passed. It felt like an outtake of Blue Planet.”

Walk. Walk walk walk walk walk walk walk.

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