"Walks, Walking and Walkers"
By: Stan Leavy
Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road.
-Walt Whitman
Paul Salopek, a journalist, has begun a walk of 21,000 miles from the Rift Valley in Ethiopia to Tierra del Fuego at the southern end of South America. Yes, a walk, on his own feet, except I suppose when he reaches the Bering Strait and must take a boat to Alaska, as he has done already crossing the Red Sea. He is imagined in the newspaper, and photographed in the National Geographic, in the vast Arabian desert, accompanied by a couple of “cargo” camels, that is, animals not to ride but to carry luggage. I take it he is pretty young, since he plans to devote seven years to this adventure and, needless to say, write a book about it.
If this journey sounds like madness, there is method in it. The earliest of our Cro-Magnard forebears originated in the Rift Valley. At various times in the last 60,000 years groups of them emerged to look for what lay beyond the next hills or forests or wastelands, and then the next, until some of their descendants ended up in Antarctic South America, after which there was no place to go. And these ancestors of ours, urged by curiosity or necessity, walked.
In our world, with all the means of transportation at hand, walking anywhere further than the corner grocery, if there is one, may be admired or derided, but hardly considered exemplary. When forced by the terrain to walk on the highway, camels and all, Salopek is understandably regarded as an interloper by drivers of cars, everywhere the prevailing mode of travel. In the U.S. it’s illegal to walk on the big roads, with or without a camel, but we must allow him to worry about that when he comes to it some years hence. We are more likely to be taken aback by the prospect of one man’s summarizing 60,000 years of our forebears’ walking in one lifetime.
Andy Skurka is another master of walking. I read about his exploit, crossing America on foot, at about the time I was doing three miles a day with our dog after breakfast from our house in New Haven. My course was up from Autumn Street to St. Ronan and Edgehill as far as East Rock Road, then going east past Whitney Avenue to the entrance, walking along the Mill River as far as the low-slung footbridge, there beginning the return journey. Making casual, not to say idle, calculations, I figured that putting my daily three miles into a consecutive well-planned hike, it would take me three years to reach the Pacific Coast, or (depending on the roads) well into the ocean, if my ambition attained that grandiosity.
Skurka crossed North America from New Brunswick to the Pacific in stages. He walked, say, a few hundred miles, flew home to the East Coast, and after sufficient R. & R. flew back to his last goal to start on the next leg (right word) of the journey. I congratulated him for his achievement in a brief exchange of letters. I also asked him why in the absence of a human companion he didn’t have a dog at his side, a question he answered quite reasonably: many of his daily walks were too long for a dog to endure. He has since then made a profession as a leader of groups hiking the western mountains, which as a latter-day John Muir he knows well.
For an old man like me then just fantasying efforts like these was and is no mean chutzpah. Yet they are far from unwelcome thoughts, maybe made easier by admitting that in all my youthful boldness I never really got as far walking and hiking as I fancied I might. The White and Green mountains were the closest I’d ever come to bigtime operations, plus tourist’s strolls in the Rockies, Alps, and Himalayas; just naming them is bragging a bit.
Well, then, it’s still quite a comedown to the present. Going up Leeder Hill’s mild slope has to pass as my equivalent of Mt. Whitney. A few years ago I could still reach Whitneyville and back in a half hour each way, these trips being clocked as about a mile there and a mile back. But no more. And the Sleeping Giant now sleeps undisturbed, after having put up with me and Margaret, and later our children, for at least eighty years in all (longer, if you count her earlier family, as her grandfather’s initials from around 1870 still testify on a rock near the summit).
I don’t tire of reminding fellow-residents, that no matter how close to home we walk, we see trees, and along the trail behind the North building it’s possible to find spots easily transformed in our minds to quiet wilderness, with the Mill River below. The trail, although used too little, is pretty civilized, and isn’t dangerous to life or limb. But I’m thinking about one safeguard above others: “walkers”—not the word that means you and me en route, but the four-(or three-) wheeled devices many of us turn to for the support of our creaky bodies against falling. Like us they have evolved from earlier forms, notably the clunky apparatus that used to hop but not roll. It may take some moral growth to attach ourselves to our walkers. Canes, sometimes alternative but not nearly so reliable, are the dignified heirs to a once-stylish tradition among men of all ages. Take up a walker and you’re dated for life. They are as much prosthetic equipment as hearing aids and dentures, and equally indispensable. They can make trouble too if we don’t watch out, insinuating in us bent spines and a downward gaze. But what pleasure too, our balance no longer challenged, our lively step resumed, a seat on which to rest or carry breakfast, brakes for safety. Make no mistake about it: the “walker” of our time is the greatest extension to bipedal locomotion since we came down from the trees.
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