Thoughts on walking

I am reading Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. Since I was little, I’ve been a walker. I walked to school from grades 3 through 12 (I lived within a mile of both schools I attended, a rarity in Los Angeles). I would walk weekends to the mall, and then I’d walk all around the mall. I’d walk along the beach, the boardwalk. When I moved to Berkeley, I’d walk up into the Berkeley hills. In San Francisco, I’d traverse high and low. In New York, well, it’s foolish not to walk.

And when I travel: walking. Heel toe. Heel toe. When I was younger, and I would travel with parents, I’d get a shitty hotel map, and just start wandering, meeting up with them at some appointed time and place. I walked San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, and London in such a fashion.

Anyway, as I read this book, it will spur various thoughts. Some of them I will write down.

A few so far:

For my money, perhaps the most haunting depiction of walking in literature is Yossarian’s ramble through the “Eternal City” in Catch-22. In an otherwise satirical and absurdist work, the bleakness of this chapter is deeply chilling.

Walking, or rather, bipedalism, is considered by some to be the original human trait. When I think about australopithecines walking around, the image that comes to mind is of the footprints found in the volcanic ash, left 3.7 millions years ago by a couple of ancestors, scurrying with some intent, quite possibly safety.

And something I just learned. The adjective “pedestrian,” meaning dull or prosaic, predates the noun “pedestrian,” meaning one who goes on foot.

Technorati Tags: walking