In Rebecca Solnit’s view of the world, space has ceased to exist. And with it, so has spectacle, terrain, and experience. Wanderlust: A History of Walking is equal parts an instruction and requiem for a deeply human practice that is slowly being excised by the false urgency of the postmodern era. I have no memory of hearing about this book, now published over twenty years ago, but I know that by that time I found a used copy—once owned by a Mary McDonnell of Aquavista Way, San Francisco—I had wanted to read it for years. Wanderlust is a survey of the ways in which walking permeates our lives. It is a history of the assault on pedestrian life in rural and urban spaces, of prostitution and pilgrimage, of mountain expeditions and suburban sprawl, of bipedal evolution and human anatomy.
I personally love to walk, but when I tell people this, I am quick to supply this with a fact. The fact is, I say, that I grew up in an extremely unwalkable city. My notion of mobility was trapped within the confines of what Solnit would refer to as a “series of interiors”—the bedroom, the classroom, the mall. Before I moved to Canada, I had a fantastical notion of cities in the west, that they were utterly perfect and that children like me who lived in them could do anything, go anywhere. And so when I moved here, a young college student, I took to walking with romantic gusto. Eight years later, now with a driver’s license and a bike, I still revel in the communal solitude of a long walk. “An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness”, Thoreau wrote and Solnit quoted, “and I can still get any this afternoon”.
But as much as Thoreau, Solnit, and I enjoy walking, we are in the midst of a political, economical, and social assault on the accessibility of space available to us. “The twin forces of globalized economies and privatized land”, Solnit writes, “are alienating us from each other and from local culture”. Walking, once in the guise of the promenade used to be a favourite pastime of the wealthy aristocracy. But it is now a symbol of powerlessness; modern urban design and suburban sprawl insist on returning us to the interiors of my childhood, and hold barely concealed disdain for walkers. Existing within these interiors hardly seems like a crisis until you begin to think about that actually leads to—a retreat from the outside world. Sequestered within offices and gyms, locked in our cars, we now spend lesser and lesser time engaging with the world we inhabit, touching it, smelling it, seeing it, learning from it, stomaching its ugliness and appreciating its beauty.
As more and more people chose to spend their spare time walking, more and more of the traditional rights-of-way were closed to them…The conflict is over two ways of imagining the landscape. Imagine the countryside as a vast body. Ownership pictures it divided unto economic units like internal organs, or like a cow divided into cuts of meat, and certainly such division is one way to organize a food-producing landscape, but it doesn’t explain why moors, mountains, and forests should be similarly fenced and divided. Walking focuses not on the boundary of lines of ownership that breaks the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning.
The decline of walking has another consequence, one of scale. It disembodies our everyday life, where we exist no longer on the scale of our bodies, but on that of the machines that we depend on to take us from one place to another. I’ve been thinking about the false promise of time saving technology a lot lately (I’m reading Odell’s How To Do Nothing these days which discusses this as well). The promise of cars and trains is that they save time that would be otherwise wasted walking, just as the promise of the assembly line was that it would decrease working hours, or to use a more recent example, as the promise of remote work during the pandemic is that it would free up more time that was otherwise wasted on a commute. But no one really, is saving any time, because any time that is freed up is promptly reallocated to some other presumably urgent task. In this way, the decline of walking is yes, about the decline of available walking space, but also about the decline of available time—the time during one might simply exist in an unstructured manner and contemplate, or absorb, or discover that which can only be found when one isn’t actively searching for it.
Quoting Solnit here—
…the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued— that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more productive, or faster paced. Even on this headland route going nowhere useful, this route that could only be walked for pleasure, people had trodden shortcuts between the switchbacks as though efficiency was a habit they couldn’t shake. The indeterminacy of a ramble, on which much may be discovered, is being replaced by the determinate shortest distance to be traversed with all possible speed, as well as by the electronic transmissions that make real travel less necessary. As a member of the self-employed whose time saved by technology can be lavished on daydreams and meanders, I know these things have their uses, and use them— a truck, a computer, a modem— myself, but I fear their false urgency, their call to speed, their insistence that travel is less important than arrival. I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.
The truth is, I find myself unwilling to finish this book. This is the first of fifty books I decided to read this year, but I’ve been about thirty pages shy of the end for weeks. I find myself picking it up, flipping back to chapters that I’ve already read, combing through it for new ideas, and discovering with some surprise, something new each time. A History of Walking is an autobiography of traversal, but hidden among accounts of Wordsworth’s long countryside strolls, the early origins of the Alpine and Sierra clubs, and the author’s own treks through the Mojave desert is also an instruction, an urgent call to reject the false urgency of our generation’s “anxiety to produce”. There is a gift in the indeterminate ramble and perhaps it is that it is unquantifiable. And so I return to old stomping grounds and turn old pages, and allow myself to meander.