The Americans never walk! In winter too cold and in summer too hot.
--William Butler Yeats
The mountains are calling and I must go.
--John Muir
An old Easter week tradition has survived the centuries, in one form or
another, which calls to me more than the music, the lilies and dyed
eggs. It is the tradition of pilgrimage—whether for days or a few
hours, whether down the block or along roads to a holy shrine, up Mount
Brandon or down the New River Trail.
Possibly because of the spring backdrop—raw and barely-begun as it
may be—Easter seems to evoke humanity’s innate urge to “break out of
the shell” of home, office, vehicle and comfort zone—and take a walk, a
picnic, a cold campout between the earth, bare trees and sky.
The urge contains in it the enzyme of something we used to call
“cabin fever,” a malady that would strike people of past springtimes
who had felt cooped-up all winter in their dark, cramped, ill-heated
homes. In those days, no home theaters, video games or other
electronics existed to entrance one into forgetting his basic
entrapment in a box, and so people had the natural urge to break free,
as out of a dungeon, into the springtime light.
But the urge to pilgrimage also has to do with the act of walking.
Now here is a useful metaphor. Through the ages and across the
cultures, “walking” has represented everything we find distinctive
about the human life. Human beings walked on two legs, where most
creatures crawled, swam or flapped.
Humankind also had free will—the ability to choose a response
beyond the survival instinct. This, too, was referred to as a “walk.”
Throughout the Old and New Testaments, we hear of people who “walked in
the way of the Lord” or “walked by faith,” and admonitions to “walk
while it is day,” to “turn neither to the left nor the right.”
Even God went out for walks, in “Genesis,” in the cool of the
day—and there seems from that ancient story a cultural recognition that
walking was a divine gift. Feet on the ground, face in the sky, a
walker seemed a connection between the two worlds of earth and heaven,
matter and spirit.
Perhaps for that reason, “walking” denoted freedom, in many
cultures. Slaves were not allowed to walk away; in most slave cultures,
they had no shoes. And so spirituals evolved in the U.S., where slaves
sang of “traveling shoes” and “walking shoes” and “golden slippers”—all
about the yearned-for realm of freedom, in this world or the next.
Even today, we still say of a person whose criminal charges have been dropped—“he walked.” He went free.
And finally, it’s the old American tradition—to walk across the land, to scout out new territory, explore, learn, grow.
And so it gives me pause, these days, to realize that few of my
teenage students—usually just the former Scouts—can walk a mile.
There are many reasons for this, of course. Having grown up in a
society that drives everywhere, and in which most recreation has been
moved indoors, where digital exploration of the world has replaced the
on-foot kind, and where the sprawling, guard-railed, made-for-commerce
landscape has grown less and less walkable and far uglier—why should
they have ever gone anywhere on foot?
But it concerns me and seems—if we only still knew how to read
this language—symbolic. That we burn less of our human energy and more
and more of the earth’s ancient reserves, while we grow heavy and the
earth grows lean, while our lives grow stuffed and the earth starves
for attention—is symbolic.
So is our crippled condition. For all the talk in our past decade
about American freedoms, we have a country full of hobbled citizens
driving around in flip-flops (because walkable shoes aren’t needed) who
are dependent upon another part of the world to move us and our
tonnages of stuff through our own “land of the free.”
But for all the practical regrets about our hobbled condition, the
interior joy of a simple walk remains to my mind the greatest casualty.
One of the English philosophers—whose name I forget, as so many
thinkers and writers walked—said “I have found no sickness or trouble
from which I cannot walk away.”
Charles Dickens, who tromped the London streets at night, working
out his plots and his personal problems, wrote “If I could not walk far
and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.”
The fiery poet Pablo Neruda included similar lines in a poem: “I stroll
along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting
everything.”
John Muir believed that cooped-up urban passivity had caused the bulk
of America’s grumpiness and ill-health. He urged people to “break clear
away once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the
woods. Wash your spirit clean.”
How much freer we’d feel, how less dependent not just on OPEC but
the pharmaceutical and health care industries to help us “cope,” if we
could but get out for a daily walk and a springtime pilgrimage, is
anyone’s guess. The late Minnesota writer Brenda Ueland was so certain
that walking could help us flourish, that during the gas crisis of the
1970s, she loudly hoped the gas would all run out.
“I often wish I could establish a kind of monastic order among
high school students, like that of the Cistercians in France who vowed
never to ride. Now if our students walked and/or ran everywhere, think
how wonderful they would be! Red cheeks, long legs, wide flashing
smiles. Dauntless and helpful.”
How wonderful we all would be under such conditions! But no need
to wait for the $4 and $6 and $10 per gallon gas to run out. It’s
spring, and Eastertide, and we are the pilgrims.
A writer, educator and community activist, Liza Field lives in Wytheville. Contact her at
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