It doesn’t take Robert Louis Stevenson nearly as long to get to that fateful word. Two or three pages after he has begun his celebrated 1876 essay “Walking Tours,” he declares, “A walking tour should be gone on alone, because freedom is of the essence; because you should be able to stop and go on, and follow this way or that, as the freak takes you; and because you must have your own pace, and neither trot alongside a champion walker, nor mince in time with a girl.” He goes on to praise and criticize Hazlitt: “Notice how learned he is in the theory of walking tours. . . . Yet there is one thing I object to in these words of his, one thing in the great master’s practice that seems to me not wholly wise. I do not approve of that leaping and running.” On his own long walking tour in France’s Cévennes mountain range, described in Travels with a Donkey, Stevenson carried a pistol but described only picturesque and lightly comic situations. Few of the canonical essayists can resist telling us that we should walk because it is good for us, nor from providing directions on how to walk. In 1913 the historian G. M. Trevelyan begins his “Walking” with “I have two doctors, my left leg and my right. When body and mind are out of gear (and those twin parts of me live at such close quarters that the one always catches the melancholy from the other) I know that I shall have only to call in my doctors and I shall be well again. . . . My thoughts start out with me like blood-stained mutineers debauching themselves on board the ship they have captured, but I bring them home at nightfall, larking and tumbling over each other like happy little boy scouts at play.”
The possibility that some of us would prefer that happy little boy scouts keep their distance doesn’t occur to him, but it must have to one writer, who blasphemed against the cult in 1918. In his “Going Out on a Walk,” the Anglo-German satirist Max Beerbohm exploded, “Whenever I was with friends in the country, I knew that at any moment, unless rain were actually falling, some man might suddenly say, ‘Come out for a walk!’ in that sharp imperative tone which he would not dream of using in any other connection. People seem to think there is something inherently noble and virtuous in the desire to go for a walk.” Beerbohm’s heresy goes further; he claims that walking is not at all conducive to thinking because though “the body is going out because the mere fact of its doing so is a sure indication of nobility, probity, and rugged grandeur,” the mind refuses to accompany it. He was, however, a voice crying out in a densely populated but otherwise convinced wilderness.
On the other side of the Atlantic, one essay on walking had lurched toward greatness, but even Henry David Thoreau could not resist preaching. “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness,” he famously begins his 1851 essay “Walking,” for like all the other essayists he connects walking in the organic world with freedom—but like all the others, he instructs us on how to be free. “I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.” A page later, “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return. . . . If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.” His are the most daring, wildest instructions, but they are still instructions. Soon afterward comes the other word, must: “You must be born into the family of Walkers.” And then, “You must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, ‘Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.’ ”
Although the walking essay was officially a celebration of bodily and mental freedom, it was not actually opening up the world for that celebration—that revolution had already taken place. It was instead domesticating the revolution by describing the allowable scope of that freedom. And the sermonizing never let up. In 1970, a century and a half after Hazlitt, Bruce Chatwin wrote an essay that set out to be about nomads but detoured to include Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey. Chatwin wrote divinely, but he always declined to distinguish nomadism—a persistent travel by any means, seldom primarily by foot—from walking, which may or may not be travel. Blurring those distinctions by conflating nomadism and his own British walking-tour heritage made nomads Romantics, or at least romantic, and allowed him to fancy himself something of a nomad. Soon after Chatwin cites Stevenson, he falls into step with the tradition: “The best thing is to walk. We should follow the Chinese poet Li Po in ‘the hardships of travel and the many branchings of the way.’ For life is a journey through a wilderness. This concept, universal to the point of banality, could not have survived unless it were biologically true. None of our revolutionary heroes is worth a thing until he has been on a good walk. Che Guevera spoke of the ‘nomadic phase’ of the Cuban Revolution. Look what the Long March did for Mao Tse-Tung, or Exodus for Moses. Movement is the best cure for melancholy, as Robert Burton (the author of The Anatomy of Melancholy) understood.”
A hundred and fifty years of moralizing! A century and a half of gentlemanly exhortation! Doctors have asserted many times over the centuries that walking is very good for you, but medical advice has never been one of the chief attractions of literature. Besides, only a walk that is guaranteed to exclude certain things—assailants, avalanches—is truly wholesome, and only such walking is advocated by these sermonizing gentlemen who seem not to see the boundaries they have put around the act (one of the delights of urban walking is how unwholesome it is). Gentlemen, I say, because all the writers on walking seem to be members of the same club—not one of the real walking clubs, but a kind of implicit club of shared background. They are generally privileged—most of the English ones write as though everyone else also went to Oxford or Cambridge, and even Thoreau went to Harvard—and of a vaguely clerical bent, and they are always male—neither dancing peasant lasses nor mincing girls, with wives rather than husbands to leave, as the above passages make clear. Thoreau considerately adds, “How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand it I do not know.” Many women after Dorothy Wordsworth went on long solitary walks, and Sarah Hazlitt, Hazlitt’s estranged wife, even went on a walking tour alone and kept a journal of it, which like most of these documents of female walking went unpublished in its time. Flora Thompson’s account of her journeys on foot across rural Oxfordshire to deliver mail in all seasons and weather is one of the most enchanting descriptions of country walks, but it is not part of the canon because it is by a poor woman, about work (and sex, in that a gamekeeper whose grounds she regularly crosses courts her, unsuccessfully), and buried in a book about many other things. Like the great women travelers of the nineteenth century—Alexandra David-Neel in Tibet, Isabelle Eberhardt in North Africa, Isabella Bird in the Rockies—they are anomalies, these walking women (the reasons why will be dealt with at length later, in chapter 14).
By the late nineteenth century the word tramp as both noun and verb was popular among the walking writers, as was vagabond and gypsy and, far down the road in a different world, nomad, but to play at tramp or gypsy is one way of demonstrating that you are not really one. You must be complex to want simplicity, settled to desire this kind of mobility. Bruce Chatwin to the contrary, Bedouins do not go on walking tours. Stephen Graham, an Englishman who early in the twentieth century took remarkable long walks through eastern Europe, Asia, and the Rocky Mountains, wrote, along with his books on specific travels, a hybrid volume called The Gentle Art of Tramping. It gives cheery anecdotal instructions on the art for 271 pages, in chapters on boots, “marching songs,” “drying after rain,” and “trespassers’ walk.” Thoreau alone seems to get lost in his own thinking and to find himself in surprising places, advocating abandonment, manifest destiny, amnesia, and, for his work, a rare nationalism, but by the time he is advocating the latter, ax-swinging frontie
rsmen rather than unarmed walkers are his protagonists. Perhaps the limits are implicit in the form of the essay, which is widely regarded as a kind of literary birdcage capable of containing only small chirping subjects, as distinct from the lion’s den of the novel and the open range of the poem. Writing and walking were reduced to fit each other, at least in this major tradition in the English-speaking world.
II. THE SIMPLE
This belief in walking—rural walking, anyway—as virtuous persists. Examples are everywhere. Recently, I found one particularly annoying essay in a Buddhist magazine asserting that all the world’s problems would be solved if only the world’s leaders would walk. “Perhaps walking can be the way to peace in the world. Let world leaders walk to the conference site instead of riding in a power-contagious limousine. Take away the conference tables—whatever their size and shape—and have a meeting of minds along the shores of Lake Geneva.” Another example by a world leader suggests how dubious this idea is. Ronald Reagan wanted to start his memoirs with the most important moment of his presidency, writes the editor Michael Korda, who tried to make them work as a book. The moment was during his first meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, near Geneva. Geneva is Rousseau’s birthplace, and it was a Rousseauian scene that Reagan described. “Reagan had realized . . . that the summit meeting was going nowhere. The two leaders were surrounded by advisers and specialists as they discussed disarmament, and were unable to make any human contact, so Reagan had tapped Gorbachev on the shoulder and invited him to go for a walk. The two went outside, and Reagan took Gorbachev down toward the shore of Lake Geneva.” Reagan went on to say that during “a long, heartfelt discussion” on that occasion they agreed toward mutual inspection and verification as well as the first steps toward nuclear disarmament. Korda objected to an aide that the anecdote as Reagan had told it, though deeply moving, was problematic. Gorbachev and Reagan didn’t speak each other’s language. If any such walk took place, a retinue of translators and security people must have gone with them to make the event more resemble a state procession than a friendly ramble.
To propose that the world’s problems would be solved by two old men walking by a Swiss lakeside (in Rousseau’s hometown, what’s more) was to propose that the simple, the good, and the natural were still aligned, and that these world leaders who held the power to destroy the earth were themselves simple men (and to suggest that they were simple is to imply that they were good and thus that their regimes were just and their achievements honorable, a series of dominoes lined up behind the first Romantic assumption). The aesthetic of the simple virtues had continued to triumph over the aesthetic of the royal procession, with its signs of complexity, sophistication, its many people signifying society. Jimmy Carter actually walked down Pennsylvania Avenue for his inauguration as president, but Reagan brought a new level of pomp and ceremony to the White House and came as close as American presidents ever have to being a Sun King. He did so by telling us simple stories about our lost innocence, our corruption by education and the arts, our ability to fall back on log-cabin virtues and thereby to dispense with the complex interdependencies of society, economic and otherwise. Portraying himself as a Rousseauian walker was one of those stories. The history of rural walking is full of people who wish to portray themselves as wholesome, natural, a brother to all man and nature, and who in that wish often reveal themselves to be powerful and complicated—though other walkers are true radicals out to undermine the laws and authorities that stifle others as well as themselves.
III. THE FAR
Just as the walking essay seems to have been the dominant form for writing about walking in the nineteenth century, so the lengthy tale of the very long walk is for the twentieth century. Perhaps the twenty-first will bring us something altogether new. In the eighteenth century, travel literature was commonplace, but the long-distance walkers left little written record of their feats. Wordsworth’s walking tour across the Alps, as described in The Prelude, was not published until 1850, and The Prelude is not exactly travel writing. Thoreau wrote accounts of walks in which his own experience is charted with the same scientific acuity as is the natural world around him, but these are more nature essays than walking literature. The first significant account of a long-distance walk for the sake of walking I know is John Muir’s Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, describing a journey from Indianapolis to the Florida Keys in 1867 (published after his death in 1914). The South he walked through was an open wound still festering from the Civil War, and Civil War historians must be frustrated by Muir’s neglect of social observation for the sake of botanizing, though it is still the most populated of his many books. The wilderness writings make him a kind of John the Baptist come back from a suddenly appealing wilderness to preach its wonders to the rest of us (wilderness because its indigenous inhabitants had been forcibly removed and decimated before Muir arrived, but that’s another story). For Muir is the United States’s evangelist of nature, adapting the language of religion to describe the plants, mountains, light, and processes that he so loved. As close an observer as Thoreau, he is far more apt to read religion into what he sees. He was also one of the great mountaineers of the nineteenth century, achieving in his woolens and hobnailed boots feats that most with modern gear would be hard-pressed to follow. Lacking Wordsworth’s poetic gifts and Thoreau’s radical critique, Muir nevertheless walked as they only imagined walking, for weeks alone in the wilderness, coming to know a whole mountain range as a friend and turning his passion for the place into political engagement. But that came decades after his walk in the South.
A Thousand Mile Walk is episodic, as are most such walking books. In such travel literature there is no overarching plot, except for the obvious one of getting from point A to point B (and for the more introspective, the self-transformation along the way). In a sense these books on walks for their own sakes are the literature of paradise, the story of what can happen when nothing profound is wrong, and so the protagonist—healthy, solvent, uncommitted—can set out seeking minor adventure. In paradise, the only things of interest are our own thoughts, the character of our companions, and the incidents and appearance of the surroundings. Alas, many of these long-distance writers are not fascinating thinkers, and it’s a dubious premise that someone who would be dull to walk round the corner with must be fascinating for a six-month trek. To hear about walking from people whose only claim on our attention is to have walked far is like getting one’s advice on food from people whose only credentials come from winning pie-eating contests. Quantity is not everything. But Muir has far more to offer than quantity. An acute and often ecstatic observer of the natural world around him, he says nothing at all about why he is walking in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf, though it seems clear enough that it is because he is hardy, poor, and possessed of botanical passions best fulfilled on foot. But though he is one of history’s great walkers, walking itself is seldom his subject. There is no well-defined border between the literature of walking and nature writing, but nature writers tend to make the walking implicit at best, a means for the encounters with nature which they describe, but seldom a subject. Body and soul seem to disappear into the surrounding environment, but Muir’s body reappears when his paradisiacal luck runs out and he starves waiting for money to arrive and later becomes mortally ill. Thoreau wrote accounts of walks in which his own experience is charted with the same scientific acuity as the natural world around him, but these are more nature essays than walking literature.
Seventeen years after Muir, another young man in his twenties set out to walk more than a thousand miles, from Cincinnati to Los Angeles. Charles F. Lummis says at the outset of his Tramp Across the Continent, “But why tramp? Are there not railroads and Pullmans enough, that you must walk? That is what a great many of my friends said when they learned of my determination to travel from Ohio to California on foot; and very likely it is the question that will first come to your mind in reading of the longest walk for pure pleasure that is on record.” Which i
s to say, he starts out thinking of his friends, readers, and the record, as well as pleasure. But he goes on to say, “I was after neither time nor money, but life—not life in the pathetic meaning of the poor health-seeker, for I was perfectly well and a trained athlete; but life in the truer, broader, sweeter sense, the exhilarant joy of living outside the sorry fences of society, living with a perfect body and a wakened mind. . . . I am an American and felt ashamed to know so little of my country as I did, and as most Americans do.” Seventy-nine pages later, he says of a brief companion, “He was the only live, real walker I met on the whole long journey, and there was a keen zest in reeling off the frosty miles with such a companion.” Lummis is vain; there are anecdotes where he outshoots and outtoughs westerners, rattlesnakes, and snowstorms, and his solemn attempts at jokes, in the vein of Twain, often fall flat. But he redeems himself by his great (and for the time, unusual) affection for the people and land of the Southwest and occasional anecdotes at his own expense. It is a remarkable story, of toughness and navigatory ability and adaptability. Long-distance walking in North America never had the gentility of the walking tour. In England, you can walk from pub to pub or inn to inn (or, nowadays, hostel to hostel); in America a long-distance walk is usually a plunge into the wilderness or at least un-English scale and uninviting spaces such as highways and hostile towns.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 17
