There seem to be three motives for these long-distance trips: to comprehend a place’s natural or social makeup; to comprehend oneself; and to set a record; and most are a combination of the three. An extremely long walk is often taken up as a sort of pilgrimage, a proof of some kind of faith or will, as well as a means of spiritual and practical discovery. Too, as travel became more common, travel writers often sought out more extreme experience and remote places. One of the implicit premises of the latter kind of writing is that the journey, rather than the traveler, must be exceptional to be worth reading about (though Virginia Woolf wrote a brilliant essay about going out into a London evening to buy a pencil, and James Joyce managed to write the greatest novel of the twentieth century about a pudgy ad salesman trudging Dublin’s streets). For writers, the long-distance walk is an easy way to find narrative continuity. If a path is like a story, as I was proposing a few chapters ago, then a continuous walk must make a coherent story, and a very long walk makes a full-length book. Or so goes the logic of these recent books, and to some extent it is true; a walker does not skip over much, sees things close up, and makes herself vulnerable and accessible to local people and places. On the other hand, a walker may be so consumed by athletic endeavor as to be unable to participate in his surroundings, particularly when driven by a schedule or competition. Some of them are happy with these limits, as is Colin Fletcher, one of those inevitable Englishmen whose first long walk is a journey up the eastern side of California in 1958. The resultant book, entitled The Thousand-Mile Summer, is a sort of trail mix made up of bite-size epiphanies, moral lessons, blisters, social encounters, and recounted practical details. He took other walks later, and like Graham wrote a guidebook, The Complete Walker, still used by backpackers. Another Englishman, John Hillaby, walked the length of Britain—a thousand miles—in 1968 and wrote a best-seller about it, as well as several other books about other walks.
By the time Peter Jenkins set out to walk more than three thousand miles across the United States in 1973 (with National Geographic sponsorship), the cross-country expedition had become a kind of rite of passage of American manhood, though by that time the means were more often vehicular. Crossing the continent seemed to embrace or encompass it at least symbolically, the route wrapped around it like a ribbon around a package. The movie Easy Rider, which had recently been released, seemed to draw some of its sensibility from Jack Kerouac’s road stories, which themselves often sprawled more like travel books than novels (Kerouac’s Dharma Bums recounts how the poet and ecologist Gary Snyder got Kerouac out of the car and into the mountains). Jenkins set out to have social encounters; the America he was looking for was, unlike Muir’s, made up of people rather than places. Like Wordsworth in his incessant encounters with characters eager to tell their tale, he takes the time to listen to everyone he meets and tells about them in his naively earnest Walk Across America and Walk Across America II. In part a reaction against the anti-Americanism of the young radicals of the time, Jenkins’s journey brings him into close contact and, often, friendship with the white southerners so reviled by northern civil rights activists. In the course of his travels, he stays with an Appalachian living off the land, lives with a poor black family for several weeks, and in Louisiana falls in love with a Southern Baptist seminarian, undergoes a religious conversation, marries the woman, and after several months resumes his walk with her, arriving on the Oregon coast a far different person from the one who set out. This is truly a journey as life, for Jenkins goes as slowly as experience demands.
The literature of the long-distance walk is a sort of downhill slope. Toward the bottom come books by people who are athletic walkers but not necessarily writers, for the necessary combination of silver tongue and iron thighs seems to be a rare one. The most impressive of the contemporary long-distance walkers I have read—there are many now—is Robyn Davidson, who didn’t exactly set out to write about walking at all, but did so brilliantly in the course of her Tracks, a book recounting her 1,700-mile trek across the Australian outback to the sea with three camels (sponsored, like Jenkins’s odyssey, by the National Geographic Society). Midway in her journey, she explains its effect on her mind: “But strange things do happen when you trudge twenty miles a day, day after day, month after month. Things you only become totally conscious of in retrospect. For one thing I had remembered in minute and Technicolor detail everything that had ever happened in my past and all the people who belonged there. I had remembered every word of conversation I had had or overheard way, way back in my childhood and in this way I had been able to review these events with a kind of emotional detachment as if they had happened to somebody else. I was rediscovering and getting to know people who were long since dead and forgotten. . . . And I was happy, there is simply no other word for it.” She brings us back to the territory of the philosophers and the walking essayists, to the relationship between walking and the mind, and she does it from a kind of extreme experience few have had.
The 1970s seem to have been a golden age of long-distance walks; Jenkins, Davidson, and Alan Booth all set out in the mid-1970s. Booth’s delightful Roads to Sata: A Two-Thousand-Mile Walk Through Japan is a milestone in how far the literature of walking had come. An Englishman who had lived in Japan for seven years and come to know the language and culture well, he is unfailingly humorous and modest, a great evoker of place and recounter of comic conversations, respectful but not reverent about the culture. He describes his trip—dirty socks, hot springs, sake and more sake, comic and tragic figures, sultry weather, lechers of both sexes—with élan. He comments wryly, “In properly developed countries, the inhabitants regard walkers with grave suspicion and have taught their dogs to do the same,” but enjoys himself all the same. Yet like most of these travel books, his is not really a book about walking. That is to say, it is not about the acts but about the encounters, just as A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf is really about botany and natural epiphanies—and On the Road and Easy Rider are only implicitly about the internal combustion engine and its implications. Walking is only a means to maximize those encounters and perhaps test body and soul.
The test is central to Ffyona Campbell’s prolific walks, as recounted in her book The Whole Story: A Walk Around the World. The daughter of a harsh military man, she seems to be on a quest to prove herself to him and to herself, with her walking an obsessive activity not unlike her sister’s anorexia (which crops up in her book). In 1983, at the age of sixteen, Campbell successfully walked the length of Britain—a thousand miles—sponsored by London’s Evening Standard and seeking to raise money for a hospital. She then set out to walk around the world—not literally, for the continuous line that links up many walkers’ narratives has nothing to do with her: “The Guinness Book of Records defines a walk around the world as beginning and finishing in the same place, crossing four continents, and covering a total of at least 16,000 miles,” says the preface of her book. She set off across the United States two years later, Australia five years later, and the length of Africa eight years later, finishing up eleven years after the English walk with a trek northward from Spain to the English Channel. It is as discontinuous as could be—she flies back to Africa and the States to complete segments she left out earlier—and only a kind of accounting holds it all together as a single act.
Perhaps it is a mistake to include Campbell in the literature of walking, even though she has produced books, but she is certainly part of the culture of walking. There is another ancestry for her in the pedestrian athletes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, who seemed indifferent whether they went their thousand miles around a track or down a road, and who were the subjects of heavy betting. After all, almost no landscape appears in her narratives of several continents; we cannot in it trace an inheritance from Wordsworth. Yet the notion that walking is somehow redemptive and walking farther is more so seems to have taken on a fearful life of its own, and surely this is something of a Victorian heritage, and those Victorians wer
e themselves heirs of Wordsworth. Such is the winding road down which history comes, now with one set of desires in view, now with another. Like Davidson, Campbell seems driven, but Davidson represents a more intellectual, insightful version of the wounded self seeking redemption through an ordeal, and comes equipped with vastly more literary and landscape sensibility. The fierce alienation is much the same, the sense of a young woman clinging to her stubbornness and her arduous goal because that’s all she has. Jenkins is softer, less locked up, maybe because it’s easier for a man, maybe because he’s more openly a seeker: he knows what kind of pilgrimage he is on.
To some extent Campbell resembles the Walkathon walkers, in that she is often walking to raise money for a cause (or more often looking for a cause to represent so she can also raise money for her expeditions, which with support staff, publicity, and so forth were often expensive). Still, to walk fifty miles in a day is remarkable, to get up and do it again the next day is stunning, and to do it day after day across the Australian outback alongside a road in ugly weather is brutal. Campbell did it, walking 3,200 miles across that continent in ninety-five days, a world record. Her legs are indefatigably strong and relentless in their pursuit, but nothing is left in her walks but accomplishment—no scenery, no pleasure, few encounters. For 20,000 miles she is struggling to understand herself well enough to outwalk her suffering, but she is alarmingly unclear about her values, seeking corporate sponsorship and media attention at some points and condemning journalists and capitalists at others, insulting people who drive cars on her second walk in the United States, after having been trailed across the country by a motor home driven by her support staff the first time. Her book ends with an anecdote that undermines all her effort, one of many passages of fuzzy reverence for indigenous peoples. It is a tale of the military men who challenge some aboriginal Australians to a footrace across the desert, which the latter abandon to track down honeycomb. Telling it, she suggests she is on the side of the aborigines in disdaining rigid goals, quantifiable experience, competition, even record-keeping or -making, as deeply flawed ways of being in the world. The tragedy is that all along she has been on the side of the military men.
Perhaps Campbell shows us pure walking. It is impurity that makes it worthwhile, the views, the thoughts, the encounters—all those things that connect mind and world through the medium of the roving body, that leaven the self-absorption of the mind. These books suggest how slippery a subject is walking, how hard it is to keep one’s mind on it. Walking is usually about something else—about the walker’s character or encounters, about nature or about achievement, sometimes so much so it ceases to be about walking. Yet together all these things—the canons of walking essays and travel literature—constitute a coherent, if meandering, two-hundred-year history of reasons to walk across the land.
Chapter 9
MOUNT OBSCURITY AND MOUNT ARRIVAL
Ffyona Campbell’s tale of the military men racing across the Australian outback toward the finish line and their aboriginal rivals straying from it to gather honeycomb suggests some of the various ways and reasons to walk and to live, or at least some of the questions. Can one weigh public glory against private pleasure, and are they mutually exclusive? What portions of an act can be measured and compared? What does it mean to arrive, and what to wander without destination? Is competition an ignoble motive? Can the soldiers be imagined as students of discipline and the aboriginal men as students of detachment? After all, there are pilgrims for whom arrival at their journey’s end is spiritual consummation, but there are other pilgrims and mystics who wander without cease or destination, from the Chinese sages of antiquity to the anonymous nineteenth-century Russian peasant who wrote The Way of a Pilgrim. These questions about how one travels and why become most pressing, or at least most evident, with mountaineering.
Mountaineering is the art of getting up mountains by foot and occasionally by hand, and though the climbing is usually emphasized, most ascents are mostly a matter of walking (and since good climbers climb with their legs as much as possible, climbing could be called the art of taking a vertical walk). In the steepest places the steady semiconscious rhythm of walking slows down, every step can become a separate decision about direction and about safety, and the simple act of walking is transformed into a specialized skill that often calls for elaborate equipment. Here I want to address mountaineering that includes climbing but leave aside the separate discipline of climbing without mountaineering, a somewhat artificial division, but one with reasons. The latter is a recently explored side canyon in the history of mountaineering in which technique has been vastly refined to ascend ever-more-challenging surfaces. A supremely hard climb can be less than a hundred feet long, and a single move can become a famous “problem” to be worked out by intense application and training. And while mountaineering is traditionally motivated by a taste for mountain scenery, technical climbing seems to involve other pleasures. Since the eighteenth century, nature has been imagined as scenery, and scenery is what is seen at a certain distance, but climbing puts one face-to-face with the rock, with a wholly different kind of engagement. Perhaps tactile encounters, sensations of gravity (and, sometimes, mortality), and the kinesthetic pleasures of one’s body moving at its limit of ability are an equally valid if less culturally hallowed experience of nature. With climbing, sometimes scenery disappears altogether, at lest in the rapidly proliferating indoor climbing gyms. Too, walking fosters one kind of awareness in which the mind can stray away from and return to the immediate experience of traversing a particular place; rock climbing, on the other hand, is demanding enough that one guide told me, “Climbing is the only time my mind doesn’t wander.” Climbing is about climbing. Mountaineering, on the other hand, is still about mountains.
Most standard histories of mountaineering and of landscape aesthetics start with the poet Petrarch, “the first man to climb a mountain for its own sake, and to enjoy the view from the top,” as the art historian Kenneth Clark put it. Long before Petrarch climbed Italy’s Mount Ventoux in 1335, there were others ascending mountains in other parts of the world. Petrarch prefigures the Romantic-generated practice of traveling among mountains for aesthetic pleasure and getting to their summits for secular reasons. This history of mountaineering really begins in Europe in the late eighteenth century, when curiosity and changed sensibilities spurred a few bold individuals not just to travel through the Alps but to try to get to their summits. The practice was gradually consolidated into mountaineering, a set of skills and assumptions—for example, the assumption that getting to the top of a mountain is a uniquely meaningful act, distinct from walking among the passes or foothills. In Europe mountaineering developed largely as a gentleman’s pastime and a guide’s profession, since the former so often relied upon the latter; in North America the first recorded ascents were made by explorers and surveyors in far remoter places (some ascents in the Alps could and can be watched through telescopes from the villages below; some in North America took weeks of wilderness trekking to reach). Of course, as the great surveyor and mountaineer Clarence King recounts, when in 1871 he got to the top of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous forty-eight states, he found that “a small mound of rock was piled on the peak, and solidly built into it an Indian arrow-shaft, pointing due west.” Mountains attracted attention and walkers long before romanticism spawned mountaineering.
A lone peak or high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and locals orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity—culminating high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth. On mountains, latitude’s imperceptible changes can become altitude’s striking transformations. Ecology and climate change rapidly from balmy foothills to glacial heights: there’s the timberline and, farther up, what could be called the lifeline, beyond which nothing lives or grows, and, above about 18,000 feet, what mountaineers call the death zone, the icy low-oxygen realm where the body starts
to die, judgment is impaired, and even the most acclimated alpinists lose brain cells. Up high, biology vanishes to reveal a world shaped by the starker forces of geology and meteorology, the bare bones of the earth wrapped in sky. Mountains have been seen around the world as thresholds between this world and the next, as places where the spirit world comes close. In most parts of the world, sacred meanings are ascribed to mountains, and though the spirit world may be terrifying, it is seldom evil. Christian Europe seems to be alone in having seen mountains as ugly and almost hellish realms. In Switzerland, dragons, the souls of the unhappy dead, and the Wandering Jew were supposed to haunt the heights (sentenced in the legend to wander the earth until the Second Coming because he slighted Jesus, the Wandering Jew suggests that European Christians often took a dim view of wandering as well as of Jews). Many seventeenth-century English writers express their detestation of mountains as “high and hideous,” “rubbish of the earth,” “deformities,” and even damage caused to a formerly smooth earth by the Deluge. So though Europeans led the world in the development of modern mountaineering, that mountaineering came out of romanticism’s recovery of an appreciation for natural places that much of the rest of the world had never lost.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 18
