At the age of 52, while visiting Paris with my wife, Nancy, I learned a better way of walking. It was January 1987, a time of French strikes and perturbations, which meant the Metro might or might not be running to take us to a place our guidebook recommended. The pleasures of walking without a destination in mind were pressed upon us in that magical snowy month in Paris.
Early in our stay, after waiting for scheduled subways that never came and finding other trains so crowded we couldn’t get on, we started walking aimlessly to get warm. We slowly began to realize January in Paris, like April, can make your heart sing.
A day or so later, an old friend from Ohio, living that year in Paris, led us on a long, meandering walk through many back streets. It turned out we were “stalking” Notre Dame, viewing it from many different angles and distances. That might be the day I began to appreciate rambling as a way of seeing the world.
If our walks in Paris lacked pre-boiled directions and firm goals, they didn’t lack purpose. Nancy was a French teacher. She’d begun teaching at a high school outside of Baltimore in 1960, when I was at Johns Hopkins. She found her true vocation in Granville, Ohio’s middle school, where students in her classes sometimes won the state’s National French Test. But like me, she’d never been to France.
Rambling along the back streets of Paris with her camera, visiting museums and sitting quietly in beautiful little churches, Nancy found much to show and tell her students. She photographed famous statues covered with snow and tiny cars parked head-in on narrow streets next to parallel-parked cars. Rambling sometimes gave us unusual takes on tourist sites, as when we chanced on the Eiffel Tower during a heavy snowstorm just as darkness fell and the lights came on.
During our month in Paris I was recovering from a few trying years as a college dean. Returning home after finding the joys of rambling in Paris, I began to write a column, “Rambling Around Granville,” for our local weekly. And I wrote a song, Love is Rambling. I still sing it nearly every day, to the tune of John Prine’s Unwed Fathers.
I was rambling down a lonesome roadside
Moving slowly, no place to go.
It was evening, turning winter.
And with darkness came heavy snow.
I saw a farmhouse with windows glowing,
An old man standing outside the door.
I walked up to him and asked a favor —
If a man might sleep dry upon his floor.
He made me welcome in his old farmhouse,
Never asked how far or long.
I laid myself down beside his fire
And heard him singing this old love song.
Love is rambling, has no compass.
Love will take you where you never thought to go.
But if you follow where love will lead you,
You might just find what we all could know.
It’s a little hard to understand why we pretty much stopped rambling when we moved to the Upper Valley in 2007. We kept walking, partly inspired and guided by a family friend, Lori Harriman, who seems to know every trail on both sides of the Connecticut River. After a few years, we found ourselves living not much more than a mile from our daughter and grandson so we can get to their house by walking through a beautiful part of the Mink Brook Nature Preserve. And from our house we can walk to a trail along the Connecticut River.
Maybe what interfered mostly with our rambling was this: Nancy and I joined a gym. We became disciplined exercisers — riding stationary bikes, using machines for strengthening our upper bodies, and swimming laps. (My flailing freestyle never quite catches up with Nancy’s seemingly effortless backstroke. She won the New England AAU 100-metre backstroke in 1954.)
We still walked, but most often now it was with specific goals, pre-boiled directions.
Then came the virus, and Nancy and I began to ramble for our sanity. We stopped riding and lifting and swimming and began wandering in places where it seemed easy to maintain the recommended social distance. On Hanover’s School Street, we spotted snow drops beginning to peek up in someone’s front yard. On sidewalks and back roads we meet people our age and younger who wave and smile like Midwesterners. Sometimes they even seem ready to stop and talk from a safe distance. We leave the news behind for a spell and feel fully alive, noticing things within easy walking distance we haven’t seen before.
And when our ramble is done and we’re paying attention to the news again, we see some of our political leaders seeming to consider turning over a new leaf or two. They appear to be looking for ways the government could make our country stronger, using our shared resources to make life better for people whose troubles are not of their own making.
It’s begun to seem possible much of our money will go to people suddenly thrown out of their jobs and needing food and rent and health insurance, as well as to small businesses on the edge of bankruptcy.
Yes, too much will go to airlines, hotel chains, cruise lines and oil companies. But it feels as though our country might be on the verge of rethinking, if not democratic socialism, then about ways to help those who right about now could use a warm fire and a dry place to sleep.
Bill Nichols lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at Nichols@Denison.edu.