“I go out walkin’
After midnight
Out in the moonlight
Just like we used to do.”
— Alan Block & Donn Hecht
Whereas Patsy Cline was singing about walking to find her lost love, I go out walking to find my muse. Across snowy fields and quiet woods, micro spikes on boots, I go out in the company of a couple of small brown dogs looking for inspiration.
We were out along the river. A sharp-shinned hawk swooped overhead. Two ravens were singing their guttural music as they perched near the carcass of a sheep, now nothing but ribs. The snow lay crusty and old, not good for skiing. The sky was grey and gloomy. The only medicine I know of for gloom, is to go out walking.
Some of my favorite authors are those who walked the land. Often suffering from periods of sadness, they found solace through walking.
“My mind only works with my legs.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed.
John Muir is said to have walked from Indianapolis to the Florida Keys. He believed that bodily contact with the wild word made both the world and the walker better for it. “I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.”
William Wordsworth is said to have walked well over 100,000 miles. George Borrow walked across Great Britain, Ireland, Europe, and Morocco, learning the languages he encountered along the way. Walking was one of the few activities that could lift British writer and walker of the old paths, Edward Thomas from depression. He wrote 140 poems in just two years before going off to fight in the first World War.
He was killed at age 39 in the opening Battle of Arras, his first encounter on the front.
One of my favorite landscape writers, Robert Macfarlane writes about finding the wild places, the mountain places, the underground places, and the “old way” paths, walking thousands of miles, sleeping in the open, not writing about achieving the summit and looking down, but about being in a place and really seeing it.
Tim Robinson walked every step of the Aran Islands and wrote poetically as a map maker in the Stones of Aran. He tells, in no hurry, the story of the wind and wave-crashed rocks, of the tales people passed down, and of the livelihoods of families who harvested kelp and attempted to grow crops on thin boney soil—fishing boats headed out into icy waters; men and boys lowered over cliffs on ropes to kill roosting birds.
I’ve been a walker most of my life, even when living in a city so dirty, raw sewage flowed down the creek. I would head out for hours to try to work through my tumultuous adolescence.
I’ve wondered about this habit of walking; might it come from some ancestral memory we have of walking as a necessary part of finding food and a place to bed down?
It seems our feet have their own sets of eyes. I carry a topographical map in my head of the places I walk. I can see right where a flat slab of shist is covered with knight’s plume moss up above the Morrill Homestead.
I can zoom out and see where the brook runs, where the vernal pool which will soon be filled with frog and salamander eggs is, where the upland forest begins and the tree species change.
However, If I am driving on Interstae 89 and become distracted, I may forget what state I am in, let alone be able to zoom out and follow the ridge of the Green Mountains or the winding Winooski.
Eventually, the dogs and I circled around to from where we had begun, and it was time to go home.
One of the little dogs had lagged and was rolling in something dead. I whistled for her to come on, that it was time for cookies.
With just enough ice to support her 23 pounds, she came running down a hill becoming airborne, her beagle ears flapping in the wind. All gloominess flew away as I ululated to cheer her on—walking had yet again, done its magic.