Wanderlust: A History of Walking (19 page)

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 frontiersmen 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.

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.

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 is 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.

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.