Wanderlust: A History of Walking (37 page)

“The Central Park Jogger Case” was discussed in startlingly different terms. Considerable public outrage had been expressed that the two murdered men had been denied the basic liberty to roam the city, and the crimes were universally recognized as racially motivated. But in a careful study of the Central Park case, Helen Benedict wrote, “Throughout the case, even up to the start of the trial, the white and black press kept running articles trying to analyze why the youths had committed this heinous crime. . . . They looked for answers in race, drugs, class, and in the ghetto's ‘culture of violence.' ” The reasons proferred, she concludes, “were woefully inadequate as an explanation . . . because the press never looked at the most glaring reason of all for rape: society's attitude toward women.” Portraying it as a case about race—the assailants were Latino and black—rather than gender failed to make an issue at all of violence against women. And almost no one at all discussed the Central Park case as a civil rights issue—as part of a pattern of infringements on women's right to roam the city (women of color rarely show up in crime reportage at all, apparently since they lack men's status as citizens and white women's titillating appeal as victims). A decade after Bensonhurst and Central Park, the gruesome lynching of a black man in Texas has been greeted with outrage as a hate crime and an infringement on the civil rights of people of color, as has the brutal death of a young gay man in
Wyoming—for gays and lesbians are also frequent targets of violence that “teaches them their place” or punishes them for their nonconformity. But similar murders motivated by gender, though they fill the newspapers and take the lives of thousands of women every year, are not contextualized as anything but isolated incidents that don't require social reform or national soul-searching.

The geography of race and gender are different, for a racial group may monopolize a whole region, while gender compartmentalizes in local ways. Many people of color find the whiter parts of rural America unwelcoming, to say the least, even in the places where a white woman might feel safe (white supremacists seem to arise from or flock to some of the most scenic parts of the country). Evelyn C. White writes that when she first tried to explore rural Oregon, memories of southern lynchings “could leave me speechless and paralyzed with the heart-stopping fear that swept over me as when I crossed paths with loggers near the McKenzie River or whenever I visited the outdoors.” In Britain the photographer Ingrid Pollard made a series of wry portraits of herself in the Lake District, where she apparently went to try to feel like Wordsworth and felt nervous instead. Nature romanticism, she seemed to be saying, is not available to people of her color. But many white women too feel nervous in any isolated situation, and some have personal experience to draw upon. When she was young, the great climber and mountaineer Gwen Moffat went to the beautiful Isle of Skye off Scotland's west coast to climb by herself. After a drunken neighbor broke into her bedroom in the middle of the night, she cabled for a man to join her and recounts, “Had I been older and more mature, I could have coped with life on my own, but living as I did I laid myself open to all kinds of advances and speculations. Ordinary, conventional men thought this way of life an open invitation and I couldn't face the resentment which I knew they felt when they were rebuffed.”

Women have been enthusiastic participants in pilgrimages, walking clubs, parades, processions, and revolutions, in part because in an already defined activity their presence is less likely to be read as sexual invitation, in part because companions have been women's best guarantee of public safety. In revolutions the importance of public issues seems to set aside private matters temporarily, and women have found great freedom during them (and some revolutionaries, such as
Emma Goldman, have made sexuality one of the fronts on which they sought freedom). But walking alone also has enormous spiritual, cultural, and political resonance. It has been a major part of meditation, prayer, and religious exploration. It has been a mode of contemplation and composition, from Aristotle's peripatetics to the roaming poets of New York and Paris. It has supplied writers, artists, political theorists, and others with the encounters and experiences that inspired their work, as well as the space in which to imagine it, and it is impossible to know what would have become of many of the great male minds had they been unable to move at will through the world. Picture Aristotle confined to the house, Muir in full skirts. Even in times when women could walk by day, the night—the melancholic, poetic, intoxicating carnival of city nights—was likely to be off limits to them, unless they had become “women of the night.” If walking is a primary cultural act and a crucial way of being in the world, those who have been unable to walk out as far as their feet would take them have been denied not merely exercise or recreation but a vast portion of their humanity.

Women from Jane Austen to Sylvia Plath have found other, narrower subjects for their art. Some have broken out into the larger world—Peace Pilgrim (in middle age), George Sand (in men's clothes), Emma Goldman, Josephine Butler, Gwen Moffat, come to mind—but many more must have been silenced altogether. Virginia Woolf's famous
Room of One's Own
is often recalled as though it were literally a plea for women to have home offices, but it in fact deals with economics, education, and access to public space as equally necessary to making art. To prove her point, she invents the blighted life of Shakespeare's equally talented sister, and asks of this Judith Shakespeare, “Could she even get her dinner in a tavern or roam the streets at midnight?”

Sarah Schulman wrote a novel that is, like Woolf's essay, a commentary on the circumscription of women's freedom. Titled
Girls, Visions and Everything
after a phrase from Jack Kerouac's
On the Road,
it is among other things an investigation into how useful Kerouac's credo is for a young lesbian writer, Lila Futuransky. “The trick,” thinks Futuransky, “was to identify with Jack Kerouac instead of with the women he fucks along the way,” for like Odysseus, Kerouac was a traveling man in a landscape of immobile women. She explores the charms of Lower East Side Manhattan in the mid-1980s as he did America in the 1950s, and among “the things she loved best” was to “walk the streets for hours with nowhere to go but where she ended up.” But as the novel progresses, her world becomes more
intimate rather than more open: she falls in love and the possibility of a free life in public space recedes.

Near the end of the novel, she and her lover go out for an evening walk in Washington Square Park and come back to eat ice cream together in front of her apartment building when they overhear a man in a group of men: “That's gay liberation. They think they can do whatever they want whenever they want it.” They have been, like lovers since time immemorial, walking out together. Like Lizzie Schauer, arrested in the Lower East Side ninety years earlier for walking alone, their venture into public space threatens to become an invasion of their private lives and their bodies:

“Lila didn't want to go upstairs, because she didn't want them to see where she lived. They started walking slowly away, but the men followed.

“ ‘Come on you cunt. I bet you've got a nice pussy, you suck each other's pussy, right? I'll show you a cock that you'll never forget. . . .'

“For Lila, this was a completely normal though unnecessary part of daily life. As a result she had learned docility, to keep quiet and do a shuffle, to avoid having her ass kicked in. . . . Lila walked in the streets like someone who had always walked in the streets and for whom it was natural and rich. She walked with the illusion that she was safe and that the illusion would somehow keep her that way. Yet, that particular night as she went out for cigarettes, Lila walked uneasily, her mind wandering until it stopped of its own accord on the simple fact that she was not safe. She could be physically hurt at any time and felt, for a fleeting moment that she would be. She sat on the trunk of a '74 Chevy and accepted that this world was not hers. Even on her own block.”

PAST THE END OF THE
R
OAD

Walking as a form of transport in modern middle-class Euro-American life is essentially obsolete. It is the rare individual who commutes to work on foot. Walking is usually linked with leisure. . . . One Irishwoman made a similar observation: “Just think, the two most important forms of transport early this century are now highly specialized hobbies!”—
NANCY LOUISE FREY
,
PILGRIM STORIES
:
ON AND OFF THE ROAD TO SANTIAGO

“People don't walk in Texas. Only Mexicans.”—
CHARACTER IN EDNA FERBER
'
S
GIANT

A black performance artist, Keith Antar Mason, told me recently that he is now working increasingly in the only public spaces for African- Americans that are supported actively by government—the prisons.—
NORMAN KLEIN
,
THE HISTORY OF FORGETTING

The stationary cycle and the treadmill both have slot machines attached, allowing casino customers to sweat and bet at the same time. . . . “People are going crazy about this,” said Kathy Harris, president of the Fitness Gaming Corporation in Fairfax, Va. . . . Ms. Harris pointed out that the machines were wired so “you can't gamble unless you're pedaling and you can't pedal unless you're gambling.” The company's motto: “Put your heart into gambling.”—
NEW YORK TIMES

We've all heard of that future, and it sounds pretty lonely. In the next century, the line of thinking goes, everyone will work at home, shop at home, watch movies at home and communicate with all their friends through videophones and e-mail. It's as if science and culture have progressed for one purpose only: to keep us from ever having to get out of our pajamas.—
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Some people walk with both eyes focused on their goal: the highest mountain peak in the range, the fifty-mile marker, the finish line. They stay motivated by anticipating the end of the journey. Since I tend to be easily distracted, I travel somewhat differently—one step at a time, with many pauses in between. Occasionally the pauses become full stops that can last anywhere from two minutes to ten hours. More often they're less definite. . . . Trapped by our concepts and languages and the utter predictability of our five senses, we often forget to wonder what we're missing as we hurry along toward goals we may not even have chosen. I became a tracker by default, not design, when my tendency to be distracted by life's smallest signs grew into an unrelenting passion to trace those obscure, often puzzling patterns somewhere, anywhere—to their source or end or simply to some midpoint in between. But when I began tracking lost people, what had begun as an eccentric habit—following footprints on the ground—quickly matured into an avocation. . . . I now commonly walk toward a single goal: to meet the person at the other end of the tracks.—
HANNAH NYALA
,
POINT LAST SEEN

In the beginning of the 1940s, Paris was a six-day walk from the border, a three-hours' drive, and one hour by plane. Today the capital is only several minutes away from anywhere else . . .—
PAUL VIRILIO
,
SPEED AND POLITICS

An automobile which cuts out the use value from your feet . . . I was recently told, “You're a liar!” when I said to somebody I walked down the spine of the Andes. The idea that somebody could just walk! He can jog perhaps in the morning, but he can't walk anywhere! The world has become inaccessible because we drive there.—
IVAN ILLICH
,
WHOLE EARTH REVIEW

“After several hours, I begin to feel something new, something never before experienced. I strongly sense, with my whole self, that I am moving from one place to another. . . . I am not passing through space, as one does in a car or airplane. I feel I am in a place; actually, in an infinite number of places. I am not in an undifferentiated space—what one feels in many modern places that, really are non-places; they are simply repetitions of concepts—the concept of hospital space, shopping space, mall space, airport space.”—
LEE
, “
A CATHOLIC AMERICAN
”
PILGRIM

. . . every walk is unreproducible, as is every poem. Even if you walk exactly the same route every day—as with a sonnet—the events along the route cannot be imagined to be the same from day to day. . . . If a poem is each time new, then it is necessarily an act of discovery, a chance taken, a chance that may lead to fulfillment or disaster.—
A
.
R
.
AMMONS
,
“
A POEM IS A WALK
”