Wanderlust: A History of Walking (43 page)

“This place is a
maze,
” grumbled Pat when he found me in Caesars Forum, the arcade attached to the casino. The Forum is the capstone of the arch, the crowning jewel of Vegas's recreation of the past. It is an arcade in exactly the sense Walter Benjamin described Parisian arcades—he quoted an 1852 guidebook that said, “Both sides of these passageways, which are lighted from above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world, in miniature,” and added, “The arcades were a cross between a street and an
interieur.
” With its arched roof painted to look like the sky and recessed lighting that changes from day to twilight and back every twenty minutes or so, this one is more so than Benjamin could have imagined. Its curving “streets” are disorienting and full of distractions: the stores full of clothes, perfumes, toys, knickknacks, a fountain whose backside is a huge tropical fish tank, the famous fountain of nubile gods and goddesses who periodically “come to life” during a simulated thunderstorm with laser lightning snaking across the skylike dome. I had visited the arcades of
Paris only six months before, and they were beautiful dead places, like streambeds through which water no longer runs, with half their shops closed and few wanderers along their mosaic'd corridors, but Caesars Forum is constantly thronged (as are the arcades of Bellagio, modeled after Milan's famous Galleria). It is one of the most financially successful malls in the world, says the
Wall Street Journal,
adding that a new addition is planned, a re-creation of a Roman hill town with occasional appearances by horse-drawn chariots. An arcade was never much more than a mall, and though a flâneur was supposed to be more contemplative than the average mall rat, shallow gentlemen are as common as soulful shoppers. “Let's get out of here,” I said to Pat, and we finished our drinks and headed for Red Rocks.

Red Rocks is as open, as public, as Las Vegas Boulevard, but nobody is promoting it, just as no one (unless they're selling gear) is promoting the free activity of walking in preference to the lucrative industry of cars. While tens of thousands of people wander the Strip, perhaps a hundred or so at most roam the larger terrain of Red Rocks, whose spires and buttresses are far taller and more spectacular than any casino. Many people only drive through or step out long enough to take a photograph, unwilling to surrender to the slower pace here, a twilight that comes only once a day, wildlife that does as it pleases, a place with no human trace to structure one's thoughts but a few trails, climbing bolts on the rocks, litter, and signs (and an entrenched tradition of nature-worship). Nothing happens here most of the time, except seasons, weather, light, and the workings of one's body and mind.

Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. Environmentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don't produce a market crop. The same is true of the meadowlands of imagination; time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space—for wilderness and for public space—must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises. Vegas has not yet decided whether to pave over or encourage that space.

That night we would sleep out near Red Rocks, in an unofficial campground with figures silhouetted against the small fires burning here and there under the starry sky and the glow of Vegas visible over the hill. In the morning we would rendezvous with Paul, a young guide who often drove out from Utah to climb here and who had invited Pat to climb with him. He would lead us along a trail snaking up and down across small arroyos and a dry streambed, past the gorgeous foliage I remembered from earlier trips, junipers with desert mistletoe, tiny-leafed desert oaks, yuccas, manzanitas, and an occasional barrel cactus, all stunted and spread sparsely by the rocky soil, aridity, and scattered boulders in a way that recalls Japanese gardens. Still limping from a fall six months earlier, Pat brought up the rear, while Paul and I talked as we went along about music, climbing, concentration, bicycles, anatomy, apes. When I turned back to look at Las Vegas as I had so often looked toward Red Rocks the day before, he would say, “Don't look back,” but I would stare, amazed how thick the city's smog was. The place appeared to be a brown dome with a only few spires murkily visible within it. This state of things whereby the desert could be seen clearly from the city but not the other way round seemed as neat an allegory as I'd ever met. It was as though one could look back from the future to the past but not forward from this ancient place to the future shrouded in trouble, mystery, and fumes.

Paul would lead us off the trail into the brush that led up steep, narrow Juniper Canyon, and I would manage to heave myself up the various shelves where the rock grew more and more gorgeous, sometimes striped red and beige in thin layers, sometimes spotted with pink spots the size of coins, until we were at the foot of the climb. “Olive Oil: This route ascends obvious crack systems for 700 feet up the south side of the Rose Tower,” I would read in Pat's battered
American Alpine Club Climber's Guide
for the region. I lounged and watched them climb with ease up the first few hundred feet and studied the mice, who were less glamorous than the white tigers and dolphins of the Mirage, but livelier. Afterward I would turn around and spend the afternoon wandering in flatter terrain, ambling along the few trails alongside the clear rushing water of Pine Creek, exploring another canyon, turning back to watch the shadows over the hills grow longer and the light thicker and more golden, as though air could turn to honey, honey that would dissolve into the returning night.

Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the
wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.

 

 

 

ref
“An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness”: Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in
The Natural History Essays
(Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1980), 99.

ref
It was nuclear weapons that first led: My early writing on walking and on nuclear politics appears in my 1994 book
Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West
(San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

 

ref
“I can only meditate when I am walking”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Confessions
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1953), 382.

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“In one respect, at least”: John Thelwall,
The Peripatetic: or, Sketches of the Heart of Nature and Society
(1793; facsimile reprint, New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), 1, 8–9.

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Felix Grayeff's history:
Aristotle and His School: An Inquiry into the History of the Peripatos
(London: Gerald Duckworth, 1974), 38–39.

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The Stoics were named: Christopher Thacker,
The History of Gardens
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 21, is my source for the information on the stoa and the Stoics. Bernard Rudofsky's
Streets for People: A Primer for Americans
(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982), also gives a précis of this information.

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“For recreation I turn”:
Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche,
ed. Oscar Levy, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Doubleday, 1921), 23.

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“He used to come”: Bertrand Russell,
Portraits from Memory,
quoted in A. J. Ayer,
Wittgenstein
(New York: Random House, 1985), 16.

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“In order to slacken my pace”: Rousseau,
Confessions,
327.

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“Behold how luxury”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “First Discourse” (“Discourse on the Arts and Letters”), in
The First and Second Discourses
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964), 46.

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“wandering in the forests”: Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” ibid., 137.

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“I do not remember ever having had”: Rousseau,
Confessions,
64.

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“Never did I think so much”: Ibid., 158.

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“thinking over subjects”: Ibid., 363.

ref
Boswell: “Dialogue with Rousseau,”
The Portable Johnson and Boswell,
ed. Louis Kronenberger (New York: Viking, 1947), 417.

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“Having therefore decided to describe”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Second Walk,” in
Reveries of the Solitary Walker,
trans. Peter France (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1979), 35.

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“Wherein lay this great contentment?”: “Fifth Walk,” ibid., 83.

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“What had at first been”: Walter Lowrie,
A Short Life of Kierkegaard
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1942), 45–46.

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“Strangely enough, my imagination works best”:
Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers,
ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 6:113.

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“In order to bear mental tension”: Ibid., 5:271 (1849–1851).

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“This very moment there is an organ-grinder”: Ibid., 5:177 (1841).

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“Most of
Either/Or
was written only twice”: Ibid., 5:341 (1846).

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“overwhelmed with ideas”: Ibid., 6:62–63 (1848).

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“My atmosphere has been tainted”: Ibid., 5:386 (1847).

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Husserl described walking: “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism,” in
Edmund Husserl: Shorter Works,
ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, Harvester Press, 1981). I benefited from Edward S. Casey's interpretation of this dense essay in his
The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 238–50.

ref
“If the body is a metaphor”: Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Scepticism,” in
Feminism/Postmodernism,
ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 145.

 

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“Human walking is a unique activity”: John Napier, “The Antiquity of Human Walking,”
Scientific American,
April 1967. Napier is one of the earliest to push the history of walking back further into prehuman history and insist on its formative importance there.

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“point out parallels”: Adrienne Zihlman, in “The Paleolithic Glass Ceiling,” in
Women in Human Evolution,
ed. Lori D. Hager (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 99. Zihlman and Dean Falk's readings of Lovejoy and the broader gender politics of human evolution in this book and in Falk's book
Braindance
(New York: Henry Holt, 1992) have been immensely helpful to my own reading.

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“This is like a modern knee joint” and following: Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey,
Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 163. See also C. Owen Lovejoy with Kingsbury G. Heiple and Albert H. Burstein, “The Gait of Australopithicus,”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
38 (1973): 757–80.

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“In most primate species”: C. Owen Lovejoy, “The Origin of Man,”
Science
211 (1981): 341–50.

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“Bipedalism . . . figured”: “Evolution of Human Walking,”
Scientific American,
November 1988.

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Dean Falk's attack on Lovejoy: “Brain Evolution in Females: An Answer to Mr. Lovejoy,” in Hager,
Women in Human Evolution,
115.

ref
Jack Stern and Randall Sussman: Interview with the author, Stonybrook, New York, February 4, 1998. See also their comments in
Origine(s) de la Bipédie chez les Hominidés
(Paris: Editions du CNRS/Cahiers de Paléoanthropologie, 1991) and articles such as “The Locomotor Anatomy of
Australopithicus afarensis,
”
American Journal of Physical Anthropology
60 (1983). Representations of hominids in deep forest appeared in
National Geographic
in 1997.

ref
1991 Conference on the Origins of Bipedalism: The three anthropologists at the Paris conference were Nicole I. Tuttle, Russell H. Tuttle, and David M. Webb; their paper “Laetoli Footprint Trails and the Evolution of Hominid Bipedalism” appears in
Origine(s) de la Bipédie;
the quoted passages appear on 189–90.

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“One cannot overemphasize”: Mary Leakey,
National Geographic,
April 1979, 453.

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“According to this view”: Falk, “Brain Evolution,” 115.

ref
“these features led to ‘whole-body cooling' ”: Falk, “Brain Evolution,” 128, and at length in Falk,
Braindance.
See also E. Wheeler, “The Influence of Bipedalism on the Energy and Water Budgets of Early Hominids,”
Journal of Human Evolution
21 (1991): 117–36.

ref
I called up Owen Lovejoy: C. Owen Lovejoy, interview by author, June 23, 1998.

 

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“These devout and simple people”: John Noel,
The Story of Everest
(New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1927), 108.

ref
Much of the information on Chimayó comes from Elizabeth Kay,
Chimayó Valley Traditions
(Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1987), and Don J. Usner,
Sabino's Map: Life in Chimayó's Old Plaza
(Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995).

ref
“All sites of pilgrimage”: Victor Turner and Edith Turner,
Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 41.

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“Often as she listened to the pilgrims' tales”: Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace,
trans. Ann Dunnigan (New York: Signet Classics, 1965), bk. 2, pt. 3, ch. 26, 589.

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“When pilgrims begin to walk”: Nancy Louise Frey,
Pilgrim Stories: On and Off the Road to Santiago
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 72.

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“Liminars are stripped of status and authority”: Turner and Turner,
Image and Pilgrimage, 37.

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“Wherever you go, there you are”: First said by Carl Franz, in his
People's Guide to Mexico,
Greg says.

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“To remain a wanderer”: Introduction,
Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words
(Santa Fe: Ocean Tree Books, 1991), xiii.

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“a complete willingness”: Ibid., 7.

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“it doesn't show dirt”: Ibid., 56.

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“a comb, a folding toothbrush”: Ibid., xiii.

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“I walk until given shelter”: Ibid., 25.

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“Reverend Charles Billups and other Birmingham ministers”: Stephen B. Oates,
Let the Trumpet Sound: A Life of Martin Luther King, Jr.
(New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 236.

ref
March of Dimes: Information from telephone conversation with Tony Choppa, April 1998.

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“At the end of November, 1974”: Werner Herzog,
On Walking in Ice
(New York: Tanam Press, 1980), 3.

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“While I was taking a shit”: Ibid., 27.

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“For one splendid fleeting moment”: Ibid., 57.

 

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W. H. Matthews cautions: W. H. Matthews,
Mazes and Labyrinths: Their History and Development
(1922; reprint, New York: Dover, 1970), 66, 69.

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“Labyrinths . . . are usually in the form of a circle”: Lauren Artress, handout at Grace Cathedral, n.d.

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“each of the speaking characters”: Matthews,
Mazes and Labyrinths,
117.

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“A garden path”: Charles W. Moore, William J. Matchell, and William Turnbull,
The Poetics of Gardens
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), 35.

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“I have a little game”: John Finlay, ed.,
The Pleasures of Walking
(1934; reprint, New York: Vanguard Press, 1976), 8.

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“in a kind of out-of-body form”: Lucy Lippard,
The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society
(New York: New Press, 1996), 4.

ref
“general principles of the mnemonic”: Frances Yates,
The Art of Memory
(London: Pimlico, 1992), 18.

 

ref
These descriptions of Dorothy Wordsworth occur on pages 132 and 188 of Thomas De Quincey,
Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets
(Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1970).

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“Twas a keen frosty morning”: William Wordsworth, letter to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, December 24, 1799, in
Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Early Years, 1787–1805,
ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 273–80. It's worth noting that in this letter Wordsworth refers both to “Taylor's tour,” a written account that described the first waterfall they visited, and to the waterfall itself as “a performance as you might expect from some giant gardiner employed by one of Queen Elizabeth's courtiers, if this same giant gardiner had consulted with Spenser,” which is to say that his vision was framed in the literary and gardening traditions of England.

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Wordsworth and his companions are said to have made walking into something new: See, for example, Marion Shoard,
This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for Britain's Countryside,
2d. ed. (London: Gaia Books, 1997), 79: “It is to Wordsworth as much as anyone that we also owe the idea that the proper way of communing with nature is by walking through the countryside.”

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“I have always fancied”: Christopher Morley, “The Art of Walking” (1917), in Aaron Sussman and Ruth Goode,
The Magic of Walking
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), a cheery evangelistic volume advocating walking for health, providing practical tips, and including an anthology of essays on the subject.

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use as their demonstration case Carl Moritz: “Yet within less than ten years from the date of Moritz's tour a striking change had taken place, and the fashion of the walking-tour (or pedestrian-tour, as it was then called) had come in. It was the beginning of a movement . . .” (Morris Marples,
Shank's Pony: A Study of Walking
[London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1959], 31); “to the new phenomenon of the pedestrian tour, and to other less ambitious forms of walking for pleasure . . . established, in the last ten to fifteen years of the eighteenth century” (Robin Jarvis,
Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel
[Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1997], 4); “removing walking's long-standing implication of necessity and so of poverty and vagrancy” (Anne Wallace,
Walking, Literature and English Culture
[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993], 10); “changes in the practice of and attitudes toward travel in general, and walking in particular, which accompany the transport revolution beginning in the mid-eighteenth century” (ibid., 18). They all assert walking is travel; that it is not necessarily so is my argument.