Walking

My friend John Harkey walks, bikes and practices sustainable living in Nashville, Tennessee.  I loved his essay on walking and thought you might enjoy it too.  You can read more of John's writing at
www.Harkeyresearch.blog.com 

Walking

In his essay of the same title Henry David Thoreau repeated the phrase wrongly ascribed to Horace Greeley: “go west young man, go west.”  Actually, Thoreau was talking about “walking” west, and for him the more precise direction was “southwest,” away from his village home (Concord), and away from the city (Boston), in the direction of the setting sun.  In his essay, he said he was going to make an “extreme” statement.  As he describes his walks, and the ambition of walking, the word “extreme” seems mild
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For Thoreau a daily four-hour walk was the minimum duration, and more was preferred. His walking “ambition” was to leave civilization entirely, avoiding the well traveled path and claiming the uncharted wilderness to the south and west as his home. His “home” in the village was merely a starting place for his walking adventure, but his destination was the Pacific Ocean, or maybe the Rocky Mountains.
 

Unfortunately, or maybe to our good fortune, Thoreau never made it that far.  In fact, his pace wasn’t very rapid, and he was easily diverted. If you have ever been on a spring wildflower walk, you will know what happened.  Every step or two there is something new and unusual for a botanist/poet to look at, and if you are in a group, comment on.  Thoreau, like Christopher Robin, knew a lot about the 100-acre wood, but a 4-hour walk might take him one place in his imagination (say to some of the Greek Isles as he followed the meanderings of Odysseus), but while thinking about Odysseus he might be observing some ant platoons outside his door re-enacting their version of the Trojan war.

For me, a walk in the wilderness is a deep pleasure. But my wilderness walks are a part time occupation. I take those walks several times a year, but in my daily walks (and bike rides), I turn Thoreau’s treatise on its head, and turn towards the city, to meet friends, to purchase coffee, to shop for groceries, and to enjoy the pleasures of the urban experience, which are many.
 

Thoreau, of course, did too.  His sustenance was more from the village and the city than from the wilderness.  He thrived on the intellectual stimulation of Concord and the wider Boston community, and he enjoyed friendship. He wrote about the horrors of the village (“most men lead lives of quiet desperation”), but was really sustained by The Village.

For Thoreau, walking was an elite activity. While it involved only a modest investment of money (good shoes, sturdy clothing, and a hat), it required time.  In Thoreau’s day, the only people with “time” were the wealthy and the occasional bohemian poet.  The men (and women) of quiet desperation walked to work and to market, but otherwise were busy creating the economic engine that won the Civil War.

One of Thoreau’s more memorable trips was taken by train rather than on foot, from Boston down to New York, and there he met a promising new urban poet, Walt Whitman, who had just been “found” and promoted by Thoreau’s mentor, a Mr. Emerson.  Thoreau had just published his masterpiece, Walden, a year earlier (1854), and Whitman had just published his first edition of “Leaves of Grass.”

In contrast to Thoreau, Whitman looked toward the city and its thriving masses of people for inspiration rather than to the uncharted wilderness near Thoreau’s cabin. Whitman’s walk is also open ended —walking “the long brown road before me leading wherever I choose”—but is about those he meets rather than where he goes—“the felon, the diseased, the illiterate person” and “the escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple.” And, the objects of civilization: “planks and posts of wharves, rows of houses, porches” and then the ideas, the “philosophies” and the “music.”  Whitman’s walk was an exploration of culture—the city—rather than fields and forest, and he liked what he saw, as much as Thoreau liked wilderness. 
 

I like both walks. For my wilderness walks, though, I take part of the city with me, in the form of a friend or two. Climbing up a mountain along a shady path, we observe the beauty of a cascading stream while discussing whether charter schools really make a difference.

Walking is easy, requires no new expenditures, can be fit into a busy lifestyle, and helps you maintain health. It’s also fun, or can be. Twenty minutes a day (just over a mile) is helpful to health.  Forty minutes (2-3 miles) will help you maintain weight, and with healthier eating, possibly lose weight.  Either distance gives you time to think (alone) or banter (with friends), improving your mood and your friendships.

Thoreau set the bar too high, leaving his quietly desperate neighbors behind as he walked “away” from the Village. Today, in Nashville at least, the Village is the spark, encouraging its residents to leave the desperation (the TV, the computer, the couch, the bag of potato chips) behind, and take a walk (on the new greenway or sidewalk) “into” the Village.

For a description of one of the more interesting urban walks in America, try this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/nyregion/high-lines-best-kept-secret-its-a-fast-commute.html?hp

Research note on Walking for Health

Two researchers at University College of London conducted a meta-analysis of 18 observational studies (460,000 participants) on the health effects of walking published between 1970 and 2007. Their study was summarized in the August 2009 edition of the Harvard Health Letter.

• Walking reduced the risk of dying by 32% during the study period. The study period averaged 11.3 years for the studies reviewed. )  
• The risk of cardiovascular events was reduced by 31%.

• Benefits of walking were found for people walking as little as 5.5 miles a week at a pace of 2 miles per hour.  Greater protection was obtained by more miles and a more rapid pace

Here is a link to the Harvard Report

http://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletters/Harvard_Mens_Health_Watch/2009/August/Walking-Your-steps-to-health

Why I Live In Vermont

Some of you have asked how I ended up in Vermont.  Here is a piece I wrote a while ago about the process that led me here, entitled "Magnetic North":                                                                      

The attraction began in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1959.  I was a freshman in high school, newly arrived in the U.S. and drowning in a river of southern English.  I would grasp at words as they floated past, but could not reconcile the currents that engulfed me with anything in the Primer Curso de Ingles that had been my sole preparation for school in the Deep South.

It was a Catholic high school, so miracles and visitations were not unheard of.  Mine came in the shape of a freckled girl whose family had just moved to town, and the miracle was that the first time she opened her mouth in class I understood everything she said.  Her words were as clear and precise as if she had clicked them out on a typewriter.  She did not stretch her vowels out like taffy, and though she spoke faster than the southern kids, I could tell exactly where each word began, and where it ended.  I could follow her train of thought.  It wasn't that different from mine.

She took me home with her one afternoon and her mother, her father and even her little sister all sounded the same.  No drawn-out diphthongs, no languid cadences.  Here was an entire family whom I could understand.  

My friend and her parents were from Massachusetts, which I learned was in New England.  I thought that someday I would like to live in a place where everybody spoke like that.                                                                                                                              

Graduate school took me out of the Deep South, all the way to North Carolina.  By the time I arrived in  Maryland in the 1970s,  language had ceased to be an issue:  I was not only dreaming, but even counting in English.  

                                                                                                                     

The back-to-the-land movement was in full swing then, and I was determined to achieve self-sufficiency in the acre and a half that surrounded our house.  I had an ambitious vegetable garden with an asparagus bed, and twenty-seven fruit trees.  For protein there were a dozen laying hens, and two Roman-nosed Nubian dairy goats who looked vaguely like Barbra Streisand.

As I had never grown a tomato, pruned an apple tree or milked a goat, I did a lot of research at the local library.  This consisted mostly of reading back issues of Organic Gardening and The Mother Earth News, and I noticed that many of the articles and letters to the editor came from New England.  The writers alluded to sugaring in the spring, and to goats coming into heat as the trees began to turn in the fall.  They advised readers to be vigilant about frozen water buckets in winter, and to keep a stack of old blankets handy for covering tender veggies in case of September frosts.

September frosts!  As I sweltered in the heat of the interminable Chesapeake Bay summer, the fantasy of living in a land where gardens snuggled under blankets, water buckets froze solid, and roadsides were free of that tropical menace, the kudzu vine, became more and more compelling.

The  library also had a shelf dedicated to books about country living.  These were more lyrical than practical, and I read them with the same passion with which as a child I had read about Heidi and her goats.  It was there that I first found Noel Perrin, Louise Dickinson Rich, Scott and Helen Nearing.  In the children's section I discovered the illustrations by Tasha Tudor.  I had read Thoreau years earlier, but the life he described seemed impossible to translate into the twentieth century.  The writers on the country living shelf, however, were very much  alive,  and they had one thing in common:  they all lived in New England.

In the 1980s, as the Maryland countryside succumbed to suburbia, I had to give up my little homestead.  But at the least provocation I would launch into nostalgic stories about the hens I had kept and the goats I had known.  “What do you mean, you kept hens for eggs,” people would say.  “Don't you need a rooster for that?”  The reactions when I mentioned my elegant Nubian does were so predictable and so dispiriting, having to do with tin cans and foul smells, that I soon dropped livestock from my repertoire of party conversations.  Would I ever live where I didn't have to explain or excuse the things I really cared about?

 It took almost four decades—about as long as it took the people of Israel to get to Canaan--but I finally made it to a place where the roadways are free of kudzu (and, because this is Vermont, of billboards as well), and MacMansions are few.  Where a near neighbor makes world-class cheese with her goats' milk.  Where, when I tell people I keep hens, they ask “what kind?”

Yesterday, in yoga class, the woman who usually sits on my right was late because one of her sheep had gotten loose.  After final meditation, while we were rolling up our mats, the woman who sits on my left gave her a short lecture on the best kinds of livestock fencing.  As I was walking out, the instructor confided  that she is  thinking about keeping bees--her gesture towards saving the planet.

From where I sit at the computer, I can see my hens pecking and scratching at  the newly-green grass.  In the garden, the spinach is up but growing slowly because of the cold spring.  The apple trees are in bloom, but I have a stack of blankets ready, since a hard frost is predicted for tonight.

The farmer who hays our field dropped by on a chilly, sunny day last week to discuss plans for the coming summer.   He complained about the rising costs of diesel fuel, and told me his philosophy on breeding cows—he prefers to wait until they are two years old, when their pelvises are fully developed, because it makes for easier births. 

“You know,” he said, finally getting around to the real topic, “this field of yours really needs manuring.  I hope you don't mind.  It'll stink badly for a couple of days, but that won't last.”

  

His speech was as crisp and clear as the Vermont air, and I could understand every word he said.