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Chapter 1 -- Why Walk?
Sanity is a madness
put to good uses.
George
Santayana
COLIN: I had better admit right
away that walking can in the end become an
addiction, and that it is then as deadly in its
fashion as heroin or television or the stock
exchange. But even in this final stage it remains a
delectable madness, very good for sanity, and I
recommend it with passion.
A redeeming
feature of the condition is that no matter how
heavily you've been hooked, you can still get your
kicks from very small doses.
Ten minutes'
drive from the apartment in which I used to live,
there was a long, grassy ridge from which you could
look out over parkland and sprawling metropolis,
over bay and ocean and distant mountains. I often
walked along this ridge in order to think
uncluttered thoughts or to feel with accuracy or to
sweat away a hangover or to achieve some other
worthy end, recognized or submerged. And I usually
succeeded—especially with the thinking. Up
there, alone with the wind and the sky and the steep
grassy slopes, I nearly always found after a while
that I was beginning to think more clearly. Yet
"think" doesn't seem to be quite the right
word. Sometimes, when it was a matter of making a
choice, I don't believe I decided what to do so much
as discovered what I had decided. It was as if my
mind, set free by space and solitude and oiled by
the body's easy rhythm, swung open and released
thoughts it had already formulated. Sometimes, when
I'd been straining too hard to impose order on an
urgent press of ideas, it seemed only as if my mind
had slowly relaxed; and then, all at once, there was
room for the ideas to fall into place in a
meaningful pattern.
Occasionally you can
achieve this kind of release inside a city. One day
some years ago, when I had to leave my car at a
garage for an hour's repair work, I spent the time
strolling through an industrial area. I crossed a
man-made wasteland, then walked up onto a
little-used pedestrian bridge over a freeway.
Leaning on its concrete parapet, I watched the lines
of racing, pounding vehicles. From above they seemed
self-propelled, automatic. And suddenly, standing
there alone, I found myself looking down on the
scene like a visitor from another planet, curiously
detached and newly instructed. More recently I've
discovered a sandhill near the place I now take my
car for repair. This desiccated oasis among
encroaching industriana still supports on one flank
a couple of windswept pines. Its center cradles dips
and hummocks that are smooth and flower-decked. And
there, while the 21st century ministers to my
horseless carriage, I can lie and read and lunch and
doze, cut off, in a quiet urban wilderness. Most
cities offer such veiled delights. In walking, as in
sex, there's always a good chance you'll find,
almost anywhere, given enough time, something that
wows you.
But no one who has begun to acquire
the walking habit can restrict himself for long to
cities, or even to their parks or less intentional
enclaves. First he explores open spaces out beyond
the asphalt. Then, perhaps, he moves on to car
camping and makes long, exploratory, all-day treks.
But in due course he's almost sure to find his
dreams outreaching these limitations. "For the
human spirit needs places where nature has not been
rearranged by the hand of man." One of the joys
of being alive today is the complexity of our human
world. We have at our fingertips more riches than
anyone has ever had: books by the zillion; CDs and
movies and TV by the ton; the Internet; also the
opportunity to move around almost as we please. But
in time the sheer richness of this complexity can
sandbag you. You long for simplicity, for the yin to
that yang. You yearn-though you may not openly know
it-to take a respite from your eternal wrestling
with the abstract and instead to grapple, tight and
long and sweaty, with the tangible. So once you've
started walking down the right road, you begin,
sooner or later, to dream of truly wild
places.
At this point you're in danger of
meeting a mental block.
Even in these
mercifully emancipated decades, many people still
seem to become alarmed at the prospect of sleeping
away from officially consecrated, car-accommodating
campsites with no more equipment than they can carry
on their backs. When pressed, they babble about
snakes or bears or even, by God, bandits. But the
real barrier, I'm sure, is the unknown.
I
came to comprehend the reality of this
barrier—or, rather, to recomprehend
it—30-odd years ago, during a four-day walk
through some coastal hills. (I was walking, as a
matter of fact, in order to sort out ideas and
directions for the first edition of this book.) One
warm and cloudless afternoon I was resting at a bend
in the trail—there was a little triangular
patch of shade, I remember, under a rocky
bluff—when some unexpected tilt of my mind
reexposed a scene that I had completely forgotten.
For all the vividness of the vital features, it
remained a curiously indistinct scene. I wasn't at
all clear when it had happened, except that it must
have been more than 15 years earlier. I still do not
even remember for sure whether it happened in Africa
or North America. But the salient contours stand out
boldly. I had come to some natural boundary. It may
have been the end of a trail or road, or the fringes
of a forest or the rim of a cliff, I no longer know
which. But I do know that I felt I'd gone as far as
a man could go. So I just stood there looking out
beyond the edge of the world. Except for a wall of
thick, dark undergrowth, I'm no longer sure what I
saw, but I know it was wild, wild, impossible
country. It still looms huge and black and
mysterious in the vaults of my memory.
All at
once, without warning, two men emerged from that
impossible country. They carried packs on their
backs, and they were weather-beaten and distilled to
bone and muscle. But what I remember best of all is
that they were happy and whole. Whole and secure and
content.
I talked to them, briefly and in
considerable awe. They had been back deep into the
wilderness, they said, away from civilization for a
week. "Pretty inaccessible, some of it,"
admitted one of them. "But there's a lot of
beautiful country in there-some of the finest I've
ever seen." Then they walked away and I was
left, still awestruck, looking out once more into
the huge, black, mysterious wilderness.
The
awe that I felt that day still hangs in my memory.
But my present self dismisses it. I know better.
Many times in recent years I've emerged from wild
country, happy and whole and secure and content, and
found myself face-to-face with astonished people who
had obviously felt that they were already at the
edge of the world; and I know, now I have come to
consider the matter, that what I have seen on their
faces is exactly what those two men must have seen
on mine, many years ago on the edge of that other
wilderness. And I know now that the awe is
unwarranted. There's nothing very difficult about
going into such places. All you need is the right
equipment, a reasonable competence in using it, a
tolerable degree of physical fitness, and a clear
understanding of your own limitations. Beyond that,
all you have to do is overcome the fear of the
unknown.
Once you've overcome this fear of
the unknown and thereby surmounted your
sleeping-out-in-the-wilderness block, you are free.
Free to go out, when the world will let you slip
away into the wildest places you dare explore. Free
to walk from dawn to dusk and then again from dawn
to dusk, with no harsh interruptions, among the
quiet and soothing cathedrals of a virgin forest. Or
free to struggle for a week, if that's what you want
at that particular time, toward a peak that has
captured your imagination. Or free, if your needs or
fancies of the moment run that way, to follow a wild
river to its source, fishing as you go, or not
fishing. Free, once you've grasped the significance
of this other reality, to immerse yourself for two
months in the timeless silence of a huge desert
canyon-and to learn in the end why the silence is
not timeless after all.
But long before the
madness has taught you this kind of sanity you have
learned many simple and valuable things.
You
start to learn them from the very beginning. First,
the comforting constants. The rhythm of boots and
walking staff, and their different inflections on
sand and on soil and on rock. The creak of harness
as small knapsack or heavy pack settles back into
place after a halt. And the satisfactions of a taut,
controlled body. Then there are the small, amplified
pleasures. In everyday life, taking off your socks
is an unnoticed chore; peeling them off after a long
day's walk is sheer delight. At home a fly is
something that makes you wonder how it got into the
house; when you're lying sprawled out on a sandbar
beside a remote river you can recognize a fly as
something to be studied and learned from-another
filament in the intricate web of the world. Or it
may be a matter of mere money: five days beyond the
last stain of man, you open the precious little
package of blister-cushioning felt pads that's
marked "$3.65" and discover, tucked away
inside, two forgotten and singularly useless $20
bills. Yet two days later you may find your appetite
suddenly sharp for civilized comforts that a week
earlier had grown flat and stale. Once, toward the
end of a week's exploration of a remote headwater
basin, I found my heart melting at the thought of
hot buttered toast for breakfast. And in the final
week of a summer-long walk I even found myself
recalling with nostalgia the eternal city hunt for
parking.
But well before such unexpected
hankerings arise, your mind as well as your body has
been honed. You have re-remembered that happiness
can have something to do with simplicity. And so, by
slow degrees, you regain a sense of harmony with
everything you move through-rock and soil, plant and
tree and cactus, spider and fly and rattlesnake and
coyote, drop of rain and racing cloud shadow. (You
have long ago outgrown the crass assumption that the
world was made for man.) After a while you find that
you're gathering together the whole untidy but
glorious mishmash of sights and sounds and smells
and touches and tastes and emotions that tumble
through your recent memory. Then you begin to
connect these ciphers, one with the other. And once
you begin to connect, only to connect, nothing can
stop you-not even those rare moments of blackness
(when all, all is vanity) that can come even in the
wilderness.
When you get back at last from
the simple things to the complexities of the
outside, walled-in man-world you find that you're
once more eager to grapple with them. For a while
you even detect a meaning behind all the complexity.
We are creatures of our time; we cannot escape it.
The simple life is not a substitute, only a
corrective.
For a while, I said, you detect
new meanings. For a while. That's where the hell
comes in. In due course the hot buttered toast
tastes like damp sawdust again and the parking
hassle is once more driving you crazy and the
concrete jabs at your eyes and the din and the dirt
sicken you, and all at once you realize that there
is no sense to be discovered, anywhere, in all the
frantic scurryings of the city. And you know there's
only one thing to do. You're helplessly trapped.
Hooked. Because you know now that you have to go
back to the simple things.
You struggle,
briefly. But as soon as the straight-line world will
let you slip away, or a little sooner, you go. You
go in misery, with delight, full of confidence. For
you know that you will immerse yourself in the
harmonies—and will return to see the
meanings.
This is why I recommend walking so
passionately. It is an altogether positive and
delectable addiction.
. . .
Naturally,
not everyone understands.
A smooth and
hypersatisfied young man once boasted to me that he
had just completed a round-the-world sight-seeing
tour in 79 days. In one jet-streamed breath he
scuttled from St. Peter's, Rome, via the Pyramids,
to a Cambodian jungle temple. "That's the way
to travel," he said. "You see everything
important."
When I suggested that the
way to see important things was to walk, he almost
dropped his martini.
Walking can even provoke
an active opposition lobby. For many years now I've
been told with some regularity that by walking out
and away I'm "escaping from reality." I
admit the statement puts me on the defensive. Why, I
ask myself (and sometimes my accusers as well), are
people so ready to assume that chilled champagne is
more "real" than water drawn from an
ice-cold mountain creek? Or a dusty sidewalk than a
carpet of desert dandelions? Or a Boeing 747 than a
flight of white pelicans soaring in delicious unison
against the sunrise? Why, in other words, do people
assume that the acts and emotions and values that
stem from city life are more real than those that
arise from the beauty and the silence and the
solitude of wilderness?
For me, the thing
touched bottom when I was gently accused of escapism
during a TV interview about a book I'd written on a
length-of-California walk. Frankly, I fail to see
how going for a six-month, thousand-mile walk
through deserts and mountains can be judged less
real than spending six months working eight hours a
day, five days a week, in order to earn enough money
to be able to come back to a comfortable home in the
evening and sit in front of a TV screen and watch
the two-dimensional image of some guy talking about
a book he has written on a six-month, thousand-mile
walk through deserts and mountains.
As I
said, I get put on the defensive. The last thing I
want to do is knock champagne and sidewalks and
Boeing 747s. Especially champagne. These things
distinguish us from the other animals. But they can
also limit our perspectives. And I suggest that
they-and all the stimulating complexities of modern
life-begin to make more sense, to take on surer
meaning, when they're viewed in perspective against
the more certain and more lasting reality from which
they have evolved-from the underpinning reality,
that is, of mountain water and desert flowers and
soaring white birds at sunrise.
Here endeth
the lesson.
But perhaps you're an unbeliever
and need proof-a no-nonsense, show-me-some-practical-results kind of proof.
Excerpted from The Complete Walker IV by
Colin Fletcher and Chip Rawlins
Copyright 2002 by Colin Fletcher and Chip Rawlins. Excerpted by
permission of Knopf,
a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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