Walking

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us if we walked only in a garden or a mall? . . .

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. . . .

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. . . .

Henry David Thoreau
“Walking” (1862)

When I walk, I naturally go down the street, east, crossing numerous other streets, some with lights or signs where I have to pause or stop, all with cars, all with houses and stores and schools, no fields or woods, all tame and cheap. I can easily walk three or four miles. I can’t imagine ten or more at any one time. I do cross a stream, two or three times, though on a sidewalk over the stream which you can’t see or hear unless you cross to a railing where it runs beneath. There are nothing but inhabitants along my walk – no fox or mink, but birds and squirrels and cats and dogs and children walking or riding bikes to school and their parents driving in cars to work, retirees tending their gardens or mowing their lawns. Henry David and I are 150 years apart, eons, light years – meadows and woods. I listen to his essay and a distant past on my iPod:

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance as it has never set before,—where there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.