Chapter Two

Walking

“IN MY WALKS, I would fain return to my senses,” Henry David Thoreau writes in “Walking.” He begins the essay by tracing the etymology of the verb to saunter, which he says derives from the word Sainte-Terrer, a person who walked about the country asking for charity under the pretense of walking to the Holy Land as did Saint Theresa, and he declares that those who do not go to the Holy Land in their walks are vagabonds or idlers, that all true walkers go forth in a spirit of adventure. Others derive the word from sans terre (without land) and Thoreau argues that those without one particular home are better able to be at home everywhere. I agree that true walkers enter a holy land, for they come to know the spiritual as well as visible landscape. The American Heritage Dictionary, however, provides the Middle English santren (to muse) as the verb’s ancestor, and surely to saunter is to muse. We return to our senses when we walk because the human body evolved to walk long distances.

I was nine when I took my first long-distance hike. My family was living in Steubenville, but we drove the seven miles to my grandmother’s house near Wintersville at least once a week. I watched the landscape pass—first city, then suburb, then country—and memorized not only the route but also the landmarks. Gradually, I formed a plan to walk all the way from home to my grandmother’s, and one Saturday in summer I started off. I was not running away: I set out to see how far I could walk. I covered about five miles before my grandparents on their way home from shopping spotted me and picked me up. I relate this incident only to point out that I was always meant to be a hiker. Even today, I do not know a place until I walk there, until I reflect on what I see, hear, and touch.

The following year my family moved to the country where I had woods and fields to explore. I walked every summer morning before breakfast and learned that the great polygonal webs of the orb weaver strung between high stems and dripping jewellike with dew foretold several days of fair weather. The prospect of walking to school four miles each way appealed to me, but I never did it because the road to my school had no footpath or berm wide enough for walking. Nor were we encouraged to walk or exercise other than in physical education. My school had no girls’ sports teams of any kind, and in those days a girl who showed an interest in sports or hiking risked severe ridicule.

Not until my college years did I become a serious hiker. One rainy day in November 1971, I accompanied a group of biology students who were working for Ralph Nader on an expedition to collect pollution samples along the Olentangy River in Columbus. We tramped across muddy fields and down slippery banks, at times clinging to barbed fencing behind factory walls. The rain and mud did not dampen my zeal to be outside, and a long-dormant need to cover long distances on foot awakened.

Hitchhiking in Britain the summer after I graduated, I discovered one of humanity’s greatest inventions: the public footpath. Not only could one walk through the countryside freely, but villages and towns also had well-marked rights-of-way that led to interesting sights and rural areas. Even a large industrial city like Birmingham had public footpaths. Although America is vast, it is very closed off because so much private property is forbidden to walkers. Only in national and state parks and reserves and on the great trails such as the Appalachian and Pacific Crest can people really see much of the land away from the roads. We are “free” in many ways, but not free to explore our environment on foot or even in many cases to walk to work. It may be that city dwellers, by using public transportation, do more for the environment than country people who have no choice but to drive cars and trucks, as buses and commuter trains never serve rural areas. The cities, which seem restricting, actually provide more opportunities than the fenced-off countryside for walking and exploring—or they did before so many cities transformed their downtown areas into cloverleaf interchanges. The movement back toward large pedestrian areas in city centers and reclamation of abandoned lots, railway lines, and canals into parks are two of the greatest national innovations in the last few decades.

For years after growing up, I continued my walks in those woods to the east of my parents’ house. In winter the trees seemed all upright trunks, and snow turned the bushes to lace; in spring the dogwood flowered white, and birdsong surrounded me; walking was difficult during summer because branches and brambles sought to reclaim all space; in the most beautiful season, autumn, the maples blazed scarlet and the oaks golden in the cool mornings and warm afternoons.

One summer I started over the hillside with no particular destination in mind. The hemlock, hornbeam, spruce, maple, iron-wood, and even the giant white oaks branching above the others were second-growth descendants of the old-growth forest, logged by settlers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Water flowed over a large rimrock jutting out over an east-facing slope and fell to the stream below, gushing down the hillside all the way to the creek. I continued walking and found a clearing edged by tall white pines standing in a row so straight I knew they must have been planted as a windbreak. Just on the other side I discovered their purpose: they sheltered a picnic house, the remains of someone’s dream of a private park, built about twenty years earlier. Swallows and bats had colonized decaying rafters, and picnic areas were now home to rabbits and groundhogs. The white pines soared thirty feet, perhaps fulfilling the dream in a different way than the designer had intended.

Farther down the hillside, a pile of boulders—remains of a bank barn that had stood there perhaps as late as the forties or fifties—provided evidence that the place where I walked must have been pasture. A red-winged blackbird perched on a leaning fence post shrilled its call that sounded like ringing glass. At last finding the creek, I located the big square stones that were the only remnants of grain mills operated during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The wooden millhouses and paddle wheels were gone, yet locals still knew the valley as Reed’s Mills and the stream as Reed’s Mill Creek; thus, we know a place by naming it. I felt part of all times at once—the present, when this stream valley seemed a sanctuary from the highways and cities; the moment two decades earlier when a dreamer who might still have been alive conceived the idea to build a private park among the trees; the early twentieth century when everyone’s attention was on the Great War, but someone who thought about the future constructed a barn; the middle of the nineteenth century when Reed built his mills to serve a rising population of farmers; the mid-eighteenth century when the first European explorers stepped among massive trees; the early eighteenth century when Shawnee and Delaware hunted deer and bear and believed that streams and lakes held human souls, that larks and thrushes were the living spirits of their ancestors, and that elusive gods walked the land in early morning because they could conceal themselves in the fog.

Across the creek the wooded hillside rose sharply. I recalled the local story that the stage coach from Muskingum had crossed the hills here during the early nineteenth century, and that if you looked closely you could find the trail the old stage road had left among the trees. The creek flowed two feet deep with a swift current; in springtime the water could be as high as three or four feet. Could wagon wheels have forded it? I searched the hillside for any break where people may have built a road. Trees and underbrush hid the stagecoach trail, relegating it to the status of legend, just as they were in the process of pulling down the barn and shelter house so carefully constructed. Thus legends grow not only out of inhabitants’ dimly remembered pasts but also out of the land itself.

The sun stood on the tops of the highest trees on the western side of the creek. I turned to retrace my own path back up the hillside, leaving the woods to the chipmunks dashing among the leaves on the forest floor. Entering the deeper woods, I heard the plaintive whistle and chirr of the wood thrush and the clear, three-note call of the wood warbler.