“Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?”
— Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”
“I learnt how distant my colleagues and I in government were from the lives of others. Our policy papers existed in a grotesque jargon space of misleading phrases about ‘transparent, predictable and accountable financial processes.’ I had become more confident disagreeing … because my walk had showed me real people in real places.”
— Rory Stewart, Member of Parliament, U.K.
“Female salmon fake their orgasms.”
Six men are standing on the rocky flats beside the River Lune, in northwestern England, discussing the threats confronting the local fishery. This used to be one of the best sea trout rivers in the United Kingdom. Not anymore. Nitrates and phosphates from the fertilizing slurry spread over adjacent fields leach into the water. Heavy rainstorms, increasingly frequent of late, disturb the streambed gravel and destroy spawning nests. A proposed hydroelectric project could disrupt the flow. And at the mouth of the Lune, some 15 miles away, salmon-farm escapees migrate through the Kent Channel, bringing sea lice and possibly other diseases.
Well, they were talking about fishing. Now the conversation has screeched to a halt.
“Female salmon fake their orgasms,” repeats the man in the green golf shirt, a pair of binoculars hanging from his neck. John Hatt was once a travel writer. Then he launched a profitable website, Cheapflights. Patron of the Lune Rivers Trust, he is a distinguished, respected citizen. And, apparently, not shy about speaking his mind.
“It’s true,” says Hatt, and he begins to explain. When she is ready to spawn, the female fish digs a hole in the gravel river bottom. She hovers over the pit, opens her mouth and starts to quiver intensely. A mate joins her and does the same thing. She releases eggs, he releases sperm, and thousands of fry live subaqueously ever after. Unless the male is not positioned directly over the eggs. That’s when she fakes it.
“They don’t make a noise, do they?” asks one of the men, fighting back laughter.
The others chortle. Everybody except the wiry fellow wearing a crisp grey suit, a blue dress shirt with white pinstripes and a tightly knotted blue tie decorated with anchors, sailboats and tiny tropical islands with perfect little palm trees. His tousled mop of a-little-too-long brown hair and scuffed brown dress shoes are the only hints that he might not be uncomfortable here. Arms crossed, he is looking at the shallow water riffling over smooth rocks. Bees and butterflies flit among the purple thistle and goldenrod that line the grassy embankment. Finally, he speaks.
“You’re acting like a politician now, John,” he jabs. “You’re just trying to change the subject.”
Everybody laughs. Not that these anglers were a difficult group to relate to for rookie Member of Parliament Rory Stewart. He represents Penrith and the Border, the largest and most sparsely populated constituency in England, about 2,000 square miles of fields, fells, clear streams and stone walls. A place where “Glen Beck” invokes an image of a creek running through a deep, narrow valley, not the incendiary Fox network talk-show host. Politics are more courteous here. Plus, this has been a safe Conservative seat for the past century, a district once governed by Pitt the Younger, and even though Rory the Tory is a Scotsman, with blue blood, he knows how to meet people on their terms, on their turf.
The minute he arrived at Old Tebay Bridge, Stewart thanked the men for joining him on the stretch of water they wanted to discuss, rather than in a stuffy boardroom. “Can we go see the river?” he asked, then swiftly climbed a wooden stile over a barbed-wire fence and stepped down to the shore.
Stewart and I drove to the Lune from Brougham Hall Farm, 20 miles to the north, where he had spent the bulk of the day mingling with constituents at the Penrith Show, an agricultural fair that celebrated its 170th anniversary in 2013. When I reached the sprawling estate, a half-hour walk from my hotel on the High Street in the lively market town of Penrith, and tore myself away from watching motorcycle trickster Valentino jump over fire in the main ring, I found Stewart on a folding chair inside the Conservative Party tent, listening to a group of farmers, all in their early 20s, describe their daily frustrations.
“We’re paid a ridiculous amount of money to fence off fields and keep sheep out,” said one, “to protect wild orchids.” A national public body called Natural England came up with this plan to conserve the endangered flower. Problem is, wild orchids need sheep. They nibble the brambles and hawthorn scrub that would otherwise choke out the flowers. It’s one of countless disconnects between policy and the people. Stewart promised to try to do something about it.
“It’s good that the local MP wants to listen,” Matthew Blair, one of the young farmers, told me when their hour in the tent was finished. “He comes out of Westminster and spends time with people like us.”
Blair’s family met Stewart during the 2010 election campaign, when he called in on their farm. Even in rural ridings, door-knocking is a crucial canvassing strategy. But Stewart’s arrival at the Blair homestead was unusual. He got there entirely on foot.
After he was selected as the Conservative nominee for Penrith and the Border, a process that culminated in each shortlisted contender speaking to the public for five minutes from the show ring of the livestock auction mart, where Stewart says “the expressions of the farmers implied they had seen mule shearlings who would make better candidates,” he wanted to really get to know the area. So he went on a 300-mile trek through the constituency, distributing pamphlets on country lanes, stopping at community meetings, joining trivia competitions in village pubs and sleeping wherever he was offered lodging for the night: a medieval keep, a 17th-century farmhouse, a room above the pub (where his lack of pop music and soap opera knowledge cemented a last-place finish in the trivia contest). Some of the tour was carefully coordinated. One evening, he zipped back to Penrith for dinner with then–New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. But most of Stewart’s encounters on the campaign trail were spontaneous, like his walkabout at Brougham Hall Farm.
After posing for a group photo with the next-gen farmers, he strode about the fairgrounds, calling in at the Cumbria Dog Training and Cumbria Wildlife Trust booths, and dropping £1 on a raffle ticket for a Peugeot at the Eden Valley Hospice tent. He shook hands with tractor dealers and auctioneers, and inspected pens with 20 different breeds of sheep, introducing me to their owner, who attempted to teach me how to recognize their subtle differences. (It was all sheep to me, though I did learn that peak-capped Hugh Harrison was born on his ancestral farmland, and that he helped out on the film Withnail and I, a cult classic that was shot south of Penrith: “I enjoyed it, but it takes a bit of the fun out of the sausage when you see how it’s made.”)
We paused to watch a pair of beefy men wearing what appeared to be long underwear, arms clasped around one another’s shoulders, heads squeezed together, slowly circle in the centre of a field ringed with onlookers, until one, attempting to lift the other, slipped and fell onto his back.
“Cumberland wrestling,” a white-haired codger leaned over and explained. “Local. Very local.”
Stewart circulated through the downhome crowd with ease. He can find his footing anywhere. A graduate of Eton and Oxford, he was a summer tutor to princes William and Harry, and became friends with their father. As a member of the British Foreign Office, he was posted to Indonesia to help sort out East Timor, and then to Montenegro during the Kosovo conflict. He served as the deputy governor of two provinces in southern Iraq and ran a charitable foundation in Kabul dedicated to reviving traditional Afghan arts and architecture. Stewart was also a professor of human rights at Harvard and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the university’s Kennedy School of Government. All before he turned 40.
His public profile is befittingly large. Before he was married, Vanity Fair featured him in a list of hot, danger-seeking bachelors, although it also slagged him — wide nose, bushy eyebrows, expressive lips, shaggy hair — as a “dead ringer for one or more of the Rolling Stones.” Esquire named him one of the 75 most influential people of the 21st century, “because he may be prime minister one day, if he finds it interesting enough.” Brad Pitt’s production company bought the rights to Stewart’s life story and was reported to be developing a biopic, with Orlando Bloom cast in the lead role, although Stewart’s gig as a Tory appears to have killed the project. “It’s just a phenomenally bad end to a film,” he said to the Guardian.
“Rory Stewart seems to display a dreamlike disconnection with the world as other mortals experience it,” Julian Glover wrote in that newspaper during the 2010 election campaign. “Walking with him, I find myself half-expecting to be beamed back at any moment to his home galaxy.”
So he’s not your average backbencher. Or your average backpacker. Which fuelled my fascination with his obsessive walking. How deeply did it inform his perspectives? Could it help foster more genuine political engagement? Would he grind my idealistic beliefs into the mud under the boots of worldly realism?
After leaving the Foreign Office, Stewart spent a year and a half walking across the Middle East and Central Asia to Nepal, yet one section was missing from the middle of his journey. So in January 2002, with American and British bombs still echoing, he entered Afghanistan without an entry visa, hoping to embark on a six-week solo march through the mountains, from Herat to Kabul. An enigmatic country viewed as “backward, peripheral, and irrelevant,” he writes in his magnificent book, The Places in Between, had rocketed into the crosshairs of the world’s attention. Stewart felt a need to experience “the place in between the deserts and the Himalayas, between Persian, Hellenic, and Hindu culture, between Islam and Buddhism, between mystical and militant Islam.” He wanted to see “where these cultures merged into one another or touched the global world.”
Afghanistan’s secret police, remarkably efficient just a fortnight into the provisional government, six weeks after the fall of the Taliban, did not think this was such a brilliant idea. “There are three metres of snow on the high passes, there are wolves, and this is war,” Stewart was told by an interrogator after being whisked away from his hotel. “You will die, I can guarantee.”
The riverside assembly on the Lune adjourns with another round of snickering about salmon sex, and Stewart and I walk downstream along an old farm track. Still in his suit and tightly knotted tie, he deconstructs the meeting. Certainly, it’s important to protect the interests of the fishermen, he says. Long a cog in Cumbrian culture, they help safeguard the natural heritage of the area. It’s a healthy pastime, and with tackle and restaurant meals rung in, angling adds a few quid to local cash registers. On the other hand, agriculture is the cornerstone of the constituency’s financial health, and farmers complain to Stewart about excessive regulations around fertilizer use. Also, he’s a proponent of hydro power, because it supplies renewable energy, and he considers it a lesser evil than wind turbines — a source of contentious debate in Cumbria, most of it over their impact on the stunning hill views that propel Lake District tourism. Aquaculture up the coast in Scotland and abnormally heavy rainstorms whipped up by a warming climate make the questions about fishing that much more complex.
“How am I supposed to resolve all of this?” Stewart asks in a gentle voice. “What am I supposed to do?”
He stops to swing open a gate, which protests with a high-pitched squeal, then closes it after we pass through. The meeting with anglers, he says, revealed “only a tiny bit of the river’s life” — a glimpse of the specialized issues one must grapple with to attempt a sensible governing stance. “As you begin to talk these things through, you realize what’s happening to contemporary societies. We’re at these extraordinary impasses,” he says, shifting his gaze beyond the Lune. “I believe, because I am a romantic, that it is possible to find solutions. That with enough care, and time and patience, you can come up with the right answer.
“But it doesn’t feel like that as a politician. It actually feels, often, as though these things are just conflicts between blind interests which can never be resolved.”
Stewart stoops over and plucks a blade of grass from a patch growing beside the hard-packed wheel rut. “We have a problem here,” he says, showing me the feathery seed head. This grass needs to be eaten before the seeds develop, otherwise it doesn’t deliver enough nutrients to sheep. But farmers have limited stock, so the grass grows ungrazed, and their flocks lose interest. Thistle and nettles sprout and spread, and the amount of edible ground contracts. This leads to higher feed costs, more chemical input and the deterioration of pastureland, to the detriment of farmers, walkers, tourists. It took Stewart three years in office to learn how to read the grass.
At the end of his first summer as an MP, Stewart completed a four-day, 80-mile walk along the River Eden, east of the Lune, from its source to the sea. He was accompanied by the director of Eden Rivers Trust, as well as, during various legs, somebody from Natural England, a representative of the U.K. Environment Agency, a dairy farmer, a fisherman and a biologist, and the trek raised money for a program that brings schoolchildren to the river for environmental education. There were hands-on activities, including a hunt for endangered white-clawed crayfish, the only species native to the British Isles. Shadowed by limestone hills and Roman-era history, the Eden Valley is fertile and green, dotted with oak and chestnut trees. As he walked toward Solway Firth, Stewart absorbed all the information he could about the valley. The dairy farmer, whose family has worked the riverside for centuries, pointed out that the crayfish live only over limestone; they need its calcium for their shells. Another hiker, a medical doctor, showed Stewart the meditation caves that early Christian monks had carved into the cliffs. After four days, stumbling over mud flats at the edge of the sea, Stewart realized how far he had travelled and how much he did not yet understand.
In Afghanistan, despite speaking Dari and some rusty Urdu, despite his experience as a diplomat and as an independent traveller in countries such as Iraq and Iran, that feeling never waned.
The secret police begrudgingly granted him permission to proceed on his walk, though only with two armed escorts. Ragged militias roamed the countryside. A dozen foreign war correspondents had been killed in the previous two months. The men assigned to protect Stewart — Qasim, small and in his mid-40s, and Abdul Haq, taller and younger — were ill-equipped. Mujahidin who had fought against the Russians, and later against the Taliban, now in the employ of a warlord-turned-regional-governor who had done the same, they carried only rifles and sleeping bags, no food or warm clothing. Worse, while agents of the administration in Herat, they had no real authority beyond the Tajik Sunni villages a few days to the east. Travelling with Qasim and Haq was dangerous. On Stewart’s route, feudal commanders presided over neighbouring valleys. War had been constant for more than two decades, but the battle lines were seldom clear. There were three other main ethnic groups, another branch of Islam and strongmen who may or may not have been friends with the Taliban just a few short weeks earlier. Some had ties to the Iranian government; others received money and weapons from Pakistan. Alliances give you power in Afghanistan, and they were swinging wildly in the wake of the Western bombardment.
Unwashed, clad in a traditional shalwar kemis shirt, baggy pants and a soft, round-topped cap, Stewart could almost pass for a local when he set out from Herat, 60 miles east of the Iranian border. The gravel desert was treeless, flanked by bare hills. The temperature, cool. It felt good to be walking. To satisfy his craving for history and culture and motion.
Securing accommodation each night was an adventure. Muslim tradition holds that travellers must be shown hospitality — “he who sleeps on a full stomach whilst his neighbour goes hungry is not a true believer,” proclaimed the Prophet Muhammad — yet the reception varied. Stewart never knew what would happen when he rapped on the door of a mosque or the gate of a walled compound. In some humble mud houses, he was graciously led to the guest room, where he sat on the carpet with men from the village, and after reciting a string of ritual Arabic greetings, fielded questions about his homeland and customs. (Peace be with you. May you not be tired. I hope your family is well. Would you marry your first cousin?) Some hosts were suspicious of the foreigner. But Stewart had letters of introduction from high-ranking officials, and most men he encountered were either curious or generous, even if they could not read. Fires were lit, blankets distributed. Meals (rice with a few morsels of mutton for dinner, nan bread and sweet tea for breakfast) were taken in silence. In more prosperous homes, he was served walnuts and oranges by servants while seated on fine carpets. Nowhere was there electricity or indoor plumbing. And until he reached the land of the Hazara, at the midpoint of his walk, there were no women in public. “In many houses,” he writes, “the only piece of foreign technology was a Kalashnikov, and the only global brand was Islam.”
In one cold, crowded guest room during the first week of the journey, suffering from dysentery and growing weary of the limited conversation, steering clear of religion but willing to dive into politics, Stewart asked a mullah what he thought of Afghanistan’s then brand-new leader, Hamid Karzai.
“Good,” replied the mullah. “Up till now.”
“Up till now?”
“Al-Qaeda was good at the beginning.”
Stewart asked another man, a wealthy landowner, why he became a Mujahid.
“Because the Russian government stopped my women from wearing head scarves and confiscated my donkeys.”
Why did he fight the Taliban?
“Because they forced my women to wear burkas and stole my donkeys.”
Rulers came and went, and it didn’t really matter whether they were religious militants or represented foreign superpowers. People had more immediate concerns.
Within a couple of days, Stewart reached the Hari Rud River. In places, it was pinched between terraced hillsides and roared through claustrophobic gorges — prime locations for an ambush. He gave Qasim and Abdul Haq some money and the gunmen agreed to turn back. Once Stewart was alone, villagers would shoulder their Kalashnikovs and insist on guiding him partway to the next cluster of houses. “I was passed like a parcel down the line,” he writes, “from one chief to the next.”
These chiefs were the only real power. In Afghanistan’s tribal mountain villages, people do not pay taxes, nor do they receive anything from the state. Laws are dictated by tradition, religion and necessity. By the land and the seasons. Government happened somewhere else, “in grand bullet-scarred buildings in Herat and Kabul.”
In Chaghcharan, a town of 15,000 at the midpoint of his journey, Stewart saw the breadth of the gap between Western rhetoric and Afghan reality. A pair of Chinook helicopters landed and two United Nations officials ducked out below the whirling blades. An Irishman and a German, they were old hands at international politicking, as knowledgeable about Afghanistan as any European could hope to become. Addressing a crowd from a microphone in front of the town’s only concrete building, they explained the new loya jirga process that would ultimately select a national leader. Ordinary people, including women, could be nominated as delegates. Then the U.N. men got into the choppers and flew away.
Stewart had friends who worked for the U.N., other international agencies and think tanks in Kabul. They ran projects that cost millions of dollars but rarely left the fortified compounds where they lived. Their goal, he writes, quoting a United Nations document, was “the creation of a centralized, broad-based multiethnic government committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.” Regardless of their intentions and sensitivity, they “came from postmodern, secular, globalized states with liberal traditions in law and government.” Did they not realize that centralized rule, in this part of the world, usually meant violent subjugation? That democracy and gender equality would not easily find purchase? “Policy-makers,” he declares in The Places in Between, “did not have the time, structures, or resources for a serious study of an alien culture. They justified their lack of knowledge and experience by focusing on poverty and implying that dramatic cultural differences did not exist.”
At a seminar in Kabul, Stewart had listened to Mary Robinson, then the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, remark that Afghan villagers were like poor people the world over — their biggest worry was where their next meal would come from. Yet the peasant farmers he met had a much better idea than most of us about the source of their next meal. Their fields. Their flocks.
You can learn a great deal about an Afghan village very quickly, Stewart says to me as we continue along the Lune. Lives are dramatic. People are literally shooting their neighbours. Or they have run out of food. They will point out bits of local lore: there is where I killed a wolf, there is where I killed a Taliban. Soon after arriving in somebody’s home, Stewart would be sitting in a room with a dozen men. They would ask him blunt questions, and half would sleep there with him.
It takes a lot longer to understand a British town, to learn about its problems. People are much more private. They spend more time inside. Farms are larger and pastures are not dotted with shepherds, hollering at you from atop ridges, beckoning you to join them for tea. When he began his campaign hike, Stewart tried to transplant his method from Afghanistan to England. Locals were friendly enough, but not everybody invited him in. “I’d call the police if someone looking like you knocked on my door at night,” one friend cautioned. “No one’s going to put you up. You’ll probably be mugged on the first day. I’d stick to the Taliban.”
The contrast is even more striking when it comes to being effective as an administrator or parliamentarian. In 2005, Stewart returned to Afghanistan and lived in Kabul for three years, running the Turquoise Mountain Foundation. While he was there, the charity established a health clinic and primary school, reconstructed 90 buildings and hooked up water and electricity for hundreds of houses. In his first three years of elected office at home, one of his biggest accomplishments has been securing broadband internet access for 52 rural homes — the product of about 120 hours of meetings.
“In a society like this, people have real needs, but they are very complicated to understand,” says Stewart. “You wake up some days and you look out the door and things are not too bad. Everybody has a school, everybody has a road, everybody has a water supply, nobody is starving. So what do I really have to do? What’s the point of being a politician?
“You can feel very superfluous today,” he continues. “You can often feel that all the major problems have been solved. That, basically, we are a society at peace that operates quite well. That I could be knocked over by a bus, and even if they didn’t have a Member of Parliament for 20 years, the roads would still be mended, the trains would still run, the electricity would still come. In a mature democracy like this, you need to be very sensitive to minor changes. You have to work more, study more and learn more to squeeze the last bits of use out of what it means to be a public servant.”
By walking across domestic and distant landscapes, Rory Stewart has become more intimate with diverse peoples and cultures. He has gained a more nuanced understanding of his constituency, and a war zone, than most politicians will ever obtain. Stewart is far too independent to be allowed near the front bench, says British political writer Ian Dunt. He’s probably right. But transformation seldom starts from a seat at the tables of power.
Stewart hiked through Cumbria to capture the attention of its people. Throughout the planet, people walk to capture the attention of politicians. Non-violent civil disobedience is a slow bleed toward change.
Henry David Thoreau wrote one of the movement’s founding texts. Motivated by his disgust toward slavery and American imperialism, and briefly jailed for refusing to pay a poll tax, he wrote the essay “Civil Disobedience” in 1849, not long after departing Walden Pond. He called for people to act in accord with their consciences — not to stand back and wait for justice — if they disagreed with a government that purported to be acting on their behalf. Over the next 10 years, Thoreau presented and refined a pair of lectures that evolved into another essay, “Walking,” published just after his death from tuberculosis in 1862. It praises the virtues of immersion in nature and condemns private ownership of wilderness. Even a familiar walk, he wrote, can provide new perspectives.
The first global figure to embody Thoreau’s words and link civil disobedience with walking in an everlasting way was Mahatma Gandhi. Monopolistic British laws prohibited Indians from producing or selling salt, forcing a mostly poor populace to purchase expensive, often imported salt from their colonizers. In March 1930, Gandhi began a march through the western state of Gujarat, from his ashram to the Arabian Sea. Joined by a few dozen followers at the outset, he spoke at every village where he stopped. Hundreds more joined the procession. On April 5, after nearly 250 miles, he reached the coastal village of Dandi and picked up handfuls of salt from the shore, breaking the law. The protest continued for another two months. Gandhi was arrested in May, inspiring others to lift salt from the sea. By the end of the year, 60,000 people had been thrown in jail, and the journey toward Indian independence was unstoppable.
Notwithstanding recent pedometer counts, Americans are good at making noise with their feet. On March 3, 1913 — the day before the inauguration of President-elect Woodrow Wilson — the Women’s Suffrage Parade streamed down Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue, seeking a constitutional amendment that would give women the right to vote. There were 8,000 marchers, 20 floats and nine bands. The route was packed with tens of thousands of spectators, largely men who were in the city for Wilson’s ceremony. Female marchers were pushed, tripped and hurt; 100 wound up in the hospital. Policemen did nothing. This became a major news story, and the police superintendent was fired. Wilson’s indifference began to erode. Seven years later, the 19th Amendment was passed. Suffering begat suffrage.
Since then, virtually every protest group in the U.S., mainstream and marginal, has taken to the streets of Washington. Fifty thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched along Pennsylvania Avenue in 1925, a ghostly procession of white hoods. Following in their footsteps came rabbis, war veterans, peace activists, feminists, anti-abortion crusaders, farmers, gays and lesbians, trade unionists, environmentalists, Tea Partyers and hundreds of other parties representing the righteous and outraged masses.
On August 28, 1963, Washington prepared for a riot. Four thousand soldiers stood by in the suburbs, and 15,000 paratroopers were on alert in North Carolina. Liquor sales were suspended in D.C. for the first time since Prohibition. Stores shipped away merchandise to prevent looting. At least 250,000 people streamed into the National Mall during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and other musicians performed. The crowd remained peaceful, harmonious — “white legs and negro legs dangle together in the reflecting pool,” wrote one reporter. When Martin Luther King, Jr., finally took the microphone at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, he cast aside his prepared speech. Instead, he preached about his dream of freedom.
“Next to sex, the activity combining bodily experience and intense emotion to the highest degree is the participation in a mass demonstration at a time of great public exaltation,” wrote British historian Eric Hobsbawm. “Unlike sex, which is essentially individual, it is by its nature collective … and it can be prolonged for hours… . It implies some physical action — marching, chanting slogans, singing — through which the merger of the individual in the mass, which is the essence of the collective experience, finds expression.”
The March on Washington paved the way to another leap forward. On March 7, 1965, about 600 activists started walking from Selma, Alabama, to Montgomery, the state capital, demanding voting rights and an end to violence and racial discrimination against blacks. They were willing to pass through and camp out in KKK-dominated Lowndes County, where 70 percent of the population was black, though none had tried to vote since 1900. The marchers were beaten back by riot police with nightsticks and tear gas after crossing Selma’s main bridge. Two days later, as images of the brutality filtered across the country, King led 2,500 people back to the bridge. They were waiting for a court order that would prevent the police from interfering. When they reached the Alabama River and a cordon of state troopers, they stopped and prayed. The nation held its breath. And then King shouted, “We will go back to the church now.” The marchers retreated.
This display of resolve and patience epitomized a “non-violent quest to transform what was normal,” civil rights historian Taylor Branch writes in The King Years: Historic Moments in the Civil Rights Movement, in which he focuses on this largely forgotten “turnaround march” as one of the era’s key moments. On March 21, five days after the retreat, now protected by a federal judge’s signature and a couple thousand U.S. Army soldiers, 8,000 people began the 54-mile walk to Montgomery. “My feet felt like they were praying,” remarked Rabbi Abraham Heschel. Four days later, at the state capital, King made the speech we know as “How Long, Not Long”: “Once more the method of non-violent resistance was unsheathed from its scabbard, and once again an entire community was mobilized to confront the adversary. And again the brutality of a dying order shrieks across the land. Yet, Selma, Alabama, became a shining moment in the conscience of man… . If the worst in American life lurked in its dark streets, the best of American instincts arose passionately from across the nation to overcome it.”
Indigenous Americans and Canadians continue to march for justice. Although their struggle was already 500 years old, it gained momentum during the civil-rights era. The American Indian Movement advocacy group was formed in 1968. Ten years later, AIM organized a 3,200-mile walk from San Francisco to Washington. It wanted to draw attention to proposed federal legislation that would contravene treaties protecting land and water rights. Twenty-eight people completed the entire five-month trek, enduring blizzards as they crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains and passing through states where they were not permitted to walk on freeways and bridges. In Reno, they were not allowed to use the main street. At the Washington Monument, Prof. Lehman Brightman, a Sioux from South Dakota who in 1969 had established the country’s first Native American studies program, at the University of California, Berkeley, spoke of the resources on native land — uranium, coal, oil, gas, timber and water — that the government wanted to steal. “Today’s a damn good day,” said Brightman, paraphrasing Crazy Horse, “to fight them on this legislation.” None of the 11 proposed laws were passed.
In 2000, about 20 Seri and Tohono O’odham Indians from Mexico and the American southwest did the Desert Walk for Biodiversity, Health and Heritage, a 12-day, 230-mile hike from El Desemboque, Mexico, to Tucson, Arizona. They ate only food from the land and learned about “the complex intersections of desert ecology, human health and culture,” writes Susie O’Brien, a cultural studies professor at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. It was “an intervention in a struggle for sovereignty over time … granting its participants a stake in the promotion of a habitable global future.” Their route passed through the hot, dry terrain where thousands of illegal migrants have died attempting to cross into the United States, but the Desert Walk did not focus on immigration policy. It was a protest against the colonization of the future.
Aboriginal history is filled with tales of people who walked great distances to bring about some kind of change, says Leanne Simpson, a scholar and author from the Alderville First Nation, northeast of Toronto. By walking, they could socialize, strengthen family bonds and engage in diplomacy. “The same things that motivated my ancestors to walk,” she says, “are motivating people now.”
Long marches are much more than a tactic or a strategy, says Simpson, who has taught a course on indigenous resistance at Alberta’s Athabasca University. “Indigenous people have long rallied against erasure: erasure from the land, erasure from American and Canadian consciousness. Putting our bodies back on the land can be very powerful.”
Canada’s Indian Act prevented Aboriginal people from mobilizing in large groups until the 1950s. Revisions loosened the restrictions on public protests, and the walking tradition was reborn. In 1974, the Native Caravan Trek to Ottawa drew activists from across the country, many of whom walked to rallying points before taking a train to the capital to complain about broken treaties. The RCMP, leery of the American Indian Movement and the influence of “radicals” from the U.S., forcibly removed demonstrators from Parliament Hill.
Three years later, Sandra Lovelace, a Maliseet from the Tobique First Nation in New Brunswick, returned to her reserve after getting divorced from her American husband. The homes of relatives were too crowded for Lovelace and her son, but the band council did not help her secure a place to live because she was “non-status” — she had married a white man. Angry that the Indian Act denied her access to her own land and imposed a patriarchal system of identity, Lovelace complained to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Then, in July 1979, inspired by AIM’s trek to Washington, she helped lead the Native Women’s Walk to Ottawa.
Lovelace left Tobique on a bus, which stopped at other reserves and picked up more people as it drove west. Just past Montreal, they spent the night on the floor of the town hall in Oka, Quebec, where Mohawk warriors would set up a blockade in 1990. Fifty women and children started walking the next morning. The temperature topped 100° Fahrenheit, feet and ankles ached, but communities on the route provided cold water, sandwiches and places to sleep. National media picked up the story; politicians, both federal and Aboriginal, met with the walkers. Seven days and 100 miles later, they marched through a crowd to the steps of Parliament Hill. Prime Minister Joe Clark promised that the Indian Act would be revised, and in 1985 the status law for women was finally changed.
“We really didn’t think anybody would listen to us, or that we would accomplish anything,” says Lovelace, who became Canada’s first female Aboriginal senator in 2005. “Just getting there was emotional.”
In the last few years, Aboriginal women have walked across hundreds of miles of Arctic ice to raise money to fight cancer, and along British Columbia’s “Highway of Tears,” where dozens of young women, almost all Aboriginal, have been murdered or gone missing. Josephine Mandamin, an Anishinabe elder from northern Ontario, led a series of long walks along the shorelines of the Great Lakes. She grew up drinking water straight from Georgian Bay and eating fresh fish every day. To her, pollution and global warming are no abstraction. “First Nations’ grandmothers do not love their grandkids more than you love yours,” says Kevin McMahon, director of the documentary film Waterlife, which features Mandamin, “but they may have a clearer view of the horizon.”
The Indian Act remains a lightning rod. It perpetuates paternalism and racism, says Leo Baskatawang, an Anishinabe from northern Ontario. In the summer of 2012, while working toward a master’s degree in Native studies, he chained a copy of the Act to his leg and walked from Vancouver to Ottawa. Averaging around 20 miles a day along the Trans-Canada Highway, he wore through 40 copies of the legislation. “These types of walks, they’re not exclusively indigenous things,” says Baskatawang, who didn’t do much walking until going on a pair of tours of Iraq as a soldier in the U.S. Army. His biggest inspiration was Terry Fox, who ran halfway across Canada on one leg in 1980 to convince people to support cancer research. Similarly, Baskatawang says that his walk “was a way to share my message with a lot of people over an extended period of time. If you want to see change happen, you have to go out and actively seek it.”
Stanley Vollant feels the same way about the Indian Act, but Innu Meshkenu is focused on individual healing and community strength. He looks at politics through a wide-angle lens. When I asked him about Canada’s governing party, he took me on a long tangent, all the way back to the Battle of Marathon, in 490 BC, when the Greeks triumphed against a much larger Persian army. Then he told me that he has been asked to run for office by the federal New Democrats and Quebec’s Liberals. Although he has his eyes on a health minister’s portfolio, he is a decade away from even considering such a move. “For me, it’s important to finish things before starting new ones,” said Vollant. “Finishing these walks will give me better knowledge of my country, of my people and of the real challenges people are facing.”
In February 2013, as I prepared to travel to Manawan for the expedition with Vollant, hereditary chief Beau Dick of the Namgis First Nation led a nine-day walk from Alert Bay, British Columbia, to the provincial capital building in Victoria. The march down Vancouver Island was part of the Idle No More protest movement. Chief Dick wanted to raise awareness about proposed federal legislation, Bill C-38, an omnibus act that contained a couple hundred pages of amendments that would weaken Canada’s environmental laws.
As the group approached Victoria, its ranks swelled from a few dozen to several hundred. City councillor Ben Isitt joined for the final half-dozen miles. The conversations he had while walking for two hours were meaningful. Businesspeople know how to build relationships and partnerships on the golf course. Informal mixing on a march or a picket line, says Isitt, encourages solidarity and helps activists pursue goals collectively.
Before being elected to municipal office, Isitt wrote and lectured about history at universities in British Columbia and New Brunswick, where his PhD thesis focused on the working class and political change. When I ask about the historical union between walking and civil disobedience, Isitt tells me about one of the longest protest marches on B.C. soil. In the 1950s, in the Kootenay Mountains, the Sons of Freedom — a radical splinter branch of the pacifist Christian Doukhobor sect — pulled their children from public schools they deemed militaristic and materialistic. Kids were forcibly rounded up by the government and interned at residential schools. Some of their families responded by bombing a courthouse, an electricity transmission tower, railway bridges and tracks, and setting schools on fire. More than 100 people were eventually convicted of these crimes and, in the spring of 1962, incarcerated in a new, fireproof, purpose-built, maximum-security prison in Agassiz, east of Vancouver on the Fraser River.
That September, roughly 600 Freedomite men, women and children began a march-cum-migration from the Kootenays to Vancouver and, the following summer, to the gates of the prison, where they established an encampment. Agassiz residents had mixed reactions to their new neighbours. Some (grocers, the pharmacist) welcomed the business; others were hostile. The RCMP kept a respectful watch. Health inspectors were satisfied with the camp’s sanitary conditions. Freedomite kids attended local schools, where they were excused from singing patriotic songs in recognition of their religious convictions. Men worked for nearby farmers or built and painted houses. No longer hidden away in the secluded valleys of the B.C. Interior, the migration brought the Sons of Freedom (and, more broadly, the entire Doukhobor sect) into the public consciousness. The tent village lasted for nearly a decade, until all of the inmates had served their time. When they were released, the Freedomites returned home and the simmering tensions faded. An understanding — and an enduring peace — had been struck.
Walking a long distance for a purpose instead of taking a bus or car has symbolic power, says Isitt. Travelling along major transportation routes and passing through communities can capture the public’s attention in ways that other protests might not. These marches belong to a spectrum that also includes funeral processions and parades, which can be political or celebratory, or somewhere in between. A gay pride march in one city might be festive, while in an another city it could be angry and defiant. Regardless, it is an elemental way to close the gap, physically and metaphorically, between where you are and where you want to be.
Governments are large, lumbering ships. They seldom alter course quickly. Individual or group actions can nudge policy in one direction or another. But even if there’s a convincing case to be made — say, the wide-ranging rewards of a particular mode of locomotion — the bureaucratic or partisan (or vested-interest) heel-dragging can be infuriating, as University of Regina climate-change researcher Dave Sauchyn was rudely reminded.
A dedicated walker who moved farther from campus so he could enjoy a longer commute on foot, Sauchyn revels in the hostility with which Regina treats pedestrians: streets with no sidewalks or crosswalks; cul-de-sacs that impede direct routes. He has knocked on front doors and asked to cut through backyards. “People stare at me,” he says. “They think I’m unemployed, homeless or mentally ill.”
As a member of the Prairie Adaptation Research Collaborative, Sauchyn was asked to speak in front of the federal government’s Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development. Encouraged not to deliver a dry, scientific talk, he penned a preamble about walking. “I began my remarks by suggesting that two of Parliament’s most challenging issues, health care and the environment, could be addressed with a single solution: encouraging Canadians to walk,” says Sauchyn. “This suggestion was met with spontaneous laughter and a second round of chuckles when one MP noted that I live in Regina. I suppose they misinterpreted my sincere advice as an attempt to preface my talk with some humour.”
Sauchyn’s research is technical. He studies how watersheds have responded to climactic changes over the past millennium. His pie charts are not uplifting. Some days, especially after talking to business associations or politicians, he is cynical. Other times, when he is with farmers or ranchers or people who are close to the land, he is more optimistic. He draws inspiration from local accomplishments and feels a responsibility to deliver a personal message: “We need lifestyles compatible with alleviating the effects of global warming. Anything that represents a shift in attitude, a shift away from car culture, represents adaptation to or mitigation against climate change.”
Urging people to walk is not the federal government’s responsibility, Sauchyn knows. The creation of walkable communities is mostly municipal terrain. Regina, despite its reputation for winters as inhospitable as Edmonton’s, is improving. Before she became Toronto’s chief planner, Jennifer Keesmaat was a consultant with a firm hired to develop a plan for the city’s downtown neighbourhoods. She titled the document “Walk to Work.” Released in 2009, it called for 5,000 new downtown residents over 15 years: a population base of young professionals, artists, students, seniors and families that would support niche retail in a city experiencing unprecedented growth. If Regina follows her recommendations, people will be walking to work along streets designed for pedestrians — streets with the type of friendly facades, transit links, parks and gathering places that Jeff Speck applauds in Walkable City.
Since 1986, when Regina’s previous downtown plan was created, the city had made minimal investments in public spaces. It wasn’t unusual for a heritage building to be torn down to make way for a parking lot, even though parking lots covered more than one-quarter of all downtown real estate. This approach did not foster a critical mass of restaurants, shops, galleries and performance halls that would keep people in the urban core after dark. And it’s those people who make a downtown lively and safe.
Keesmaat’s plan was approved by Regina city council in 2012, but already a pair of major new buildings (an office tower and a condo high-rise) had been designed to include public plazas, street furniture and awnings that will mitigate the concrete-canyon wind-tunnel effect. The city has implemented less restrictive sidewalk-café guidelines and halted the expansion of its network of elevated pedways between buildings, because they remove people from the street. “The last time something like this happened with our downtown, it was 20 years ago,” Regina’s mayor said in a radio interview, “so we wanted to make sure we got it right.”
Canada’s provincial governments also have a horse in this race. In Ontario, where the annual health-care bill is about $50 billion, the Ministry of Health promotes walking as a way to counter obesity, diabetes, cancers and dozens of other physical and mental ailments. The Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing supports the development of mixed-use neighbourhoods that increase rates of active transportation. “Community design,” states its land-use planning handbook, “influences how people travel and how physically active they are in the course of the day.” Metrolinx, the provincial agency created to coordinate and integrate all transportation in the greater Toronto and Hamilton area, one of the fastest-growing regions in the country, envisions safe and convenient pedestrian access to a network of mobility hubs where buses and trains connect. The Ministry of Infrastructure sees walking and cycling as an everyday element of urban transportation.
This policy work is the domain of the public service. It trickles into our lives slowly. You don’t hear heated debates about walking in the provincial legislature — it’s not a campaign flashpoint. But that didn’t deter my one-track mind when I saw John Fraser striding toward my driveway.
I was in the back of my van, packing for a camping trip. There was a by-election coming up in my riding. Liberal leader and premier Dalton McGuinty had stepped down, and Fraser, the premier’s right-hand man, was hoping to step up.
“You’re busy,” he said, seeing me wrestle with sleeping bags and plastic bins crammed with rain gear. “I won’t stay long.”
“No, please,” I said, jumping out of the van. “I’ve got time.”
A large man with a bushy swoosh of grey hair, John Kerry meets Jay Leno, Fraser told me about his career in the grocery business, and how he took a “temporary” leave of absence to work with McGuinty 18 years earlier. He asked for my support and promised to continue serving the residents of Ottawa South.
“So,” I said when he had finished his spiel, “are you doing a lot of door-knocking?”
“Seven days a week,” said Fraser. “I’ve lost 16 pounds so far. My knees are giving me problems, though. I came in too heavy, too hard. I’ve started to see a physiotherapist.”
I explained why I was curious about canvassing, and he said he had been doing it for years, with McGuinty and other politicians. “I’ll tell you one thing — it feels totally different when you’re the candidate.
“And you know what?” he added. “If more people walked, the world would be a better place.”
Fraser invited me to join him on the campaign trail. A couple of weeks later, I met him and five young volunteers on a residential street not far from my house. Fraser and the Conservative candidate were even in the polls, and the election was five days away.
“How was that camping trip?” he asked, exhibiting door-knocking strategy number one: learn something about each person you shake hands with, and remember it. His job out here, essentially, is to show constituents that if they need help, he will be approachable. “There is genuine skepticism about the political process,” he said. In a single day, when every tweet and Facebook post is tabulated, candidates receive the same amount of media coverage that would have taken them six months to accumulate 30 years ago. This has a desensitizing effect. Voters are busy; you need to find a way to connect. “This is exactly how you win elections — by walking,” Fraser’s campaign manager, Jackie Choquette, had told me. “Nothing replaces that door-to-door interaction.”
Fraser pulled a small bottle of mouthwash out of his pocket, swished it around, then spit into a sewer drain. Garlicky shawarma had been on the menu at the campaign office. Cradling clipboards that indicated where undecided voters lived, the volunteers fanned out. Fraser had a list of addresses to try. He knocked on a screen door and a white-haired woman answered. He introduced himself; she was in the middle of cooking dinner. “I just want to tell you one thing,” Fraser told her. “I love what I do and I believe I can make a difference.”
For the next hour, he knocked on doors and asked residents about their concerns. Homecare for seniors. Youth jobs. Hospital funding. Fraser spoke knowledgeably about all of these issues. While working behind the scenes for the premier, he was the riding’s de facto MPP. He knows what to say and when to say it (such as his remark, within minutes of meeting me, that walking can make the world a better place). Only once, when a woman started talking about a private-home daycare task force she was on, did he seem anxious to get moving. The clock was ticking. There were 80,000 voters to visit and the campaign was only seven weeks long. “It’s important to remember,” he told me as we approached the next house, “that the smartest person in the room knows what they don’t know.”
It was a muggy evening. Dark clouds rolled in. The sky darkened. Thunder roared. Raindrops started falling. Fraser and the volunteers walked quickly back to their van. “Who wants ice cream?” he asked. “Let’s go get ice cream. We can wait this out.”
“In any country, politicians are the lowest form of life,” Rory Stewart said to me as we were leaving the Penrith Show, en route to the River Lune. “But you have to sacrifice yourself on the altar of democracy.”
Stewart is leading “one of the most remarkable lives on record,” opined the New York Times. He is a dreamer, less bound by convention than virtually all of his peers. But his remark that every major problem has been solved was tongue-in-cheek. A juxtaposition of pastoral Cumbria and war-ravaged Afghanistan. Whenever war or extremist violence flares up in a country like Iraq or Syria, whenever jihadists from Western countries make headlines, he is a frequent commentator on current affairs programs and in the op-ed pages, stressing the need for “detailed experience in a particular place,” and urging humility and restraint when considering foreign intervention. Thinking beyond the next election, striving for a deep read on the land, surely he can hear the tension building in the connective tissues spidering throughout the globe.
As we huddled behind a stone wall to escape the wind and eat sandwiches on top of the Merrick, Joseph Murphy had told me about the Dark Mountain Manifesto. In 2009, a group of writers and artists in Oxford published a pamphlet warning of “ecological collapse, material contraction and social and political unravelling.” They argue that “politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain.” Solutions proposed by government and corporate leaders, which usually involve “the necessity of urgent political agreement and a judicious application of human technological genius,” are a smokescreen. “Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us.” On the precipice of a transformation so colossal we cannot comprehend its scale, the manifesto advises us to look down. To look at the land. At ourselves. At the now. Temporal awareness as an act of resistance.
On our way back to Old Tebay Bridge, Stewart stops and leans against a fence. The Lune burbles behind him. In the modern world, he says, one of the great privileges for a walker is to arrive in a place that has no roads. To reach a community where people ask where you came from, where you are grateful for the right to travel on their land.
He points to the east, a sea of green. “My constituency ends on the top of that hill there.” He points to the west. “And on top of that hill there.
“If you climbed that large hill,” he continues, pointing south, “you would see my constituency and nothing else, rimmed by the horizon. I feel very lucky to have a home like this. A place with limits and bounds.”
Then he tells me about his favourite night of the election campaign hike. It was in the town of Wigton, near the border with Scotland, at a public housing estate with about 150 homes. There is a high unemployment rate in the neighbourhood, a high incidence of drug abuse. One in five people have been in jail. Yet when he crisscrossed its laneways and alleys for six hours with a local, meeting dozens of adults and children, listening to their stories, and then slept on a couch in a flat where three generations of the same family live, he was moved. “I left so joyful and positive, so convinced that it’s the most wonderful community,” he says. “That’s probably a misleading sense of things. There are many things there that are very miserable.
“I do believe strongly that in developed countries, in North America and Europe, walking is changing from what it used to be. You need a lot of very thoughtful and original approaches — going to the same place twice, being careful about how you present yourself, travelling with a local — to learn from the experience. You have to work harder than you do walking across Afghanistan.
“My dream,” he continues, “would be to be able to take a year off to walk through Cumbria and spend time in every village, meeting everybody. As a Member of Parliament, I want to learn more. But I think my constituents would get fed up if I took a year off to go wandering.”