“The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted — all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind that’s focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.”
— John Stilgoe, historian, Harvard University
“Remember, one of the main tenets of capitalism is to have the consumer filled with fear, insecurity, envy and unhappiness so that we can spend, spend, spend our way out of it and, dammit, just feel better for a little while. But we don’t, do we? The path to happiness — and deep down, we all know this — is created by love, and being kind to oneself, sharing a sense of community with others, becoming a participant instead of a spectator, and being in motion. Moving. Moving around all day. Lifting things, even if it’s yourself. Going for a walk every day will change your thinking and have a ripple effect.”
— Michael Moore, filmmaker
Early October, late evening, the waxing moon a sliver from full. A 10-foot-long stack of cross-hatched split white cedar has been doused in gasoline and set on fire. Now it has burned down into a bed of red-hot embers. Tongues of flame dance on the coals, which radiate about 1,500° Fahrenheit, and plumes of grey smoke drift into the dark sky.
I am east of Ottawa at a rural retreat owned by the family that runs Canada’s largest chain of kung fu schools. For the past two hours, as the wood snapped and crackled, 30 of us sat inside the adjacent pagoda listening to grandmaster Jacques Patenaude and his son Martin talk us through the ritual we are about to experience. “You have an incredible force inside you,” said Jacques, a short, stocky Franco-Ontarian who transformed a youth of bare-knuckled barn fighting and motorcycle-gang mischief into a martial arts empire. “It is the exhilaration of living.
“Some people make prisons in their own minds, but if you know who you are and what you want — if you focus and avoid distractions — you can harness this power to do anything.”
Wearing a black T-shirt with “from fear to power” written on front and “I walked on fire!” on the back, Jacques springs to and fro when he speaks, and has a penchant for quoting Bruce Lee. “The teacher tonight will be the fire,” he told us. “We are only the providers.”
People have walked on hot coals since at least 1200 BC. From Iron Age India and Taoist Japan to Eastern Orthodox festivals in present-day Greece, the practice has been considered a rite of passage, a test of faith or courage. A way to overcome your fears. Tolly Burkan brought it to North America in the 1970s, opening an institute for fire-walking education and research in California’s Sierra Nevada mountains; self-help guru Tony Robbins was one of his early disciples. Robbins convinced Oprah to try it at one of his “Unleash The Power Within” seminars. She called her midnight walk “one of the most incredible experiences of my life.”
Almost all of my fellow walkers train at one of the Patenaudes’ 22 dojos in Ontario and Quebec. Most say they have come for “personal development,” the same reason people gave me when I asked why they had joined Stanley Vollant’s Innu Meshkenu journey. “J’aime beaucoup le barbecue,” quipped one participant. “C’est mon cadeaux,” said another, brought blindly by his brother without knowing the destination. “It’s a symbolic way to help me tackle challenges in my relationships,” a rangy young man offered. (Later, I would learn that he is one of the Patenaudes’ star students, the winner of several mixed martial arts prison fights against inmates in Thailand.) A guy with a shaved head and piercing eyes drove all the way from Toronto to be here. “My life is a complete disaster,” he said to me. “I have to do something. This can’t hurt.”
Actually, it can. People have been seriously injured by participating in fire walking, read the waiver that I signed upon entering the pagoda. There is an inherent risk.
I am here seeking metaphorical closure. Two years is a long time to focus on one project, but this book is nearly complete. I started in snow, passed through a mental fog, explored the urban jungle and braved the worlds of business and politics. I even ventured into an art gallery and a church. Now I am ready to cross a threshold. To confront my biggest opponent — myself.
“The coals are hot,” Martin announces from outside through the open sliding door. “Super hot.”
“How many people,” Jacques asks with a wink, “are we going to burn tonight?”
We are capable of doing extraordinary things on our feet. For instance, tightrope walking. I stare longingly at people slack-lining in parks, but have not yet had a chance to try it. “The essential thing is simplicity,” advises French funambulist Philippe Petit, who walked between the Twin Towers on a steel cable when the buildings were nearing completion in 1974, spending 45 minutes spellbindingly suspended 110 storeys above Manhattan. “That is why the long path to perfection is horizontal.”
Nor have I experienced the sensation of serious barefoot walking. Our feet did not evolve to be clad in cushioned footwear with rubber soles. These deaden the muscles and make us strike with our heels, which can lead to injuries. When infants put on shoes, they walk faster and take longer steps; the long-term impacts on gait are unknown. Going barefoot is like travelling atop a pair of stethoscopes, a geologist I know told me after he completed a bootless mountain hike in the Yukon. A gravel path in the city reminds him of munching potato chips. Some people believe that “grounding,” unhindered contact with the earth, draws electrons into the body, and that these tiny, negatively charged particles can help regulate our biological clocks and neutralize infection. (One of my brothers, a molecular biophysicist, calls this pseudoscientific nonsense.)
The benefits of walking backwards are more established. It is said to be good for the knees and the back, for balance and posture, and for cardiovascular health, and may help us stay mentally sharp by putting the brain in an unfamiliar trajectory.
The trajectories explored in this book, the stories contained herein, continue to unfurl. As of this writing, in the fall of 2014, most of the people I walked with are still making slow and steady progress.
Stanley Vollant came through Ottawa in October, the weekend of my fire walk, and I joined him for a stroll along the river to a rally on Parliament Hill. “My project is not a protest,” he told me. “It’s an affirmative walk, to help empower people.” Vollant has expeditions planned through 2016, including a winter trek along the formidable Labrador coast between the troubled Innu communities of Sheshatshiu and Natuashish. Then he’s going to strike out for Vancouver.
Rich Mitchell is collecting data for the Woodlands In and Around Town experiment in Scotland, and though the Glasgow effect remains a mystery, researchers in England have new evidence that the relationship between access to green space and reduced mortality is most pronounced in deprived areas.
Matt Green has covered about 5,500 miles, and is hoping to see every inch of every block in New York City by the spring of 2016. On a recent afternoon, after a three-month drought, he spotted Headz Ain’t Ready, his 92nd “barberz” shop, between a shoe store and a courier service for Colombian immigrants, on 37th Avenue in Queens.
Beat cops continue to patrol North Philadelphia, and one of the two men accused of killing police officer Moses Walker, Jr., has pled guilty to third-degree murder and agreed to testify against his co-defendant.
Neighbourhoods across Canada are starting to lose home delivery of mail, and a massive building on the Canada Post administrative campus near my house has a mural on its side: a Richard Long–sized painting of a smiling letter carrier with a shopping cart full of parcels. “Delivering the online world,” reads the tagline. (The last time I passed by, that slogan was still there, but a new image depicted four shopping carts and no postie.)
Spence the basset hound is riding shotgun in Andrew Markle’s car and has yet to have an accident in the vehicle.
Mike Collier’s Walk On exhibition is still touring the U.K., and Todd Shalom has shifted Elastic City’s focus to an annual festival of free walks.
In the home stretch of the Scottish independence referendum, MP Rory Stewart cancelled plans for a unifying hand-holding rally along Hadrian’s Wall, the Roman fortification that shadows England’s northern border in Cumbria. Instead, he walked the wall path for a couple of days, a landscape where people “had eaten olives, and gazed at the wet ground, and the scrub, and the distant line of hills, for 300 years.”
My grandmother sold her condo and moved into an apartment in an assisted-living building. There is a tree-lined footpath around its perimeter, and she is now within walking distance of my parents’ house.
Work has yet to begin on the textured brick crossing at the busy intersection near my daughters’ school. But a large blue “information/guidance sign Mx-38” has been installed beside the pedestrian button at all four corners.
Even when I wasn’t looking for walkers, I found them. In the crossroads village of Tamworth, Ontario, population 200, I rented a suite above a store for a week so I could have a quiet place to work. Three days before I arrived, a reclusive man, provoked by a dispute over muskrat trapping, had gone on a shooting spree, killing one person and sending two others to the hospital before taking his own life. During my stay, on a cold March night, almost everybody who lives in Tamworth gathered outside the hockey arena for a healing walk, a silent procession through the streets. “The violence happened over such a wide geographic area,” one of the organizers said to me as we passed the post office, where a firefighter had been shot, “so there’s a sense that we are taking back the space.” The walk, she believed, would replace images of violence in the minds of locals with images of community.
A couple of months later, Lisa, the girls and I spent a weekend in a town called Bancroft, near Tamworth. In the park next to our hotel, an all-night Relay for Life cancer fundraiser was under way. As a band played classic rock songs on a stage decked out like a log cabin, men and women walked laps on a trail around the park boundary, their route lined by paper bags bearing names of — and messages for — cancer survivors and victims. I returned to the park after Maggie and Daisy were in bed. Lit up by electric candles, flickering in the dark grass, the “luminaries” looked magical, like small beacons that might at any moment float up into the sky. “Cancer fears the walker,” somebody had written on one. There was a chill in the air. I did a lap to stay warm, and then another.
Glaciers are melting. The Middle East is exploding. Ebola is spreading. Why bother? Why walk? Why not withdraw behind walls, and travel on wheels or wings?
Because walking is a tonic for body, mind and soul. Because the act can restore health and inspire hope in places where there is not much of either. Because it can help replant the seeds of independence and interdependence, two things we cannot bloom without. Michael Pollan distilled his recipe for a healthy diet into seven simple words. Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. My manifesto fits into three. Walk more. Anywhere.
Wood is not a very good conductor of heat. When you walk across a bed of embers, your feet don’t stay in contact with the coals long enough to burn. That’s the theory, anyway. Jacques Patenaude has done it 300 times, distances up to 40 feet long, and has been singed six times.
“Don’t look directly at the fire, and don’t run,” he told us. That pushes your feet deeper into the embers, and increases the likelihood of injury. “But don’t go too slow,” he added.
We line up on a rubber mat outside the pagoda. The sound of West African drumming and rhythmic clapping fills the air.
Martin rakes the coals, sending a shower of sparks into the night.
We are told to extend our arms forward, palms up, and to repeat the mantra “cool moss.”
My mind is clear when I reach the edge of the fire. Nothing flashes in front of my eyes. No wave of emotion or fear. After an instant’s hesitation, I simply step forward — “cool moss, cool moss” — and six footfalls later I am standing on the damp grass on the other side. There was a small pinch on the arch of my left foot, but no other pain. No strong sense of catharsis, either. Just the feeling that once I started, it was easier to keep moving than to stop.
When everybody in the group has walked through the coals, I circle around to the back of the line, ready to go again.