Heavenly Trust

“Once I was very hungry and lonely in Tennessee. I had been walking most of the day in the Cumberland Mountains without coming to a single house, but in crossing a dark-shaded stream whose border trees closed over it like a leafy sky I found the frail Dicksonia that I had looked for so long, and the first Magnolia, too, that I had ever seen. I sat down and reveled in the glory of my discoveries. A mysterious breathing of wind moved in the trees, and the stream sang cheerily at every ripple. There is no place so impressively solitary as a dense forest with a stream passing over a rocky bed at a moderate inclination.

“Feelings of isolation soon caught me again among these hushed sounds, but one of the Lord’s smallest birds came out to me from some bushes at the side of a moss-clad rock. It had a wonderfully expressive eye, and in one moment that cheerful, confiding bird preached me the most effectual sermon on heavenly trust that I had ever heard through all the measured hours of Sabbath, and I went on not half so heart-sick, nor half so weary.”

– John Muir, who in 1867 walked 1,000 miles from Indianapolis to Cedar Keys, Florida, recalling a moment on his journey in The Wilderness World of John Muir (1954) edited by Edwin Way Teale; the picture above is of the Dicksonia fern.

Thank You, Walt

“Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.”

– Walt Whitman, “Song of the Open Road”

Walking in Sarajevo

From Dan Fesperman’s Lie in the Dark (1999), we read about Vlado Petric, a police detective in Sarajevo during the siege:

“So, Vlado walked wherever he went, piling up more mileage than he ever had as a foot patrolman. He’d grown used to it, and for all the hazards of extra exposure to gunfire the walking had become something of a comfort. He worked himself into a rhythm on the longer stretches, easing his bleakest thoughts into the open, then pounding them beneath his feet, moving until his mind was blank and he could drift, with an eye out for people running or dodging, and an ear open for the whistling approach of a shell.”

And this, about Goran, who runs a small cafe in Sarajevo, an excerpt which I may have posted before:

“Through all of this he’d developed a knack for knowing when it was okay to keep gossiping and when it was time to stop asking questions, and he knew better than to ever ask for anything more than his own meager piece of the action, just enough to keep his bar and his theater up and running. It was bad enough owing these people money. The last thing you wanted to owe them was a favor.”

My Most Favorite Birthday Card

Photo, “Isle Royale Moose,” by Jim Brandenburg; quote by Thoreau, published by Artists to Watch.

The Wisdom of Winifred Kirkland

“Still every woman must admit, and every man with as much sense as a woman, that it’s very hard to make a home for any man if he is always in it.”

– “A Man in the House”

“It is part of my quarrel with inanimate objects that they always exert an hypnotic influence upon me in the shop, and always excite loathing so soon as they arrive at my home.”

– “Luggage and the Lady”

“I well remember a certain mitten. It was a brown mitten on my left hand. My mother and I were walking down a flight of stone steps. I slipped; my mother caught my hand, retained, not it, but the mitten, and I bumped unimpeded to the bottom. My baby resentment against that mitten endured long. It was a surprise, a disappointment, this treachery of the accepted; so my clothes were not to be trusted; it was well to keep half an eye on them.”

– “My Clothes”

“The letter has the advantage of not belonging at all to conscious or commercialized literature. It is not written to be seen of men, nor yet to be sold to them. It is literature intimate, unintentional, overheard. In so much as it is personal expression, plus detachment but minus self-importance, and also in so much as it endeavors to adapt itself sympathetically to another person’s interest and point of view, the letter strikes through the merely individual and touches deep and universal feeling, thus in all its humbleness fulfilling the ancient dictum for art.”

– “Letters and Letter-Writers”

“Whimsical symbol, perhaps, my new-bought rubber boots, of adjustment to a man’s free-hearted adventuring. If I am to tramp alone, let me be valiantly shod like a man, though a woman at heart, for is not all the world mine for the walking it? Who knows what new fun may be abroad for now, in my rubber boots? I was made for life’s out-of-doors. I am a woman who wishes to walk this earth in all weathers… It is not given to my friends of the highway, sensible men creatures on wheels, any more than to their wives, snug at home in dry domestic shoes, to know the joy of my walk through the swift, wet snowflakes. On and up I go, never meaning to go home by the same way I have come. What lover of the road ever does that?”

– “The Wayfaring Woman”

From The Joy of Being a Woman and Other Papers (1918) by Winifred Kirkland, an essayist who deserves to be read and remembered.

Walking: A Fine Art (1907)

A few excerpts:

“It has been a wearisome trudge over the city’s ugly pavements, and between the citizens’ ugly walls with their endless rows of windows, screened and curtained into a privacy which I have no desire to invade. Electric cars shake the earth, their gongs rend the air; the peanut vendor’s whistle shrieks on the corner; small boys yell and curse; drays rattle over the cobble-stones; ‘devil wagons’ leap through the streets, hissing and thumping, and leave behind them the stench… But even in the city streets nature is kind, for she often sends us a cloud of vaporized oil from the oil-cloth factory, to counteract the ‘intolerable stink’ of the automobile, while the heart-sick walker sighs for that lodge in the vast wilderness…

“To be in the open fields with no human companion, to be embraced by the sunlight, and to see only the flowers beneath and the sky above is what the soul and the body of every naturalist, amateur and professional, aged or young, must have if he would not lose his mind.”

– Dr. Alfred C. Stokes

“When Nero advertised for a new luxury, a walk in the woods should have been offered. It is the consolation of mortal men. I think no pursuit has more breath of immortality in it… It is the best of humanity, I think, that goes out for a walk. In happy hours all affairs may be wisely postponed for this.”

– Emerson, quoted in James Elliot Cabot’s A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1888)

“I am not going to advocate the disuse of boots and shoes, or the abandoning of the improved modes of travel; but I am going to brag as lustily as I can on behalf of the pedestrian, and show how all the shining angels second and accompany the man who goes afoot, while all the dark spirits are ever looking out for a chance to ride.”

– John Burroughs in Winter Sunshine (1875)

“Walking is the natural recreation for a man who desires not absolutely to suppress his intellect but to turn it out to play for a season.”

– Sir Leslie Stephen in Studies of a Biographer (1898)

“Well, walking, perhaps, is the primal instinct, ancient as Eden, where the Lord God walked in the garden in the cool of the day. And, if my theory is correct, walking will persist till in recovered Paradise man walks with his Maker again.”

– Arnold Haltain, Atlantic Monthly, October 1903, with a nod to Genesis 3:8

The Postman Walks

A postman carries the mail in Angel Hill, Sutton, Surrey, a city center in the southern part of greater London, with the pedestrian bridge in the background. A horse and wagon can be seen even farther back, indicating that this photo was taken before the advent of the automobile, when it was still safe to walk in the road, if you watched where you stepped.

Walking with Jane Austen

“Jane Austen is an example of a respectable young woman, who, living a very sheltered and uneventful country life amid people to whom gentility was everything, yet nevertheless felt the urge to walk, even when others disapproved. It was indeed one of her few and greatest pleasures; she did not walk far, as compared with the walking-tourists, and the scenery of Hampshire, through which she walked, was not particularly striking; but she probably walked often, and by making a number of her characters also enjoy walking, she succeeds in transmitting to us something of her attitude and feeling about it. There is scarcely a novel without a young lady who walks. In Pride and Prejudice (1797) we have Elizabeth Bennett, who likes long, solitary walks; in Sense and Sensibility (1798) the Dashwood girls. In Northanger Abbey (1798) it is Catherine Moreland, who goes walking with a mind tuned to the influence of nature; and twenty years later, in Persuasion (1818) Anne Elliot shows an even greater and almost Wordsworthian sensitivity to what Jane Austen calls the ‘peculiar and inexhaustible influence’ of nature on a ‘mind of taste and tenderness.’ This may perhaps be taken to show that not only Jane Austen herself, but many other young ladies of similar social position were kicking over the traces in this mild way.”

– Morris Marples in Shank’s Pony: A Study of Walking (1958)

Eager Walking

“With light step, as if earth and its trammels had little power to restrain him, a young man in gorgeous vestments pauses at the brink of a precipice among the great heights of the world; he surveys the blue distance before him — its expanse of sky rather than the prospect below. His act of eager walking is still indicated, although he is stationary at the given moment; his dog is still bounding. The edge which opens on the depth has no terror; it is as if angels were waiting to uphold him, if it came about that he leaped from the height… He is the spirit in search of experience.”

– Arthur Edward Waite in The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1910), card designed by Pamela Colman Smith.

To Walk Freely

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers barroom regulars — to be part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording — all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

– Sylvia Plath, journal