Walking

Spring arrives in Volunteer Park. Digital sketch with Procreate on iPad, John Wells 2022

Even though I was born a Wells, I’m a Walker through and through.

I guess my love affair with walking began in college. I was at the University of Kansas living in a dormitory and needed to get from one end of campus to the other for some of my classes. The KU campus is quite beautiful and I really found I enjoyed walking on the sidewalks that wound through the buildings. Since these weren’t leisurely walks for the most part, I had to walk at a pretty good clip to make it from one place to another on time, and I developed a love of a solid, steady pace meant to get somewhere.

Around the same time, or a short time after school, I found myself walking along a riverside trail through the woods at night with a handful of friends. Even though it was dark and we were in the thick woods of the river banks, we were walking fast and in single-file, our feet churning along, all of us moving together as one through the darkness like we were on a invisible train. None of us had a flashlight and it was hard to see where we were going, but it was strangely easy to navigate by the feeling under our feet on the worn path. The lead guy set the pace, and would occasionally call out “down!” when he encountered a sharp drop, or “rocks!” or “mud!” or “low branch!” We were all high as a kite, and the experience of that fast-paced hike in the darkness was something I’ll never forget. The trail ended a few miles outside of Lawrence, the college town in Kansas, right across the river from a massive power plant that was lit up like it was the emerald city. And seeing that view of the power plant at night was the whole purpose of the hike. Looking back, for me it was the walk itself that was the magic of the night.

Fast forward a couple of decades and I was on my first of many trips to Europe. I was traveling alone and had spent the previous two weeks in Italy walking the narrow streets of Florence, Rome, Siena, San Gimignano, and Milan, but then I took an overnight train to Paris for the remaining week of my trip. I had become accustomed to being able to easily walk to all the places I wanted to see in the Italian towns, but I wasn’t prepared for the size of Paris. 

My first morning in Paris I took the Metro from the airport to the neighborhood of my hotel, near the Luxembourg Gardens, and after dropping off my things in the room, I set out on foot for the Musée National Picasso. On the map it looked like an easy walk from my hotel. Looking back, it wasn’t a huge distance, but at the time I felt like I was walking half way across France. I remember being completely surprised by how big Paris seemed compared to the Italian towns I had just come from. Since then I have been to Europe many times and done a lot of walking, and Paris doesn’t seem quite as big as it did then. 

I have also now come to know the word Flaneur, a French word that literally means “one who strolls aimlessly.” A Flaneur is someone who sets out to explore Paris on foot with no destination in mind, someone who opens themselves up to let the city be a spontaneous guide, and someone who is there purely to witness the life of the city at that particular moment in all it’s fleeting beauty. The Flaneur wanders and sees life all around, holds the moments in his/her mind for as long as the moments last, enjoys each moment thoroughly, and then moves on to the next, which might be at the next corner or inside the quiet park up ahead. The seeing is not a judgement, but a witnessing, and as life happens all around, we need merely to observe it as we stroll by. The Flaneur thinks, “Ah, isn’t that interesting,” and then lets it go. The aim is to spend a couple of hours, or maybe a whole day, aimlessly wandering, and then arrive back home fully satisfied having witnessed a rich tapestry of existence. The Flaneur is an artist.

I think I have always been a Flaneur. And now when I travel, I always try to keep my touristy plans to a minimum so that there is plenty of time to let each place show itself to me organically. 

Having just turned sixty years old, my walking is not only to explore and experience the world around me, or to get from point A to point B, but it’s now a central part of my ‘stay alive longer’ strategy. 

It turns out that we have discovered the Fountain of Youth, and it’s called exercise.

After two years of being at home nearly all the time from the Covid pandemic, I was beginning to age. My body was stiff and weak, and I had put on a few extra pounds from lack of movement. So at the beginning of the year I got an Apple Watch and have been walking at least thirty minutes a day. I now have several great half-hour routes around the neighborhood, which include some pretty serious hills. I’ve found that I mostly end up walking among the big houses and mansions in the neighborhood, and in the beautiful Volunteer Park just a few blocks away. The houses, yards, and gardens, and Volunteer Park, are wonderful, and it’s really lovely to walk in these beautiful places.

Lately some of the big houses have been smelling like shit. I think it’s bullshit, but it’s probably cow shit – manure spread all over their gardens. The smell is getting better now, but a couple of weeks ago it was hard to breathe near some of the places. I know it’s good for the soil, but wow does it smell bad. I’m sure the people who live in those houses are sealed in tight, are in air-tight bubbles in their cars, and don’t actually have to smell it much. But anyone on foot struggles to breathe. An idea I had was that maybe they put out thick blankets of manure as some kind of unconscious method to reduce pedestrians on their sidewalk. You know, to keep the riff-raff like me away.  It’s a little ironic, I suppose, that the nicest houses are the ones that smell like a feed lot. 

Smells aside, I’m really enjoying my daily walks. Something about walking satisfies something deep inside. Humans are meant to walk, and the act of it is as natural a human movement as there is. In fact, walking and curiosity took humans out of Africa about 70,000 years ago and populated the entire world by about 35,000 years ago. Most species are not on every continent, but humans are. We didn’t start domesticating horses until around 3,500 BC, and by then we were already everywhere building huge civilizations. And it’s all because of waling and being curious. 

When I’m out on my daily walks, I can feel that timeless connection; moving forward with that most human of movements, step by step I look around at the world as I move through it, and I am participating the very activity that makes us human.