The Where and When of Walking

As I write this, it’s pouring rain outside, a kind of vertical sheeting with a force and volume that only became known to me when I first visited the American South and that is now—after decades living here, on the borderline with the American West—familiar. The kind of rain like an area-wide bag full of bulging water slit open with a knife over a furious fan, the deluge so sudden and intense it requires humans to cease outdoor movement, secure immediate shelter, watch for flash floods. There is supposed to be a fall festival later tonight, car trunks open to rounds of costumed treat-gatherers; by then, we may have only warm puddles reflecting streetlights in a dark parking lot to remind us of this welcome arrival, or it may still be driving us indoors. Even the weather app has no clear idea—right now, it’s apparently “Partly Cloudy,” with a forecast only for more of the same.

My travels and contemplations since May and my thoughts about each of you receiving this note every week have further revealed to me the encouragements for and barriers to walking, long walking right outside the door of our dwellings and/or employment, onto the surrounding trails or sidewalks or city streets. One of our primary considerations for determining a walk is our work schedule and site, of course—the when and the where and the if at all of our walk. Beyond that, weather is a primary shaper of the experience, including time of day and its light or dark (or, in the case of Alaska in early summer, the bears’ calendar for emerging from hibernation and gorging themselves along exactly the path I would have taken). For women, especially, the choice for a solitary walk falls along a spectrum of safety according to these factors. Yesterday, I was at my sister’s house, and our mother’s (part-coyote?) dog, Alice, whined and pressed for a walk together; even 16 months after our mother’s move into a care home and Alice’s into my sister’s home and her care, Alice remembered our routine. (Does she know my love for her? My delight in our turns around her old neighborhood? My sorrow at the allergies that prevent my living with her now?) Alice and I were lucky enough yesterday to walk with another sister around the hills of the new place. I had dressed too warmly for the heat and the humidity; I soaked through my clothes and socks and into my shoes before we were halfway through our jaunt. I especially soaked up our conversation, our in-person connectivity, the walk-and-talk a very different exercise from the walking-as-meditation in which I most often engage, both walk varieties nourishing and joyful in differing ways. My sister probably could have broken into a ten-mile run, and I would have been happy to continue our ambling pace for hours, but we accommodated Alice’s growing weariness and a sisters’ meal and evening ahead and returned up the hill to the beautiful house blinking its big windowed eyes into the sunset.