A Lust to Wander

I’ve just finished a book by Rebecca Solnit titled wanderlust: a History of Walking, and I loved it even before I picked it up for nothing more than that word in the title: wanderlust.

This, to me, is one of the truly great words in the English language. It says so much, takes us so many places. Wanderlust. A lust to wander. A need, a yearning, a desire, to walk, to hike, to explore. To strike out for destinations unknown. To travel at will using only one’s feet.

I can imagine no greater freedom, no greater happiness, than this. When I envision some misty future in which all my dreams come true, I see myself walking — through some great sweeping valley in the shadow of mountains that heave above the horizon, or alongside a willow-lined river, through a deeply shaded forest or across a wind-scratched desert. Sometimes, even, through a town. But walking. Singing, sometimes conversing and laughing, often meditative, always with a journal at hand. But walking. Not cycling or canoeing, not riding in an airplane, not driving or taking a train. Always walking.

Solnit: “The image of the walker, alone and active and passing through rather than settled in the world, is a powerful vision of what it means to be human.”

Ahh. So then, walking is what it means to be human.

This would explain why I feel most alive, most connected to the world around me, most in balance with my inner self, when my feet are moving rhythmically along a trail or sidewalk or shore. Feet connecting with rock or dirt, lungs tasting the pollen of this particular landscape.

Buddhist mountaineer Gary Snyder to Jack Kerouac in 1956: “The closer you get to real matter, rock air fire wood, boy, the more spiritual the world is.”

And how better to do that than by walking?

William Wordsworth and his sister trekked through England’s Lakes District in the dead of winter, at a rate of more than 20 miles a day, in an era when walking beyond the bounds of a walled garden was considered inappropriate activity for gentlefolk. Charles Dickens rose at 2 a.m. one morning and walked 30 miles, just to get breakfast. We’re talking serious peripatetics here.

One of my favorite walkers was a more contemporary woman, and an American. Granny D, as she became known, walked from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., to bring attention to the need for campaign finance reform — in itself, a significant achievement.  Considering that she was 89 years old when she began the walk and had her 90th birthday on the road, it was an achievement of astounding proportions. Granny D was a woman to admire. She was already dead by the time I learned about her. Otherwise, I would have been tempted to look her up. (Granny D: Walking Across America in My 90th Year)

My mother broke me in to walking at a young age when she gave me the choice of taking the bus downtown to pay our bills, or walking and keeping what little money we had for ice cream. My three-year-old feet had no trouble with the six-mile walk. I don’t remember the ice cream. I do remember relishing the discovery that I was capable of walking anywhere I wanted to go.

When I was seven, I made friends with Kenny. When he wasn’t pulling my hair and I wasn’t raising welts on him with my just-burned-out sparkler, we shared a love of wandering.

One day we hatched a scheme to see where the railroad tracks went. We met on the corner of Gladstone and Ottawa just before the sun came up, headed for the tracks, and hung a right. The tracks led us through neighborhoods, industrial areas, open fields, and then, at long last, a woodlot fronted by a deep ditch. The cattail-lined ditch teemed with tadpoles and barefoot country kids who were scooping the creatures into murky water-filled peanut butter jars. Off came my shoes and socks. Cool mud squeezed between my toes. Tadpoles swam in my cupped hands. Now and then a passenger train would roar past and adult faces would for a moment gaze at us. Then with a rush the train would be gone, the air would settle, and the trees alone stood watch again, the silence broken only by the ping of bullets hitting targets in the shooting range across the tracks and our own murmurings over the tadpoles. 

When the shadows of the trees reached the ditch, the barefoot kids took their jars home and we  headed back along the tracks, hungry now for our missed meals. Our fathers and brothers were out combing the streets, Lanspeary Park, and the stores on Ottawa Street, a task they’d been about all day while our mothers paced and imagined the many ways death can come to a child in the city — and the worse deaths they would inflict upon us themselves if we made it home alive. It was one of only two times my mother spanked me.

Oh, but it was worth it.

I had tasted the adventure that lives beyond the end of the road. My lust to wander had been whetted.

Now — where to next?