T Magazine: Sign of the Times | Walk, Don’t Run

Travel by foot leaves an imprint on the memory, and slows down time for a precious moment.

To read a book about the pleasures, epiphanies and mettlesome feats someone has accumulated over the course of an incredibly long walk is to be fascinated, jealous and, most of all, incredulous. Who has time to walk, in this overscheduled age? I always seem to be running, not walking, whenever I happen to be at large on two feet, suffused with a cold-sweat adrenaline panic that I'll be late to whatever the next vital thing is, miss the train, the flight, the crucial email, the fateful encounter or just closing time at the grocery store. It's one thing to distractedly click on an Instagram photo or a Facebook note a friend has posted of a breathtaking scene or enviable meal he's scored on a far-flung holiday; that doesn't jolt us from our harried workday routines. We absorb them half-consciously before checking Twitter, then return dutifully to our inboxes. The literature of walking shakes us out of this world set on whir, nudging us into a parallel universe where days are measured not by the messages on the screen, but by the rising and setting of the sun.

Both consolation and inspiration can come from reading the unrushed accounts of observant souls who found a way to live, for a while, in slow motion; on the other hand, those satisfactions are mingled with the mournful recognition that most of us who read these books — and there are so many of them — will never manage to do what their authors did: to slow down and lead a proper, examined human life in the manner of the togaed philosophers, drinking in the natural world and nursing introspective reveries footfall by footfall. Envy kicks in at the thought that anyone, in any era, had the luxury of detaching himself from the daily grind for weeks, months, even years at a time. Are long-distance walkers more antisocial than most people? More enlightened? Or are they just luckier?

In 1988, at the age of 50, the explorer Helen Thayer walked alone (if you don't count her husky dog, Charlie) to the magnetic North Pole, and wrote about it in a book called "Polar Dream." Thirteen years on, not remotely walked-out, she traversed the Mongolian desert, having prepped for the ordeal by trudging across Death Valley (200 miles) and the Sahara (4,000 miles). What induced her to subject herself to this effortful form of hooky? In "Walking the Gobi: A 1,600-Mile Trek Across a Desert of Hope and Despair," she explained, "I yearned to test myself, to push myself to the limit, and to associate with little-known cultures."

There's a more accessible and beguiling charm to be found, I believe, in the variety of walkalogues, written by casual rovers — call them ambulatory amateurs — whose purpose is idiosyncratic, whose rules are loose and who make you feel you could retrace their steps. Ever since Bill Bryson grudgingly trod the Appalachian Trail in 1996 for as long as he could stand it, and wrote about it in "A Walk in the Woods," I've toyed with the idea of bumbling through a bit of that trail, encouraged by the knowledge that giving up is allowed.

But when I read Graham Greene's 1936 book, "Journey Without Maps," about his monthlong walk through the uncharted African country of Liberia, I was so enthralled that I boarded a flight to Ghana and embarked on a walking journey of my own. I published an article or two about it, but never, to my shame, wrote about the most indelible leg of that trip — a detour to track the "Predatory Beast of Penkwasi," whose rampages had occupied the front pages of Ghanaian newspapers during my visit. Even now, when I close my eyes, that expedition, made nearly 20 years ago, unspools in vivid color in my mind. It's as if every step I took had engraved each unfamiliar sight and taste, each interaction with a stranger I'd never see again, onto a reel of memory that cannot be eroded.

Henry David Thoreau, one of the fathers of American nature writing, reproached deskbound people like me in "Walking," one of his thousand exhortations on the virtue of wild rambles, for "sitting with crossed legs" all day long in our workplaces. He marveled that we hadn't "all committed suicide long ago." It's reassuring to know that his untrammeled wanderlust was fed by pies and cookies that his mother and sister cooked for him in their civilized kitchen, a few miles away from his lair in Walden Pond.

Fairly recently, Rory Stewart, a British member of Parliament, made the capricious decision to walk across Afghanistan, from Herat to Kabul, the month after the end of Taliban rule, in the dead of winter. His route, about 600 miles as the convoy rolls, but much longer as the goat walks, would be mountainous, snowy, sparsely populated and mined with dangers. When you read his book, "The Places in Between," you can't help being entertained by the hand-wringing reactions he got from Afghani bureaucrats who clearly wished he would leave them in peace and fly back to England, impressed by his stoicism in the face of armed heavies. On the outset of this journey, Stewart had a walking stick made for himself. As soon as that stick popped up, it was impossible not to think that he must have been emulating Patrick Leigh Fermor, the dashing 20th-century British war hero, famous for kidnapping the Nazi general Heinrich Kreipe on the island of Crete during World War II (and for reciting Horatian odes with his captive the next morning as the sun rose over Mount Ida). In 1933, when Fermor was an 18-year-old ne'er-do-well, unfettered by responsibility, he strolled from the Hook of Holland through Germany and what was then Czechoslovakia, down through Bulgaria and on to Istanbul (which he called Constantinople). Before hopping a steamer to Holland, Fermor had bought a walking stick at a London tobacconist, a "well-balanced ashplant." At each German town he entered, he nailed a different silver badge to this staff, just as in the Cinque Terre today, hikers add a different bead to a necklace to mark each village they've passed. He wrote, "When I lost the stick a month later, already barnacled with 27 of these plaques, it flashed like a silver wand." Seventy years later as Stewart furnished himself with a "well-balanced" broom handle in Herat, onto which, through force of will, he persuaded mystified blacksmiths to weld a metal tip to the bottom and a lead ball at the top, you could envision his heroic forebear. A bemused old man, watching him stride off with his staff, remarked, "You're carrying it for the wolves, I presume."

It took "Paddy" Fermor over 40 years to get around to writing the first volume about his walk, "A Time of Gifts," which followed his "great trudge," as he called it, only as far as the Danube, leaving addicted readers craving the rest of the itinerary. But Fermor could not be rushed: the third and final volume, "The Broken Road: From the Iron Gate to Mount Athos," only emerged last fall, put together posthumously, since Fermor died, at 96, in 2011. The would-be walker who hungrily devours this long-awaited book feels not only gratitude, but wonder. Really, it is proof that any path you break remains yours, no matter how long ago you broke it; the ground you cover on your feet stays with you always, imprinted on your neural pathways. Books like these let us hope that maybe each of us, one day, can take a walk worth remembering.

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