Talking about Walking
Once something I avoided if I could, walking held no interest for me until a 1984 trip to Paris. After two weeks in Scotland and England, short on time and money, we used a book Bill and Maribeth Lynn had loaned us to map out a couple of days walks that would take in the major sites on this, our first trip abroad. In later years, we would follow a similar map to scope out the Hemingway and Faulkner sites, and then follow scholar and friend John Murphy around on a Cather excursion. Meanwhile we learned a lot about travel from veteran travelers Larry and Betty Becker Theye, Tom and Mary York, and Jerry and Janet Fox.
This year will mark the 30th anniversary of our first time in Paris, and among the features of that trip that still linger in our memories is the discovery of walking. Almost every hour I’d find myself saying, “Think what I miss in driving by things without noticing them.” It was the first dent in my all-American fascination with cars.
It turned out to be more than a minor dent. When we returned from that trip to Kearney, I took up walking, often walking the 2 miles to and from work. I was then Rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, making almost daily visits to Good Samaritan Hospital, so mid-day usually meant another mile and a half round trip walk to and from the hospital.
I found dozens of different routes I could take, each of them initially as fascinating as poet Don Welch’s later walks through Kearney’s alley-ways. His walks ended up in a book of poems, mine began to turn me toward the poetry in things, the tangle of realities hidden in the obvious and overlooked.
When we moved closer to St. Luke’s and I lost those walks, we discovered the trails at the Oldfather Prairie at Cottonmill Park. Even the shorter trails seemed awfully long when we first started to walk them routinely. (Sometimes I would run them, but if you ever watched me run you would probably classify it as an only somewhat hurried walk, accentuated by a little more arm pumping!) A landowner who knew me from community theater productions invited me to jump his fence and use his bike trails. Putting those trails together, I could get a good six to seven mile stretch.
Those walks were a great preparation for our time in China. During my Fulbright in Changchun at Northeast Normal University, we were (blessedly) car-less and except for using taxi cabs for excursions into other parts of the city, we walked daily around the sprawling campus and from there and back to the nearby downtown. Students would note that they had seen us, each with one handle of a bag between us, carrying home our groceries. Confined to one route until we started to get to know the city better, we sometimes amused ourselves by recounting every building along our way. Then, we discovered lots of ways off the better traveled streets. Those walks brought us up close to a wide range of ordinary Chinese life, to streets whose traffic included donkey-drawn carts and big, black Hummers, along with thousands of bikes, cycles, and people, the newly rich and the still very poor.
When we returned, one of the first things we did was to get ourselves out to Cottonmill and the trails. We’ve kept up those walks for years now and among the things we missed when we moved to Grand Island was the easy access to those trails. In Grand Island, however, a new friend, Vince Dowding, told us he liked to take some time midday to collect his thoughts by walking around the L.E. Ray Lake, and we lived right next to Suk’s Lake, so we contented ourselves with those beautiful walks.
I don’t know how deep L. E. Ray is, but deep enough that it hid a stolen car for some years until someone discovered it doing some diving practice (for a snorkeling vacation run in my mind, but possibly for search and rescue practice)…we came upon the scene on a walk, surprised to find a number of tow trucks, fire engines, and police cars and the crowd they’d attracted, all of us watching as officers and operators in diving gear went down, secured the cables, and pulled the car out.
But the fascination (at times) and serenity (at other times) that we enjoyed in these walks didn’t depend on bizarre events like hoisting up stolen vehicles—or later performing baptisms in that same lake—but on the little joys of walking—seeing this or that, noting the changes as the seasons came and went, watching our step, changing our direction, seeing what scurried across our path, hearing from golfers on the nearby course, sometimes jovial banter, sometimes a frustrated expletive.
As happy as we were to get back to the Oldfather prairie trails when we moved back to Kearney, the walks around L.E. Ray and Suk’s are among the things we miss being away from Grand Island.
Of more recent years, as we’ve been spending 5-6 weeks in Milwaukee each summer to be near our son and his family, we’ve added some splendid walks from our perch at Prospect and Brady…walks over to the lake and marina and the lakeside coffee shop, walks down the hike and bike trail to North Avenue, walks along the lakeside or the lakeside boulevard up to the beach or sandwich shop, walks down the lakeside to the art museum and festival grounds, walks on Sundays down to church and brunch, and walks up and down Brady for meals or groceries or a trip to the tailors.
We’ve been attentive enough that we could probably draw a pretty good plat map of the region where we stay, clear over to River West to the North and downtown to the South, the lake to the east and the public library to the west…a pretty sizeable area. That map would describe a place, but even more, each piece of it would be a record of something we had thought of, seen, observed, stopped to watch, been surprised by, seen change over time, puzzled over.
City walks often lack one feature of walking trails—the uneven, irregular surface of a trail makes you take special care of your footing and balance—something that some feel is good for extending the abilities of aging folks like us. But, city walks often add an element of human interest that calls for a different kind of focus – one that is probably also good for aging folks like us.
Ours is a world with songs and films about walking (Walking to Hollywood, Walking to New Orleans, Walking to Memphis, Walking Across Egypt—a film drawn from a novel by Clyde Edgerton whom we got to hear and meet in Oxford, Mississippi – also the site of some good walks) and pilgrimages (Campostella, Les Saintes Maries) and the likes of Brancusi’s walk to Paris, and celebrations of the anniversaries of famous walks, like the walk across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma. Next to these famous walks, ours may seem somewhat pedestrian. (Forgive me, please, for ending on a terrible pun.). But then, walking is walking…and for us often an adventure in keeping our balance—in many more ways than one.
Chuck Peek
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