The Lost Art of Walking

1. An Introduction

‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’, or so Lao-tzu, the Chinese Taoist sage, is often quoted as saying. In fact, this is a free translation of what he actually said, which was more like, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins beneath your feet’. My own feeling is that with most journeys, and especially the metaphoric sort, it’s extremely difficult to decide where and when that first step occurs. We’re already in motion before we know where we’re going, before we even realize that we’re on a journey at all. Designating a particular step as first or, for that matter, last is a tricky and often arbitrary business.

However, in my own case there was one particular step that was very different from any of the other steps I’ve ever taken in my life. It was a misstep, a stumble, a fall, a disagreement with gravity, a bone-breaking coming together of all-too-fragile body and all-too-solid earth.

Christmas was two days away, I was in Los Angeles, and I was feeling optimistic. I had decided to write a book about walking, my publisher had decided this was a fine idea, a commission was in the offing, and I was doing what could be construed as practical research. It was a warm, sunny California winter afternoon, and I was taking a long, hard walk in the Hollywood Hills.

That was where I lived at the time, and still do. It was, and is, one of my favorite places to walk in Los Angeles. It’s intriguing and glossily peculiar territory, the craggy high ground up above the flatland of the city, a place with ascents and descents that are steep enough to get your heart and lungs pumping, which is the whole point. From up there you get panoramic views over the sprawl, occasionally you can see all the way to the ocean, and you regularly catch sight of the Hollywood sign. There are palm trees, cactus, and bougainvillea, and sometimes you turn a corner and are suddenly confronted by a coyote or a deer crossing the street, as though they, and you, were still out in the wild.

Yet the Hollywood Hills, like much of L.A., are still essentially suburban: the hedges are trimmed, freshly cleaned cars stand gleaming outside double or triple garages. Residents are house-proud, and they keep themselves to themselves, and that’s one of the attractions. I was one of the few people who ever seemed to walk there. I encountered a few dog walkers, the odd person pushing a pram, the occasional jogger, a Mexican maid who didn’t have transport, but I seldom saw anyone who was simply walking for the hell of it, as I was. I never saw anyone fall down.

Of course, I take full responsibility for my own actions and my own accident, but there remains something inscrutable about it. I was perfectly clean and sober, for instance — and it would surely have hurt less had I been drunk. True, I wasn’t walking with any great care, but I wasn’t so self-absorbed as to be oblivious to where I was putting my feet. And although I was in good spirits, I don’t think there was any smugness or hubris in the equation. I certainly didn’t think that nothing bad could happen to me.

I was walking along briskly, happily, the street had a steep downward slope, but there was nothing treacherous about it, nothing I hadn’t successfully negotiated thousands of times before. There was even a sidewalk, by no means a given in many parts of L.A. But now, incomprehensibly, the negotiations broke down. I lost it. I tripped, I stumbled, I began to fall.

The older you get, the bigger a deal it is to fall down. When you’re age five you can hit the deck, skin your knees, bleed profusely, and be up playing again in five minutes. The older falling man is so much more vulnerable. He’s less supple, less resilient, less accustomed to the experience. He feels far more pain, embarrassment, and humiliation.

Even as I was falling I thought, Oh crap, I’m not really going to go all the way to the ground, am I? I’ll stop myself somehow. I’ll keep my footing. I’ll regain my balance. And then I knew I was wrong about that. I was going all the way. I’d passed the tipping point. Oh crap, indeed.

Then there was the impact, a much greater, more generalized blow than I’d been anticipating. I was on the ground, winded, hurting all over, feeling like a fool, trying to breathe deeply and regularly, and thinking, possibly saying aloud, ‘Oh man, this really, really hurts, this is a bad one’.

Even so, I didn’t imagine I was actually going to do anything other than get up, dust myself off, and carry on walking. I thought I might have ripped a hole in my jeans, but that was all the damage I was expecting. So I made all the moves you’d make in order to stand up, using my arms to push myself off the ground, and then I realized I couldn’t possibly do that: my right forearm was hurting far, far too much. And then I looked at the arm and saw that it appeared soft and spongy and was bent like a crescent roll. It was obviously, spectacularly broken. This was a brand-new experience. I hadn’t lived an especially careful life. I’d had my share of accidents and impacts, but I’d never broken anything before. It seemed both shocking and unlikely.

Naturally, I’ve since tried to work out exactly what happened, and in the absolute sense, I don’t know, and never will. But as far as I can tell, as I started to pitch forward, I reached out my right arm to break the fall. I had my camera in my left hand, and I was trying to protect it: a big mistake. All my weight and inertia homed in on my right wrist, with what now seems all-too-predictable results.

I lay on the ground unable to get up, and considered my options. If I’d had a cell phone with me I might have called 911 or, more likely, my wife, begging her to come pick me up, but I had no phone, just a camera, and I wondered if I could use the built-in flash as a distress signal. In the end it wasn’t necessary.

I wasn’t lying there very long before a guy getting into his car saw me on the ground, decided I wasn’t a derelict or junkie, and came to my assistance. He hoisted me up and drove me to a nearby fire station. This was the smart way of doing things, he assured me. The firemen would be able to give me some immediate first aid, then drive me to a hospital, where, having arrived in an emergency vehicle, I’d be able to jump the line in the emergency room. All this, in due course, proved to be true.

I was taken care of by a young fireman who had his surname stitched onto the pocket of his uniform: the name was Finger. He was grimly impressed by the look of my arm. ‘How’d ya do that?’ he asked. ‘Just walking’, I said. He shook his head. It didn’t seem right to him. It seemed downright weird. Normally, they only saw breaks like mine on people who’d fallen off ladders. He put me on a stretcher, put my arm in an inflatable splint, gave me enough morphine to disorientate me without quite killing the pain, and ferried me to a hospital, where everyone continued to respect the extremity of the injury.

The X-rays showed there wasn’t just one break but three: two in the radius, one in the ulna, with huge displacement all round. I’d have to have some serious surgery, was the opinion of the X-ray guys, and I’d end up with metal pins in my arm. They were right about all this. And they, too, were impressed. They thought my injury was something out of the ordinary, as though I must be one wild and crazy dude to have done that to myself by whatever method. They said it looked like a skateboard injury, and this made me feel just a little better. Another dose of morphine made me feel better still.

♦

A week later I had surgery at the Good Samaritan Hospital on Wilshire Boulevard. My doctor had a signed photograph of Slash from Guns N’ Roses on her wall, and Slash was obviously happy with the service.

Once I’d been operated on, put in a cast and splinted up, sent home, and begun the recovery period, I started meeting more people who asked what I’d done to myself. I sensed that they wanted to hear stories of knife fights, car wrecks, overturned Jet Skis, and I didn’t want to disappoint them, though I didn’t want to lie. I found myself saying, ‘The break was spectacular, even if the cause was pedestrian’.

And there was always the big L.A. question: ‘Are you OK to drive?’ Drive? Hell, I had problems enough walking. As a man working on a book on the subject, I felt I had a duty to try to keep pounding the streets, even with a broken arm. It didn’t sound so hard. But walking with a broken arm is much more difficult than you, or certainly I, might imagine. For one thing, despite serious quantities of painkilling opiates, the arm continued to hurt like hell. There’s a rich tradition of walking while enjoying opiate-induced sensory derangement — Baudelaire, De Quincey, Coleridge — but I didn’t feel happily deranged — I simply hurt. And even if the arm didn’t hurt when I set off walking, by the time I’d gone a few hundred yards the blood was circulating faster and setting off freshly revealed twinges and spasms.

More than that, walking while nursing an injured arm in a cast and sling throws off your balance and distorts the geometry of the walking body, creating various tensions and asymmetries that in themselves create further pain. My broken arm ached and it made the rest of my body ache, too. And that didn’t end even when the cast came off. I was left nursing this tender, half-formed thing, something soft and without muscle: it was like having a week-old puppy dangling at the end of my arm, although in this case the puppy actually was the arm.

Worse, having fallen down once, I feared that I could all too easily do it again. It seemed my walking capabilities were no longer to be trusted. I still went out walking, but with a new attention to detail. I didn’t go very far, and I made sure that I now wore ground-hugging, butt-ugly shoes. I walked more slowly, obsessively looked where my feet were going, and regarded curbs, steps, and changes in gradient as obstacles set specifically to undo me. Who knew walking was such a confidence game? Who knew it was so complicated and risky?

Well, quite a few people it turned out. I suddenly discovered that falling down while walking wasn’t such a rare event. My friends and acquaintances turned out to be a poorly balanced crowd, and many of them had stories about getting a foot caught in a pothole in the street, losing their footing on slippery or uneven sidewalks, tumbling off wet stepping stones, or having pratfalls while walking across gravel driveways or parking lots. Sometimes, like me, they fell for no apparent reason whatsoever.

By some accounts, walking itself was a series of falls, a precarious balancing act that had the walker standing on one leg for most of the time, constantly pitching himself forward, transferring energy and weight in a reckless and dangerous manner, avoiding disaster only by constantly getting a foot down in the very nick of time.

Others said that spending your whole life on two legs was a downright odd thing to do. Plenty of mammals stand on two legs once in a while, but humans are the only ones ridiculous enough to do it all the time. The body just wasn’t designed for it. All those bad backs and knees and feet and hips — we’d have had none of those things if only we’d remained on all fours. If a quadruped missed a step with one foot, there were three others right there to make up the difference. What was the big deal about bipedalism, anyway?

♦

At one time, the explanation for bipedalism seemed simple enough, and was demonstrated in that old, familiar illustration: a line of rising, ever-more-human-looking creatures, a common ancestral ape at the far left-hand side, some chimplike critter walking on his knuckles in the middle, and a naked, spear-carrying Homo sapiens at the far right.

The text that accompanied this drawing would have told you that our ancient primate ancestors lived in trees and moved on all fours until a more sophisticated primate appeared, called Ramapithecus, that could stand up at least part of the time and could pick up things with its hands, probably rocks to throw at its enemies. Then, about five million years ago, Australopithecus came on the scene, tiny-brained but a proper upright walker who probably used stones or bones for specific tasks, though these didn’t quite constitute ‘tools’. Next, two and a half million years ago, along came ‘1470 man’ with a better brain than any ape, and with the genuine ability to make and use tools. Standing on two legs is a great help when you want to use tools. Homo erectus arrived about half a million years ago, Homo sapiens, 250,000 years after that. The move was always onward and upward: four legs good, two legs better.

This narrative fits with what is known as the ‘savannah hypothesis’, which suggests that our ancestors were perfectly happy living in trees and would have remained there, but some profound ecological change occurred, leading to a catastrophic deforestation. Swinging from one tree to another was no longer possible because the trees were too far apart, and so a new form of travel was required. This new form involved some trial and error. At first we scrabbled on all fours, then raised ourselves a little, using our forearms and knuckles as necessary, and finally we made the breakthrough: we stood up and walked on two legs because that was the most efficient way of getting from nearby tree A to distant tree B.

Other theories of bipedalism suggest that walking on two legs simply uses less energy than walking on four: it’s claimed that walking humans use 75 percent less energy than chimpanzees, for instance, and evolution favors efficiency. Another theory, the ‘thermoregulatory model’, asserts that standing upright is advantageous because it keeps the body cooler, placing it in the vicinity of fresh, moving air. A different theory attributes bipedalism to changes in social and reproductive habits in early hominids. At a certain point in human development, males acquired the nurturing urge. They wanted to care for their families and to provide for them. They went out foraging and brought back what they’d gathered, carrying it in their arms. Since two limbs were engaged in the carrying, they were forced to walk on the other two.

These narratives don’t strike me as mutually exclusive, though naturally there is fierce debate among supporters of the different theories. However, as a result of research done by two English scientists, Robin Crompton and Susannah Thorpe, the whole bipedal apple cart has now been upset. In the early 2000^s, Crompton and Thorpe spent a year in the rain forests of Sumatra, studying and filming orangutans, a species that spends its entire life in trees, and therefore, one might have thought, a species with absolutely no use for bipedalism.

Well, it turns out the Sumatran orangutans are extremely bipedal. They may not walk on the ground, but they constantly stand on two legs and walk along tree branches, using their arms for balance and for gathering food. The conclusion is that we didn’t come down from the trees and gradually adapt to walking on two feet, but that bipedalism was already part of the repertoire. Knuckle walking, therefore, wasn’t an intermediate stage but a later development, necessitated in chimpanzees and gorillas because they’re anatomically unable to straighten their legs.

If Crompton and Thorpe are correct, this information completely changes the way anthropologists are going to have to think about human development. It means, above all, that our ancestors didn’t start walking upright approximately five million years ago, as previously thought, but more like ten or fifteen million years earlier. It also means that the precise ‘reasons’ for bipedalism remain as obscure as ever.

I wasn’t much cheered by all this theory. If my ancestors had been walking for fifteen to twenty million years, that really ought to be enough time to get the hang of it, to build the skill set into the race memory.

Things only got worse when I spoke to Dr. Martin Bax, an English pediatrician with an international reputation. Martin reckoned there was nothing difficult about walking. For instance, he told me, you can see the legs of unborn babies moving in the womb, making walking motions, from about seventeen weeks. This is a good sign and proof that the baby is healthy, mobile, and not tangled up in anything, but there’s nothing very advanced about it: at seventeen weeks, the baby’s cortex isn’t fully formed, indicating that walking is a function of the spine or midbrain.

In the 1920^s and ‘30^s in Oxford, Martin said, an academic by the name of Sherington did experiments with decorticated cats. He removed their brains and found they were still able to walk perfectly well. Martin was also aware of some unpublished research done in England in the 1970^s on aborted fetuses, and scientists had managed to get them walking, too. In other words, walking could be, quite literally, a brainless activity. You didn’t even have to be alive to do it.

Once babies are out of the womb, Martin continued, they achieve ‘primary walking’ at about six weeks of age. This isn’t real walking because the babies have no sense of balance and no strength in their legs, so they can’t stand up, but if you support them, they’re able to make all the motions that are needed for walking. There are some extraordinary films and photographs, shot in the late 1920^s by the German pediatrician Albrecht Peiper, in which given a certain kind of support, not only do babies walk on the ground, they can also walk up walls and on the ceiling.

In fact, there’s a long artistic tradition of walking on the ceiling, often done by stage magicians. Ricky Jay writes about them in his Journal of Anomalies. Usually there’s nothing very magical about the process. The illusion is created using suction cups, hidden ropes, or metal shoes that fit into grooves on the ceiling of a stage set.

More impressively, the Moscow Circus, in the 1960^s, featured an act in which an acrobat walked upside down along the underside of a beam that was suspended above a cage full of tigers. Simultaneously, a tiger walked, upright, across the top of the beam. As the tiger walked, it triggered a series of hidden loops that dropped down from the underside of the beam: the upside-down acrobat then inserted his feet into the loops and walked along, too. This is an amazing feat not only of walking but also of coordination. The acrobat’s steps had to match precisely those of the tiger.

A man might be forgiven for losing his footing in such circumstances, but what excuse did I have? If I couldn’t even walk in the street without falling down and breaking my arm in three places, then I had to ask myself what my qualifications were for considering myself a walker.

The overriding one was that I liked walking: I liked it a lot. And I didn’t just like it in the abstract, I liked doing it, and all through my life I’d always done it a lot, usually in an unorganized but nevertheless enthusiastic way, on four continents, at home and abroad, in town and country, in conditions that could be favorable or adverse.

Walking had certainly always been a pleasure, but it was more than that. For me walking has to do with exploration, a way of accommodating myself, of feeling at home. When I find myself in a new place I explore it on foot. It’s the way I get to know that place. Maybe it’s a way of marking territory, of beating the bounds. Setting foot in a street makes it yours in a way that driving down it never does.

Often I’ve walked for the simplest reasons, sometimes because I’ve had no choice. When I was younger and poorer, a three-mile walk home was the way I frequently rounded off an evening out. Sometimes walking is simply the most efficient way of getting from A to B. If you live in a big city, and for large chunks of my life I’ve lived in London and New York, walking is often infinitely preferable to using public transportation. When you walk you’re your own boss.

On a very small number of occasions I’ve walked as an act of political protest, though I suspect my fellow protesters might have said they were on a ‘march’ rather than a walk. These events pertained to the usual sorts of things — nuclear proliferation, the British poll tax, the ‘gate hours’ at my old college, which prevented you from having girls in your room overnight. Actually the second and third of these protests might be thought to have been successful: both the poll tax and my college’s gate hours were duly abandoned. The nuclear issue is evidently going to require a bit more walking.

I’ve also walked for charity, but that was some time ago, and even back then it struck me as a dubious thing to do. If people want to give money to charity, if they want to help fund a cure for AIDS or cancer or whatever, they should go right ahead and do it. They shouldn’t have to wait for somebody else to promise to walk thirty miles and then sponsor them to do it. It suggests that walking is some eccentric and out-of-the ordinary activity, so rare that people would only do it for money, even if the money was going to a good cause. There’s also the sense that walking is a form of suffering: by walking we share the pain and sorrow of the AIDS sufferer or the cancer patient. I object to both these propositions. Walking is special but it’s not strange. It’s not a stunt. It’s worth doing for its own sake.

There is, of course, an environmental argument in favor of walking. Undoubtedly there would be green benefits if we all walked to work rather than drove there in our cars. Undoubtedly, also, we’d do less harm if we spent our leisure hours walking in quiet places rather than, say, off-roading in SUVs. However, the changes that would be needed to convert us into a nation of walkers rather than car users are so colossal that it seems to me we’re not talking about promoting pedestrianism here, but rather about attempting to change human nature itself, which strikes me as, at best, an overambitious project. Yes, there was a time when everybody walked: they did it because they had no choice. The moment they had a choice, they chose not to do it.

If the pedestrian-advocate movement has a solution to this problem, I’ve yet to hear it. But the main problem I have with the activist walking lobby is that its members seek to make a hard and fast division between walkers and drivers: walkers are saints, drivers are pure evil. This doesn’t match my experience of humanity. Most of us are both walkers and drivers. Sure, I find drivers annoying when I walk, but I also find pedestrians annoying when I drive. It’s not clear to me that absolute virtue resides on either side.

More than that, even the most environmentally conscious walkers sometimes get in their cars and drive considerable distances in order to go walking. I can see the obvious contradiction in this, but I don’t find it genuinely pernicious. Sometimes the neighborhood just isn’t enough. In any case, my walking isn’t intended to save the planet.

Great claims are also made for the health benefits of walking, for its capacity to make us lean and fit, but I have serious doubts about this. Clearly walking is better than nothing, and in general it does the body no harm (unless you happen to pull, sprain, twist, or break something, or get run down by a car). But the number of calories burned while walking is really unimpressive. A 180-pound man walking at four miles an hour burns up about 100 calories per mile. True, a 300-pound man walking at five miles an hour burns 218 calories per mile, but I suspect there are rather few 300-pound men who are capable of walking at five miles per hour even for brief periods.

The fact is, to the dismay of anyone who’s ever tried to lose weight, a pound of body fat contains 3,500 calories. In other words, to lose a pound of flesh, you need to walk thirty-five miles. There must be easier ways of doing it. In any case, I don’t walk in order to get or stay fit. If there’s any such thing as a desirable ‘walker’s physique’, I have yet to see it.

I’ve never walked professionally, though I’ve had jobs that required me to do a fair amount of walking: garbageman, gardener, security man, drone in a department store. Actually, in the last case the walking wasn’t so much work as a way of avoiding work. I was employed by Harrods in London, a vast and labyrinthine, multifloored department store, ripe for exploration. I discovered, as many had before me, that a man who displayed a false sense of purpose and held a piece of paper in his hand could wander just about anywhere in the place and everybody would always assume he was going about his proper business.

And so at Harrods I walked constantly, relentlessly, through airless, air-conditioned departments, up and down escalators and staircases, moving just purposefully enough to avoid giving the impression that I was loafing. I circulated through the pet department, ate samples in the food hall, went to the musical instrument department, where I admired the grand pianos. I investigated book and record departments, checked out men’s suits. Sometimes I lurked in the electronics department and watched TV; on the odd occasion I even found myself in the bridal department admiring empire bodices and taffeta trains.

And although I wasn’t being paid to walk, I did earn money while I was doing it, in the sense that I earned the same amount of money whether I was doing anything useful or not. Since I hated the job so much, every moment that I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to be doing became a victory — a modest victory to be sure, but I took my satisfactions where I could find them. When I eventually returned to my own desk after what might have been an hour-long walking expedition, it was rare for anyone in the office to notice I’d even been away, although one Australian colleague did regularly accuse me of ‘going walkabout’.

The word walking looks and sounds like a simple, honest, straightforward one, and in some ways it is. The dictionary tells us it has its origin in late Middle English, and therefore doesn’t need a Greek or Latin precursor. Latin terms such as ambulare or pedibus ire seem needlessly fancy — the classical Greek peripateo, stoicbeo, or erchomai are just downright unfamiliar.

Yet perhaps that very simplicity in English is why we need so many qualifiers, so many synonyms, or not quite synonyms, for walking, each word with its own shade and delineation of meaning. I found it revealing to see which of these words applied to my own walking and which didn’t. Tell me how you walk and I’ll tell you who you are.

For example, I’ve performed all the slack, idle, casual, purposeless forms of walking. I’ve strolled and wandered, pottered and tottered, dawdled and shuffled, mooched and sauntered and meandered.

I’ve certainly ambled, and I could be said to have rambled (though the British Ramblers’ Association is made up of hale, out-doorsy hearties who would probably spit on my walking efforts and dismiss them as trifling), and probably I’ve also shambled, but I don’t think I’ve ever gamboled.

I’ve definitely hiked, or at least I’ve definitely been on paths that call themselves hiking trails, but hiking conjures up a degree of seriousness, organization, and specialized clothing that I never quite trust. One of the minor but profound satisfactions of being on a grand, well-known hiking trail is to swan along in shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt, and to encounter others who are dressed as though for an assault on Annapurna. By the same token I’ve also trekked.

I’ve trudged, tramped, and slogged, and in New York I’ve certainly schlepped. As I say, I’ve never marched in any military or quasi-military sense. Incidentally, the phrase ‘Bolivian marching powder’ as a euphemism for cocaine, much popularized by the literary firm of Mclnerney and Ellis in the 1980^s, turns out to have a much earlier origin. In the First World War, British soldiers were given cocaine-based tablets, known as ‘forced march tablets’, though I’d have thought all marching is forced — the soldiers wouldn’t be doing it if they hadn’t been ordered to.

At the time of the Falklands War, the people of England heard a lot about British soldiers ‘yomping’ to Port Stanley. It’s unwise for a civilian to offer a hard-and-fast opinion on army slang, but I believe yomping involves crossing rough terrain carrying a full pack, and is similar to, but significantly different from, ‘tabbing’. Marines yomp — paratroopers tab, which according to some sources stands for ‘tactical advance to battle’. Tabbing is about speed — yomping is about distance. Unless you’ve been a British soldier it would be unwise to claim to have done either.

A couple of times when suffering from tendonitis or bursitis (walkers’ complaints) I’ve limped and hobbled. I’ve waded, which is walking in, though not on, water. I’ve occasionally, metaphorically, walked on air, and I have probably, again not literally, sometimes walked a tightrope and walked on eggshells. Apparently when I was a child I sleepwalked a few times, but I have no memory of it. When I was a would-be playwright we did walk-throughs of my plays. Occasionally I’ve been given my walking papers. I have never, Byronically, walked in beauty like the night.

I have certainly drifted. However, that’s a word that contains one highly specialized meaning, coming from the French founders and followers of psychogeography, who speak of the derive, which translates as drift, both noun and verb. Psychogeography, as a word, and sometimes as a practice, looms large over the contemporary, literary walker, including me. It was the brainchild of a Frenchman, Guy Debord, who defined it in 1955 as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment’. He and his fellow psychogeographers liked to think of themselves as flaneurs: urban and urbane, disciples of Baudelaire, bohemian dandies who walked around the city observing cool stuff, often stoned. There will be much more of this later, but essentially we’re back in the realm of sensory derangement and heightened sensibility, a condition that may cause a man to stagger, roll, barrel, career, or careen. I’ve walked in some of these ways — maybe I’ve even floated. The extent to which this actually makes me, or anyone else, a flaneur is debatable.

I don’t think I’ve ever cruised. I’m not sure that cruising is a thing a heterosexual man can do. I’m equally sure I’ve never trolled or minced. Edmund White tells us that whereas in English the word cruise is an exclusively gay term, the equivalent French word drageur is also heterosexual. ‘Straight people cruise one another in Paris’, he writes, in a book called, tellingly, The Flaneur, ‘unlike Americans, who feel menaced or insulted by looks on the street’. Ah, those poor, sensitive Americans.

There is, undoubtedly, a sexual component to walking. Actually having real sex while walking, that’s just about impossible, but some people are very sexy when they walk, and a great many more people think about sex as they walk. In the days when I had a real job and a real place of work, I’d live for the lunch hour, when I could get out and walk the streets and look at all the women who were also walking the streets on their lunch hour. We’re talking about the male gaze here, a dangerously ubiquitous phenomenon apparently, and one immortalized in the Frank Loesser song ‘Standing on the Corner’:

Brother you can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking

Or for that ‘woooo’ look in your eye…

Some would probably have it otherwise — and yes, walking is a very different prospect for men than for women.

♦

I’m always fascinated by the female models in fashion shows, the ones who parade up and down on the runways and catwalks. They’re sexy, all right, and it’s got a lot to do with the way they walk, but it’s a very specialized form of walking. They strut and stomp, they stride out, hammer their feet down, scissor their legs across each other, and look as though they’re really determined to get somewhere, but of course they never really do get anywhere. They just get to the end of the runway and then they spin around on their stiletto heels and head back precisely where they came from. This only just counts as walking. And runway is such a strange term, because it sounds like they’re at the airport, taxiing, getting ready to fly. But these fashion models never lift off. They don’t even run on the runway.

Streetwalker is another term that doesn’t quite describe the sexuality or the style of walking to which it refers. Yes, streetwalkers operate in the street, and, yes, they’re on their feet, but how much walking do they actually do? Streetwalkers have always been the lowest of prostitutes. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the word to 1592, but even if the word was newfangled at the time, the practice surely was not. The streetwalker is, and always has been, the most vulnerable of sex professionals. The sight of a woman walking at night, whether she’s selling herself or not, is enough to stir uncontrollable urges in some men. It has required some women to take back the night.

And yet, here and now in the West, women walkers are surely safer than they’ve ever been. That may not be saying a whole lot, but here’s the Spanish feminist Margarita Nelken claiming that walking was the one thing that separated her, a twentieth-century woman, from her mother and grandmother. ‘This footing’, she writes:

‘‘this morning walk — elastic step, rhythmic body in loose, comfortable clothing — of the girls that walk for hygiene in these clear and warm days of early spring…they have opened the windows of the sad room in which their grandmothers sat.’

She wrote that in 1923 in a magazine called La Moda Elegante.

There are, I think, certain ways in which sex and walking closely resemble each other. For one thing, they’re both at heart basic, simple, repetitive activities that just about everybody does at one time or another. And yet despite being so ordinary and commonplace, they’re both capable of great sophistication and elaboration. They can be completely banal and meaningless, and yet they can also involve great passions and adventures. Both can lead you into strange and previously unknown territories: a walk on the wild side.

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So, if I have never cruised, catwalked, or streetwalked, I also hope I’ve never flounced, as in ‘flounced out of the room’. Stormed, I think, is the preferred manly word here. Sometimes, less forcefully, I may have sloped off or stolen away. I have sidled, tiptoed, pussyfooted, perhaps even slunk.

I have hit the streets, pounded the pavement, worn out shoe leather, taken shank’s pony, hotfooted it, legged it, strode out, loped, paced. So far I have never waddled, but as the years pass and the pounds pack on, it may be a fate awaiting me.

Otherwise I may well have promenaded, pedestrianized, peregrinated, ambulated, perambulated, circumambulated, hoofed, and locomoted, but these aren’t words I’d ever normally use. And I’ve never said, as apparently they do in Cockney rhyming slang, ‘gone for a ball of chalk’, although I’ve probably done the deed it describes, which is essentially to ‘get lost’.

I’m sure I’ve strutted, but I’m pretty damn sure that I’ve never swaggered. In a notorious speech he made at the Republican National Convention in 2004, George W. Bush said, to the delight of the supportive crowd and the consternation of others, ‘Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger. In Texas we call it walkin’’.

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In fact, the word swagger has its origins in the Norwegian dialect word svagga, meaning to sway, which may not be quite what the ex-president had in mind. However, given the capacity of the English language to soak up words from elsewhere, it’s hardly surprising that many of our words for walking originate in other tongues.

French gives us promenade and march, and the word mooch has its origins in the Old French muchier, meaning to hide or skulk. We get shuffle from the Low German schüffeln, and tramp from Old Teutonic. Trek comes from the Dutch, via South Africa. Flounce comes from jlunsa, a Scandinavian word that means hurry in Norwegian and plunge in Swedish.

What’s more surprising is that if you consult the Oxford English Dictionary to find where the words trudge, stroll, and saunter come from, you’ll find them simply designated ‘origins obscure’. Hike is ‘original dialect obscure’. Strut is ‘obscure’, and ramble is simply ‘origin unknown’.

Some words, more comprehensibly, have been borrowed from other parts of English for their metaphoric possibilities.

Ambling, for instance, despite its historic Latin origins, was once a thing done only by horses — meandering was done only by rivers. The word slope, as in slope off, didn’t contain the sense of walking at all until the mid-nineteenth century, and is one of the few genuine all-American coinages. Pussyfoot is another, even later one, being the nickname of one W.E. Johnson, a lecturer and advocate of Prohibition.

I began to wonder whether other languages have as many words for walking as English does. I put the question out among my polyglot friends and acquaintances and was impressed by their enthusiasm for the subject. Any misinformation in the paragraphs that follow is naturally all their fault.

A friend in Sao Paolo reported with dismay that his Portuguese thesaurus listed only eight synonyms for walking, and none of them approximated his favorite word, trudge. Another friend, whose Farsi is admittedly rusty, came up, via her mother and grandfather, with nine synonyms, including kharamiden — to walk elegantly, like a deer — jahiden — to walk percussively, like a frog — and verjeh vorjeh harden — to squirm about. The Norwegians seemed much better supplied. My source came up with over fifty synonyms, including vagge, flahke, sjangle, and spankulere.

From an American now living in Italy I learned such colorful walking phrases as darsela a gambe (to make with the legs) and alzare i tacchi (pick up the heels), both of which mean to run away. He also came up with the word cammellare, literally to walk like a camel, a style adopted by disaffected youths who slouch along, head down, creating a camel-like hump on their backs.

The Germans, I learned, have the quaint expression auf Schuster’s Rappen, which means ‘on the shoemaker’s black horses’, pretty much the equivalent of shank’s pony, and a particular favorite of mine is Um den Pudding laufen, which means to walk round the block or go the long way round, or literally ‘running around the pudding’.

Instead of using various different words for walking, the Japanese use a common base verb, then add an assortment of phenomimes, which are used as adverbs. So aruku is the basic word meaning to walk, then chokochoko aruku is to toddle, noronoro aruku is to inch along, furafura aruku is to shamble or teeter, and zorozoro aruku is to swarm or cluster.

Sometimes, as in Russian, a reverse principle seems to be at work. Instead of having many words for walk, the word for walk itself can have many meanings other than simply putting one foot in front of the other. The Russian word bodit’ is usually translated simply as to walk or to go, but it also contains the senses of sail, ply, move, visit, attend to a sick person, circulate money, wear, look after, take care of, nurse, step, straddle, foster children, play cards, scuff, scuffle, shin, flop along, tag along, herd, tend to, track, traffic, go at a crawl, and find one’s feet.

The Dutch use one or two words that look a lot like their English counterparts — lopen, wandelen, promeneren, for instance — but they also have the wonderful ijsberen, which means pacing to and fro (ijsbeer being the Dutch word for polar bear). They also use flaneren, which brings us back to the French word flaner, and to psychogeography.

The French have really hit the conceptual jackpot with the word flâner, a truly wonderful word in that it means simultaneously to walk and to not walk. It can indeed mean to stroll, but it can also mean the act of simply hanging around, staying right where you are and not walking at all. There is something gloriously perverse about this, and it is, of course, the root of flaneur.

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Another part of my qualifications for considering myself a walker was my familiarity with the standard texts on walking. The connection between walking and writing is an obvious one. Walkers write — writers walk. There are quite a number of usual suspects:

Thoreau, because he wrote the ‘book’, or essay or lecture, called ‘Walking’. And his fellow Americans Emerson and Hawthorne and Whitman, the last of whom wrote, ‘Afoot and light-hearted / I take to the open road’.

And Wordsworth, and also his sister Dorothy, who walked with him and wrote about it in her diary:

‘March 30, 1798. Walked I know not where. March 31, 1798. Walked. April 1, 1798. Walked by moonlight.’

And their friend Coleridge, who calculated that Wordsworth had walked 180,000 miles over the course of his life. And De Quincey, and William Blake, and John Clare, and John Keats with an epistolary account of his walking tour of the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands.

And Boswell and Johnson touring the Western Isles, which must have been a strain, given Boswell’s description of Johnson’s physical condition:

‘His figure was large and well formed, and his countenance of the cast of an ancient statue — yet his appearance was rendered strange and somewhat uncouth, by convulsive cramps. So morbid was his temperament, that he never knew the natural joy of a free and vigorous use of his limbs: when he walked, it was like the struggling gait of one in fetters.’

And Mark Twain in the Alps, and Robert Frost in ‘The Road Not Taken’, which is a wonderful work if you read it as a poem suggesting that you end up in much the same place regardless of which road you take, and you might think that’s the only sensible way it can be read, yet there seem to be a lot of people who want to read it as a poem about strident individualism.

And Charles Dickens, naturally, passim, but especially in ‘Night Walks’ and the opening of The Old Curiosity Shop, and there are the stories about him saying to guests at his house, ‘Let’s have a walk before dinner’, and then dragging them around the countryside for a few hours and coming home later after covering twelve or thirteen miles.

And Henri Michaux’s poem ‘Marchand’, which puns, in French, on marchant meaning walking and merchant meaning salesman. And Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘Walking to Work’, with the opening lines ‘It’s going to be the sunny side / from now / on’, and also his poem ‘Ode on Causality’, which contains the phrase ‘standing still and walking in New York’, which is also the title of a collection of his essays.

And there’s Joyce’s Ulysses, and Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, and Walter Benjamin, and Flaubert, and Proust in Swarm’s Way, and Borges in ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, and Samuel Beckett in Lessness — ‘One step in the ruins in the sand on his back in the endlessness he will make it’.

I respect the great, more or less, contemporary nonfiction walkers, travel writers such as John Hillaby, Peter Jenkins, Edward Abbey, and Bill Bryson. And one or two of them, Sebastian Snow and Bruce Chatwin, I absolutely love. But I have a problem reading most of them. They make me feel guilty. They make me feel I should be doing what they’re doing. I should be out there walking, covering the miles, pitting myself against the elements, not sitting about reading.

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Modern literary theory sees a similarity between walking and writing that I find persuasive: words inscribe a text in the same way that a walk inscribes space. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau writes:

‘‘The act of walking…is a process of appropriation of the topographical system on the part of the pedestrian — it is a special acting-out of the place…and it implies relations among differentiated positions.’

I think this is a fancy way of saying that writing is one way of making the world our own, and that walking is another.

Being outside the loop of academic theory, I had never come across de Certeau until I read an essay by Markus Poetzsch, which I sought out because I was so impressed by its title, ‘Walks Alone and “I know not where”: Dorothy Wordsworth’s Deviant Pedestrianism’. As well as parsing de Certeau, Poetzsch writes:

‘‘No less than the physical act, the literary acts of Romantic pedestrianism are, from their earliest beginnings, bound up with notions of deviance and deviation, with a willful turning away from what is generically, or shall we say topographically, normative: the well-trodden path. From the ‘devious feet’ of William Wordsworth’s speaker in ‘An Evening Walk’, to the socially and ‘self-leveling expeditions’…of Thelwall’s Ambulator’, to the unsociable traveler in Hazlitt’s ‘On Going a Journey’ who walks expressly ‘to get rid of others’…to Clare’s autobiographical account of his escape from High Beech asylum near Epping, the textualization of walking in the period is marked by a self-conscious nonconformism. The mere act of foregrounding this most taken-for-granted and familiar of motions signals unconventionally, for it ascribes to pedestrian activities hitherto unrealized significance.’

As I sat in Los Angeles rereading the literature, nursing my broken arm, and doing rather little walking, I was at least becoming a student of my own condition, and I found one interesting local literary precedent. In the 1950^s Aldous Huxley, author, explorer of inner space, knocker at the doors of perception, had lived in the Hollywood Hills, not far from where I did. The Hills reminded him of Greece.

Huxley was a walker, writer, and thinker in the great English literary tradition. David King Dunaway’s Huxley in Hollywood describes a typical day in the life of Aldous Huxley: getting up, writing six to ten pages, eating the lunch prepared for him by his maid, and then at one-thirty setting off on a long walk through the Hollywood Hills, getting back home in time for tea.

He often walked with other people — his wife arranged a series of entertaining but inconsequential mistresses for him — but on at least one occasion he walked alone and had a nasty fall. The area was far less built up than now and Huxley fell among scrub and dirt, a soft landing compared to mine and one that didn’t result in any breakages. However, Huxley’s fall was also less unexpected than mine. He was an old man and half-blind. He had far better excuses than I did, but I still liked to think of him as a fellow traveler and tumbler.

A better precedent, I discovered, was Thomas Jefferson, a mad keen walker by all accounts but also an unfortunate one. In Paris, in 1785, he, too, fell over while walking and broke his right wrist. There are various accounts of the circumstances: that he fell while jumping over a wall, in the company of an unnamed friend, though sometimes the unnamed friend is an unnamed married woman and sometimes the wall becomes a kettle. These are all, it seems to me, variations on the same story — though another variant has the broken wrist caused by a fall off a horse, which definitely spoils things.

What seems certain is that Jefferson didn’t get very good treatment from the doctors of Paris. His arm was completely out of action for several weeks and gave him trouble for the rest of his life. Much later, in 1821, just a few years before his death, he fell again, on a broken step while descending a staircase, and this time broke the left arm.

And then there is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he of The Reveries of the Solitary Walker. On the second walk, he’s on the road ‘down from Menilmontant almost opposite the Galant Jardiniere’, having spent an afternoon in ‘peaceful meditations’, when he sees a Great Dane barreling toward him, running ahead of a carriage, which apparently was the style in those days. Rousseau decides that in order to avoid being knocked down he’ll make a ‘great leap…so well timed that the dog would pass under me while I was still in the air’.

History doesn’t tell us how big the Great Dane was, but it couldn’t have been very small if Rousseau thought it was going to knock him down, so say it was three feet tall — I don’t know how much of an athlete Rousseau was, but if he was really thinking about jumping three feet straight up in the air from a standing start, he must have had a high regard for his own prowess. His abilities weren’t put to the test. While he was doing his calculations about when and how to jump, the dog hit him and knocked him over and out. ‘I did not feel the blow, nor the fall, nor anything of what followed until the moment I came to’, he wrote.

He was so stunned that he suffered from momentary amnesia, didn’t know where he was, and couldn’t even tell the people who picked him up where he lived. But eventually he remembered. Someone advised him to get a cab home, but he didn’t, he walked, ‘easily and sprightly, feeling neither pain nor hurt, though I kept spitting out a lot of blood’. And eventually he got home. ‘My wife’s cries on seeing me made me understand I was worse off than I thought’.

Fortunately, he wasn’t as badly off as some people thought. The Courier d’Avignon on December 20, 1776, mistakenly reported that he was dead:

‘M. Jean-Jacques Rousseau has died from the after-effects of his fall. He lived in poverty — he died in misery; and the strangeness of his fate accompanied him all the way to the tomb.’

Dying while out walking: it doesn’t get much stranger than that. It’s certainly much stranger and more epic than breaking an arm. And in some ways I found myself wishing that my own injuries had been stranger, or at least more dramatic. Nobody is impressed by or even very sympathetic toward a broken arm. Nobody, and I include myself in that category, understands how it might send you into a tailspin of melancholy. As I recuperated physically, I found myself becoming increasingly, and it seemed to me unjustifiably, gloomy and depressed. The intensity of the feelings seemed out of all proportion to the injury. OK, so I’d broken my arm — OK, so I couldn’t walk as much as I wanted to in fact, I was scarcely walking at all. But why would that plunge me into the kind of despair I was feeling? It seemed unfathomable.

And then I read Oliver Sacks’s book A Leg to Stand On. It describes how he broke his leg while walking, and the long, surprisingly traumatic process of his recovery. The story of his break offered all the surface drama and excitement that my own lacked. He did it while walking on a mountain in Norway, and he fell while being chased by a bull. The injury was serious. He was alone on the mountain and it took him six hours to drag himself to anything like safety. He might easily have died.

Sacks’s break was complicated, the convalescence infinitely more painful and protracted than mine. His triggered a personal and professional crisis, and although my own injury wasn’t quite doing that, not yet anyway, I feared that it might, and I saw all too clearly how an injury that the world regarded as trivial, as little more than a simple repair job, could completely change your view of the world and yourself.

Sacks’s case was complicated because he was a doctor who suddenly became a patient, a change of role and status that I imagine all members of the medical profession would find threatening. But he also experienced an anguish far more general, yet from where I was now standing (or slumping) far more recognizable than that. He writes:

‘Almost every patient who had had injury or surgery to a limb, and whose limb had been casted, out of sight, out of action, had experienced at least some degree of alienation: I heard of hands and feet which felt ‘queer’, ‘wrong’, ‘strange’, ‘unreal’, ‘uncanny’, ‘detached’, and ‘cut off’’.…Yes, that seemed to be describing my own condition, but I’d have said it was more than that. I didn’t just feel detached from my injured arm — I felt detached from the whole world.

As I sat around the house in L.A. nursing my broken arm, and doing no walking, I became increasingly dispirited. I was feeling depressed, and although there were some reasons for that, those reasons didn’t seem great or serious enough to justify the scale of my feelings. I felt feeble, vulnerable, becalmed, utterly miserable. I was spending my time reading books about walking, but I thought I might never walk out of the house again. I considered myself a good and enthusiastic walker, a fully qualified pedestrian. I loved walking: it was a source of happiness, wonder, and enlightenment. Yet a walk to the end of the street now seemed as impossible as a journey of a thousand miles. I told myself I wasn’t doing any walking because I was so depressed and enervated. And then I thought of something. Perhaps I was depressed and enervated precisely because I wasn’t doing any walking.

I should have realized this much sooner. There was something very familiar about it. It was something I had worked out some time ago, then managed to forget. The truth is, the real reason I walk is because I have to. I walk because it keeps me sane. I had proved this to myself a couple of years back when I first arrived in Los Angeles.