The Lost Art of Walking

10. Perfect and Imperfect Walks, Last Walks, the Walks We Didn’t Take

In the course of my walking life I’ve often wondered if there’s any such thing as a perfect walk, in the way that there’s a perfect storm, a perfect wave, or a perfect inning — the one walk that is utterly different from all the other walks we’ll ever take in our lives, a walk that is personal and universal, that makes a giant leap from the ordinary to the extraordinary, a walk that is everything you ever wanted a walk to be and yet is something more than that, too.

Being the first person ever to set foot on some piece of terra incognita would surely have a kind of perfection about it. Inevitably, it’s an option that’s denied to the vast majority of us — walking in fresh snow or on fresh sand is as close as most of us will ever get — and perhaps we’re lucky, since perfect or not, a great deal of bitterness and conflict can come out of this kind of exploration.

Matthew A. Henson is now widely considered to be the first American ever to have set foot on the North Pole. In 1909 he was part of an expedition led by Commander Robert Peary. This was Peary’s eighth such attempt, and along the way he fell ill and became unable to walk. As they neared their goal Henson was regularly sent ahead on foot as a scout while Peary continued on a dog sled, tended by four Eskimo guides.

Thus, by definition, Peary wasn’t ever going to be the first man to walk on, much less walk to, the North Pole. Henson inevitably got there first. Nevertheless, Peary wanted all the credit for himself and he wanted Henson to have none. Henson writes:

‘From the time we knew we were at the Pole, Commander Peary scarcely spoke to me.’

I have just the very slightest sympathy with Peary. Henson was a great man to have with you, no doubt, but he didn’t conceive of the expedition, didn’t organize it, finance it, or lead it. Whether Peary was justified in regarding Henson as at best an employee, probably more as a servant, is another matter. Completely unjustifiable was the rage Peary expressed when Henson wrote his own account of events in his book A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. Yes, the first American to set foot on the North Pole was black, and only long after the event did he receive his due. It wasn’t until 1944 that Congress gave him a duplicate of the silver medal they’d awarded to Peary decades earlier. The four Eskimos remain undecorated.

Recently, the author Robert Bryce has claimed that nobody on the Peary expedition got within a hundred miles of the Pole. He has, unsurprisingly, been denounced in certain quarters as a racist.

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Things were less racially charged at the South Pole, if only because the notion of a racially integrated expedition was unimaginable to its explorers. A Frenchman, Jules-Sebastien-Cesar Dumont d’Urville, was the first man to set foot on Antarctica, and Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, was the first man to walk to the South Pole, shortly followed, though not literally, by the Englishman Robert Scott.

Amundsen’s description of walking across an area he named the Devil’s Ballroom gives some idea of his chilly Scandinavian stoicism. ‘Our walk across this frozen lake was not pleasant. The ground under our feet was evidently hollow, and it sounded as if we were walking on empty barrels. First a man fell through, then a couple of dogs — but they got up again all right’. Insouciance is certainly part of the perfect walk, I think.

However, when it comes to chilly reserve, along with nobility, self-sacrifice, and British understatement, none can beat Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates, a member of Scott’s expedition. Oates, suffering from frostbite, and realizing that he was a burden that threatened to destroy the mission, walked out of the tent and into the oblivion of an Antarctic blizzard on March 17, 1912, having said to Scott and the others, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’.

There is a kind of perfection about this walk, and of course none of the other members of the expedition said, ‘Hey, steady old man, don’t go out for a walk, stay here with us. What does it matter if the expedition gets ruined? Your health’s the most important thing’. That would have ruined things in quite a different way.

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There seems to have been little insouciance or selflessness when it came to the first moon walk — I mean the literal sort, not the Michael Jackson version. The original plan for the Apollo 11 mission had Buzz Aldrin slated to be the first man to walk on the moon, but Neil Armstrong, as team leader, changed that plan so that he could be first. Aldrin was understandably furious, so much so that he refused to take any pictures of Armstrong walking on the moon: a gloriously petty revenge. This moon-walking disappointment is sometimes offered as an explanation for Aldrin’s descent into depression and alcoholism, from which he later recovered.

The man who emerges with the most dignity from the moon landing and walk is Michael Collins, the third member of the Apollo team, the one who remained in the orbiting craft and never got to walk on the moon at all. Collins does have the minor distinction of being the third man ever to walk in space, in 1966 on Gemini X when he left the craft to perform a couple ‘extravehicular activities’, but let’s face it, a gravity-free space walk really isn’t any kind of a walk, it’s more of a float.

In any event Collins had enough of the right stuff not to be disappointed, or at least not to let the disappointment spoil his life. No doubt it helped that he knew all along that he wouldn’t be walking on the moon, and wouldn’t be thwarted at the last minute the way Aldrin was. According to Collins, ‘I think he [Aldrin] resents not being the first man on the moon more than he appreciates being the second’.

As Armstrong walked on the moon he fluffed his big line. He said, ‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’, when he should have said, ‘one small step for a man’. Did anybody care? There is, however, footage in circulation indicating that Armstrong’s initial reaction was far more colloquial and unscripted. On the sound track to a blurred bit of moon footage he’s heard to say quite clearly, ‘Jesus H. Christ, we’re on the fucking moon’. And Houston, getting into the spirit of the thing, replies, ‘You’re cleared to hook up lunar equipment conveyor to walk, fucking walk, on the moon’. This has an air of believable authenticity about it, though for all we know it may have been faked. Of course there are sources, not all of them certifiably insane, claiming that man has never set foot on the moon at all. This, too, has been offered as an explanation for Buzz Aldrin’s drinking. Having to pretend that you’d walked on the moon when you hadn’t would surely create every bit as much anguish as having been the second person to walk there.

Buzz Aldrin has been known to punch out people who accuse him of being part of a hoax, and while I’m not immune to the joys of a conspiracy theory, I find it hard to understand the pleasure some people take in believing that the moon walk never happened. Nevertheless, the not-quite-real walk, the walk that doesn’t quite take place, that takes place largely or solely in the imagination, that contains an element of fantasy or fraud, is a curious phenomenon and more common than you’d suppose.

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In September 1954, Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and then his Minister for Armaments, made up his mind to walk from Berlin to Heidelberg, a distance of 620 kilometers. Since he was incarcerated in Spandau prison at the time, and was to remain there until 1966, his walk had to be an entirely theoretical and imaginary one.

He paced out a circular course of 270 meters in the prison garden, which he had designed, and began a journey that would require him to make just over 2,296 circuits of that course. He set himself the task of walking seven kilometers seven times a week. If he fell behind one day he’d try to make it up the next, and he kept detailed, some would say obsessive, records of his walking, noting the distances covered, along with daily and overall averages. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s deputy in the Nazi party, also an inmate of Spandau, helped him keep count.

Speer completed his ‘journey’ to Heidelberg on March 19, 1955, his fiftieth birthday. He then decided he might as well continue and make another imaginary walking trip, this time to Munich and beyond. Again Hess tried to be helpful and suggested he could walk all the way to Asia, though Speer fretted that almost any route he might take would involve having to walk through some dreaded communist countries.

According to Speer’s diary, he and Hess had some discussions about whether or not this sort of walking was inherently sane. Speer at first claimed it wasn’t and writes, ‘I insisted on my claim to have a screw loose’, an odd thing to insist on unless he thought that incipient insanity might speed up his release. Hess, however, was having none of it. ‘That just happens to be your pastime’, he said, quite reasonably, and this is surely one of the very rarest moments in history when one sides with Hess rather than Speer.

By September 18, 1956, Speer had come round to Hess’s point of view and was able to record, ‘I have walked 3326 kilometres — counting the winter that makes a daily average of 9.1 kilometres. As long as I continue my tramping, I shall remain on an even keel’.

A perfect walk is certainly one that keeps you on an even keel, and Speer, for all his claims to have a screw loose, wasn’t perpetrating any deception about where and when he was walking. He was telling no lies, and the fact is, a single lie may be all that’s required to utterly destroy a walker’s reputation and credibility.

Ffyona Campbell was a British walker (she now describes herself as a retired pedestrian) who first came to public attention in 1983, at the age of sixteen, when she walked the 875 miles from John o’ Groat’s in the North of Scotland to Land’s End in Cornwall.

This was to become the first phase of a round-the-world walk that would take eleven years and cover 20,000 miles. She crossed America east to west. She crossed Australia, from Sydney to Perth, in ninety-five days, faster than any man had ever done it. She walked from Cape Town to Tangiers, about 10,000 miles, in a little over two years. And then she walked through Europe, from Algeciras in Spain back to London to complete the trip. If you find yourself asking how a round-the-world trip can entirely avoid Asia, I share your puzzlement.

I lived in England throughout this period and I don’t remember Campbell being exactly front-page news, though those of us who took notice of these things were well aware of her two travel books, Feet of Clay (1991) and On Foot Through Africa (1994).

However, I do remember, in 1996, when she published a third book called The Whole Story, that all hell broke loose and she became tabloid fodder. Being a good-looking blonde was both a blessing and a curse for her, being by all accounts a thoroughly difficult and unsympathetic character made her toast.

This third book was a confession. She could no longer live a lie, she said. She revealed that early in her walking career, while she was on the American part of her journey, at age eighteen, she became pregnant by a member of her support team, a driver named Brian Noel, whom she was regularly ‘bonking’ (her word). Being pregnant slowed her down. She could no longer complete the grueling daily requirements to keep on schedule. She had commitments to a sponsor, Campbell’s soup (no relation), that was organizing events at stops along the way.

So, by her own account, Ffyona Campbell rode in the truck with Noel for about a thousand miles of the journey, appearing on foot only at the beginning and end of the day when people were looking. The fact that she was able to get away with this certainly suggests that the American media spotlight wasn’t trained on her with any great brightness.

Later she terminated the pregnancy and continued walking around the world. Only after she’d walked another 16,000 miles or so did the guilt really hit her. By her own account she became a depressive and a user of heroin. Then she tried to exorcise her guilt by telling all.

The scorn and contempt poured upon her by the English press in the wake of her confession was staggering. The London Evening Standard called her ‘a self-serving ninny’, which was the least of it. Campbell seems to have been surprised — I can’t think why. To be conned is one thing; to have the confidence trickster then turn around and point out how gullible you are is simply unbearable. Revenge is called for. And naturally, once someone tells you they were lying about a certain part of their story, there’s no reason to believe they are telling the truth about any of the rest. That record-breaking Australian walk suddenly starts to look suspect. Perhaps the confession itself is just another deception. Maybe Campbell really is a great walker, who told one lie and later suffered and made up for it. But by what means can we now tell whether or not that’s the case?

The great contemporary British explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes once called Campbell ‘the greatest walker of them all’. I wonder what he calls her now. I also suspect that even at the time he was being uncommonly generous, since by Fiennes’s standards very few people in the world are real walkers at all. Fiennes was the first man to cross the whole of Antarctica on foot, and in 2000 he attempted, and failed, to do a solo walk to the North Pole, losing his fingertips as a result. He cut them off himself because he was impatient with the doctors who were treating him.

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Campbell’s title On Foot Through Africa echoes, accidentally I think, that of a memoir written by James Augustus Grant, a Victorian explorer of equatorial Africa, and sometime companion of John Speke in his search for the source of the White Nile. Grant called his book, published in 1864, A Walk Across Africa, but in fact he by no means walked all the way across. For five months he had an excruciating condition in his right leg, what is now thought to have been Buruli ulcer, that caused abscesses, pain, swelling, and foul discharge. He could barely straighten his leg, much less walk.

Eventually he was carried on a stretcher from the kingdom of Karague in Abyssinia to Uganda, where he was to meet up with Speke. Grant recounts that the stretcher bearers, members of the Waganda tribe, conveyed him at shoulder height, at six miles an hour, ‘jostling and paining my limb unmercifully’.

Speke himself was no more merciful when Grant joined him. He was about to set off into the Ugandan interior and wanted to know if Grant was capable of making a ‘flying march’ of twenty miles a day. Grant knew he wasn’t, and Speke knew it, too. Speke traveled without him and therefore didn’t have to share the glory of being the first white man ever to see the source of the White Nile.

The title of Grant’s book may then seem at best an exaggeration, but given that Grant himself is the one who reveals the fact of his incapacity it would be churlish to object, especially since it was inspired by Lord Palmerston, who greeted Grant on his return from Africa with the words ‘You have had a long walk’. Call it poetic license.

It certainly seems more forgivable than the conduct of Mao Zedong during the Long March of 1934–1935. As 90,000 Red Army troops retreated north from Jiangxi to Shanxi province, dwindling by 90 percent along the way, Mao was one of only two people who did no marching, or walking, whatsoever. (The other was Otto Braun, a Prussian advisor, and an ideological opponent of Mao.) According to Dick Wilson’s The Long March, Mao:

‘would never march, and either rode a horse along the route or else, if it were a long stretch, would be carried on a wooden litter by four carriers’.

The Long March remains one of the great national myths of China. Writing in late 1935, Mao declared, ‘The Long March is the first of its kind. It is a manifesto, a propaganda force, a seeding machine’. Well, only up to a point.

It wasn’t until 2002 that anyone tried to repeat the exercise. In that year two Englishmen, Ed Jocelyn and Andy McEwan, retraced the steps of the Long March, and although their, and apparently everyone else’s, knowledge of the route depended on educated guesswork, they calculated that the march was some 4,000 kilometers shorter than had generally been claimed. The Long March is said to have been 10,000 kilometers long (a nice round figure), but Jocelyn and McEwan only clocked 6,000. They covered the route in 370 days — the Red Army took 384.

The two Englishmen were not iconoclasts, and they didn’t set out to disprove or debunk the myth. Nevertheless, they’ve been denounced by Chinese officials. Gao Zhiyin, a spokesman for the Yan’an Foreign Affairs Department, is quoted as saying, ‘Can they change history? The whole world acknowledges these facts’. That’s all right then. Print the legend.

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Which brings me to one of the world’s most enigmatic (and let’s face it, perfectly silly) walkers, an English playboy, womanizer, and gambler named Harry Bensley. The story, and it comes in several versions, is that on January 1, 1908, Bensley set off from Trafalgar Square in London wearing a four-and-a-half-pound iron mask in order to test whether or not a man could walk around the world without being ‘identified’. One version has John Pierpont Morgan and Lord Lonsdale debating the matter at the London Sporting Club, which was briefly the name of a boxing venue in Manhattan, though there were surely other places with the same name. Lonsdale said it could be done — Morgan said it couldn’t. Bensley overheard the debate, and being a sporting man, offered to demonstrate that it could. He stood to win £21,000 of Morgan’s money if he succeeded. Another version has Bensley in enormous debt to the two men and being forced to do the walk as a forfeit.

There are problems with both these versions, and either way the whole proposition is surely an absurd one, and not much of a bet, since the matter of identification depends so largely on who the man is and precisely what parts of the world he walks around. But the real issue is the wearing of the mask, which seems to be a cheat in a couple of ways. Yes, in one way it prevents the wearer’s being recognized, but in another way it doesn’t. After a while people might well see him walking down the street and say, ‘There goes that guy in the iron mask’, which is surely a sort of recognition. More crucially it means nobody could ever be certain it was actually Bensley inside the mask and doing the walking. Perhaps this was his intention.

But even assuming there was a bet to be made, would anyone, however sporting, really be inclined to give up several years of his life to travel around the world wearing a mask, even for that amount of money? If Bensley was doing it as a forfeit, that makes Morgan and Lonsdale a couple of very creepy guys indeed. Both versions do, of course, suggest that Bensley might have been thoroughly broke.

The conditions laid down for the walk were extremely strict and occasionally bizarre, and could be read in a pamphlet that Bensley sold while traveling in order to finance himself. They included details of how he was to dress, how much money he was allowed to spend (very little, although if he was broke this wouldn’t have been much of an issue). He was to push a baby carriage in front of him, not a particularly onerous condition since he could carry his belongings in it, but far more problematically he had to find himself a wife en route, one who had never seen his face.

The conditions also dictated the route. It was an interesting version of ‘the world’. Bensley was to visit over 150 towns in Britain, fifty or so in continental Europe, three in Canada, eight in the United States, four in the whole of South America, eight in South Africa, six in Egypt (though none in the rest of Africa), and a handful each in India, China, Australia, and New Zealand. It was precisely the sort of route a son of the British Empire might take. Whether Bensley actually took it is anybody’s guess.

He surely did go to some of the places dictated. A number of postcards were made depicting the iron-masked walker, and messages on the backs of the surviving ones indicate that Bensley covered at least some parts of England. Legend has it that he was arrested in Bexleyheath, in Kent, for selling his postcards without a license, and that he once sold one to King Edward VII for the staggering sum of five pounds. I find it hard to believe any king of England would pay one of his subjects so much for so little, but it’s a story that does him credit.

Whether Bensley went abroad is more doubtful. The final part of the legend has him in Genoa at the outbreak of the First World War, at which point he abandons the frivolous business of walking and enlists in the British army, to be invalided out a year later. In another version the start of hostilities moves Morgan to call off the bet, although since Morgan had died in 1913 this is a variant we can reasonably discount.

I suspect that Bensley wasn’t much of a walker, and certainly didn’t walk around very much of the world. Rather, he was a sort of showman and self-made fairground attraction, who had probably never set eyes on Morgan or Lonsdale. He’d turn up at gatherings around England on high days and holidays and make a spectacle of himself, be the center of attention, sell some postcards and pamphlets, then go on his way. The walking, or the claim to be a great walker, was a way of drawing a crowd, part of the shtick, like the baby carriage and the mask. He made a weird and wonderful sight, and sometimes I wonder if the whole exercise wasn’t just a photo opportunity, an excuse to make a zany postcard.

Bensley’s round-the-world walk was, I think, imaginary, and it existed not so much in Bensley’s imagination as in the minds of his public. Yes, Bensley was a sort of fake, a sort of con man, not a true walker, but he could see the appeal of being a great pedestrian, and although money was part of the equation, the invention of the walker in the iron mask must surely have appealed to some private need and fantasy of his. He is surely not a great walker, but he is one of the very greatest nonwalkers. His imaginary walking had a perfection about it that remained unassailed by reality.

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I realize that much of the above makes walkers appear to be a vain, duplicitous, lying bunch. Wasn’t walking, especially walking straight and tall, supposed to be synonymous with honesty and plain dealing? Well, only up to a point. Perhaps all great walks involve the imagination to some extent and contain a nagging element of self-dramatization and self-aggrandizement that may not have much to do with the facts. Perhaps if we’re in search of perfection we need to look for something more local and less ambitious.

I have found one walk that strikes me as perfect and perfectly honest, the more so because it is essentially modest and small scale, and doesn’t make any unnecessarily large claims for itself.

One Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1948, George de Mestral took a life-changing walk in the mountains of his native Switzerland. De Mestral was an inventor by trade and an enthusiastic weekend hiker. He and his dog walked all the time, and as they set off that day he had no reason to believe that this walk would be different from any of the others, and in truth the walk itself was unexceptional enough.

The walk took him through brush and undergrowth, and when he got home he began the tedious process of removing the cockleburs that had attached themselves to his clothes and his dog’s coat. Again, this was a common experience — it happened every time he walked. This time, however, as he picked off the burs he found himself wondering, as he’d never wondered before, just why they stuck so firmly.

He took one of the cockleburs to his study, put it under a microscope, and made the discovery that changed his and, to a strictly limited extent, all our lives. He saw that the burs had hooks on them, and these hooks attached themselves to the fibers of his clothes and to the coat of his dog. He thought there must be some practical application for such a hook-and-loop system. There was. George de Mestral had made the discovery that enabled him to invent Velcro. The rest is social history.

De Mestral’s walk has a modest perfection about it. Something local and quotidian becomes the source for something ubiquitous, if not, in the more grandiose sense, universal. It’s the simple domesticity that’s so appealing. Almost none of us will ever know what it’s like to walk on the moon or the North Pole. We won’t walk around the world or across continents, we won’t complete a 10,000- or even a 6,000-kilometer march. But most of us can imagine, and aspire to, a short walk in familiar territory that might provide us with our great idea, our great moment of inspiration.

And for a writer that’s especially alluring. We know that when William Wordsworth was in the throes of composition he would stride up and down the garden path outside his home in Grasmere — walking and writing had for him become synonymous. And I do believe that there’s some fundamental connection between walking and writing. In the broadest sense I’ve always found walking to be inspiring. When I need to solve a problem that’s arisen in something I’m writing, to work out a plot point, to decide what character A might say or do if she found herself in a room with character Z, then going for a walk will usually clarify matters. The pace of words is the pace of walking, and the pace of walking is also the pace of thought.

Both walking and writing are simple, common activities. You put one foot in front of the other — you put one word in front of another. What could be more basic than a single step, more basic than a single word? Yet if you connect enough of these basic building blocks, enough steps, enough words, you may find that you’ve done something special. The thousand-mile journey starts with the single step — the million-word manuscript starts with a single syllable.

With writing as with walking you often find that you’re not heading exactly where you thought you wanted to go. There’ll be missteps and stumbles, journeys into dead ends, the reluctant retracing of your steps. And you have to tell yourself that’s just fine, that it’s a necessary, and not wholly unenjoyable, part of the process. It’s an exploration.

Even the most determined and committed walker finds that there are certain walks he always intends to take yet never quite does. For instance, I have always meant to walk the length of the River Thames in London, crossing from one side to the other each time I encounter a bridge. In New York, I fully intend to walk the entire length of Broadway, but have never quite got around to it. A walk along the Great Wall of China remains an ambition, and not an unrealizable one. None of these is a particularly original or unusual walk — they have all been done many times by others. But that shouldn’t be a reason for me not to do them. And I tell myself there’s plenty of time. I have plenty of years ahead of me, perhaps I will do these walks after all. Still, it is one of the intimations of mortality to realize that we only have a certain number of walking miles in us. There are walks we simply won’t make. We’re guaranteed to end our walking days with certain routes and paths still untrodden.

For now I continue to walk constantly, mostly in Los Angeles because that’s where I live most of the time, but I also walk wherever else I am. Walking continues to be a great pleasure. It also continues to be a form of self-medication. It stops me from getting depressed. It keeps me more or less healthy, more or less sane. It helps me to write.

And so far I’ve managed to remain upright as I walk. Like anyone else I’ve occasionally tripped or slipped, lost my footing for a moment here and there, but so far I haven’t fallen down again, not since that day when I was walking in the Hollywood Hills and broke my arm in three places. This is a small achievement but a real and welcome one.

Walking is not a risk-free activity, and we probably don’t want it to be. We may fall down along the way. Something may get broken. People get lost, people walk into oblivion, some willingly, some not. Some return to tell lies about where they’ve been and what they’ve done — they create myths for themselves and others. This may not be strictly a good thing, but it’s hard to see how it can be prevented. For many of us the perfect walk may simply be the one that we come back from in one piece. For a writer the perfect walk may simply be one he can write about.

Perhaps also, in both writing and walking, each word, each step takes you a little nearer to the end of things, to the last sentence, the last walk. Sooner or later everybody takes their last step. However, because walking is able to make us healthier, happier, slightly fitter, certain steps in fact take us just a little further away from the end, at least for a while.