The Lost Art of Walking

7. Some Desert Walkers, Walking in and Out of Nature, With and Without God

I don’t know much about gods, but it seems that they like their believers to do a lot of walking, metaphoric and literal. A lot of people are keen to walk with God — a lot of people insist that they already do.

In A.D. 341, St. Anthony, an Anchorite, one of the Desert Fathers, sometimes known as St. Anthony of the Desert, then age ninety, had a vision that told him Paul the Hermit, the very first Desert Father, was ‘nearby’, living in a cave in a different part of the Egyptian desert. Prayer walking was part of the Desert Fathers’ creed. They walked as they prayed, prayed as they walked. Anthony set out on foot to find Paul, although he had no idea where he was. According to St. Jerome, who is the only source for these events, a visionary centaur appeared to Anthony and pointed him in the right direction. After walking through the desert for three days he found Paul the Hermit, age 113, weak and close to death.

The two saints spent the night in prayer and the next morning, knowing he was about to die, Paul asked Anthony to walk back to the monastery from which he’d come to pick up a robe that had belonged to Athanasius the Great and bring it back. Paul wanted to be buried in the robe.

Anthony did what was asked of him, walked for three days back to his monastery, picked up the robe, and began the journey back to Paul’s cave. On the third day of this walk, i.e., his ninth consecutive day of desert walking, Anthony had a vision of angels and prophets ascending to heaven with Paul the Hermit among them, a clear sign that Paul was already dead. And so it proved.

Finding Paul’s dead body in the desert cave, Anthony wrapped it in the holy robe as preparation for burial, but then found he was too weak to dig the grave. Two lions came running out of the desert, knelt beside the body of Paul the Hermit, roared in lamentation, then dug a grave with their paws before disappearing into the desert again.

It’s strange what you find yourself seeing when you’re ninety years old and have been walking in the desert for nine consecutive days.

I was in the Mojave Desert, in Death Valley, in early November. I was there to do some walking, and I’d gone to the general store in Furnace Creek, bought some supplies, and was sitting on a bench outside the store drinking a soda before setting off again.

One of the guys who worked there, a large, heavy, slow-moving man, walked by and said to me, ‘So, where you from?’

I said, ‘L.A.’

‘L.A.’, he repeated. ‘So how do you like walking in my desert? I bet you think it’s all a big nothing’.

Few things could have been further from what I actually thought about the desert, which I wasn’t much inclined to think of as ‘his’ or anyone else’s, but in an attempt to keep things simple I said, ‘I love the desert’.

The man grunted and softened a little, and told me that he was originally from the L.A. area, specifically Pasadena. Then he said, ‘If you walk on concrete for too long you start to think like a predator’.

I thought this was a great line, but then he added, ‘‘Cause everybody wants something from you’, which I thought rather spoiled the effect.

The less simple thing I might have said to him was, first, that I don’t think the desert is a big nothing at all, I actually think it’s a beautiful, intense, profoundly moving ‘something’, and then I’d have said that although by far the majority of my walking has been done in cities, and continues to be, I’ve also walked in a lot of places that are not cities. I’ve done my time walking in the great outdoors (not that cities are ‘indoors’ exactly), in forests, woodlands, wetlands, seashores, hills, even mountains so long as they were the walkable rather than the climbable variety, but it’s only in the desert that I’ve ever found anything that came close to giving a spiritual dimension to my walking, whereas others seem to find that spiritual dimension just about everywhere they look.

I’ve been trying to find where the phrase ‘walking in nature’ came from. I’m guessing its first use must have been an ancient one, and in itself it’s a perfectly harmless form of words. However, all too often it gets hijacked by what I might as well call New Agers. A quick browse among New Age walking sources will soon have you screaming for mercy as you’re told that nature is an unalloyed source of goodness, purity, benign intention, spiritual insight, higher consciousness, and (oh spare me) healing.

Here’s someone named Linda Leonard on the website livinglifefully.com:

‘I find nature so nourishing. I love to hike, especially in the mountains. When I’m walking in nature, I feel in awe of the wonder of creation. Nature is full of surprises, always changing, and we must change with it. In nature, the soul is renewed and called to open and grow’.

Here’s a blog entry from Stephen Altschuler, who calls himself the Mindful Hiker, which is also the title of a book he wrote:

‘Walking is not anything separate from life’, he bleats. ‘It is integral to life, especially walking in nature. Yesterday, I encountered a rattlesnake on the trail — came quite close to it — and I marveled at its wildness, the ferocity of its rattle as I almost stepped on it’.

Altschuler may not be the very worst of the New Age desert explorer he made himself out to be, but his observations certainly ring true. He writes:

‘And yet in the fullness of time Nature designs that this waste and all of earth with it shall perish. Individual, type, and species, all shall pass away — and the globe itself become as desert sand blown hither and yon through space. She cares nothing for the individual man or bird or beast; can it be thought that she cares any more for the individual world?’

Is that a religious thought or an antireligious thought? Is it some notion of being at one? It’s pretty much my version of nature that he’s describing: rough, scary, utterly indifferent. In the face of this, a walk seems like exactly what it is: something but not much, certainly not a means of salvation. It may be pleasurable and worth doing, it may stop you getting depressed, but in the end it’s just a walk. Why would you want it to be more?

I was born and brought up in England, so it was a long time before I ever set foot in a desert, though I was familiar with the concept. I’d seen it on-screen: in Road Runner cartoons, in cowboy movies, in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill’, in any number of cheap science fiction movies, and in a few very expensive ones. The initial appeal was primarily visual. The desert appears in so many movies because it looks so good.

On the other hand, it never looked like a place you could actually go walking. It seemed too mythic, too otherworldly for that. When I eventually discovered you could drive a car out into the American desert, park at the side of a dirt road, and walk off into the distance, that was quite a moment, quite a realization, and I’ve been doing it ever since.

I know that some people find the desert frightening: all that space, all that isolation, all the terrible things that can happen to you. And of course I realize that terrible things really can and do happen out there, from dying of thirst to falling and breaking something to encountering Mansonite cults, but that’s part of what I like about it. Charles Manson at his trial: ‘I am the biggest beast walking the face of the earth’. Charles Manson at his 1992 parole hearing: ‘But there’s a line that man walks. All men walk a line. And I walk that line in prison’.

You have to be on your mettle when you’re walking in the desert, you have to take charge of yourself, you have to know what you’re doing. And to an extent the desert helps you. It sharpens up the senses, makes you more aware and more self-aware. I’ve never felt lonely in the desert.

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I’ve only been really lost in the desert once and, of course, once might have been more than enough. Ultimately it lacked drama because I lived, and because it was brief, certainly no more than a couple of hours, but it was a long couple of hours, and for all I knew they could have been the first of my last hours.

It was in Western Australia, about twenty-two miles outside the mining town of Kalgoorlie. I was with my then girlfriend and we’d just picked up a Land Cruiser in which we planned to do some not-too-serious off-roading and some walking. But that was ahead of us. On that afternoon in question we were making a minor foray into the desert, to get the lay of the land and the feel of the vehicle.

We drove out to a ghost town called Kanowna, which even by ghost town standards was a big nothing. There really was nothing worth seeing. There had once been twelve thousand people living there, along with their churches, hotels, breweries, and railway station, but there was no sign of any of these now, and although a few signposts had been put up indicating where a post office and courthouse had once been, they weren’t marking anything other than a few bits of rubble and piles of ancient tin cans.

Disappointed, we left the Land Cruiser and walked around. We didn’t bother to take water or even sun hats with us. There seemed to be no need. We weren’t even doing anything so definite as ‘going for a walk’. We were just wandering about. We investigated some old tailings dumps, peered into a lethal-looking open mine shaft. If we went more than a mile I’d be surprised.

Before long we decided to head back to the Land Cruiser. After we’d walked for a while in what we felt sure was the direction of the vehicle, we realized we were mistaken. We didn’t arrive at the vehicle. In fact, now that we looked around us more critically, we realized the Land Cruiser was nowhere to be seen. That didn’t seem right; it scarcely seemed possible. We set off in another likely-looking direction, and that didn’t take us to the Land Cruiser either. Above all, it seemed plain odd and incomprehensible, but it was frightening, too, and we realized it was perfectly possible that both our attempts to get back to the vehicle might in reality have taken us farther away.

We felt like idiots. If we’d been heading out to do some serious desert walking we’d have done all the right things: studied maps, carried a good supply of water, brought a compass. As it was, we had nothing.

It seemed absurd that we could get lost in territory like this. It was a tame, flat, unexceptional, unthreatening bit of desert, but that was a large part of the problem. It was a landscape without landmarks, and certainly without any high place you might climb up to in order to get your bearings. This terrain was featureless, with every bush and rock looking very much like every other bush and rock. Then we noticed a lot of stripped animal bones lying on the ground, and we saw a skull, the kind you see in cartoons that opens its jaw and says, ‘You’ll be sorry’. We realized just how bad and serious our situation was.

To cut a short story even shorter, we did, of course, eventually find our way back to the Land Cruiser. It had everything to do with good luck and nothing at all to do with good judgment, and I know that the story might very easily have turned out quite differently and that I’d be in no position to write it. Perhaps we didn’t altogether deserve to survive.

We wandered aimlessly for what seemed an age, but which, as I said, was only a couple of hours, and suddenly we spotted the open mine shaft we’d seen before. From there we were able to find our way back to the Land Cruiser. In some ways it was an anticlimax, though not an unwelcome one. It taught me that simply walking off into the desert is a very stupid thing to do, but perhaps that’s something I shouldn’t have needed to learn. Walking lost in the desert was an entirely unspiritual experience. It did not make me feel at one with anything, least of all nature.

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In retrospect I realize what I should have done was to choose a spot on the ground, any spot, and walk a spiral course moving outward in ever-expanding circles. That way I would inevitably have come to the Land Cruiser sooner or later.

If you had been watching this from the air you might possibly have thought that I was performing a labyrinth walk, the most ancient form of spiritual walking, and the New Agers have naturally picked up on it. Labyrinth walking has figured in rituals and religions from Iceland to Sri Lanka, from Tunisia to Sumatra, from India to Brazil.

In common parlance the words maze and labyrinth tend to be interchangeable — however, there’s a significant difference. Whereas a maze contains multiple paths and dead ends, and therefore many opportunities for getting lost, the labyrinth contains just one path. By taking it you inevitably get to the center. In a maze you encounter high walls or hedges that conceal the path and the pattern. Labyrinths generally have no walls, no concealment. They’re marked out on the ground in two dimensions, in earth, sand, or tile. If you chose, you could walk straight across to the center, avoiding the marked path completely, although naturally this is frowned upon by serious labyrinth walkers. Walking around a maze is a form of puzzle solving — walking around a labyrinth is a spiritual exercise. The notion that there’s only one true path is of course attractive to believers. You cannot get lost in a true labyrinth.

Virginia Westbury, author of Labyrinths: Ancient Paths of Wisdom and Peace, asked the many labyrinth walkers she encountered what they thought labyrinths were ‘for’. The replies she got included ‘meditation, celebration, spiritual connection, talking to God, talking to spirits, self-exploration, healing, sensing ‘energy’ wisdom, worship, divination, inner peace, forgiveness, transformation and communicating with others’. Is there nothing a labyrinth can’t do?

There are Christian labyrinths inside the French cathedrals of Chartres, Reims, and Amiens. The one at Chartres is the oldest, dating from the early thirteenth century. These are pavement labyrinths, set into the cathedral floors, and the original symbolic intentions have largely been lost. It seems they may have been as much concerned with seasonal rituals as with prayer walking, but we do know that in the eighteenth century pilgrims would walk around these labyrinths on bended knee while praying, as a penance.

There are currently a number of prisons in the United States that have installed labyrinths in their exercise yards. A few years ago the authorities at Monterey County Jail in Salinas, California, spent three thousand dollars on a portable version, a purple labyrinth painted on canvas, ninety feet across. It was unrolled from time to time and prisoners walked its path.

Prisoners reported feeling calm and at peace having walked it, though Cynthia Montague, one of the jail’s chaplains, reckoned its chief function was metaphoric. The labyrinth walk was about getting and staying on track, returning to the narrow if not the straight. Montague said, ‘If you accidentally step off the path and go onto a different part of the path, you might find yourself heading back out. But you’re allowed to start over again and keep at it’.

The most famous of all labyrinth walkers must surely be Theseus, who walked into the labyrinth in Crete to slay the minotaur. In order to avoid getting lost he used Ariadne’s ball of golden thread to trace his steps. This means, of course, that he was actually in a maze rather than a true labyrinth.

Instead of a golden thread, Hansel and Gretel tried leaving a trail of bread crumbs to stop themselves from getting lost, although you could argue that they were not so much lost as abandoned by their father. And in fact they did perform considerable walking feats. The Grimms’ fairy tale has them dumped in the middle of the forest and then ‘walking all day and all night’ to get home.

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The Death Valley ‘49^ers, of 1849, the desert’s most famous lost pioneers, had neither golden thread nor bread crumbs, but they did have a map promising a shortcut through the desert, via the Walker Pass, taking five hundred miles off their journey from Salt Lake City to California, where the Gold Rush was in full swing. The phrase ‘I know a shortcut’ should strike fear in the heart of any serious walker.

The ‘49^ers started out as part of an expedition led by Captain Jefferson Hunt, under the auspices of the Mojave San Joaquin Company, known as the Mojave Sand Walking Company, a name that gives me pleasure every time I think of it, although this started out as a wagon train rather than a walking expedition.

Hunt’s progress was too slow for some, and there were various splits and regroupings, some temporary and some permanent, before a faction known as the Bennett-Arcane party, following the dubious shortcut map, at last found themselves lost, stranded, exhausted, and helpless in the heart of what is now Death Valley.

Two of the younger, fitter men — William Manly and John Rogers — decided they would simply walk out of the valley on foot, cross the Panamint Range, get help, and return to rescue the survivors, if any. This, incredibly, they did, although Manley confessed in print that it had crossed his mind never to return for the others.

In any case, Manly and Rogers did the right thing. They walked 250 miles from Death Valley to the San Fernando Valley, where they obtained supplies, along with two horses and a mule. They were intending to ride at least part of the way back, but both horses died en route, so it turned into another walking expedition. Once they’d saved the people left behind, they all had to walk the route once again.

Manly eventually wrote his account of events in a book titled Death Valley in ‘49. It is the story of his life as well as the story of the 49^ers, and parts of it read like a primer on the pains of walking and adverse walking conditions. He writes:

‘Walking began to get pretty tiresome. Great blisters would come on our feet, and, tender as they were, it was a great relief to take off our boots and go barefoot for a while when the ground was favorable’.

‘This valley was very sandy and hard to walk over’.

‘All the way had been hill and very tiresome walking’.

‘At times we walked in the bed of the stream in order to make more headway, but my lameness increased and we had to go very slow indeed.’

Manly’s book makes very little mention of God, or the Almighty’s role in his enforced walking, though he does describe the desert as the ‘most God-forsaken country in the world’. He’s extremely skeptical about ‘God’s purpose’ in imposing the ordeal on him, although others on the expedition take a more high-minded view.

Undoubtedly, walking may be used as a form of divine punishment, as variations on the story of the Wandering Jew indicate. Although he was supposedly present at the crucifixion, the Wandering Jew does not appear in the Bible, and seems to have been an invention of the thirteenth century, though refined and made more widely significant in the seventeenth century thanks to a series of pamphlets published in Germany from 1602 onward.

He goes by many names — Buttadeus, Ahaseurus, and Isaac Lacquedem among them — and is variously a shoemaker or Pontius Pilate’s doorman. What is central to the myth is his mocking of Christ. He sees Jesus carrying the cross and taunts him for walking too slowly. Jesus certainly received worse insults, but on this occasion he did not turn the other cheek. He condemned the Jew to walk the earth until the time of the Second Coming.

There is some resemblance here to Cain, the fratricide, to whom God says, ‘A fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth’. This isn’t quite the same as condemning him to ‘walk the earth’, but a fugitive and a vagabond no doubt ends up doing a good amount of walking.

There’s also a resemblance to Jules Winnfield, played by Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, who says:

‘Basically, I’m just gonna walk the earth. You know, like Caine in Kung Fu — walk from place to place, meet people, get in adventures.’

It must have been such a delight for Tarantino when he was writing the script to invoke the biblical Cain and then immediately ditch him in favor of David Carradine’s TV character.

An Armenian bishop visiting England in 1228 not only asserted that the Wandering Jew was alive and walking, but that he’d met him. This was good news for Christians. To have someone around who had been an eyewitness at the crucifixion proved the historical basis of Christianity. It was also a myth that had its uses for Jews. The Wandering Jew dramatized and personified the diaspora, while also emphasizing the anti-Semitism and downright vindictiveness of certain Christians.

It is also an extremely rich and inventive myth of punishment. The sinner is punished not only by enforced walking but by joyless immortality. He must walk forever but he isn’t going anywhere. There’s no destination, no journey’s end. He is walking with no purpose, just killing time. He must exist in a state of constant fatigue, never experiencing rest, nor even the possibility of rest. He approaches an exhaustion that will never arrive, because if it did, then he would stop walking, and the divine power will not allow that.

Following the sighting by the thirteenth-century bishop, the Wandering Jew was spotted all over Europe throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and at least once in the nineteenth century in the United States. According to Alex Bein in The Jewish Question: Biography of a World Problem, the ‘Desert News reported on Sept. 23, 1868, that he had visited a Mormon named O’Grady’. How and why the Wandering Jew traveled to the United States must remain a question for speculation, but if he came by boat he must surely have spent the entire voyage walking around the deck. Perhaps he is walking still.

An Italian folktale, known as ‘Malchus at the Column’, is a variant on the story of the Wandering Jew, and devises an even worse and more inventive punishment. Malchus, by this legend, was one of the Jews responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus, and although all the others were forgiven, Malchus remained unforgivable because he’d physically struck the Virgin Mary. Consequently, he was confined inside a mountain, and forced to walk endlessly around a column until the end of the world.

As the story ‘opens’ Malchus has been walking in circles for so long that his footsteps have dug a deep circular trench in the earth and only his head appears above ground. When the path is trodden lower still and his head finally disappears, the world will come to an end and he will be sent to a place that God has prepared for him. I can’t decide whether this would be an incentive to walk more quickly or more slowly.

These stories seem to involve a myth more ancient than Christianity, more the stuff of Sisyphus or Tantalus, but the notion of a punishment without limit or motion, without hope of rest, is truly horrifying. We do want our walking to take us somehere: we want it to have an end.

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Non-Christian gods and non-Christian believers can also be passionately concerned with walking. Taoism, for example, employs various walking meditations that function as exercise, as spiritual practice, and ultimately as martial arts. The best known is Baguazhang, which is based on the I Ching and essentially involves walking in circles, sometimes known as ‘Turning the Circle’. The technique is four thousand years old and is based on the Taoist principle of seeking stillness in motion. It’s a way of walking that doesn’t in the practical sense take you anywhere, although as a martial art it does enable the initiate to walk in such a way that he can defend himself against attackers coming at him from eight different directions.

It was a Taoist, a Chinese woman named Guo Lin, who, in the middle of the twentieth century, developed a series of spiritual exercises known as Walking Qigong or Guolin Qigong. Qigong is the ancient Chinese art of balancing and strengthening the ‘life force’. Walking was her version of it, and she used it as a cure for cancer.

Guo Lin had had several bouts of cancer over more than a decade, along with the operations to ‘cure’ her, but finally in 1964 doctors declared that the cancer had won, and Guo Lin was given six months to live. Being full of fight and perhaps thinking she had nothing to lose, by relying on instinct and trial and error, and consulting some texts that had been left to her by her grandfather, a Taoist monk, she developed a method that worked for her. There were bending and stretching exercises, the control of breathing, the massaging of acupressure points, but the cornerstone was walking for two hours per day. At the end of her allotted six months the cancer had gone.

By the 1970^s Guo Lin was a living, walking legend, traveling around China spreading the word, teaching her technique to classes that sometimes contained four hundred eager learners. She continued in this way, revered and idolized, until her death in 1984.

There has so far been no large-scale scientific investigation of Guolin Qigong either inside or outside China. However, the anecdotal evidence is sufficiently impressive that millions of people, by no means all of them in China, practice it every day to prevent cancer.

Posited explanations for how or why Guo Lin’s method works are unlikely to convince nonbelievers. One theory is that it simply increases oxygen supply, and this kills cancer cells. If only.

Another suggestion is that it is balancing the yin and the yang, which is, of course, what all Chinese medicine professes to do. Still, if you had cancer and were able to exercise and walk for two hours a day (by no means a given), why wouldn’t you try it? Nowhere can I find any evidence that Taoism ever uses walking as a punishment.

Walking meditations are also employed in Buddhist practice, sometimes called meditation in action. Walking is one of the four asanas, or postures, in which the Buddha is depicted. A practicing Buddhist I know says he finds walking meditation much easier than sitting meditation because the mind doesn’t drift as much when you walk. Walking forces concentration. You become aware of your body, your breathing, the sun, the air, and so on and this all helps to create — he tells me — Mindfulness.

He also tells me that the Buddha encouraged something called the Development of Lovingkindness meditation. While walking, whether in the town or the countryside, in or out of nature, ancient Buddhists would try to exude benevolence. In the towns this went out to their fellow man — in the countryside it went out to wild animals and was considered a very good way to avoid being attacked by snakes.

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And so we come to Islam, the only religion I’m aware of that insists its adherents must undertake an arduous walk in the desert. All Muslims are implored to make a journey to Mecca, to participate in the hadj. These pilgrims are not required to walk all the way there (though a few do), but they have to do some walking when they arrive.

Among other rituals, they are required to follow in the footsteps of Muhammad, walking seven times around the Kaaba, the cube-shaped shrine in the center of the Great Mosque in Mecca. The first three circuits are to be taken quickly, the last four slowly, because that’s the way Muhammad circled it. And as they walk, the pilgrims must try to touch the sacred Black Stone, part of the Kaaba, on each circuit.

There is currently a quota system in place: only two million Muslims per year are allowed to make the visit at hadj — many more would do so if they could — but that still represents a staggering number of people crammed into the Great Mosque for these religious circumambulations. It sounds like a recipe for pedestrian chaos rather than spiritual harmony, and film of pilgrims at the Kaaba shows a great seething slow-moving mass, but for obvious reasons I have no personal experience of it.

Someone who did was the English explorer Sir Richard Burton, who visited in 1853, in disguise, and went to elaborate lengths to measure the dimensions of the Kaaba, spending a good many hours walking with the rest of the pilgrims. There was much cursing and pushing, he reports, especially when he monopolized the Black Stone in order to see what it was made of (aerolite, he thought). At last he emerged ‘thoroughly worn out with scorched feet and a burning head — both extremities, it must be remembered, were bare’.

Burton also tells us, ‘Many pilgrims refuse to enter the Ka’aba for religious reasons. Those who tread the hallowed floor are bound never again to walk barefooted’. Is that a religious reason? He was also surprised to find that the Muslim circumambulations went counterclockwise. As an old India hand he was more familiar with the Hindu Pradakshina, the clockwise circular walking performed in Hindu temples around the sanctum sanctorum.

Ziauddin Sardar, a contemporary Muslim academic and journalist, who has completed hadj five times, reports that things have got worse rather than better since Burton’s time. When pilgrims arrive at the Great Mosque, he says, they encounter the mutawwa, the Saudi religious police. To ensure that the walkers keep moving, the mutawwa hit them with long sticks. Sardar writes:

‘Pilgrims performing the tawaf or praying by the Kaaba are constantly hit on the head and asked to move, and not infrequently beaten and ‘shooed’ as though they were cattle.’

He also says that he has witnessed ‘unreported numbers’ of pedestrians on their way to the Great Mosque who suffocate, are crushed underfoot, or die of heat stroke. Personally I find it hard to see the spiritual dimension in this aspect of walking, but then I am, of course, an infidel.

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I used to be a bit of a snob about walking in the desert. I wanted millions of acres of untrodden, untouched, and uninhabited desert. If there was a trail or a ranger station or an information board or if I met another walker, I thought this was a terrible defilement, and that my desert walking experience was being spoiled.

Well, that was precious and stupid of me, and I’ve lightened up a lot, for a number of reasons. First, because I know that there aren’t millions of acres of untrodden, untouched, and uninhabited desert available. Second, because I now realize that trails, ranger stations, and information boards can be helpful, might even in certain circumstances save your life. Third, because if you meet someone walking in the desert they’re likely to be, if not exactly a kindred soul, at least someone with a shared interest. The other part of this equation is that most visitors to the desert aren’t very serious walkers, or walkers at all. They drive, stop their car, walk no more than a few yards, take a couple of photographs, and drive on. If you walk even a couple of hundred yards off the beaten track you can be very alone indeed.

Just as important, I’ve learned the pleasures of the undramatic desert. If you go wandering around some celebrated desert attraction, White Sands or Zabriskie Point or the Grand Canyon, well, of course you’re going to run into crowds of people. But if you go walking in, let’s say, the Big Morongo Canyon Preserve in California, which is only about forty miles from Palm Springs, you’ll certainly find some information, some designated trails, and even a rest room, but on most days you can be pretty sure of being the only person there. A desert walk, I realized, doesn’t have to involve rolling sand dunes, fields of cacti, Joshua trees, breathtaking gorges, rattlesnakes, and so forth. It certainly doesn’t have to involve spiritual enlightenment.

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The desert, naturally, as St. Anthony proved, is a place of mirages, of fata morgana. The desert walker ‘sees’ all manner of things that may or may not be there, figures viewed through a heat haze appearing to move relentlessly toward you but never quite arriving, or large expanses of sparkling, glittering water that turn out to be nothing but sand.

There are, however, one or two places where the water is not a mirage at all. Badwater in Death Valley is one of these. Badwater is a long, wide salt flat that stretches to the distant blue mountains. At 280 feet below sea level it’s the lowest point in the western hemisphere. When I first visited Badwater, a decade and a half ago, you pulled off the road, parked on the dirt, and went wandering across the scorched, salted surface. Some of us did, but not many. Now there’s a big parking lot, so everybody thinks there must be something really worth seeing and masses of people park and walk.

Sometimes, especially in the winter, there’s water on the flat, low desert bed standing perfectly, eerily still, reflecting the mountains and the sky like a mirror. From a distance you can’t possibly guess how deep the water is — it’s easy to imagine it profound and limitless — but in fact large stretches are no more than a couple of inches deep.

In these conditions hundreds of people walk out from the parking lot, drawn into the emptiness, like true believers, like earthlings going out to meet the mother ship. But since there is no mother ship, nothing to believe in, they just go and investigate the water, discover how shallow and smooth it is, then walk a few yards into it and have their friends and family take pictures of them so they look as though they’re walking on water.

Abul Hasan al-Shadhili, a thirteenth-century Sufi master, warned would-be mystics to avoid performing miracles such as walking on water. He regarded it as a distraction and a form of showing off. Of course there is some anti-Christian sentiment at play here, but also the idea that walking on water is a perfectly achievable goal.

And so, at Badwater, hundreds of people appear to go walking on water. It’s playful, good-natured, and as far as I can see, not remotely sacrilegious. Even so, you have to think that it wouldn’t mean nearly as much if we weren’t all familiar with Jesus’ biblical example. I found it impossible to avoid singing Leonard Cohen’s line from his song ‘Suzanne’: ‘Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water’. But obviously this is nonsense. If there was ever a moment when Jesus wasn’t a sailor it was precisely when he walked on the Sea of Galilee — when he was absolutely a pedestrian.

I also found myself thinking about a line from Jack Kerouac, a born Catholic turned self-invented Buddhist, and a man who did his share of walking in nature. He had serious doubts about LSD, chiefly because it seemed to offer an instant religious experience. He thought this was a cheat. He thought religious enlightenment was something you had to work for, that couldn’t be found at the drop of a hat. He summed it up perfectly for me when he said, ‘Walking on water wasn’t built in a day’.