A Walking History

I read The Lost Art of Walking recently, and although it disappointingly shed little insight into the effects walking can and has had on people, it did inspire me to think about and write my own walking history. The author never suggests to do this. He just writes a lot about his own personal experiences of walking and it made me think about my own walking. I believe I've been blessed by the opportunity to walk more than most first-world citizens and would even go so far as to say that much of my story, much of what makes me me can be extracted from my walking stories. You may know me by my walk.

I obviously don't remember my first steps, and as far as I know, they weren't any more special than any other baby's first steps. I don't remember any of the several thousand subsequent steps either or much of anything about America, the country I was born in. I can remember some of the parks near the several houses we lived in all over America, and how I would run behind my older brother with Power Ranger figurines in our hands, heading to the colorful plastic playgrounds so we could make the figurines fight and throw them down the slides. I remember walking across the asphalt in Pennsylvania and across the dust in New Mexico. I can remember walking through the goats' pen to get to our cabin in North Carolina and I can remember a goat named Allison who once got too friendly and knocked me over. I was scared every time I had to pass through that field again, keeping an eye out for those scary creatures, sprinting from the entrance gate to the big tree in the middle, and waiting for the coast to clear before booking it to the exit gate.

I can remember an abrupt change in my walking patterns when I was six years old. No longer did I just walk across the street to the park. I walked everywhere. I say walk, but I was more dragged. I can picture my hand clutched tightly by my mother's protective grasp and pulling me along through the vast crowds, struggling to keep up with my father and the rest of their coworkers as I meandered on my short legs, peering all around me, attentive not to the direction we were headed, but to the strange sights, sounds, and smells all around me. I was now in Russia. You see, my parents decided to become missionaries when I was very young which took them from Pennsylvania where my dad was a pastor to North Carolina for training (at a farm so they could learn how to survive without common American amenities; skills which turned out to be completely unnecessary), and New Mexico for a Russian language course.  

In Russia we walked everywhere in a swarm of other people. Even when we took public transportation, we always had to walk to and from the bus/subway stops. Eventually, as I grew up, my lingering walk formed into the fast-paced, aggressive kind of walk characterized by those who live in big cities. When I was thirteen I moved to Germany to attend an American boarding school. It was there I stopped playing video games in favor of socializing with friends. And inevitably, while in high school I started to like girls and let my emotions run rampant. My go-to escape from all these drastic emotions was a long walk through the beautiful hills and forests of the Black Forest. I also often walked to school since my dorm was a nice 6.3 km (according to a sign that I can still see in my mind) away through the countryside. These walks brought the peace and solitude I needed.

During the summers I would return to live with my parents who had now moved to Kazakhstan. With no friends and no desire to spend all my time sleeping in or surfing the Internet, I went on walks. I never had a plan of where to go, I would just pick a direction and go. I would never go far enough to get lost, usually opting to just go down a certain nearby street as far as I wanted and then turning back. These were ambling walks, just to get out in the fresh mountain air. Sometimes I would pick a random pedestrian and follow them until they reached their destination or out of the area I felt comfortable finding my way back home from.      

When I graduated from high school in Germany I moved back to America, to Michigan where my sister and brother just finished college. Since I didn't have enough money to begin college right away I took two jobs for a little while, though I ended up quitting the one at Meijer because the hours interfered with the other one which paid slightly more. I walked to and from work, the one at Meijer being over three miles away, until my brother moved away and gave me his cheap bike. Being new to the area with few friends and becoming increasingly bored by the mundane jobs and American life, I started hitch-hiking. Most of the time I had a specific destination, but sometimes I would just go. If I had a few days off work I would pick a direction and see how far I could get or go visit my friends in the nearby city of Chicago or their small college in Indiana. Hitch-hiking requires a lot of walking and one of my favorites aspects of hitch-hiking were the long stretches of road when no one would pick me up and I could get lost in my own thoughts, as I put one foot in front of another. At first I just brought a small backpack and a thin blanket and airplane pillow to sleep on, but as the days grew colder and I made more money I upgraded to a hiking backpack, a sleeping bag, and some base-layer bottoms.

As my mini-adventures increased and my patience with my ordinary work lifestyle waned, I began to formulate in my mind something grander, a great escape. I thought of the appeal of the barrenness of Alaska, of the seeming foreignness since it was so far away. Then a movie called Into the Wild came out and I loved it so much that I went to see if five times in the theater, walking the miles to and from the theatre with all kinds of wild fantasies of what I could do. I don't exactly remember how I came to this decision, but I figured that I would either take off for Alaska or join the military. The latter idea won out, probably since it was more practical and easy to execute. It would also be easier telling my parents since it would help pay for the inevitable college years to come.

So then I went to basic training for half a year and hiked around a lot with not only a heavy backpack, but a flak jacket, heavy boots, and a weapon or two. Not exactly ultralight, but I think it did toughen me up some. During our long hikes I rarely fell behind even when guys much bigger and stronger did. It was then I fully realized how much the mind plays a critical role in whether one can succeed or not. I do remember during one particularly long and grueling hike during boot camp I started to fall a little behind. The drill instructors kept yelling at me to keep up and I would sprint to catch up only to slowly fall back and run to catch up again. Then one of the shoulder straps broke on my backpack. Being a small guy, the huge unwieldy backpack was already difficult for my body to bear, but now I had to try to balance the whole thing on one shoulder while awkwardly pulling off some of the weight with my hands slung over my other shoulder. They wouldn't let me stop to fix it. It slipped further and further down, biting into my back. I had to buck forward every few steps to pull it up further. We still had over a mile to hike. Then I exploded. It seemed as if every angry feeling I've ever felt burst forth. Things I didn't know were still in me rushed to escape. Stuff about my parents. Rejection from girls. Things I felt like I was entitled to. All the wrongs done to me. The anger powered me and I no longer was falling back, in fact I was getting mad at the others around me for being too slow. I wanted to be done. I screamed incomprehensibly the rest of the way as images flickered through my maddening mind. The drill instructors stopped bothering me.

During my time at the School of Infantry we got weekends off and although we were supposed to stay in buddy pairs while off base I knew I couldn't truly relax if I went out and did the kinds of things my buddies were doing: wasting money, drinking, and picking up girls. So I went my own way. Sometimes I would watch a movie at the theatre. Sometimes I would take a train to a city far enough away from the military culture. A lot of the time, however, I would walk. I would explore a town and just walk the streets. I wouldn't go into any shops. I'd talk to strangers sometimes. I'd walk along the beach, through the small beach town centers, and even through the residential blocks. I slept on the beach. One weekend I went to a music festival with two other Marines and we met a woman who was in the Air Force. After spending some time with her she told us how she knew we were Marines when she first spotted us just because of the way we walked. She said all Marines walk the same. Almost desperately, to prove something to myself, I asked her if I walked that way and she assured me that I did not. I still maintained my walking identity. They could not break me that far.

Right after basic I devised a grand scheme to hike a section of the Appalachian Trail with one of my best friends from boarding school. The views were spectacular and the time together was great. We were in the south during the summer so all thru-hikers were far north by then. We weren't really prepared. First of all, I brought two weeks worth of food in the form of MREs which severely weighed us down. We didn't get nearly as far as I had hoped so my parents had to drive much farther to pick us up. Halfway through we ended up throwing half our food away in a trashcan we found to lighten our load. We left our bag of trash out in the shelter one evening and a mouse or two had their fill during the night. Some of the steams along the way were dry and one day we had to go most of the day with nothing to drink. One day when we were resting by the side of the trail my friend confessed that I had let him down. When we were in high school I was something of a hero to him. He thought I was strong and when he saw that I had fallen short just after I moved to America, he felt as if there was no way that he could be strong. And so he also fell in the same way. Whether he meant to sound like it or not, it was as if he was placing his guilt on me. It was now mine. Walking together in silence must have made him really think about his emotions, his state of being and he revealed these to me. I can't say for certain, but it is possible that had we not gone on this little walk in the woods, he would have never confessed this. For better or for worse, I'm glad he did. It means something to be real even if it hurts.    

Since I joined the Reserves, I did not have to go to a base after basic, but back to Grand Rapids where I enrolled in community college. I resumed my hitch hiking adventures, going all the way up to Canada through the Upper Peninsula on one occasion. Within five minutes of walking down the interstate, just after crossing back over the border to America, a State Police sheriff pulled over and gave me a ticket. He then drove me over to a different road, the only other road that went south/north all the way back down to the lower Michigan peninsula. It was an old road that everyone used decades ago before the highway was put in. Now it was a barren stretch of concrete, used by the few people with remote homes scattered across the few miles between the highway and the eastern lake coast. I was now stuck, forced to walk the thirty miles with little hope of car-drivers picking me up. What should have taken a half-hour car ride was now going to take at least three days. So I began to walk. And walk. And walk. And walk. And walk some more. All day long I walked until it became dark. Then I slept in a patch of trees jut off the road. The next morning I woke up and began to walk again. Walking all day long, alone, with no distractions really did something to my mind. I had no music with me so I was literally lost in silence all day long for two days. My mind went everywhere. I remember first thinking of the usual stuff, things I wanted to think about. Then I just tried to remember song lyrics and sung them for a few hours. Then I thought of some slightly unusual things. Then my mind seemed to entirely take over and took me places that I would never explore unless in this exact situation. It was as if my mind was a bowl of candy. I first picked through my favorites and ate up all of those. Then I ate all the candies that I didn't really enjoy just because they were the only ones left. Now, having an empty bowl, I went completely bonkers and tried to eat the bowl. I'm not sure I ever truly thought of anything coherent, certainly not memorable. It was really just the outer edges of brilliance or stupidity, and I don't know which. I was grasping at the fringe of certain philosophical concepts, but not really getting anywhere with them. It was like brain detox. And it was only a couple of days! Plenty of ascetics, prisoners, and others have endured much longer in silence and solitude. Still, the time with only my mind was enjoyable, the rare absolute break from distractions for such a prolonged period of time. Toward the end of the second day someone actually picked me up and drove me just over into the lower peninsula to Macinac, where having had enough adventure I found a bench to sleep on and caught a bus in the morning back home.      

After two semesters at the community college I transferred to a four-year college to obtain my bachelor's degree and met the girl who would become my wife. During my time there I found peace in getting away by taking bike rides in lieu of walks. I did, however, become the guy who walked everywhere barefoot: to class, outside on the sidewalks and in the grass, to the cafeteria, through the halls, even to public restrooms. I liked the feel of wearing no socks or shoes. I even went to an interview for the school coffee shop barefoot. I did not get offered the job. I liked to think I was building up strong feet and when I went away for the weekend once every month to train with the Marines I never got any blisters, even when most of my buddies did.

And now I'm married, just finished my six year contract with the Marines and about to walk the Appalachian Trail with my wife.

At the wedding, we were barefoot.