The Pleasure of Walking

As a little kid, I walked the farthest to school any kid was allowed to walk. Everyday it was a mile to school and a mile from school. A lot can happen to an unsupervised kid in a mile, but times were different then. There was a whole neighborhood full of kids, and we all walked together. We bundled up in our snowsuits, boots, scarves, hats, mittens, with our little backpacks and lunches, and that was how we went to school. We never worried about strangers; the worst thing that ever happened to us were the bigger older kids that sometimes followed us home from school. Walking was simply part of our existence, like breathing and ice cream on hot days. It's what we did in the morning. I slept so well then. Kids in general do, but the exercise calmed me as well and I slept like a log.

As I got older, the walks actually got shorter, but I hated the walking more because I had to do the roundtrip twice, once for school, and then again for theater in the evening. The worse things got at home, though, the more things I found to occupy my time away from the house, so the walking continued. It was a little piece of heaven not to be around cigarette smoke, fighting and being talked at. I walked out of necessity, not pleasure.

When I moved to Boston in the early 90s, I discovered a city that you could really navigate on foot. The T (tranit system) was simple, but slow. As a friend put it, her boyfriend's apartment was an hour and a half on foot, by T three quarters of an hour, but by bike it was ten minutes. So to save time and money I got a bike. But I was noticing I was spending so much time securing my bike, looking for a place to put my bike, walking my bike across weird intersections (for which Boston is famous), the biking really wasn't very good. Plus the drivers were nuts. So I took up walking as a means of transportation.

This continued even after I got a car. Keep in mind, I love to drive. I learned to drive in the craziest city in the world, and I am to this day a great driver because of that experience. If there had been a car rodeo, I would have come in first place place, even ahead of the cabbies. I could parallel park like a demon and get my car to fit into spaces not fit for a motorcycle. But driving was not Zen. It was like the anti-Zen. It was exciting, but everywhere I went I ended up with a parking ticket. So walking became a luxury. It was stress-free, I went out, saw places, saw people, saw things. And when I got home, I might be blistered and sunburned, but I was calmer and happier than if I had driven.

Walking here is not the same way. In Boston the neighborhoods are close together. You can take a walk through many neighborhoods, and it is almost like visiting different eras of your life.

Although I have spent much more time here, the vividness of the memories has long since faded, except the red, raw scars left after too much bad healing and festering infection. I walk here, and the sky is at once unbearably oppresive and endless; it shrivels the soul, pounds it into numb, everlasting, ongoing submission, the clouds warring and tumbling across the sky, the swan song of my ambition ringing in my ears. Night is a welcome relief, especially in winter, a respite from gray light, respite from the unplumbable depths of my own failures. In short walking outside has become unbearable here.

I miss feeling my muscles move and work under my skin, the differences in the textures of the streets, the feeling of hot pavement through my shoes, the way my shorts fit just that much better because of how walking changed my body, the freedom, and the faith that it took to claim it... stress and fear and age and time and responsibility and injury and memory, conspire to rob me of a favorite activity I once did all day. I wonder if I will ever be able to reclaim the pleasure of walking.