In the heady Oregon spring of my senior year of high school I embarked on a grand experiment: for 30 days, I would not ride in an automobile. I was curious to see if life could be lived, and what life might be like, on my own two feet (and occasionally on the two fat wheels of my one-speed Schwinn). School was six miles away by road, but four by shortcut through woods and fields, and that part I liked. A little extra time in transit was rewarded by a zesty hike and the scenic wonders of buttercups and barbed wire. I remember practicing my choir numbers in the forest. And I loved the sense of my home being connected to school in one, steady, bodily motion. For the last few yards I strode through a large and thoroughly needless parking lot; I was already there, with nothing to encumber me. For the 30 days I quite literally paced myself and managed to get to my various obligations in due time.

The only problems I remember were with the women in my life. My mother asked me to rush down to the grocery store to buy some eggs for a recipe she was baking for some company that was soon to arrive. I calmly informed her I would ride my bicycle down to the store, but not drive. That, she said, made no sense at all. She was mad. And I seem to recall that my girfriend and I may have broken up that fateful month. Her house was eight miles from mine, and I showed up less frequently and sometimes asked for a shower when I got there. Evening dates became difficult, as did making out in the nonexistent front seat of the nonexistent car.

As it turns out, I married a woman who likes to walk, though unfortunately her natural pace is about twice the speed of mine. I have heard that in some parts of India the husband walks 20 paces in front of his wife. In our own progressive but pedestrian marriage, this arrangement is reversed. Just a couple of summers ago we spent a week in Tuolumne Meadows to celebrate our 20th anniversary, scrambling up some of the peaks we had first climbed on our honeymoon. On the way down Mt. Dana, only just recovering from the aerobic trauma of our ascent, I told my wife I was thinking of writing a novel called In Her Steps. She was far enough ahead of me that she didn't quite hear what I'd said.

"Isn't that the one that asks, 'What would Jesus do?'" she said.

"I think Jesus would walk more slowly," I told her.

To say, as the warbling soloists of my childhood often did, that "I walked today where Jesus walked" is to equate walking with living. That we have in recent centuries invested walking with particular cultural significance is the fascinating thesis of Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History of Walking. And that in relatively recent decades Americans have impoverished themselves by subtracting walking from their living is Solnit's prophetic word. City planners, she informs us, now calculate "walking distance" as one quarter mile or less. Anything more is a hop in the car. Beyond a quarter mile, apparently, our legs, our patience, our time, and our imagination give out. I drove today where Jesus walked.

Solnit is eloquent in suggesting the advantages of engaging thought and place through our feet:

Walking, ideally, is a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned, as though they were three characters finally in conversation together, three notes suddenly making a chord. Walking allows us to be in our bodies and in the world without being made busy by them. It leaves us free to think without being wholly lost in our thoughts.

For Solnit, "a certain kind of wanderlust can only be assuaged by the acts of the body itself in motion, not the motion of the car, boat, or plane. It is the movement as well as the sights going by that seems to make things happen in the mind." One of the most alienating experiences to be had, she says, is watching a film on a jetliner at 35,000 feet—doubly removed from the earth. She also holds special contempt for the fashion of the exercise treadmill. Such simulated walking suggests that space itself has disappeared: "The treadmill is … a device with which to go nowhere in places where there is now nowhere to go. Or no desire to go."

Automated motion, actual or virtual, creates a false urgency, an "insistence that travel is less important than arrival. I like walking," says Solnit, "because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness."

If this sounds romantic, Solnit would agree: Romantic with a capital R. She traces the roots of her sense of walking back to Rosseau and Wordsworth in particular. (They, in turn, draw upon the medieval tradition of pilgrimage.) Rosseau claimed, "I can only meditate when I am walking. When I stop, I cease to think; my mind only works with my legs." Wordsworth, along with his immediate peers and predecessors, began the practice of walking for the pleasure of being in landscape. Rosseau was interested in the landscape of his own mind. So was Wordsworth, but he made a particular virtue of engaging his mind with the world that he walked through.

Solnit claims that perhaps his most revolutionary act was walking through France to Switzerland with a Cambridge friend when they should have been studying for exams. In effect, Wordsworth subverted the tradition of the Grand Tour, in which young Englishmen of privilege would travel by coach to the principal cities of Europe to meet other persons of their own class and view the established artworks and monuments. Instead, Wordsworth and his college chum traveled 2,000 miles by foot that summer, some 30 miles a day. Their goal was not the cultural treasures of Italy but the ruggedness of the Swiss Alps. They did not benefit from arranged introductions to persons of note but from chance encounters with country peasants.

I think now of the many off-campus programs offered by colleges today. Those in Europe often still emulate the old Grand Tour in a dizzying round of coaches, hotels, cathedrals, theaters, and museums—the students sometimes little more than FedEx parcels in transit. And I think of an old professor of mine expressing his indignance with those who refused to stray far from the bus: "You don't know a land until you feel it in your feet!" Wordsworth remains countercultural, though he has spawned a large subculture, both in Europe and North America. The same students who gladly submit to mechanized McTours of Europe are also likely to feel the lure of a backpack trip in the Adirondacks or the Rockies.

Solnit observes that Wordsworth made walking central to his life and art to a degree almost unparalleled before or since. It was how he encountered the world and how he composed poetry, a mode not only of traveling but of being. It is tempting to read Wordsworth's 1802 "Preface to Lyrical Ballads" in light of Solnit's observations. Wordsworth regrets the desire of his contemporaries for "gross and violent" entertainment, their "degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation." He was referring to gothic novels, sentimental melodrama, and the recent advent of daily newspapers. (One can only guess what he would have made of ten minutes of previews at the local cineplex.) The human mind is capable of being more gently moved, he says, through his own particular poetry—a poetry grounded in his own (iambic) feet. Walkers of the world, unite!

Which they have, occasionally, from Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims to protest marchers in Tallahassee. Solnit's more speculative but nevertheless interesting chapters seek to interpret the religious and political meanings of various kinds of corporate walking. She also treats such diverse subjects as English gardens, traditional courtship, mountaineering, church labyrinths, city pedestrians, suburban disembodiment, and the politics of open spaces. Her approach is consistently and rather convincingly feminist, marred on occasion by personal indulgence. Antinuclear activists who walk in procession at the Nevada Test Site rank as her holiest heroes, and indeed it seems that almost every street movement of the past generation, whether it be for gay rights or against the Gulf War, has her implicit blessing. The assumption appears to be that if people are willing to band together and walk for a cause, it must be a worthy one. (Conveniently, walkers for more conservative causes are generally absent from her discussion.) But this pervasive bias is a small price to pay for her wide-ranging and spirited analysis of walking in general—a subject of such universal human significance that we tend to take it for granted.

If Rebecca Solnit provides us with a theory of walking, John Leax, in Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World, provides us with a reassuring record of particular instances. Solnit is a young woman at home in the urban wild of San Francisco; she admits to being "raised as nothing in particular by a lapsed Catholic and a nonpracticing Jew." Leax is a graying but still middle-aged man at home with his wife and garden and five-acre woodlot in western New York; he teaches English at Houghton College and attends the local Wesleyan church. Where Solnit dazzles with erudition and eloquence, Leax settles the reader with a plainspoken profundity. Solnit is a roller-coaster; Leax is a good walk with a friend. I am reminded of the differences between Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry. One constantly seeks to astonish with her amazing juxtapositions of disparate materials, while the other goes about his sober business, plowing the page behind his horses. Dillard and Solnit are essentially metaphysical poets, after the manner of John Donne; Berry and Leax are heirs of the careful decorum of Ben Jonson.

Out Walking is a small but significant intermixture of essays and poems, most of them set close to home. Stewardship is a constant theme, as is gratitude to God. Many of the essays are marked by a Wordsworthian sense of encounter. Typically, Leax is walking, or paddling, or just standing on his porch, and he meets with something that must be reckoned with. It might be something physically immediate: a newt, a heron, or a triple-stemmed ash. It might be something in his mind: a remembered passage from Aldo Leopold or William Stafford, or a recollected experience from his childhood in rural Pennsylvania. His richest essays combine all of these elements: something alive in the natural world and something alive in the memory of his reading and his past. The result is a full but understated sense of connection, or wholeness, a "momentary stay against confusion" that the reader may share.

"Of Humans and Turtles" is a good example of Leax's method. It begins with the memory of turtles kept by his grandfather, who drilled their shells and tethered them to trees with wires. His grandfather says there is one live turtle in the river with the date 1860 carved on its back. Then Leax recalls his contempt and admiration for a turtle that ate his goldfish in a pond he dug as a teenager. And then a more recent experience—watching a man aim his car at a painted turtle on the road: "Beside me he swerved. I heard the shell pop and felt the spatter of the turtle's life on my bare arms." In the climactic moment of the essay, Leax is fishing waist-deep in the Genesee River and hooks something powerful. It swims toward him:

About twenty feet away, it surfaced—a plate-sized snapping turtle, a nightcrawler hanging from its jaw. I knew what it could do; I knew its beak could slice to bone. In its domain I felt soft and vulnerable. It came on relentlessly. I stopped reeling, dug my knife from my pocket, and cut it loose. Still coming at me, it dived. Too shocked to move, I watched the dark disk beneath the water. Totally other, as beautiful as the wild itself, it bumped my leg, tilted, and swerved away into blackness. For more than a moment, standing in that water, I was afraid, capable of killing what I feared.

This gives rise to a meditation on his fear, how it could turn to either hatred or awe, separation or belonging, and he bases part of his reflection on remembered lines from a poem by Frederick Morgan. Finally, Leax provides a postscript on the man who ran over the turtle: "This winter everyone was shocked when he emptied his company's bank account, abandoned his family, and skipped town for parts unknown. Somehow, I wasn't surprised."

That would have been a good place to end the essay, but Leax gives in, as he often does, to the temptation to be more didactic than necessary. He continues for a paragraph on the nature of sin, the self, and the fall. However, as I have said before in another context, that is a small price to pay for the art and pleasure of the entire work.

Part of that art and pleasure are the poems included in Leax's book, a dozen earnest "psalms" and a dozen rather playful haiku. The psalms give thanks for God's creation, sometimes in a way that is reminiscent of Wendell Berry's Sabbath poems. I particularly like "The Clever Trout," in which the fish "swims as he / was made to swim," the popple "stands / as it was made to stand," and the jay "cries / as he was made to cry." Also, "To Christ the Creator":

With your eyes I see
the six-inch snake,
green as mint, soft
as a baby's hand, curled
about my finger,
and love it with your love.

In this poem, I think John Leax walks where Jesus did.

John Suiter's well-crafted book, Poets on the Peaks, might aptly be subtitled "I sat today where Buddha sat." For it is not so much about walking as perching, and all about finding dharma. With sensitive prose and exquisite black-and-white photographs, he chronicles the experience of the Beat writers Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac as fire lookouts in the 1950s on lonely summits of the North Cascades in Washington.

And lonely it was. Kerouac, in his 63 days atop Desolation Peak near the Canadian border, had nary a visitor; Snyder and Whalen, in their multiple seasons, saw only a handful. For all three of these writers, their times aloft in the North Cascades were immersions not only in alpine wilderness but also in Buddhist writings and practice. ("Ever, ever be on the lookout!" says a medieval Rinzai master.) For Kerouac, this was the end of a relatively brief fling; for Snyder and Whalen, an important beginning. Snyder went on for many years of Zen apprenticeship in Japan, and Whalen became a Buddhist monk.

Poets on the Peaks suffers from a hagiographic impulse. Himself a Buddhist convert, Suiter paints a glowing triptych of saints' lives, of stylites, of holy hermits on mountaintops, treating the Beat writers—Kerouac in particular—with palpable reverence. (The alcohol abuse, the drug addiction, the womanizing, and the narcissism of Kerouac would seem to make him an unlikely object of adoration. But there it is. And many of my students share it.) In the course of his research, Suiter revisits each fire lookout as one might journey to a shrine.

I am reminded of another recent book, Real Matter, in which David Robertson, a professor of English at the University of California at Davis, accompanies Gary Snyder on a climb of Matterhorn Peak in Yosemite, carefully retracing the steps that Snyder took with Kerouac in 1955. This is the ascent that Kerouac describes in his novel Dharma Bums, the same novel that ends with his lookout experience on Desolation. To be fair to Suiter and Robertson, it must be said that misplaced pilgrim awe is a very common human failing, shared, for example, by many Christian biographers of C. S. Lewis. One can worship at a mountaintop or worship at a wardrobe, it makes no difference.

I have not hiked to the fire lookouts in the North Cascades that Suiter so beautifully describes, but in the 1970s I quite often climbed Matterhorn Peak when I was a guide in the Sierra. I went back with a friend last summer, and was surprised to find the summit register overflowing with tributes to Snyder and Kerouac. It was a little more than I could take, considering that Kerouac, hung over and out of shape, had not even made it to the top. So I divided my entry, first quoting a line from Snyder's poem upon his own last climb of the Matterhorn: "I am still in love." Then I added, "Jack Kerouac is a weenie." According to Suiter, that is what most people born and bred in the Northwest think of Jack Kerouac. Still, I'm glad my wife wasn't there to beat me back down the mountain.

Paul Willis, a poet and novelist, is professor of English at Westmont College.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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