Wanderlust: A History of Walking

by Rebecca Solnit

Like the taste for landscape, the emphasis on the pictorial and the existence of scenic tourism seem unremarkable things to present-day readers, and yet they were all invented in the eighteenth century.

Notable too are the many times in which walking appears as a noun rather than a verb in this book and in this era:

He was, in some ways, the ideal tourist, a tourist with a unique gift for remembering and describing what he saw, and his relationship to the Lake District is an odd balancing act between the clear-eyed intimacy of the local and the enthusiasm of the tourist.

Wordsworth made walking central to his life and art to a degree almost unparalleled before or since. He seems to have gone walking nearly every day of his very long life, and walking was both how he encountered the world and how he composed his poetry.

For Wordsworth walking was a mode not of traveling, but of being.

something of a pattern: autodidacts who took the trinity of radical politics, love of nature, and pedestrianism to extremes.

Earlier poets and artists had looked at the cottages and bodies of the poor and found them picturesque or pitiful, but no one with such a voice had found it worthwhile to talk to them before.

“When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods,” remarked Thoreau, but Wordsworth headed as eagerly to the public roads as to mountains and lakes.

English people tell me that walking plays so profound a role in English culture in part because it is one of the rare classless arenas in which everyone is roughly equal and welcome.

Most modern writers are deskbound, indoor creatures when they write, and nothing more than outline and ideas can be achieved elsewhere; Wordsworth’s method seemed a throwback to oral traditions and explains why the best of his work has the musicality of songs and the casualness of conversation.

‘I broke your wall down, Sir John, it was obstructing an ancient right of way, and I will do it again. I am a Tory, but scratch me on the back deep enough and you will find the Whig in me yet.’”

He had taken the walk out of the garden, with its refined and restricted possibilities, but most of his successors wanted the world in which they walked to be nothing but a larger garden.

only such walking is advocated by these sermonizing gentlemen who seem not to see the boundaries they have put around the act (one of the delights of urban walking is how unwholesome it is).

to play at tramp or gypsy is one way of demonstrating that you are not really one. You must be complex to want simplicity, settled to desire this kind of mobility.

Recently, I found one particularly annoying essay in a Buddhist magazine asserting that all the world’s problems would be solved if only the world’s leaders would walk.

The history of rural walking is full of people who wish to portray themselves as wholesome, natural, a brother to all man and nature, and who in that wish often reveal themselves to be powerful and complicated—though other walkers are true radicals out to undermine the laws and authorities that stifle others as well as themselves.

In paradise, the only things of interest are our own thoughts, the character of our companions, and the incidents and appearance of the surroundings.

To hear about walking from people whose only claim on our attention is to have walked far is like getting one’s advice on food from people whose only credentials come from winning pie-eating contests.

Long-distance walking in North America never had the gentility of the walking tour. In England, you can walk from pub to pub or inn to inn (or, nowadays, hostel to hostel); in America a long-distance walk is usually a plunge into the wilderness or at least un-English scale and uninviting spaces such as highways and hostile towns.

books by people who are athletic walkers but not necessarily writers, for the necessary combination of silver tongue and iron thighs seems to be a rare one.

Perhaps Campbell shows us pure walking. It is impurity that makes it worthwhile, the views, the thoughts, the encounters—all those things that connect mind and world through the medium of the roving body, that leaven the self-absorption of the mind.

Since the eighteenth century, nature has been imagined as scenery, and scenery is what is seen at a certain distance, but climbing puts one face-to-face with the rock, with a wholly different kind of engagement.

When we are attracted, we draw near; when we draw near, the sight that attracted us dissolves: the face of the beloved blurs or fractures as one draws near for a kiss, the smooth cone of Mount Fuji becomes rough rock rising from underfoot to blot out the sky in Hokusai’s print of the mountain pilgrims.

The measurable part of an experience translates most easily, so the highest peaks and worst disasters are the best known aspects of mountaineering, along with all the records—first

History, let me clarify, means an act imagined as being situated in the context of other such acts and as it will be perceived by others; it arises from a social imagination of how one’s private acts fit into public life. History is carried in the mind to the remotest places to determine what one’s acts mean even there, and who can say how much it weighs for those who carry it?

an answer to the question why one climbs. You are doing something hard, so hard that failure could mean death, but because of knowledge and experience you are doing it safely.”

What is recorded as history seldom represents the typical, and what is typical seldom becomes visible as history—though it often becomes visible as literature.

Michael commented that the consequence of the theory that nature is supposed to make you happy is that those most desperately in search of happiness tend to show up there.

To pretend that the world is a garden is an essentially apolitical act, a turning away from the woes that keep it from being one. But to try to make the world a garden is often a political endeavor, and it is this taste that the more activist walking clubs around the world have taken up.

Muir and some of the other founders believed that those who spent time in the mountains would come to love them, and that that love would be an active love, a love willing to go into political battle to save them.

John Muir took a stand against anthropocentrism, against the idea that trees, animals, minerals, soil, water, are there for humans to use, let alone to destroy, but by positioning wilderness as a place apart from society and the economy he avoided addressing the wider politics of land and money.

Walking in the landscape can be a demonstration of a specific heritage, and when it is mistaken for a universal experience, those who don’t participate can be seen as less sensitive to nature, rather than less acculturated to the northern European romantic tradition.

The Naturfreunde, or Nature Friends, was founded in Vienna in 1895

The Boy Scouts, like the Wandervogel, like so many situations in the history of walking, raise the question of when walking becomes marching.

Marching subordinates the very rhythms of individual bodies to group and to authority, and any group that marches is marching toward militarism if it is not already there.

But accessing the land has been something of a class war. For a thousand years, landowners have been sequestering more and more of the island for themselves, and for the past hundred and fifty, landless people have been fighting back.

It’s a chicken-and-egg question as to whether the taste for the rural or the awfulness of the cities came first, but the British have always sworn allegiance to footpaths, not boulevards.

Walking focuses not on the boundary lines of ownership that break the land into pieces but on the paths that function as a kind of circulatory system connecting the whole organism. Walking is, in this way, the antithesis of owning.

Certainly one of the pleasures of walking in England is this sense of cohabitation right-of-way paths create—of crossing stiles into sheep fields and skirting the edges of crops on land that is both utilitarian and aesthetic. American land, without such rights-of-way, is rigidly divided into production and pleasure zones, which may be one of the reasons why there is little appreciation for or awareness of the immense agricultural expanses of the country.

rights-of-way do preserve an alternate vision of the land in which ownership doesn’t necessarily convey absolute rights and paths are as significant a principle as boundaries.

Thus the Sierra Club fought for boundaries, while British walking activists fight against them, but the boundaries laid down in America are to keep the land public, wild, and indivisible, to keep private enterprise out, while in Britain they kept the public out.

Private property is a lot more absolute in the United States, and the existence of vast tracts of public land serves to justify this, as does an ideology in which the rights of the individual are more often upheld than the good of the community.

And this is the great irony—or poetic justice—of the history of rural walking; that a taste that began in aristocratic gardens should end up as an assault on private property as an absolute right and privilege.

Walking has become one of the forces that has made the modern world—often by serving as a counterprinciple to economics.

But there are three prerequisites to going out into the world to walk for pleasure. One must have free time, a place to go, and a body unhindered by illness or social restraints. These basic freedoms have been the subjects of countless struggles,

Walking in the landscape was a reaction against the transformations that were making the middle-class body an anachronism locked away in homes and offices and laborers’ bodies part of the industrial machinery.

Just as a bookshelf can jam together Japanese poetry, Mexican history, and Russian novels, so the buildings of my city contained Zen centers, Pentecostal churches, tattoo parlors, produce stores, burrito places, movie palaces, dim sum shops.

Cities have always offered anonymity, variety, and conjunction, qualities best basked in by walking: one does not have to go into the bakery or the fortune-teller’s, only to know that one might.

A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know, and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.

Yet urban walking seems in many ways more like primordial hunting and gathering than walking in the country.