Taking life in stride
On foot: Walking’s delights are legion — and one day it may even help us top up the city’s electrical grid
“The best thing is to walk.” — Bruce Chatwin, from Anatomy of Restlessness.
Iwalk a lot nowadays, though once I could not think of a greater waste of time. It was boring, it seemed ... aimless. Jogging, on the other hand, offered a payoff. You ticked off the kilometres and calories. Jogging appealed to the modern work ethic that took its cues from efficiency experts, whose compression of time during our working hours leaked into our leisure ones. Hurry up! Time’s a wastin’! Run!
I still jog, but without the conviction I used to. Now when I see those committed runners lost in their earbuds and fervent with exertion, I get the uneasy feeling — one I have recognized in myself — that they hope to outrun death. I have news for them.
But walking isn’t transformative, as runners expect jogging to be: it’s restorative. The Victorian English were great walkers, and saw it as a means to clear their heads, to invite inspiration or, simply, to wander about — and it’s no wonder their greatest explorers ended up doing so from Africa to Asia and back again. Dickens was a great walker, as was Wordsworth, whose verses would come to him while he wandered lonely as a cloud about his beloved Lake District. The 20th-century Chatwin, quoted above, inherited his literary forebears’ need to walk to the point of compulsion. He could not sit still, and was always off for a walk in Patagonia, the Australian outback, Afghanistan. For him, walking was a sacramental act — his god, he once called it — and in his collection of essays What Am I Doing Here, he told the story of German director Werner Herzog, who walked from Munich to Paris when he learned his favourite critic Lotte Eisner was dying in the City of Light. Herzog walked the 700 kilometres in the middle of winter, convinced his pilgrimage would cure her. He arrived at Eisner’s apartment to find her recovered, and she hung on for another decade.
In the future, science may offer a purpose for walking that could be the saviour of us all. Last week, I interviewed Taylor Ward, a Simon Fraser University student who won the international Student Design Challenge in San Francisco for his concept of a shoe insole that, using piezoelectric nanogenerators and compactors, would store the kinetic energy produced by walking and transform it into usable electricity. That electricity could then be downloaded into the city’s power grid at special transfer platforms.
Ward saw it as a way of making Vancouver even more green than it is now, but imagine a billion Chinese pounding the pavement, with all that kinetic energy obviating the need for coal-fired generators. The piezoelectric technology is still in its infancy, Ward said, though it has been used in some practical applications, so for the moment his sole is still the stuff of Popular Mechanics. But I look forward to the day when walking to my grocery store will save the world from global warming. (A vignette from Ward’s win in San Francisco: During his presentation to the judges, he lost the audio and picture of the video he had prepared for his demonstration. Desperate, he resorted to an onstage ad lib pantomime of how the system would work. “I had to walk them through it,” he said.)
I began to walk for a more mundane reason. I bought a FitBit that urged me to walk 10,000 steps a day. That’s easy enough to do, but I began to walk whenever I could, even walking the dog, a chore I previously loathed. Last week, she and I set out and we just kept going ... for 10 kilometres. Along the way, I noticed things I would otherwise have not while jogging — the toque stuck on the chain link fence, the crocuses thriving along a sidewalk boulevard, the internal conversation I had with myself. I found, too, that walking expanded time. Once, I timed myself when I walked the 10 blocks or so to the gym, guessing that it would take about 30 minutes. It took 12. And my knees didn’t hurt when I got there.
Walking might be an expression of age — not because of physical limitations, because these days 80-year-old joggers aren’t uncommon — but because at a certain time in one’s life, the idea that every journey has its end presses itself upon you more urgently.
Why be in a hurry to get there?