Today’s walk took me along the creek to the northwest suburbs of the city. I followed the paved pathway until it ended, then walked through the weedy grass at the side of the road until I reached the area’s main commercial artery. Then I walked east until I hit another major road and headed south. The noise of the traffic was bothering me, though, so I walked back to the recreational pathway and retraced my steps home. Total distance: about 30 kilometres (I can’t be more specific because mapmyrun.com doesn’t include all the paths that I walked in its database.)
The day was humid and airless, with a thick haze obscuring the sun for much of the walk. The sun still managed to get through, though; the bench where I sat to rest and eat some trail mix was uncomfortably hot. Maybe black isn’t the best colour for park furniture? I walked past the sewage pumping station that released who knows how much raw sewage into the creek during the recent flooding, when the waste-water treatment plant was too overwhelmed to cope. That was two weeks ago, and I would assume that everything is back to normal, except for the sewage pong along the creek by the station. Even upstream, the creek is the colour of chocolate; it carries a heavy nutrient load–mostly agricultural waste from farms and ranches southeast of the city–and the release of untreated sewage could only have made the situation much, much worse.
I stopped for a Tim Horton’s iced latté, which was way too sweet (do people really take that much sugar in their coffee?) and, later, sat at a picnic table in a shady spot and fell asleep! Maybe it was the nap, or maybe my endurance is improving, but when I got home I felt energized instead of exhausted.
What I really enjoyed about the day, though, was the rhythm of putting one foot after the other and the sense of quiet along the pathway: just birds and insects and the distant sounds of traffic and construction. Sometimes I could almost convince myself that I was walking through a Spanish village during siesta.
Of course, I wasn’t walking in Spain. I was walking a route I’ve taken many times before, and that means that the sense of discovery, of every step taking me through a brand-new space, was absent. Maybe that’s one of the major differences between walking around your home town and walking through a foreign country–that continuous sense of discovery. I thought about the story I’d heard about a Belgian man who knew that when he walked the Camino Francés he would be walking 30 kilometres every day for a month, so he trained for his trip by walking 30 kilometres around the town where he lived for a month. Okay, training is important, but that’s overkill, don’t you think? Not to mention boring.
I suppose I’m one to talk. Maybe I need to find some new places to walk, places where that sense of discovery isn’t completely absent.