Last night I was thinking about the next step in my walking research, which I’ve had to put on hold because of the pandemic. Instead of long walks in the country, I’ve been making shorter walks in the city. I found myself wondering about the city as a language, and more generally, about the implications of an analogy between space and language. I haven’t studied linguistics, and I’m not that interested in langue, in the larger structure of a language; I studied literature, and perhaps for that reason I’m more interested in parole, in utterances or speech acts, in how people use langue. But obviously langue and parole are related, or interrelated, in language but also in this spatial analogy. Neither can exist without the other.
What would the langue of the city be? Its design? A grid of streets in neighbourhoods developed before the 1960s, and curving streets (bays, crescents, circles, cul de sacs) in neighbourhoods developed after that. I’m tempted to connect that urban grid to the larger grid of rural roads imposed by the Dominion Land Survey, but I’m not sure that connection makes sense, given the fact that every nineteenth-century city in North America is, in large part, designed as a grid for efficiency. It’s rare for a city to be old enough that its layout isn’t a grid—Manhattan south of Houston Street, or Quebec City—or for a city to be designed so that streets meet in a central square (Washington, D.C., or Guelph). Rivers and creeks complicate the grid. So do coastlines or harbours or railway lines. But that grid occurs everywhere. It’s not the langue of a particular city; it’s the langue of all cities that were built before the 1940s. Cities constructed after the 1940s combine a grid of major arteries with curving minor streets—at least in residential areas; industrial districts keep to the grid. I’m not convinced that those curving streets say anything about a specific city, since like the grid, they seem to be characteristic of everywhere.
So I’m not interested in the langue of the city. I’m not a geographer—I’m not even sure that’s what geographers are interested in. I’m interested in its parole. I’ve been photographing odd signs, strange objects, natural phenomena. Are those examples of this city’s parole? I think so. But I need to be careful. Some of the odd or curious things I’ve been photographing are the result of poverty. They are relics of abandonment, of the city’s class divisions, of its ghettoizing of Indigenous peoples, rather than neutral objects that ought to lend themselves to an ironic critique. That critique is easy. To see those curiosities with empathy or care, to see them within that social and economic context—that would be the more appropriate response. I’m not sure I know how to do that. And I wonder if that documentary impulse works against the playfulness that seems to be inherent in mythogeography. Is documenting the city the same as imaginatively rethinking the city? No. But could that imaginative rethinking end up being callous and exploitative and extractive? I think that is a serious risk. How does the city speak of power and class and at the same time how does it speak of resistance to them? Can I really find that resistance in sidewalk scribbles or odd signs or urban jackrabbits?
Besides, are those photographs really the heart of a walking practice? Isn’t the walking the actual point? Walking—especially outside the city centre, or the recreational areas around the lake or along the creek where it’s encouraged—ends up being an act of resistance, at least potentially. It is slow, inefficient, laborious, reflective; it requires effort and attention. All of those qualities resist what our society prizes: fast, frictionless activity; inattention; ease; efficiency. And if that’s true of an urban walking practice, it must be even more true of a rural walking practice. Walking in rural areas—especially in this province, with its vast distances and sparse population—makes absolutely no sense. That senselessness is perhaps what constitutes its potential for resistance.
But that resistance can only be symbolic and individual, unless one orchestrates groups of walkers, which is quite possible in the city, where distances are manageable, but more difficult on a grid road in the middle of nowhere. Convivial walking in rural Saskatchewan is complicated; it requires support vehicles and guides and maybe even first aid, and all of that takes time and money to arrange. It’s not impossible to organize—my friend Hugh Henry does a fantastic job of putting group walking events in rural Saskatchewan together—but it’s not easy. The other challenge with convivial walking in rural Saskatchewan might be distance. It takes time to experience this landscape, and that means walking distances that might be difficult or even impossible for some people. I remember very well how exhausting it was to walk 12 kilometres when I first began walking; how my feet would blister after 15 kilometres; how many weeks it takes me to get comfortable walking 20 kilometres or more after a long cold winter. Is it reasonable to expect people to walk such distances as a way of experiencing the land from the vantage point of a grid road? Is 20 kilometres even enough? Doesn’t this particular landscape require an investment of time and energy and sweat before it begins to pay off in understanding and respect and even love? That’s been one of the lessons of walking in rural Saskatchewan, from my perspective—either alone, or with others. Of course walking with others is safer and more enjoyable, but it takes an incredible amount of work and planning to arrange that kind of walk.
Unless, that is, one is particular about where those walks happen. Maybe walking in Grasslands National Park would require less time and effort and distance than walking along a grid road. Walking in that park might offer a more immediate experience of the land—or at least a part of it. But here’s the problem: a park is a curated landscape. If the point is to encounter the land as it is, rather than as we might imagine it to be, or like it to be, we need to step outside of the park boundaries; we need to trudge along grid roads or highways instead. After all, less than 14 percent of southern Saskatchewan remains grassland, including Grasslands National Park. Most of this land is very different. If we want to see what is there, we can’t remain inside a curated landscape. And given this province’s trespassing laws, and the difficulty of finding landowners to get permission to be on their land, we will find ourselves limited to roads—particularly if we are walking together in a large group. It’s one thing for a single walker to climb through a fence and walk in a pasture without permission; that might be overlooked or explained away as an error. It’s another thing entirely to take a group of people onto private land without making arrangements with the landowner or pasture manager. So outside of those curated spaces, outside of parks, convivial walking is going to be limited to roads.
But walking in the country is very different from walking in the city, and those differences will affect the terms this essay began with: langue and parole. What is the parole of a rural space? What is its langue? Are grid roads the langue of the land, for instance? Or are they instances of parole? Is the langue the grassland that’s been almost entirely eradicated? Or is that an idealized space that for the most part no longer exists? Aside from the occasional farm or bin yard or sign, the signs of human occupation—a better term would be “Settler occupation”—are the roads, the fences and power poles, the litter in the ditches, and the miles of barley and wheat and canola. Are those examples of langue, or of parole? What defines the land? Does industrial agriculture define it? Or does it have an essence beyond industrial agriculture? Do such essences exist? Perhaps we need to look up at the sky, to the clouds and the wind and the sun, if we are going to experience the land? Or is that a contradiction? What phenomena are included within the category “land”? Does it include the sky? I don’t have answers to any of these questions, even though I’ve been thinking about them for several years, and walking in rural Saskatchewan for even longer. Maybe, if I keep walking and thinking and reading and writing, I’ll start coming up with answers?
(All photographs are from August walks in summers past. Perhaps the pandemic will have run its course by this coming August.)
Today the city was a tree, and I was counting its rings as I walked. I started in the 1920s, then I walked through the wartime houses of the 1940s and the small frame bungalows of the 1950s. I passed through the 1960s and then the 1970s before finding myself in the 1980s. Then the city skipped ahead to new neighbourhoods before it ended. I thought of something I once read in a book by Will Self:
For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to go for walks. Walking helps ease my anxiety about the Covid-19 pandemic–at least sometimes. Other times, despite my intentions, I end up staying in the house, listening to the news and worrying, or trying to manage teaching online, which has turned out to be a lot more work than I had imagined. Turning off the radio, shutting down Facebook, that would help; and yet sometimes it’s very hard to do. And often, when I do get outside, walking doesn’t help. It just gives me a chance to ruminate and play out worst-case scenarios in my mind. I don’t imagine I’m alone in any of this.
My first walk, once the sidewalks were free of ice, was a rather long trudge to the university and then around Wascana Lake–long enough that my feet, tender after a winter without much walking, blistered. It was a sunny afternoon, and the path around the lake was packed with people, most of whom had not apparently heard of the term “social distancing.” I haven’t been back there since. Maybe it would be okay early in the morning, or when the weather is bad, but there are other places to walk that are less crowded, and possibly more interesting, too.
