It was a sunny spring morning when I left the house. I chatted with a curious rabbit and saw a paddling of ducks—mostly males, for some reason—milling about on the creek. I walked along the creek to a group of willows where once I saw a huge hawk sitting on a horizontal branch. We looked each other in the eye. The bird was only a few feet away, I remember. It glared at me with its cold yellow eye. Then it shat contemptuously and flew away. Its powerful wings made its flight seem lazy and careless. When I walk past those trees, I take out that memory and look at it, and then I put it away again.
I turned away from the creek and walked north through a series of neighbourhoods I had never seen before. The signs were ironic: one, barely attached to a fence, promised security; another mocked something our prime minister said about spreading the novel coronavirus. I took a selfie, reflected in a Christmas bauble. A stolen licence plate rusted in last fall’s leaves. The wind tugged at my hat and coat. I tasted a winter’s worth of dust.
Eventually I found myself on a familiar road: a broad thoroughfare that leads to the multiplex in the city’s northwest. I followed it north until it became a gravel grid road. I had reached the edge of the city. The wind blew harder and I chased my hat across a wet ditch into the stubble of last year’s barley.
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:
I’ve taken to long-distance walking as a means of dissolving the mechanized matrix which compresses the space-time continuum, and decouples human from physical geography. So this isn’t walking for leisure—that would be merely frivolous, or for exercise—which would be tedious.
I was “dissolving the mechanized matriculates which compresses the space-time continuum,” too, as I walked today. I was extending space while travelling through time at five kilometres per hour. When I reached the edge of the city, I could see its future: the fields of stubble between the newest development and the highway to Saskatoon were soon to be turned into more tract houses. Maybe that highway will act as a girdle limiting the city’s northward expansion, or maybe the city will leap past it and keep going.
And then the road curved back towards the city. My feet hurt. I thought about how much farther I wanted to walk—not too much more, I thought. Another two or three hours of walking would have brought me home, but I didn’t think I had that much walking left in me, so I called home for a ride. Christine picked me up in a parking lot lined with stores and restaurants and drove me home. We made tea and shared the last brioche and I wrote these words, wondering again if I’m learning to see the city differently, to read it with fresh eyes. I still can’t tell. I’ll have to keep practicing.
Nice post Ken. Clearly you are growing in your practice. Though we are some kilometres, ok, many kilometres apart, it was nice to be walking at the same time as we share our virtual Camino. Practicing the forms of walking that are meaningful to us. Now to post my blog. I’m looking for your thoughts.
Geoff
Oh, I’m not out every day the way you guys are. But you know, Thoreau walked 15 to 20 km every afternoon, or so he said, so maybe I could do the same.
I’ve sort of started to collect accounts of walking into the city, or out of the city, in Victorian writing — relics from when you could still do that. Off the top of my head, I’m thinking of the opening of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White, or Nell’s flight with her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop. But there’s even an essay by Ian Frazier about walking from New Jersey into New York City, if I remember rightly. Mostly though it’s just not feasible, I suppose.
Dale Nelson
If you can find a copy of The Vintage Guide to Walking, edited by Duncan Minshull, you might find more accounts of walking into or out of cities there. You might like my post on Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital; he walked around the edge of London. The fellow who wrote this blog–https://metroscapes.ca/toronto/–walked into and out of Toronto. Depending on where you live, it’s surprisingly easy to do it. It’s not always pretty, but prettiness isn’t the only criterion to measure experience.
Ken, this is a fantastic line, and a wonderfully poetic observation: “Today the city was a tree, and I was counting its rings as I walked.”
Thanks! You are very kind.