I was on a Zoom call a couple of weeks ago, learning more about a walking workshop I’ll be part of in early May. I recognized the name of one of the other participants: Ann de Forest. Don’t I have a book by her? I asked myself. When the call ended, I went looking. Yes, there it was: Ways of Walking. It’s been a while since I read something about walking. Why not give Ways of Walking a try?

What’s a good metaphor to describe the collection of personal essays? A buffet, a smorgasbord, a feast? (It’s getting close to supper time–can you tell?) The 26 authors included show how moving through the world on foot is connected to so many other aspects of experience, individual and collective and both together: grief, curiosity, memory, connection, anger, caretaking, assault. Ever asked yourself what it might be like to walk through Philadelphia–many but not all of the essays here describe walking in that city, the home of its editor–if you’re African American? Wonder what it’s like to walk in places that have been colonized? Want to know about walking and disability, or walking and illness, or walking and injury? As a woman, if that’s not how you identify? Thinking about walking and pilgrimage? All of that, and more, is included here. The writers aren’t shy about giving credit to their literary forebears, either. Thoreau makes multiple appearances, as does Virginia Woolf; the Little Prince shows up, as does Hart Crane, Yi-Fu Tuan, Gertrude Stein, and Aphra Behn. Ways of Walking is a rich collection of perspectives and references.

Some of the thinking here caught me unawares. For instance, Justin Coffin, in the final essay suggests that there are “two kinds of great journeys: we are either Theseus escaping the labyrinth or Odysseus trying to get home.” I want to steal that idea. David Hallock Saunders remembers walking games his father played with him in Los Angeles when he was a boy, games that recall the playful way that the Situationists and, more recently, psychogeographers like Phil Smith navigate the city. Ann de Forest’s essay about walking in Los Angeles encourages me to rethink what I imagine that city to be like. Ruth Knafo Setton, remembering walking with her late father, suggests that “[w]alking is an act of gratitude for our ability to perceive, to move with our bodies, and to see and absorb with our senses.” Walking gives Lena Popkin “two conflicting, almost clashing, emotions”: as a woman and a survivor of sexual assault (more and more it seems those two groups of people are one and the same, a Venn Diagram that overlaps completely), she feels “both apprehensive and calm, often in the same walk and sometimes at the same time.” Once again, I was reminded of how limited the notion of a text being “relatable” is. We ought to read to understand difference, not similarity–to learn something new, even if that’s difficult.

My favourite essay in this collection, I think, is Sharon White’s “Walking (Variations on Thoreau).” It’s a beautifully written braided essay, and I’m a sucker for beautifully written braided essays. Half of the time I wasn’t sure what was going on in White’s essay, and it didn’t matter:

In the pine forests it’s not a handicap to be alone. A group of fishermen give me a map. A ranger says I should have had an ice ax, but I don’t. I take a day or so to reach the ridge and then it’s splendor wherever I look. The chime of the wind crashing against my ears. In the morning I can’t see, my eyes pinned shut by bees. My first-aid kit is useless. But I can make it down to the series of clear sandy streams emptying into pools where I strip off my clothes and soak my bites in the water.

Had I not been on that Zoom call, had I not recognized de Forest’s name, this book would’ve stayed on its shelf, and I would’ve missed reading that paragraph. You just can’t predict what wonderful surprises are waiting for you.