For years, I walked to work. Actually, I walked everywhere, but mainly I ambled, strolled, marched, moseyed, sauntered and tramped back and forth to work. I was known for it. People would stop and ask me if I needed a ride in the best weather and others would always comment about me being ‘that guy who walks all the time’ as if this made me akin to some supernatural phenomenon. But it was true. I really was that guy who walked everywhere. For a while, anyway.
When we first moved to our current home, I was thrilled by the idea that I could walk to and from work in just seven minutes. Every day I went up and down the hill. I met nice neighbors, watched the seasons change, experienced the vicissitudes of the weather, from unbearable heat to freezing cold and all the glorious chaos in between. I have been rained on, snowed on, made faint from the sun and burned by the wind.
It suited me, too. I love being outside. I love to walk. Being close enough to work to use my legs as transit made me feel very outdoorsy and in tune with nature. I loved everything about it. Walking gave me a few extra minutes a day to meditate on the coming or just passed workday. I also listened to a lot of books, spoke with neighbors, met police and EMS and firefighters, city workers and many other walkers and generally became somewhat of a fixture on the leafy streets surrounding our neck of the woods. It’s odd to say, but I had a real sense of ownership with the process.
Part of why I was walking was necessity. Our boys needed the family cars for school and their first jobs and Micki needed our van to commute to her work and help her mom get to appointments and other engagements. Some days I needed our van, but mostly it was me walking and I was okay with that. In fact, I often changed after work and walked to meetings or other events, sometimes accumulating full miles daily during the workweek and even more on the weekends by taking long, leisurely walks with Micki or hiking together and sometimes with friends. I became a demon walker, going everywhere I could on my two legs. I felt great. It was wonderful.
Then the pandemic locked us all down. I was home and so was everyone else. In an effort to maintain distance with our many in-house residents, we started walking longer and longer distances every afternoon. By the time I had to go back to work, we were walking three miles daily. I was in the best shape of my life—fully in mid-season form, as Bertie Wooster would say. We both were. And although this was in the late Spring and the temps were warming up, we were also just happy to be out rambling. Just after that period, though, things started to change.
First, we sold our beloved, heavily used family van and got a compact SUV for Micki to use as her main conveyance. We no longer needed to fit more than four people simultaneously into a vehicle and the long family drives were becoming rare.
Then, when our middle lad moved to Raleigh from a local town, he shed his midsize pickup truck for a small, fuel-efficient two-door car. Not long after that, he and his soon-to-be fiancé started carpooling to work in her larger SUV which was also perfect for hauling around their two larger dogs. When job offers came to him from the western part of the state, he opted to sell his car to his younger brother and share their family car until they got settled in their house. The car the youngest of our three had been using was now free for me to use, since he had his own vehicle from his brother.
Admittedly, the tale of vehicle use in our family really is a saga, complete with the nebulous details of a coveted piece of ground changing hands during a medieval battle. And yet, now I had a car that I could use regularly but this new freedom came with a curse, as all such freedoms do. Having unfettered access to wheels, I started driving more regularly. Then I started driving all the time.
For more than a decade, I walked at least 1.5 miles per day. Assuming that I did at least that on weekends, too, I was walking just shy of 550 miles a year. In the roughly ten years that I had been walking to work, give or take a few sick days, vacations, hurricanes and so on, I likely walked over five thousand miles. That’s just a few miles shy of walking the Appalachian Trail twice! That’s a considerable step count.
Suddenly though, and uncharacteristically, I was driving. And I still am.
Driving has its benefits. Now I could swing by the store on my lunch break or on the way home. I could leave in the middle of the day and run an errand or two, without worrying that I’d be late getting back. I can run to the next town and back in less than an hour. I can jaunt to a doctor’s appointment early, and still get to work on time. But there were downsides, too. Rather than stopping for a brief chat with friendly neighbors on the way to or from work, I toot the car horn as I sweep by. The street that I got to know so well while plodding daily, now zips by barely noticed. I see police and EMS and fire and city workers, but I can’t stop and chat with them.
It’s true, I save time. I get to leave a few minutes later and still arrive more than early. I can stay right up to the hour accomplishing a few dedicated tasks at the end of the day and still be home only a few minutes past time. I can enjoy the cool of automotive air conditioning on days when the combination of humidity and temperature are enough to make cold-blooded creatures and insects take a moment to ask why they're outside. I stay dryer from rain and sweat, have fewer layers to put on or peel off, less transition between inside and outside temps. I can take a shorter midday lunch and that regularly contributes to a little extra time on Fridays to get home for pizza night.
Walking takes time. The average mile for me, when I was strolling around all the time, was about twenty minutes, which is excellent for someone who isn’t crazy enough to be a jogger. If you have to go more than a mile, you have to plan ahead, leave early, be prepared to get home late and expect a whole host of possible weather outcomes that merely bounce off the windscreen of the car.
On the other hand, I spend more on fuel than ever before. Yes, I don’t drive very far on any given day, but with costs for fuel as high as they have been, it always means a shaky and hoarseness whispered “you’ve got to be shitting me,” when I see the total at the pumps. I’m also contributing negatively to my carbon footprint and adding lots of CO2 to the atmosphere which also makes my skin crawl with guilt and shame.
Mainly, though, despite the conveniences of a motor vehicle, which are many, I miss being outside. I miss the extra time to ready the brain for another bout in the proverbial salt mines. I miss the gloriously chilly days in Spring and Fall when my cheeks are rosied by the crisp, frosty air. I miss visiting, however briefly, with neighbor friends and other walkers. I miss the burnished, bronze tone my face takes on from exposure to wind, sun, cold nights and brisk mornings. I miss watching the sun progress through its own perambulations as the year fades and waxes anew.
In the meantime, in order to salvage some of the healthful rewards all that walking gave me, I have taken up walking at the gym. The gym is too far to walk to, so I drive to walk. The irony is thick as cement.
I put in nine miles a week at the gym. I listen to my audiobooks or watch streaming movies. I nod and smile at the gym folks, but there's no friendship there. Even the people I am friends with who I see regularly at the other treadmills or weight machines want to be left alone and walk or lift in their own private world and, honestly, so do I. Walking on a treadmill is fine. I can simulate walking outdoors with the screen on the machine that will even show an arid landscape, as if I was on the road to Athens with Socrates, if I wanted. It’s not a decent substitute. I get the miles in and I get to feel good and have excellent blood pressure, but I’m not outside, which is where I want to be.
I miss feeling trim, fit, light and flexible, springy, ready for a stroll. I miss bragging to folks that I walk everywhere. I miss walking. It’s that simple. No amount of treadmill miles, no matter how good for my blood pressure, seems to make up for the lack of outdoor time.
I miss walking.
Perhaps ironically, as I write this, the weather outside is like dog breath. Trees hang limp, humidity and haze obscure the sky, any time spent outdoors leaves one soaked through and sticky. But the days are slowly getting shorter, the shadows lengthening, the heat and humidity are slowly on the wane. A few more weeks and things will be more tolerable, I hope. As we head to the equinox, the days will become more tolerably walkable. I’m holding out for cooler weather, yes, but I’m not going to mince words about it. When the cooler temps happen, I am going to leave the car in the driveway, even in driving rain or pelting hail (anyway, the Scandinavians are famous for saying there is no bad weather, only bad clothes). It will be worth it to get back to walking. And maybe, between the gym and the leg-impelled commute and the subsequent reimersion into the outdoors, I can shake these walking blues.
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