Walks To Remember:
Armchair travels in the age of a pandemic

Marc Nair
24 July 2020

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“The image of the walker, alone and active and passing through rather than settled in the world, is a powerful vision of what it means to be human, whether it’s a hominid traversing grasslands or a Samuel Beckett character shuffling down a rural road.

Excerpted from Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust: A History of Walking. ”

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It is somewhat fitting to begin with a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s wide-ranging, meditative and singular book on walking. Solnit considers the figure of the walker as sacred, often a lone figure traveling on a quest-like journey, in search of or fulfilling a promise. Or simply setting out to see the world. Walking is not about measuring speed or distance. To walk is not to boast. But neither is it aimless. Walking is the most ancient way of travel. It is the slowest, but also the most entwined with the earth.

This is not a book review or a suggestion for a tour. Rather, it is a reflection on the beatific, redeeming act of seeing a country on foot. To walk for long distances in this age is to deny the affordances of modern travel and all of the attendant infrastructure that has sprung up around it. We are living in a time of gross convenience. When Alan Booth set out in 1977 to walk the length of Japan’s three islands from north to south (Hokkaido to Kyushu), there were no convenient stores to flatten out the cities and towns and create a sense of undifferentiated experience.

Booth drank beer at grocers’ shops, stayed at minshokus, the equivalent of B&Bs, and stumbled upon a whole array of local village celebrations that were enacted not for the tourist calendar but existed through hundreds of years of ritual. Thankfully, he also wrote The Roads to Sata, an account of his close to five month long journey, so that we can relieve his travails and marvel at his doggedness to consistently walk 30 to 40 kilometres every single day. 

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COVID-19 has ground our quick weekend getaways, artificially induced travel tours and the entire reductive experience of travel into bite-sized social media posts to a halt. The uncertainty over borders, hygiene, permission and prices has reduced our worlds to the narrow parameters of our homes. Travel becomes domesticated a long walk, a jaunt to a different part of the city or even immersion in a travel narrative. 

Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.

And so opens Matsuo Basho’s (yes, Basho the haiku master) The Narrow Road to the North, a travel tale of journeying into Japan’s harsh northern reaches while pausing frequently to write haiku. Right after that lovely line, he drops this revelation:

Coming home from a year’s walking tour of the coast last autumn, I swept the cobwebs from my hut on the banks of the Sumida just in time for New Year, but by the time spring mists began to rise from the fields, I longed to cross the Shirakawa Barrier into the Northern Interior.

A walking tour that spanned a year! Now that’s some serious travel.  Here’s an excerpt of how a typical day would go for Basho: 

The sky cleared the morning of the sixteenth. I sailed to Iro Beach a dozen miles away and gathered several colorful shells with a Mr. Tenya, who provided a box lunch and sake and even invited his servants. Tail winds got us there in a hurry. A few fishermen’s shacks dotted the beach, and the tiny Hokke temple was disheveled. We drank tea and hot sake, lost in a sweeping sense of isolation as dusk came on.

Loneliness greater
than Genji’s Suma Beach:
the shores of autumn

Wave after wave
mixes tiny seashells with
bush clover flowers

This was some time in the late 17th century, and what struck me was how the haiku resembles a photograph in the way Basho wields it. The haiku becomes a fragment of the scene, holding emotion in its brief mention of the landscape; folding in the personal within imagistic details. The ideal travel image is somewhat akin to this, although the selfie camera has largely put paid to that. Travel should be that experience of what is outside/other to yourself. It may be idyllic at first glance, as this little inlet I spied as I walked around Havana last year attests to:

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When I walked down the bank, I found it led both to the sea and also to a rubbish dump that had been previously obscured by the palm trees. But that is all part of the fuller experience of walking. 

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On a bus, I would have been left with a fleeting glance of a postcard scene. On foot, I was able to explore the other side. 

One remembers more when walking. For the casual traveler, it is another way of remembering, writing with one’s feet. Somewhat tangential to this is Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, an autoethnographic sojourn into Aboriginal Australian territory to look for the connection between Aboriginal songs and nomadic travel. 

Chatwin asserts that language started as song, and in the aboriginal Dreamtime, it sang the land into existence. Rocks, trees and rivers came to be and the singers became one with the land. Published about a decade after The Roads to Sata, The Songlines is a book that is not so much about physical journeying but an extended musing.

Bridging fiction and non-fiction, the protagonist quotes from Heidegger and writes his observations of a white Australian woman negotiate the sale of an Aboriginal painting to hapless American tourists. It is a knowing kind of commodification; the artist privy to the jumble of facts and marketing mythology but playing along for his cut. Meanwhile, Chatwin comes up against the impossibility of trying to follow the songlines beyond the story. He is excluded as a stranger. Though he makes friends and gains invaluable insights, there is a world governed by songlines that he is unable to walk and sing into existence. 

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While walking brings a far more nuanced experience of travel certain scenarios, inevitably, get played out again and again. Over and over, in sun and rain, Alan Booth was regularly stopped by drivers who assumed he was hitchhiking and could not understand why he wouldn’t take a lift from them. 

As I stood consulting my map at a point where it looked as though I could finally get off the highway, a car drew up, the driver wound his window down and said in English, "Where go?"

"Obama," I replied, not looking up from my map.

He was half a minute piecing together his second English sentence, and when he had done this, he said, very carefully, "Where go?”

“Obama," I sighed and folded up my map.

The driver frowned at me, pointed straight down the highway, and said, "Obama. Obama. Obama."

"Yes," I replied in Japanese, "but I'm walking, so I'd rather get off the highway, you see. Anyway, I can read a map quite well and I know exactly where I am."

The effect of this on the driver was remarkable. It was as though each Japanese word I uttered were a gob of spittle in his face. His forehead puckered into furrows, his lips tightened, his eyes narrowed, he wound up the window and roared away, leaving me to turn wearily onto a quiet road that crossed a short, sluggish river.

The Roads to Sata is delightful not just because Booth ticks the descriptive boxes for scenery and an endless array of beer-drinking jaunts, but for his brief, often intense exchanges with the locals, many of whom cannot comprehend that he is speaking to them in Japanese. These conversations, often in tiny bars and on windswept beaches would be impossible in the age of the shinkansen, where commuters are whizzed from Tokyo to Kyoto quicker than the duration of a Studio Ghibli movie. 

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Being able to write about walking is another kind of skill altogether. It pulls together various talents; the ability to observe with piercing clarity, candour and perspicacity both the minute and the magnificent. There’s also the need to constantly shake up one’s vocabulary to find 100 different ways to describe a mountain range or how the sea looks at mid-day. Then there must be the discipline to record all of these observations and finally to shape them into some kind of coherence. And to trust that the reader will walk through the book as the writer has walked through the land. 

Perhaps this pandemic will force us to slow down, to consider reshaping how we think about walking for extended distances as something that is not just about exercise or pilgrimage, but an ecstatic, sacred way of apprehending the world.  

Where to get these books:
The Roads To Sata
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
The Songlines