Walking in America
On Thoreau and claustrophobia
When I was in high school, a friend of mine and I had a habit of driving up to where the Pacific Crest Trail cuts its way across the nearby mountains. We wondered over the meadows and through the fern-gripped trees, along the outcroppings of rock and down the scrubby saddles. We would regularly go off trail to climb up and down steep hills, roll boulders, or simply walk unguided through the wilderness. Arriving over the back of a ridge from the side facing civilization, we would mount the crests to see an endless expanse of forest, often unheeded by those who lived below, and it induced a vertigo of new proportions. Yet being there allowed us to experience at once a strength and a humility generally unknown within even small towns.
For in the cities the wilderness is far off. Even outside the city limits, where I lived, it was hard to come by: No trails passed through the lot divisions, large though they might have been, and to find the unguarded wild one had to ascend the road to a hillside or patch of brush, unmarked if not unowned, where the toes of the mostly uninhabited mountains bled into the properties. This we did, sometimes following old logging roads, sometimes simply choosing a slope and ascending until space opened. Escaping in this way was liberating, but it took a great deal of effort and, I hardly need add, some risk on our part. For most, such expeditions were only accessible by driving sometimes considerable distances.
Henry David Thoreau, certainly one of America’s greatest nature writers and an apostle of the wilderness, had it easier. In his essay Walking, he remarks on the availability of unowned, wild spaces to saunter as one chose:
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public roads, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.
Though some portions of the landscape are too rugged to be fully parceled and walled, we have indeed come upon “the evil days.” For most places have become a patchwork of exclusion, with only the parks, the larger of which are usually accessible only by car, as places of public refuge. Currently, I live in the Central Valley of California, in a place well-known for agricultural production, and nearly all the land has been tamed and nothing left for public use, with a few noteworthy exceptions. The vast expanses of the valley, flat as a saucer and overflowing with fertility, are in some places so overcome by almond groves that one can drive for hours and see barely an oak or open field. Houses dot such landscapes, but most inhabitants are congregated in towns and cities, where walking, if one walks at all, is more often than not over concrete and among the churning of vehicles.
Thoreau feared that we would come to this, and yet it is one of the terrible ironies of Walking that he frequently champions the spirit that, at least in its more perverse forms, has brought us here. He praises the conquering of meadows, the heroic American spirit, the call to westward expansion. Viewing the wide panorama of the Mississippi, he remarked, “I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that this was the heroic age itself.” He criticizes the agricultural simplicity of Native Americans (whose wildly diverse methods were, incidentally, hardly as simple as he thought), saying, “[they] had no better implement with which to intrench himself in the land than clam-shell. But the farmer is armed with plough and spade.”
To be fair to Thoreau, he didn’t want nature to become one plowed field, much less a parking lot. Rather, he accepted the necessity of cultivation while hoping for the maintenance of the wild. And, as suggested in his famous statement that “in the wilderness is the preservation of the world,” it was largely through the untamed places that he felt humanity could draw its strength, for he saw them as reservoirs of life, of awe, of spiritual fulfilment: “I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest.” Without this resource, without the freshness breathing from the humus and the pines, the rivers and the moss, he believed that we become weak, uninspired.
And yet the “heroism” of expansion, of unbridled building that was heir to the spirit of manifest destiny has arguably gone too far, or in the wrong direction. Most of us live now estranged, with hardly a footpath that we need not drive to. Even in the country, fences abound and walking is, if anything, rarer than in the city. We have preserved much in our national and local parks (may they stay pristine), but on a day-to-day level, in the immediate vicinity of our homes, we are hemmed in, cut off from the wells of life Thoreau spent so much energy praising.
The west was for Thoreau an image of that life spring, of the freedom of the wilderness, where one could break from the confines of the old world. “We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature,” he wrote, “retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure.” In the west were the gardens of the Hesperides, where the human spirit could at last run free and noble. But what would Thoreau say if he could see Los Angeles sprawling down to the beach? What would he say to the interstates or even the claustrophobia of the endless almond groves, mechanically farmed? The “heroic age” may have had much heroism, but there was too much a mix of hubris in its enterprise. And why would it have turned out different, when from the first we were unwilling to learn from those peoples that knew how to inhabit the land, whom we so violently displaced? The spirit Thoreau championed strikes me less as reflecting his own reverence than a lust of dominance.
There are other metaphors for which the west might serve, after all, for it is the place of the setting sun, of shadow and scattered light. We have come to the wide Pacific and found here breakage and division, loss of roots and memory, and the acme of the West is not the freeborn yelp of Whitman, but the hollow drone of Silicon Valley.
At least, that is one way of viewing the matter, though it is certainly one-sided. Many of us who live in America experience a sense of claustrophobia, of an increasingly narrow public sphere. It is not just my neighborhood. Our opportunities for walking that do not involve the roar of engines are minimal, and the number of places—much less green spaces—that we can access seem always insufficient. The sprawling distances of so many cities are themselves alienating and restrictive. Ironically, a town feels smaller when it is built on a scale for cars, and that is, alas, the norm.
But this need not cause despair, though it may require a change in strategy. Thoreau describes walking out his door and allowing his own natural instinct to guide him whichever direction it chose. The world was open to him. But it is not so for us. Rather than march over endless expanses to discover greater views, our conditions are better suited to pursue intimacy with that which is nearest at hand. While we can and should get to know whatever wild and open placed are left to us, we should also get to know whatever natural life is close. Our yards or even the trees in our apartment blocks could serve to some extent as our open woodlands. And we can always get to know them better. There are, in all probability, thousands of insect species just beyond one’s front door throughout the year, and an equal number of plants. The weeds tread underfoot have names, families, histories, uses. They may be food or clothing, baskets or ornament. Their flowers—effervescent, miniscule—are threaded by veins of porphyry, emitting scents like myrrh.
Such things are all around us, even in the most neglected, conquered space. And the more we get to know them, the more they open out, and the world seems larger. Each patch of land is infinite for all the variety and wonder it can, if properly attended to, evoke. And in growing in that wonder, we begin to connect with that spirit which rides through the wilderness and makes it grow, in which we too live and find our strength, and this can spread within us, outward to combat, in some small way, the forces shaping the estrangement in which so many of us live. Then we might know what Thoreau meant by the preservation of the world in the wilderness, or with Gerard Manley Hopkins say,
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
