(Host) As the cool days of autumn commence, commentator Martha Molnar, a
public relations professional and freelance writer, is rediscovering
the pleasures of walking.
(Molnar) All summer I didn’t walk. I
walked around outside the house of course, but it was too warm for my
customary two-miles. Until just the other day, when I put on my new,
superlight running shoes and traipsed down the driveway and out to the
road.
I walk alone. My husband finds walking the same two hills,
day after day, incredibly boring. But to me, the same road is never
boring because it’s never the same road.
First, the road looks
different when walking it from different directions. Walking down the
hill from the house with my head turned to the right, I see the only
house I pass. Up the next hill, I see a neighbor’s bulls, followed by
horses in the next field. On the way back down and up, I see woods,
until I reach our property and turn my head to the left to check on the
rogue ash trees that appeared suddenly along the fence last year.
But
that’s now. In spring, my attention is on the stream that follows the
road. I could be looking at a thin runnel or at waters rushing and
tumbling into pools. Then there are the colors. I can watch a single
color, yellow for instance, as it advances from spring’s first marsh
marigold to late summer’s goldenrod and finally up into every tree. Even
the dirt road is intriguing, since it’s a shifting map of whatever the
daily weather throws at it, resulting in a changing maze of ruts and
potholes.
Walking the same road year after year does require new
eyes. It takes attention to note that the leaning birch has dropped
along the maple’s trunk and is now resting in the crook of a branch. It
takes alertness to see that a rodent hole has disappeared but a new one
has been excavated further up the hill. And it takes vigilance to
observe that the nest that only yesterday seemed full of action has been
abandoned.
These things can only be observed at a walking pace.
The unexpected hoot of the owl in the morning would be missed while in a
car or even perched on a bicycle. So would the sight of a single
miraculous, ripe wild strawberry this late in the season. This
familiarity with the big and small features of the landscape of my home,
renewed with every walk, creates a deep sense of place and belonging.
But
it’s the rhythm of walking, as much as what can be seen, that draws me
back. Walking a road generates a kind of thinking that almost never
happens sitting at a desk or immobilized in a car – or even hiking in
the woods, where the uneven trail demands attention. Walking the road at
a constant cadence, past familiar sights seen in ever transforming
light, lets my mind travel with my feet, steadily, freely, naturally.
I’m amazed that a single mile of dirt road can yield so much.