Elegy of the Walker
By the conclusion of Mildred Lissette Norman‘s 2,200 mile hike on the Appalachian Trail in 1952—the steep snow-covered peaks of New Hampshire’s White Mountains; the autumnal cacophony of Massachusetts’ brown, orange, and red Berkshires; the verdant greens of New York’s Adirondacks and Pennsylvania’s Alleghanies; the misty roll of Virginia’s Blue Ridge; the lushness of North Carolina and Georgia’s Great Smoky Mountains—she would wear down the soles of her blue Sperry Topsiders into a hatchwork of rubber threads, the rough canvas of the shoes ripping apart at the seams. “There were hills and valleys, lots of hills and valleys, in that growing up period,” Norman would recall, becoming the first woman to hike the trail in its entirety. The Topsiders were lost to friction, but along with 28 additional pairs of shoes over the next three decades, she would also gain a new name—Peace Pilgrim. The former secretary would (legally) rechristen herself after a mystical experience somewhere in New England, convinced that she would “remain a wanderer until mankind has learned the way of peace.”
Peace Pilgrim’s mission began at the Rose Bowl Parade in 1953, gathering signatures on a petition to end the Korean War. From Pasadena she trekked over the Sierra Nevada, the hardscrabble southwest, the expansive Midwestern prairies, the roll of the Appalachians and into the concrete forest of New York City. She gained spectators, acolytes, and detractors; there was fascination with this 46-year-old woman, wearing a simple blue tunic emblazoned in white capital letters with “Walking Coast to Coast for Peace,” her greying hair kept up in a bun and her pockets containing only a collapsible toothbrush, a comb, and a ballpoint pen. By the time she died in 1981, she had traversed the United States seven times. “After I had walked almost all night,” she recalled in one of the interviews posthumously collected into Peace Pilgrim: Her Life and Work in Her Own Words, “I came out into a clearing where the moonlight was shining down… That night I experienced the complete willingness, without any reservations, to give my life to something beyond myself.” It was the same inclination that compelled Abraham to walk into Canaan, penitents to trace Spain’s Camino de Santiago, or of the whirling Mevlevi dervishes traipsing through the Afghan bush. It was an inclination toward God.
Something about the plodding of one foot after another, the syncopation mimicking the regularity of our heartbeat, the single-minded determination to get from point A to point B (wherever those mythic locations are going to be) gives walking the particular enchantments that only the most universal of human activities can have. Whether a stroll, jog, hike, run, saunter, plod, trek, march, parade, patrol, ramble, constitutional, wander, perambulation, or just plain walk, the universal action of moving left foot-right foot-left foot-right foot marks humanity indelibly, so common that it seemingly warrants little comment if you’re not a podiatrist. But when it comes to the subject, there are as many narratives as there are individual routes, for as Robert Macfarlane writes in The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, “a walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells.” Loathe we should be to let such an ostensibly basic act pass without some consideration.
writes in that “Like eating or breathing, [walking] can be invested with wildly different cultural meanings, from the erotic to the spiritual, from the revolutionary to the artistic.” Walking iswrites in her bestseller : an account of how Strayed hiked thousands of miles following the death of her mother, and learning “what it was like to walk for miles with no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets… It seemed to me it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild.”
