Aubade

I carried a book as I walked: Immortal Poems of the English Language, an Anthology, edited by Oscar Williams. My parents had a copy lying around the house when I was a child.

I read every night before bed at home, and expected that I would have time for many books on my walk. But how many books can one man carry? The foods you want to pack on a walk are concentrated, dehydrated, freeze-dried or otherwise high-calorie and low-volume.That was my design for my books–for my single book–too.

In fact I hardly had a moment to spare for poetry, really. My evenings were extremely social, or equally tired. But on the morning  of May 15–and a fine clear morning it was, after a tempestuous night of wind and conversation and a boatload of fine port wine–I have a hangover, and the companiponship of Robert Browning. 

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea,

And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim:

And straight was the path of gold for him

And the need of a world of men for me.

Bewteen the Woods and the Water

It looked like a dull and dusty road. Fifty miles from the Delaware to to the Hudson, over country that seemed flat and useless. I expected a desert of the imagination. I should have known better.

Late last night, as I perused my favorite map, The Reaches of New York City 1939, an all-but-buried label caught my eye.  It’s a busy map, and well worth reading. (Some people read detective novels for pleasure, I prefer old maps.) This part of the world once was called “The Drowned Lands.”

Now that is a Romantic notion: Drowned Lands! I’m reminded of The Polymath, who warned Patrick Leigh Fermor in A Time Of Gifts that

“Everything is going to vanish! They talk of building power dams across the Danube and I tremble whenever I think of it! They’ll make the wildest river in Europe as tame as a municipal waterworks. All those fish from the East–they will never come back! Never, never, never!”

Fermor returned to the Danube, and the prediction of The Polymath, in  Between the Woods and the Water. He had continued his walk to the Iron Gates in 1938, but wrote this second volume at a time (1977) when “progress has placed the whole of this landscape underwater.”  The theme of the vanishing landscape haunts him, as if it were a blue Danube walk. He laments even that the dam-makers have carefully removed and reconstructed the drowned mosques and cathedrals on higher ground.

No imaginative or over-romantic traveler will ever be in danger of thinking he hears the call to prayer rising from the depths and he will be spared the illusion of drowned bells, like those of Ys, the cathédrale engloutie  off the Breton coast; or those of the legendary city of Kitezh, near the middle Volga, hard by Nizhni-Novgorod.  Poets and storytellers say that it vanished underground during the invasion of Batu Khan. Later it was swallowed up in lake and chosen listeners can sometimes hear its bells tolling from the drowned towers .

But not here: myths, lost voices, history and hearsay have all been put to rout, leaving nothing but this valley of the shadow.

I love the casual way Fermor encyclopedically tosses off a series of irresistible stories. He and The Polymath may be lamenting a sort of drowned land different from the formerly malarial miasmas of Orange County, New York. Drowned lands can also refer to riverine lowlands dammed and flooded, for flood control, power or drinking water. The Walkilll Valley was long thought to be a place that needed drying out. (Its history–and a fascinating contemporary controversy, are explained by Fred Isseks and his students in an excellent blog, called Garbage, Gangsters and Greed.)

The kind of flooded places that I know well, and plan to visit on my walk, are such underwater towns as Enfield, Dana, Prescott and Greenwich in Western Massachusetts where I went to school, or East Weare Village in New Hampshire where I grew up. But before all this modern dam-building, drowned lands meant seasonally flooded areas, like the Walkill Valley I’ll be passing through in May.

The swamps of North America, whether they have been dredged and drained or dammed and flooded today, were not always abandoned as lost lands. Hunting, trapping and fishing, the Native Americans swarmed these swamps. (Arrowheads and artifacts still abound.)  The early white settler-farmers did not consider the natural flow of the Walkill a good thing. Here is the 1875 report of the New Jersey State Geologist:

The extreme breadth of these lands is four miles,- and their area is 25,600 acres, of which 15,600 acres are in New York, and 10,000 acres in New Jersey. Through the entire course of the stream in these lands the fall is less than three inches to the mile, and the current is scarcely perceptible. After heavy falls of rain the stream becomes swollen and overflows its banks, and these lands are soon covered with water,remaining so for weeks together. In the present condition of the stream there is no chance for improvement; ditches are of little use for lack of an outlet, and nearly the whole of this area is ruined for the best agricultural uses. Some of the land is in swamp; other parts are attached to farms, and coarse and sour grass is gathered from them, when the seasons are not too wet. Along the borders of the upland, some of this ground is cropped, and fine returns are obtained, but the greater part of the area is utterly useless.

By November 1941, the drowned lands had found a new and less useless place, as recounted in the pages of the National Geographic Magazine.  Dorothea D. and Fred Everett contributed Black Acres: A Thrilling Sketch in the Vast Volume of Who’s Who Among the Peoples who Make America,  with photographs of their adopted home in The Drowned Lands.

The color plates display exotic peasants digging ditches, planting onions, blessing the onion seeds in their churches (no onion domes are depicted), eating onions, celebrating onions in old-world dances, and wearing costumes that Patrick Leigh Fermor would have described lovingly. These were recent European immigrants, mainly from Poland, who had drained the swamps and made the desert bloom. The Black Dirt Region of New York State–as it is now christened–had become a major producer of onions, the “wine-scented and poetic soul of the capacious salad bowl,” in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, whom the Everetts quote, romantically. They write

At night the toilers come home black with dirt but happy. Week ends they clean up and gather for a few hours dancing to their own Polish band music. For more than two years we lived across a small valley from their woodland park, and often the summer breezes wafted to us their sprightly tunes.

The swamps are being drained and cleared at an ever-increasing rate. In 1930 some 3,00 acres were in use; in 1939, 6,800; and in 1940 , about 9,000. At this rate the total area of 26,000 acres will soon be under cultivation.

And so it is now, according to contemporary accounts. I want to explore this land myself, and also investigate the irony that the public health of the Drowned Lands is today more threatened by an out-of-control landfill than a malarial swamp.

From these lovable people we have heard many stories brought over from the Old Country, legends based on superstition. Favorite subjects are the balls of fire seen dancing through the swamps on dark nights. Scientists, of course, have an explanation, but to simple folk such phenomena are weird omens.

These ancient sorceries reminded me vaguely of the Danube–was it Patrick Leigh Fermor who told a chilling tale of the watery intervale on the old river below Vienna? No, it was a lesser light I recalled: Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), a master of the Edwardian ghost story, and author of “The Willows” (1907).

“The Willows” is my favorite ghost story; it was H.P. Lovecraft’s, too. The horror is terrifyingly restrained. It is a simple story of two young men on a canoe trip on the Danube, who find a dead body among the the drowned islands of Austria-Hungary:

After leaving Vienna, and long before you come to Budapest, the Danube enters a region of singular loneliness and desolation, where its waters spread away on all sides regardless of a main channel, and the country becomes a swamp for miles upon miles, covered by a vast sea of low willow-bushes. On the big maps this deserted area is painted in a fluffy blue, growing fainter in color as it leaves the banks, and across it may be seen in large straggling letters the word Sumpfe, meaning marshes.

In high flood this great acreage of sand, shingle-beds, and willow-grown islands is almost topped by the water, but in normal seasons the bushes bend and rustle in the free winds, showing their silver leaves to the sunshine in an ever-moving plain of bewildering beauty.

The only source of their dread is that dead body, and the sound of the incessant wind in the willows, But Blackwood is a master of the uncanny, of finding the fear in everyday events. Unseen and unseeable beings surround the lads–as one of them says, ” We happen to have camped in a spot where their region touches ours, where the veil between has worn thin.”

Herbert Welsh, whose footsteps I’ll be following in May, also dabbled in spiritualism, and sought to pierce that veil between worlds–there is a miscellaneous file of “Psychic Interests (1926)” among his collected papers, which I have yet to explore. It consists of letters from corespondents who have tell of weird omens of the other side.

No road, by the way, is dull, once you start down it.

 

A Time of Gifts

In the indispensable walk book A Time of Gifts (1977) Patrick Leigh Fermor introduces a character he calls The Polymath. Fermor, eighteen years old and drummed out of his English school, set off on foot for Constantinople in 1933. It was as audacious as it sounds.

A voracious reader and autodidact, young Fermor commands enough language skills to complete his education along the way. He stops at the castles of Europe’s diminishing aristocracy–he himself is of the right sort and knows people–where his delight at discovering a library that holds the Encyclopedia Britannica, Meyers Konversations-Lexikon or the Larousse XIXème Siècle is only matched when he wanders into Danubian tavern and encounters a learned “man in loden.”

I had chanced on a gold mine! ‘Enquire within about everything’: flora, fauna, history, literature, music, archaeology–it was a richer source than any castle library…He had a delightful Bohemian scholar-gispy touch.

The Polymath tells Fermor the story of the Goths, the Vandals, and also the Macromanni and the Quadi in Central European history,, and, by extension, to the reader. This reader agrees with Fermor when he exclaims “This is the way to be taught history!” From an inhabitant of a Danubian castle, drawing maps of migrations on the tablecloth after a second bottle of Langenlois.

Fermor actually wrote A Time of Gifts forty years later. The Polymath may be a composite character of the kind common to memoirs; he may be a reflection of Fermor himself.  The adult writer had now learned some flora, fauna, history, literature, music, archaeology, but ascribed them to a character. (The contrast is sharp with a writer/walker such as W. G. Sebald, whose narrator in The Rings of Saturn simply watches his thoughts turn to, say, a detailed history of the Chinese silk industry as he wanders the coast of Norfolk.)

Truth be told, Fermor, like Sebald, like me, aspires to be a polymath, or, at least, a Bohemian scholar-gipsy. I want to know it all, and to write about it all. When Sebald’s publisher in England asked what category–fiction, travel, memoir, essay– he would like to put his book in, the author replied, “All of them.”

Indians (II) : Walking the Trail

There is at least one American path, heading from East to West, leading neither into the possibility of the future, nor the morning of the world and of humanity. In the 1830s, we the people of the United States removed tens of thousands of Native Americans from their homes in the southeast and sent them marching west to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Thousands died, along what is now known as the Trail of Tears.

Jerry Ellis, a Alabaman writer of Cherokee heritage, walked back to Alabama from Oklahoma and wrote Walking the Trial in 1991.  It’s a exemplary walking book, mixing memoir and desire, the political and the personal, historical epic and sore feet. Ellis rambles some, but he stays on his path. He meets a representative sample of Americans on the way, some who know more about the trials and tribulations of his ancestors than Ellis; some who live next to the Trail and have never heard of it.

A fascinating digression: Ellis falls in love. Looking for a place to sleep, he wanders, with trepidation, into a Christian hippie commune in Missouri. “Zion’s Order” is one of those pure products of America that thrive under wide horizons and religious freedom. Venda is a young woman who was born and raised within the compound.

Jerry meets Venda, and they fall in love, in a stumbling unconsummated romance–a story too real for fiction. Like Ellis’s writing and walking, his love affair somehow melds deep meaning and random events.  Its sudden starts, twists and stops seem less literary than literal: I believed in this strange assignation, because it seemed absurd.

Following this walk and such stories, I found myself humming the songs of The Old, Weird America, that invisible republic that Greil Marcus and Harry Smith repopulated, largely with the ghosts of black folk and criminals. But there are also Native spirits in the air–after all, Smith, “As a schoolboy, swirling in the irregular orbits of his parents’ religion, their fantasies, their poverty and delusions of grandeur, … discovered the local Indian tribes.”

That was years before Smith ever walked the Mississippi Delta, listening for America. Jerry Ellis meets some strange folks, as he crosses Arkansas, Missouri, the odd corner of Illinois, Kentucky and Tennessee, making his way home. He hears strange tales–not the least strange, as he tells more of it: the forgotten concentration camps, ethnic cleansing and genocide of his native land. The tales of my land include incest and insanity; but nothing is too weird for America.

I’ll be scouting for evidence of Native America as I walk in May. Not just because  Hebert Welsh, whose footsteps I’m walking in, was an Indian rights advocate. But because it’s “as if the earth under our feet / were / an excrement of some sky” in the words of William Carlos Williams, and it is a Native Sky.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

“The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry” (2012)

“Herbert Welsh walked from Philadelphia to Sunapee,” I said, and paused, briefly, not long enough for Amy to ask the question I wanted to ask, “Is that even possible?”

Not impossible, but highly unlikely, which brings me to the title, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012),  a novel by Rachel Joyce. Walking books are legion; novels somewhat more rare. Fiction favors the picaro, the rascal whose adventures–often connected only by the travels of the anti-hero, who lives an entertaining story. It’s fun to read because he’s a rogue (he’s usually male), not because he’s on foot.

Harold Fry is no rogue. Mid sixties, dully married, 45 years a drudge and just retired, Fry gets a note from an old friend. Queenie lives 600 miles away, and is dying. On the way to the box to mail Queenie his condolences, Fry decides to just keep walking:

Tell her Harold Fry is on his way. All she has to do is wait. Because I am going to save her, you see. I will keep walking and she must keep living.

Fry is no pilgrim either.  He arrives slowly at the idea of a potential religious, or spiritual, connotation of walking  to save a soul. A shopgirl he meets between Wessex and The Borders reveals it to him.  He meets people like that, and hears a lot of stories on his walk; these picaresque episodes are fun to read. The mystery–who is Queenie, and why must Harold see her?–is less fascinating.  My response went from Who cares? to Oh, now I get it rather too quickly.

But along the way (pun intended) I really enjoyed all the stories: the sadly closeted elderly gay man, the Eastern European woman who nurses Fry to health, the fanatic who follows him. Fry is like “The Man of the Crowd,” or, at any rate, Fry’s tale puts the reader in the position of the nameless narrator of that Edgar Allan Poe story, observing a tumultuous sea of human variety.

That “mood of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs,” is common to all walk books, even this unlikely one. But The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry is anomaly among walks, because no pilgrim actually made the pilgrimage. I will return to the question of pilgrimage on my way.

The Old Ways

Really, the only question to ask of a book about a walk is: Would I want to go for a walk with this writer?

British paperback cover. Note Old Type (Gill Sans) and Old Woodcut (Stanley Donwood). The Old Modernism.

When my friend and neighbor Paul K. St. Amour first recommended The Old Ways to me, we were bicycling, unsteadily, home from a bar. Paul’s the kind of cyclist with whom a drunken conversation about modernism is always enlightening. “Have you read Robert MacFarlane?” he asked: “He’s kind of the dean of the new British school of literary geography.” Or maybe it was literate geography.

Either way, The Old Ways is a delight, and I’m grateful for the tip. MacFarlane gets around. He walks in England, Scotland,  Palestine, Nepal, Spain–and even manages a “wonder-voyage” by sea in the Outer Hebrides: “The boat we sailed down the sea roads was a century-old cockle-shell.” He’s a graceful writer and a polymathic companion, familiar with geography, history, theology, philology and old sea vessels.

MacFarlane’s old ways are often not on any map, sometimes not even across land. To walk the way MacFarlane does is to stay awake, alert and alive to the passing land- or seascape. I welcome his rare awareness of the old ways, the paths that people of, or in, the past–the old ones–have travelled before us. These are  the”ghostly roads,” that the Anglo-Welsh poet-pedestrian Edward Thomas (1878-1917) described.

MacFarlane borrows heavily from Thomas, who, in his turn, was influenced by a great English wanderer and Bible salesman with the fitting name of George Henry Borrow (1803-1881).  To walk is to borrow, as it is to write.  A path is only a path because someone has already walked it; there’s no shame in repetition. In fact, “footstepping” a walker from a century before–as I will be following Herbert Welsh–is one of the delights of walking, and of writing, come to think of it. As he appraises the life and work of Thomas and his Modernism, MacFarlane might be said to be writing about literature, but I think he wants us to consider the old Ways of Seeing, too, in the simple but profound sense that John Berger had in mind, that “the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe.”

The way that George Borrow, and Edward Thomas,  and Robert MacFarlane,  and even I see the world is informed by all the walkers who preceded us on this path, as well as the time of walking or writing. For instance:

Thomas sensed early that one of modernity’s most distinctive tensions would be between mobility and displacement on the one hand, and dwelling and belonging on the other–with the former becoming ubiquitous and the latter becoming lost (if ever it had been possible) and reconfigured as nostalgia. He experienced that tension between roaming and homing even as it was first forming.

Across the Atlantic in Thomas’s time, Herbert Welsh was feeling that tension, too, in response to the same world, and the same wars. But British walking literature differs from American in its ways of seeing nostalgia. (And also in the way that the usual American complaints about sore feet and bad weather are summarily dismissed by a Brit, like McFarlane, as “The travelers usual mix of excitement, incompetence, ennui, adventure and epiphany.”)

As Frederic Gros put it in A Philosophy of Walking:

To us Europeans, the wilderness is associated with origins: an immemorial fault,permanently open, an obscure starting point. It’s the ancestral place to which we may want to return, which sometimes comes up at us, but is our definitive past. For Thoreau the American,the wilderness is located in the West, before him. It is the possibility of the future. The wilderness is not the night of European memory, but the morning of the world and of humanity.

MacFarlane expressed it conversationally, in Patience: After Sebald, a film, about W.G. Sebald, the German-British writer-walker (More to come on Sebald) and his seminal Rings of Saturn: An English Pilgrimage (Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine Englische Walfahrt):

The British tradition is walking as recovery;  and the American tradition is of walking as dis-covery: that striding forwards into the oncoming crisis of the world. For the Romantic tradition, the British Romantic tradition, it is to strip away the accretions of civilization, the hawking and hammering of time lived in cities, and return to some original state. In the American tradition, we travel to liberate ourselves, to discover new ways of being.

What distinguishes the British style of walking narrative from the American is visible to the naked eye. Look at the films they inspire.

 

MacFarlane’s British publisher was inspired by The Old Ways to sponsor a contest–“take your own walk–” that drew scores of video submissions. Here’s the winner.

The most popular recent American walking bestseller, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, (more on Strayed later) inspired Hollywood to tale of a young woman who walked “From lost to found on the Pacific Coast Trail.”

 

Of these three, whom would you choose as a long walk’s companion?

Walking to Vermont

When first I contemplated walking to New Hampshire, and writing a book about it, I wondered, “Has somebody already done that ?” This is the curse of baby boomer authors.

Ellen Stroud mentioned a book called Walking to Vermont in Nature Next Door.  She wrote that “When New York Times journalist Christopher Wren ushered in his retirement with a walk from Times Square to his summer home in Post Mills, Vermont…he had far more company on his walk [than Herbert Welsh], since he spent most of his four hundred miles on the Appalachian Trail…But Wren had it right: hiking from Times Square to the Green Mountain Forest is not so strange. The cities and forests of the Northeast are all of a piece.”

Stroud’s conclusion is profoundly simple: the unity of town and country. Between the woods and the megalopolis, the connections–of ownership and stewardship, watershed and foodshed, protectors and predators–are stronger than the distinctions. And at a plodding pace, Wren, like Herbert Welsh a hundred years ago, was able to connect the city, the suburb, and the land.

As curious a text as The New Gentleman of the Road is, I prefer Welsh’s prose to Wren’s. Of course, Wren tells more exciting stories: he was a foreign correspondent for 29 years, in  Moscow, Cairo, Beijing, Ottawa and Johannesburg at the UN, and reported from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, China and Southeast Asia, Africa, South America and Canada. The trouble with Walking to Vermont is Wren’s apparent resolve to include an anecdote from every outpost, even if it has nothing to do with his walk. His story wanders, and not in an enlightening or entertaining way.

Like every long-distance pedestrian I have read, Wren dropped several pounds and felt fitter and younger when he got where he was going. (Welsh himself published an affidavit from his physician in his book.) He draws no other moral from his story. All well and good. But when Colin Thubron observes that walking, like poetry, makes nothing happen–his wry conclusion seems more hard-won than Wren’s.

I note that Wren’s route is not exactly mine, and hope my passing thoughts are less, well, pedestrian, too.

To a Mountain in Tibet

The illusion that speed saves time is shattered, in the end, by death. When someone near me dies, I’m reminded that none of us has world enough, or time.

When British traveller and storyteller Colin Thubron lost his 97-year-old mother in 2006, he went for a long walk.  To a Mountain in Tibet is the story of that walk, to isolated  Mount Kailas, the source of four great rivers of Asia and almost as many religions.The ritual pilgrim practice involves walking around the mountain–clockwise for Buddhists, counterclockwise for  Hindus–not to, or up the mountain. “Its slopes are sacrosanct,” Thubron notes, “and it has never been climbed.”

Thubron is not a believer, but the romance of that massif enthralls him, and he makes the circuit.

This is a breathtaking book, haunted by death. As Thubron walks, he remembers. Struggling to breathe in the thin mountain air, he recalls his mother’s breathlessness at the end. Musing on Buddhism and Hinduism or Himalayan botany raises memories of his father, who served with the British Raj in India. The sheer pyramidal faces of Kailas remind him of his sister’s untimely death, aged 21, in an accident in the French Alps.

Many walkers and writers try to meld memoir and travelogue; few do it well, because the way memory works on foot is not altogether as straightforward as prose. Thubron, also a novelist, dances gracefully bewteen now and then–from an exegesis of the Tibetan Book of the Dead to a memory of his mother’s grief at the loss of her daughter, to her hospital bed, to describing a vertiginous high-altitude monastery.  The narrative structure is more like a vernacular temple than an architectural drawing. It’s a pleasure to explore, if you read slowly.

Maybe the apparently formless scaffolding of To a Mountain in Tibet just reflects the dizzying effects of altitude sickness; but it also feels like the way my mind works on a long walk. Thubron walks and writes with integrity and honesty, and maybe that’s why he never reaches any conclusions.

You cannot walk out your grief, or absolve yourself of your survival, or bring anyone back. You are left with the desire only that things not be as they are. So you choose somewhere meaningful on the earth’s surface, as if planning a secular pilgrimage. Yet the meaning is not your own.

I am undertaking a secular pilgrimage myself, revisiting some of the haunted lands where my sister Sarah Elizabeth Statt (1959-60), my grandmother Elizabeth Wheeler (1900-1967), my mother Mary Putnam (1926-1999), and my brother John Charles Statt (1953-2007), were born and died.

In the last year, my ex-wife and my mother’s sister both died, in New Hampshire. I rented a car, filled a thermos with coffee, and jumped onto Interstate 95. New Hampshire is less than six hours away, that way. But I was responding to death.  Is a fore- and afternoon on the road an adequate show of respect? It seems too fast, just as the life that has brought me from New Hampshire to Philadelphia seems too fast–even though it has taken almost 60 years.

I don’t believe I need to hike a magic mountain to remember. But walking can be an act of mourning, too, moving slowly where I might hurry–that helps.

 

 

A Philosophy of Walking

Frédéric Gros teaches philosophy in France. The practice of philosophy does not require an advanced degree and an appointment at a respected university, as Gros has.  The first words–first sentence, first paragraph–of A Philosophy of Walking are “Walking is not a sport.”

Logically, you might take issue with that. For instance, in the early 20th century, when Herbert Welsh was advocating foot travel as the way to health, it had been only a few years since the heyday of Pedestrianism, according to the subtitle of a recent book, “When Watching People Walk was America’s Favorite Sport.”

Gros means something like what I might have in mind if I wrote “Philosophy is not an academic discipline.”  The thinkers on Gros’s mind include Kant and Nietzsche, yes, but also poets–Nerval and Rimbaud–pilgrims and politicians such as Ghandi, and all-around free spirits such as Thoreau and Rouseau.

Like those walkers and writers, Gros’s work here is rangy and loose-limbed. He meanders, slowly, and repeats himself–three qualities that also describe the pedestrian pace he prefers. It’s not a sustained argument for a particular point of view; this is une philosophie, not la philosophie.

Like Twitter and facebook, Gros favors the style of the aperçu–the quick quip of illumination: “Presence is something that takes time.”  “The secret of monotony is that it constitutes a remedy for boredom.” “You have to walk a long way to relearn self-love.” “The illusion of speed is the belief that it saves time.” These aren’t steps in a proof; there is no Q.E.D. at the end. Right at the start, Gros observes what every walker knows.

When you walk for a long time, there comes a moment when you no longer know how many hours have passed, or how many more will be needed to get there; you feel on your shoulders the weight of the bare necessities, you tell yourself that’s quite enough–that really nothing more is needed to keep body and soul together–and you feel you could carry on like this days, for centuries.

And as I will be walking across a century, I will need that.