I am leaving this morning on my long walk home, from Philadelphia to New Hampshire.
Daily blogging is not a chore I choose, but I will post a couple of photos daily, on Instagram, which will also appear here, and on facebook. They are geotagged, if you’re concerned with my whereabouts. Or want to look for me on the road.
I bought a new phone the other day. Herbert Welsh, walking from Philadelphia to New Hampshire a hundred years ago, would have called my old phone a wonder. But my LG Optimus S was aged and overloaded, and could do nothing but make phone calls, send and receive texts, and show me exactly where I was, anytime, anywhere, on a map.
That’s all. Back in 1915, that would have seemed a miracle. One hot afternoon in 1915, out of cash in Middletown, New York, stranded in the “financial desert” along the road from Port Jervis to Newburg, Welsh was saved when a local merchant advised him:
“I’ll tell you what you do; ‘phone your bank in Philadelphia to wire you that money and you’ll have it within an hour” A bright and happy thought, surely, and how stupid I was not to have found that out myself. It worked like a charm, and here’s where having an expert telephonist like Dorothy Whipple came in handy. In a moment she was conversing easily with [the Philadelphia banker]…and my mind was in a moment set completely at rest. I blessed the long-distance telephone which could do such wonders.
Dorothy, like the millennial in your office, who not only knows what Meerkat does but knows what to do with it, could take full advantage of one of youth’s blessings: easy familiarity with technology.
We who are old have to figure out for ourselves, “What kind of technology do we want use?”
My walk will be not one of those stunts where you try to live like it’s 1900. In something as fundamental as my shoes, I will be taking full advantage of Goretex, Otholite and Vibram. And I can’t imagine how I could present myself fit for dinner–after a 20-mile walk–in anything other than light-weight quick-dry nylon clothing.
But in the related technologies of communications and navigation I will be choosing restraint. Herbert Welsh relied on printed maps to find his way, and the US Mail to keep in touch–he wrote postcards to friends and letters for publication to the Philadelphia Public Ledger.
Walking in May 2015, I am choosing to bring a series of pages torn from old DeLorme Atlases, back issues of National Geographic, and my collection of USGS 7.5′ quadrangles. My antiquarian fondness for printed maps may seem quaint, but it is not unconsidered. I have earned, after all, an academic degree in geographic information systems.
To find my place on a map is a skill. Here is the world, where am I in it? My GPS, which can instantly create a map with me at its center, starts with me and creates a world around me. But as Copernicus’s mom, and mine, used to say, “The world doesn’t revolve around you, you know.”
I also am choosing not to blog my walk. Writing these anticipatory pages the last few months has made it clear to me that I would spend way too much mental and emotional energy in such an endeavor. But I will take a photograph or two every day, attach them to a GPS map and post them on Instagram, so that anyone who’s curious can follow me–and maybe even find me if I’m passing through your neighborhood.
At the heart of my walk, a conflict between solitude and sociability confronts me. I plan to spend eight hours a day alone and afoot. But I also plan to eat and sleep almost every night with people: with strangers from Couchsurfing, with friends new and old, with relatives I haven’t seen in decades–that’s a lot more companionship than I’m accustomed to.
My daughter (who used to laugh at my intellectually challenged “smart”phone) texted me (of course!) a warning when I got my promising and powerful Moto X: “Don’t get too download happy–you probably feel like you have more space than you know what to with!”
I replied that I wasn’t filling that space fast, because “I kind of enjoy having so much empty memory.” A phrase which, as I texted it, seemed not to make much sense, but which has grown on me. Empty memory is something worth cultivating, at almost sixty years old, and a good response to the question concerning technology, too.
Lewis Mumford, born in 1895, is a hero. He died in 1990 in a little house in Amenia, New York–a home that, for no good reason–is not an historic landmark today. Traipsing through in 1915, Herbert Welsh, in The New Gentleman of the Road, praised Amenia only as “a favorite resting place for automobilists.”
Historian, sociologist, philosopher, and literary critic, Mumford is best remembered for his study of cities and urban architecture, but was, above all else, a writer.
My attraction to the writer Mumford has a history, and that story has a theme, that can best be described as “Mumfordian.”
I’m a country boy. Grew up working on the farm and in the forests, hiking and camping for fun: rural peace and bucolic quiet came to me as second nature. But in the 60s, the metropolis felt as close as the TV set and The New York Times, and I choose to live today in a mess of a big old American city. The tension between City and Country dominated Lewis Mumford’s work–as well as my life.
I discovered Mumford when I was in college–in a used bookstore, not a classroom. The City in History (1961, and still in print) is, in its author’s words, a “book that opens with a city that was, symbolically, a world: it closes with world that has become, in many practical aspects, a city.” Here was a topic that ranged wide enough to suit my imagination. The writer Mumford was, and is, too much a generalist, a polymath, to get much academic credit. He never earned a college degree, although later in life he taught at several universities–he once called himself “a professor of things in general,” a course I would have signed up for with joy.
At Amherst College in the 70s, Mumford was wholly absent from the curriculum. I knew that Amherst was never going to be a scholarly home to me–the scholarship grant that generously financed my education proved, oddly enough, a hindrance to any academic scholarship. I was drawn to this un-credentialed and un-tenured teacher, who also seemed to take seriously such country matters–in all senses– as I had learned at home, in New Hampshire.
If you have no inkling of Lewis Mumford and his many books, I suggest you watch an evocative and nostalgic film that he created in 1939, for the New York World’s Fair. It’s called “The City,” but you will see that it nevertheless spends a lot of time in “The Country.”
Mumford was an early advocate of Regionalism, and the region where he spent most if his life was, in fact, The Reaches of New York City (1939). The City he loved; and The Country, but his distaste for Suburbia was profound:
The end product is an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set: soon, with a little more automation of traffic, mostly in a motor car, travelling even greater distances, under remote control, so that the one-time driver may occupy himself with a television set, having lost even the freedom of steering wheel. Every part of this life, indeed, will come through official channels and be under supervision. Untouched by human hand at one end: untouched by human spirit at the other. Those who accept this existence might as well be encased in a rocket hurtling through space, so narrow are their choices, so limited and deficient their permitted responses. Here indeed we find ‘The Lonely Crowd.’
The greatest 20th-century American urbanist made pastoral Amenia, New York, his home: this is where died in 1990. Twenty-five years on, Amenia is a suburb of New York City, as is most of the range of my great walk. Must we always rhyme, as I did when I was young, the very word “suburb” with “subdued,” “dumb” and dull?” I hope not. I hope my feet, as I walk, map out a better way.
Mumford’s biographer Donald Miller describes Leedsville, New York,
…the upstate hamlet where he had been living for thirty-six years [since 1936] with his family, in a simple wooden farmhouse tow miles or so from Amenia, an old iron-making center not much larger than Emerson’s Concord. Here, in a tiny study off his book-lined living room–a monk’s cell, really–he had done most of his best work; for while he loved the variety and velocity of the city, country living suited him better. In slow-moving Leedvsville he lived a life in line with his temperament, writing in the mornings and walking, sketching and gardening in the afternoons.
No record shows that Mumford ever even considered the 90 mile stroll to or from Manhattan. Even from Poughkeepsie, whence I’ll be coming, Amenia is a long walk. I will visit Mumford’s home on my way. The simple message of Mumfordian Regionalism is also the truth of my walk: no country without the city, no city without country. Walking, you come to know that the city is both very far from, and also very near, the countryside.
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!”
Fermo
r 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.
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.
If the British tradition sees walking as a kind of recovery, while the American tradition is about walking as discovery, maybe the real American way is more about covery–covering up past crimes. The boundless American future has always been predicated on the emptiness of its past, specifically, the pre-Columbian emptiness of the North American landscape. The New World, it was once said, lacked history and inhabitants: terra nullius. The old world walker can wander Druid wonderways, trace an ancient pilgrimage, or tramp castle-to-castle down the Danube. If an American pedestrian wants to contemplate ruins, or wonder who walked this path before him, he has to consider the American Indians.
Herbert Welsh’s obituary in the New York Times (June 31, 1941) left no doubt that he had spent his life thinking of them: “FRIEND OF INDIANS”
“The Red Man,” as the Times obituary writer was not ashamed to call him in 1941, had been driven West across the continent, but not from the pages of The New Gentleman of the Road. Stopping in in Milford, Pennsylvania in 1924, and feeling nostalgic about an eariuer excursion, Welsh wrote:
I have another and less pleasant recollection of that summer spent in Milford, in the form of a little monument, a shaft of gray stone, set up through the enthusiasm and energy of a Presbyterian pastor, then resident in the town, to record the virtues of Tom Quick, one of the early settlers of that region. If I remember correctly, — I am open to correction, — this pioneer of Anglo-Saxon civilization had, by his trusty rifle, the old muzzle-loader pea-ball pattern, caused the death of no less than 40 Indians — men, women, and children. He lay in wait for them and picked them off from behind bushes or trees on every convenient opportunity. This was under lex talionis, — lawyers will amend my Latin, if it needs the same, — as Tom’s father had been shot by an Indian. My white brother seems to have gotten more than even with his adversary. I can understand Tom Quick’s feeling and his method of expressing it, but what has always puzzled me was to understand the school of theology to which the Presbyterian pastor belonged who felt called on to raise a monument to a hero of that type.
The Tom Quick Monument, destroyed by vandals–heroes of Welsh’s type, perhaps– in 1997, was recently restored. Progressive thinkers have added an interpretive plaque, explanation, if not an excuse, for the benighted, earlier, commemoration of “a hero of that type.” I want to see it for myself, because it is somewhat hard to figure out on the Web just what it looks like today. (A postmodern species of Robert Musil’s “invisible monument.”)
An indefatigable fundraiser, Welsh’s travel memoir also recorded meetings on his walk with donors to, and supporters of, the Indian Rights Association he had founded in 1882. Welsh visited the Sioux Reservations that year, and recorded his impressions in Four Weeks Among some of the Sioux Tribes of Dakota and Nebraska. Trained as an artist, Welsh evinced a Romantic faith in the potential of the Indians to acquire “civilization.” I won’t try to explain all his complex opinions about the Native Americans here. That is well done in a dry, but exhaustive, book, The Indian Rights Association: The Herbert Welsh Years 1882-1904 (1985). The historian William T. Hagan highlighted this line from Four Weeks:
The Indians at Rosebud quite unconsciously presented to us a series of brilliant pictures, with a touch of the Orient about them, which might have inspired the genius of a Delacroix or Decamp.
I note not merely the Romanticism, but the literal Orientalism, with which Welsh quite unconsciously observed the Natives. The Indian Rights Association was assimilationist, and committed to Christian education and private ownership of land among them.
The IRA had been founded…
… with the object of acquainting the people of our country with the actual condition and needs of the Indians, and of so enlightening public sentiment as to ensure adequate support for legislative and executive measures for securing and protecting the just rights of the Indians, and maintaining the government’s faith plighted to them in treaties.
That faith in treaties did not seem much on Welsh’s mind as he strolled the banks of the Delaware River, where a shameful, if non-violent appropriation of Native land by the Quaker State had taken place in 1737: the infamous Walking Purchase.
The Delaware (Lenni Lenape) Indians of Pennsylvania were convinced by Thomas Penn, a son of William, that the white folks had found an old deed. In 1686, Penn said, his ancestors and the Indians’ had agreed to sell the Quakers a tract of land upland from the Delaware River, “As far as a man can walk in a day and a half.” I pick up the story from Harry Emerson Wildes (The Delaware, 1940)
All was ready for official measurements. The “Walking Purchase” was to made in the fall of 1737. There was a difference in in point of view, however, as to the methods to be used. According to Indian interpretation, a friendly party of whites and Indians would set out, strolling leisurely in gentlemanly fashion, until thirty-six hours had elapsed. There would be frequent rests for food and smoking, and the day would be limited to the time the sun was visible.
Sounds like the kind of walk up the Delaware that I would enjoy.
Thomas Penn had other views. He combed the colony for young and wiry woodsmen. Selecting … the best athletes to be found, he trained them well and ordered them to make themselves thoroughly familiar with the route. They were instructed secretly to blaze a trail through the woods, and to clear it of all underbrush.
Penn’s athletes made it into a competition, built their own track, and won. The Lenape were pushed west and landed in Indian Territory, Oklahoma, where Welsh would have found them in the early 20th century. In the early 21st, as late as 2006, the Delaware were asking the United States Court of Appeal, 3rd Circuit for relief from the fraud. They failed, on an interesting interpretation involving sovereignity.
I want to keep the natives in mind as I walk in May, in part because I want to walk and write in the British tradition, and recover something. Do any traces of Ancient America remain along my path?
I have legal documents to prove I was born in the village of Webster, in southeastern Massachusetts, in 1956, and that I enrolled the second grade in the New Boston, New Hampshire, Central School in the fall of 1963. The complex migrations of the intervening years–the Statt family Völkerwanderung–are as mysterious to me today as any second century migration is to European historians. The witnesses are all dead: father and mother, aunts and uncles, brother and sister. And I only am escaped to tell…
We spent my first few years here. The Hudson River Valley is the setting of my earliest memories; the familiar landscape of many of my dreams. The houses we rented that short decade dotted the map of Putnam County, New York: Mahopac, Croton Falls, Lake Carmel, Peekskill. Low-ceilinged stone cottages; overhanging cedars and oaks; a faint smell of damp clay from a muddy stream–a kill— leading to a wide slow-flowing river. The scent of mud in the leafy woods would be familiar enough for me to smell “home” here right away. I haven’t been this way for fifty years; in the third week of May I’ll be walking through, moving at a pace that will try my sense of smell.
Elizabeth Wheeler, my mother’s mother, lived on Lake Mahopac, in a apartment above Erickson’s Ice Cream Parlor and Marina, and we spent a lot of time there, eating, swimming and playing in boats. When my father was away, Grandma drove us–my mom, my brother, my sister and me–to Bear Mountain, Sterling Forest, Boscobel or the Croton Falls Reservoir for outings. At this time, my father was frequently incarcerated and institutionalized, in punishment for dark sexual crimes, which I didn’t understand then, of course, but even today I’m not sure what he did or with whom. My sister Sarah was born here in 1959 and died within six months; the cause was obscure. For my parents, it was no picnic.
W
e did eat a lot of picnic lunches in the parks in those days. Crossing the Bear Mountain Bridge–a bridge built in 1924: in 1920 Herbert Welsh had to cross the on a “ferry that carried us over the lordly river…Let it be noted by the indolent among my readers that this was the only occasion in our long journey when we trusted to any artificial means of transportation.”–crossing the handsome Bear Mountain Bridge, my brother John and I, in the back seat of Grandma’s Valiant, sang the first song I ever learned by heart:
The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain,
The bear went over the mountain,
To see what he could see.
And all that he could see,
And all that he could see,
Was the other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain,
The other side of the mountain,
Was all that he could see.
As a child I was pretty sure that the mountain that befuddled the bear must be Bear Mountain. This children’s song worried me to the bone. It spoke to a deep disappointment that I was feeling already, having lost my little sister, and wondering where Daddy was. Four years old, I was aware our family was somehow amiss. All that I could hear, was a lyric that warned things might stay that way. The bear spoke to me of darkness, silence, and solitude: the dusky woods, the somber Hudson, and me, alone. That hopeless loneliness still haunts me, the fear that maybe I won’t find a pot of gold, or blue birds flying, on the other side of the mountain.
I think of this time and place as my Unheimliche Heimat (1995), a phrase I borrow from W.G. Sebald’s 1995 book of essays about postwar Austrian literature. “Strange homeland” works as a translation, but misses the pun on “un-homely home,” and also Sigmund Freud’s well-known translation of “unheimlich” as “uncanny,” Freud says the uncanny is “that class of the terrifying that leads us back to something long known to us, once very familiar.”
The English theater director Katie Mitchell, speaking in the film Patience: After Sebald, has said, “the most uncanny place is one’s own home.” I will see what I can see.
Really, the only question to ask of a book about a walk is: Would I want to go for a walk with this writer?
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?
A cryptic clue in Saturday’s puzzle in the Financial Times: “2D: Dry ditch (6)” The six-letter solution is “desert,” of course. A classic “double definition?” Almost but not quite, because, in this case, the rains have both left–or ditched–the desert, and left it without water–dry. The two definitions: arid and abandoned, are the same, really.
This is the way Herbert Welsh went. I call it the Desert of the Imagination, because I can’t think of anything to say about this particular suburban wasteland, and I will be parting from Welsh and Dorothy Whipple, to meet them again on the Hudson River,
I admit that I learned, as I scribbled on this fascinating National Geographic map of “The Reaches of New York City” (1939), that I might yet see the Baptist Meeting House 1792, the William Bull and Sarah Wells House, the Clinton Home, or Washington’s Headquarters. These are the sites highlighted on this masterpiece of Modernist cartography: which appears to have been drawn with a compass, tracing a couple of hundred mile radius around the city. Within a couple of leagues, the New York World’s Fair was taking place in Flushing Meadows that same year–that dream of the Modernist project. When Welsh was walking from the Delaware to the Hudson River in the Twenties, Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford (whom we will meet later, along the Housatonic) were founding the Regional Planning Association of America (1923-1933), to promote their Modernist vision of a great city that was dependent on, and responsible for, the country surrounding it.
Their short-lived organization might have displayed this map in its office, to illustrate its purposes. The Appalachian Trial is one of the few monuments of the RPAA.
And “thinking regionally,” I see that almost every step of my walk, or Herbert Welsh’s, can be traced on this map. It’s not just the walk: It seems I have lived my whole life in “The Reaches of New York City” (1939). Poor as we were, my mother insisted that we read the New York Times every day–even if it arrived a day late in New Boston, New Hampshire in the 60s. When my older brother needed a suit, we went to Manhattan, to Brooks Brothers, to buy it. (My clothing came from the Fat Boy’s Shop, despite the fact that I was named, if misspelled, after a rival New York clothier–Paul Stewart Statt.)
I’ll be taking the low road, the Appalachian Trail, a few miles south of here. It seems less deserted, if not less traveled by, thanks to the work of the Regional Planning Association of America. Along the high road, which is now more or less I-84, Welsh described these three days as “30 miles of desert land–financially speaking–that lay between me [in Port Jervis] and General Washington’s headquarters on the Hudson, Newburg.” No bank would cash his check. Today a “financial desert” more commonly describes some inner city, or immigrant suburb,where poor people, who have no bank accounts, are forced to pay outrageous fees to cash a check; as a “food desert” is a place where the poor can’t buy fresh fruits and vegetables, even if they have the funds.
This is only a metaphorical desert, but these early 20th-century maps illustrate the the emptiness of the land. Explore the old maps of Port Jervis, Goshen and Schunemunk; they mark only a few houses, and have a dun and dusty look.
Welsh’s route seems a wasteland in other ways. Places to stop were few and shabby: like Hackett’s Hotel in Goshen–“a poor apology for a hotel, surely,–untidy, out at elbows, and when we saw the condition of the bedrooms assigned to us, depressing in the extreme.”
Welsh tried to enjoy a church supper in Slate Hill, but “a window, wide open just back of me, let in an abundance of cool air upon me when I was overheated. I think cold or rheumatism, or ‘malicious animal magnetism’ must have attacked a muscle or tendon in my left leg.” Then one of his “Trot-Moc” moccasins disappeared. Dorothy Whipple nursed him back to health, but the shoe was lost forever.
Walking Back 