Walking Is Falling With a Catch

In 1982, avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson released an album containing the song “Walking and Falling,” which includes these lyrics:

You’re walking / And you don’t always realize it / But you’re always falling / With each step, you fall forward slightly / And then catch yourself from falling / Over and over, you’re falling / And then catching yourself from falling

And this is how you can be walking and falling / At the same time

It struck me then, and now, as profound. How little we consider the act of walking, unless we can’t. Oh sure, you could build and fill a library called The Library of Books About Walking, but those books will be mostly lyrical and poetical and not too concerned with the mechanism of walking itself. Understandable, really. Walking is fundamental to being human. Bipedalism is definitive of being human. It’s so much a part of us, we look right past it (usually on the way to our cars).

This past summer, I committed myself to a week of backpacking above the Arctic Circle. While the route wasn’t particularly long (seventy miles or so) and didn’t have tons of climbing, it seemed imprudent, and very likely impudent, to assume I could come off the couch and do it comfortably, or happily. And so I started walking, not “hiking,” just walking. I walked six miles home after leaving my truck at the tire shop. I walked three miles home from a party on July 4. I walked seven miles to get tacos in downtown Laguna Beach and grabbed a cortado on the seven-mile walk back. I walked thirteen miles home from my father-in-law’s.

Boy, did I walk—on sidewalks and the sides of the coast highway, on fire roads and singletracks—always with ambient sounds and my own thoughts for company. I did not conjure a method to become a millionaire overnight or come up with a solution to climate change or stumble upon a great revelation. But after mile grew upon mile, it did strike me that walking is just about the most honest thing you can do. 

My friends and family were astounded at how far I was legging it, as if five miles on foot was a big deal, and I was reminded of a story I heard years ago, how archaeologists, or some kind of -ologists, grossly underestimated the traveling capabilities of indigenous peoples because they viewed them through the lens of modern locomotion, where walking from the parking lot to Trader Joe’s counts as travel. After fourteen miles, my feet certainly get tired, but I chalk that up to pavement and not distance. Walking at the moderate pace of three miles an hour, with a summer day’s worth of daylight, you could get from D.C. to New York in a week, Los Angeles to San Francisco in two. As Jack Hitt wrote in Off the Road, his chronicle of walking the Camino de Santiago, “Pilgrimage creates a paradoxical effect. Instead of short distances seeming long, it’s just the opposite. The vastness of a great distance shrivels when it falls within one’s grasp.”

Hitt also wrote—and I love this—“A map is a reduction in scale, and a pilgrimage is about just the opposite, a sort of airing things out to an original measure.” What more original measure is there than a human stride?

The purpose of Adventure Journal remains the same as when I started it back in 2008, which is to explore what it means to live with adventure in your life and to celebrate the people, places, and things that matter to the outdoor recreation culture. Publishing is like sailing, though, where you aim for your destination while tacking back and forth with the winds and currents. Back then, it felt important to inspire people to get outside. Then so many people got outside, we were loving our treasured lands to death, and AJ turned to the discussion and need for responsible recreation. Now we’re in a world that is accelerating away from our animal biology, seemingly at the speed of light, toward one spliced permanently to electronic technology—and I believe that we the people and AJ the publication must keep the focus on pursuits that are healthy, constructive, and fix us in our proper scale. That is not an indictment or rejection of running, or zooming downhill on a bike, or grabbing a raft-shaped balloon and jumping into a river, but a reminder, and a call to action, that the simplest method of travel is where we will find our truest selves.