[Footnote 24: Reprinted, by permission of the author and of the publishers,
from _The Outlook_, April 25, 1917. Copyright, 1917, by The Outlook Co.]
"Traveling afoot"--the very words start the imagination out upon the road!
One's nomad ancestors cry within one across centuries and invite to the
open spaces. Many to whom this cry comes are impelled to seek the mountain
paths, the forest trails, the solitudes or wildernesses coursed only by the
feet of wild animals. But to me the black or dun roads, the people's
highways, are the more appealing--those strips or ribbons of land which is
still held in common, the paths wide enough for the carriages of the rich
and the carts of the poor to pass each other, the roads over which they all
bear their creaking burdens or run on errands of mercy or need, but
preferably roads that do not also invite the flying automobiles, whose
occupants so often make the pedestrian feel that even these strips have
ceased to be democratic.
My traveling afoot, for many years, has been chiefly in busy city streets
or in the country roads into which they run--not far from the day's work or
from the thoroughfares of the world's concerns.
Of such journeys on foot which I recall with greatest pleasure are some
that I have made in the encircling of cities. More than once I have walked
around Manhattan Island (an afternoon's or a day's adventure within the
reach of thousands), keeping as close as possible to the water's edge all
the way round. One not only passes through physical conditions illustrating
the various stages of municipal development from the wild forest at one end
of the island to the most thickly populated spots of the earth at the
other, but one also passes through diverse cities and civilizations.
Another journey of this sort was one that I made around Paris, taking the
line of the old fortifications, which are still maintained, with a zone
following the fortifications most of the way just outside, inhabited only
by squatters, some of whose houses were on wheels ready for "mobilization"
at an hour's notice. (It was near the end of that circumvallating journey,
about sunset, on the last day of an old year, that I saw my first airplane
rising like a great golden bird in the aviation field, and a few minutes
later my first elongated dirigible--precursors of the air armies).
I have read that the Scotch once had a custom of making a yearly pilgrimage
or excursion around their boroughs or cities--"beating the bounds", they
called it, following the boundaries that they might know what they had to
defend. It is a custom that might profitably be revived. We should then
know better the cities in which we live. We should be stronger, healthier,
for such expeditions, and the better able and the more willing to defend
our boundaries.
But these are the exceptional foot expeditions. For most urbanites there is
the opportunity for the daily walk to and from work, if only they were not
tempted by the wheel of the street car or motor. During the subway strike
in New York not long ago I saw able-bodied men riding in improvised barges
or buses going at a slower-than-walking pace, because, I suppose, though
still possessed of legs, these cliff-dwellers had become enslaved by
wheels, just like the old mythical Ixion who was tied to one.
I once walked late one afternoon with a man who did not know that he could
walk, from the Custom-House, down near the Battery, to the City College
gymnasium, 138th Street, and what we did (at the rate of a mile in about
twelve minutes) thousands are as able to do, though not perhaps at this
pace when the streets are full.
And what a "preparedness" measure it would be if thousands of the young
city men would march uptown every day after hours, in companies! The
swinging stride of a companionless avenue walk, on the other hand, gives
often much of the adventure that one has in carrying the ball in a football
game.
Many times when I could not get out of the city for a vacation I have
walked up Fifth Avenue at the end of the day and have half closed my eyes
in order to see men and women as the blind man saw them when his eyes were
first touched by the Master--see them as "trees walking."
But the longing of all at times, whether it be an atavistic or a cultivated
longing, is for the real trees and all that goes with them. Immediately
there open valleys with "pitcher" elms, so graceful that one thinks of the
famous line from the Odyssey in which Ulysses says that once he saw a tree
as beautiful as the most beautiful woman--valleys with elms, hill-tops with
far-signaling poplars, mountains with pines, or prairies with their groves
and orchards. About every city lies an environing charm, even if it have no
trees, as, for example, Cheyenne, Wyoming, where, stopping for a few hours
not long ago, I spent most of the time walking out to the encircling mesas
that give view of both mountains and city. I have never found a city
without its walkers' rewards. New York has its Palisade paths, its
Westchester hills and hollows, its "south shore" and "north shore," and its
Staten Island (which I have often thought of as Atlantis, for once on a
holiday I took Plato with me to spend an afternoon on its littoral, away
from the noise of the city, and on my way home found that my Plato had
stayed behind, and he never reappeared, though I searched car and boat).
Chicago has its miles of lake shore walks; Albany, its Helderbergs; and San
Francisco, its Golden Gate Road. And I recall with a pleasure which the war
cannot take away a number of suburban European walks. One was across the
Campagna from Frascati to Rome, when I saw an Easter week sun go down
behind the Eternal City. Another was out to Fiesole from Florence and back
again; another, out and up from where the Saône joins the Rhone at Lyons;
another, from Montesquieu's château to Bordeaux; another, from Edinburgh
out to Arthur's Seat and beyond; another, from Lausanne to Geneva, past
Paderewski's villa, along the glistening lake with its background of Alps;
and still another, from Eton (where I spent the night in a cubicle looking
out on Windsor Castle) to London, starting at dawn. One cannot know the
intimate charm of the urban penumbra who makes only shuttle journeys by
motor or street cars.
These are near journeys, but there are times when they do not satisfy, when
one must set out on a far journey, test one's will and endurance of body,
or get away from the usual. Sometimes the long walk is the only medicine.
Once when suffering from one of the few colds of my life (incurred in
California) I walked from the rim of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado down
to the river and back (a distance of fourteen miles, with a descent of five
thousand feet and a like ascent), and found myself entirely cured of the
malady which had clung to me for days. My first fifty-mile walk years ago
was begun in despair over a slow recovery from the sequelæ of diphtheria.
But most of these far walks have been taken just for the joy of walking in
the free air. Among these have been journeys over Porto Rico (of two
hundred miles), around Yellowstone Park (of about one hundred and fifty
miles, making the same stations as the coaches), over portages along the
waterways following the French explorers from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to
the Gulf of Mexico, and in country roads visiting one-room schools in the
State of New York and over the boundless prairie fields long ago.
But the walks which I most enjoy, in retrospect at any rate, are those
taken at night. Then one makes one's own landscape with only the help of
the moon or stars or the distant lights of a city, or with one's unaided
imagination if the sky is filled with cloud.
The next better thing to the democracy of a road by day is the monarchy of
a road by night, when one has one's own terrestrial way under guidance of a
Providence that is nearer. It was in the "cool of the day" that the
Almighty is pictured as walking in the garden, but I have most often met
him on the road by night.
Several times I have walked down Staten Island and across New Jersey to
Princeton "after dark," the destination being a particularly attractive
feature of this walk. But I enjoy also the journeys that are made in
strange places where one knows neither the way nor the destination, except
from a map or the advice of signboard or kilometer posts (which one reads
by the flame of a match, or, where that is wanting, sometimes by following
the letters and figures on a post with one's fingers), or the information,
usually inaccurate, of some other wayfarer. Most of these journeys have
been made of a necessity that has prevented my making them by day, but I
have in every case been grateful afterward for the necessity. In this
country they have been usually among the mountains--the Green Mountains or
the White Mountains or the Catskills. But of all my night faring, a night
on the moors of Scotland is the most impressive and memorable, though
without incident. No mountain landscape is to me more awesome than the
moorlands by night, or more alluring than the moorlands by day when the
heather is in bloom. Perhaps this is only the ancestors speaking again.
But something besides ancestry must account for the others. Indeed, in
spite of it, I was drawn one night to Assisi, where St. Francis had lived.
Late in the evening I started on to Foligno in order to take a train in to
Rome for Easter morning. I followed a white road that wound around the
hills, through silent clusters of cottages tightly shut up with only a slit
of light visible now and then, meeting not a human being along the way save
three somber figures accompanying an ox cart, a man at the head of the oxen
and a man and a woman at the tail of the cart--a theme for Millet. (I asked
in broken Italian how far it was to Foligno, and the answer was, "Una
hora"--distance in time and not in miles.) Off in the night I could see the
lights of Perugia, and some time after midnight I began to see the lights
of Foligno--of Perugia and Foligno, where Raphael had wandered and painted.
The adventure of it all was that when I reached Foligno I found it was a
walled town, that the gate was shut, and that I had neither passport nor
intelligible speech. There is an interesting walking sequel to this
journey. I carried that night a wooden water-bottle, such as the Italian
soldiers used to carry, filling it from the fountain at the gate of Assisi
before starting. Just a month later, under the same full moon, I was
walking between midnight and morning in New Hampshire. I had the same
water-bottle and stopped at a spring to fill it. When I turned the bottle
upside down, a few drops of water from the fountain of Assisi fell into the
New England spring, which for me, at any rate, has been forever sweetened
by this association.
All my long night walks seem to me now as but preparation for one which I
was obliged to make at the outbreak of the war in Europe. I had crossed the
Channel from England to France, on the day that war was declared by
England, to get a boy of ten years out of the war zone. I got as far by
rail as a town between Arras and Amiens, where I expected to take a train
on a branch road toward Dieppe; but late in the afternoon I was informed
that the scheduled train had been canceled and that there might not be
another for twenty-four hours, if then. Automobiles were not to be had even
if I had been able to pay for one. So I set out at dusk on foot toward
Dieppe, which was forty miles or more distant. The experiences of that
night would in themselves make one willing to practice walking for years in
order to be able to walk through such a night in whose dawn all Europe
waked to war. There was the quiet, serious gathering of the soldiers at the
place of rendezvous; there were the all-night preparations of the peasants
along the way to meet the new conditions; there was the pelting storm from
which I sought shelter in the niches for statues in the walls of an
abandoned château; there was the clatter of the hurrying feet of soldiers
or gendarmes who properly arrested the wanderer, searched him, took him to
a guard-house, and detained him until certain that he was an American
citizen and a friend of France, when he was let go on his way with a _bon
voyage_; there was the never-to-be-forgotten dawn upon the harvest fields
in which only old men, women, and children were at work; there was the
gathering of the peasants with commandeered horses and carts in the
beautiful park on the water-front at Dieppe; and there was much besides;
but they were experiences for the most part which only one on foot could
have had.
And the moral of my whole story is that walking is not only a joy in
itself, but that it gives an intimacy with the sacred things and the primal
things of earth that are not revealed to those who rush by on wheels.
I have wished to organize just one more club--the "Holy Earth" club, with
the purposes that Liberty Bailey has set forth in his book of the same
title (_The Holy Earth_), but I should admit to membership in it (except
for special reasons) only those who love to walk upon the earth.
Traveling afoot! This is the best posture in which to worship the God of
the Out-of-Doors!