Walker\'s Paradise

Review of Dan Rubenstein, Born to Walk: The Transformative Power of a Pedestrian Act. Toronto: ECW Press, 2015, 251pp. Foreword by Kevin Patterson. by Dianne Chisholm

Walking, for those with functional lower limbs, is the most natural thing to do, and if we make it an artful practice it will exercise our higher faculties and turn us into superior beings. So argues the author of Born To Walk, who recently converted to walking as a way of life. An avid runner till knee surgery forced him to slow down, Rubenstein discovers a therapy not just for his own recovery but for a humanity in need of a cure for the diseases of sedentary modernity. To advance our retreat from the mounting catastrophes of the Anthropocene, he prescribes walking for its existential, pre-/post-modern potential. For if, as his research shows, the greatest step in man’s ascent was to rise from all fours, place one foot in front of the other and commence a bipedal migration that mobilized the growth of the Homo sapien brain, then technologies that diminish our walkability inevitably derail our evolutionary trajectory. Born to Walk is a book on a mission to get us back on track to what we were created to be. A born-again walker, Rubenstein organizes eight chapters around themes that quest and reveal the diverse and potentially transformative benefits of walking. “Body,” “Mind,” “Society,” “Economy,” “Politics,” “Creativity,” “Spirit,” and “Family” trace walking’s capacity to shape and refine a basic set of anthropomorphic traits into web of interrelated virtues. Like the other chapters, the “Body” chapter features a particular walk, its specific aims and passages, along with supporting testimonials (including Rubenstein’s own) to illustrate and develop the chapter’s focal theme. In this case the featured walk is the Innu Meshkenu or “Innu Road,” a mythical journey

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that Innu surgeon Dr. Stephen Vollant reinterprets as a healing pilgrimage for Inuit and First Nations suffering from alcoholism, drug abuse, diabetes, depression and other ailments of colonization. Involving “a five year, 5,000-kilometer series of walks, in all seasons, between every Aboriginal community in Quebec and Labrador, and a few in Ontario and New Brunswick,” Vollant’s Innu Meshkenu revives a tradition once crucial to the survival of nomadic peoples. Those who partake reportedly feel not only physically uplifted (after their blisters are taped and their fatigue has passed) but also socially and spiritually (re)connected to the land as they as tramp and camp together across their traditional territories. Rubenstein’s writing style mimics his walking style, which is to follow myriad leads on secondary paths without getting totally side-tracked. He might begin a chapter with an eyewitness report of a feature walk, testifying to its particular challenges and revelations before breaking off to investigate relevant research. If his narrative of experience and encounter seems casual, even serendipitous, his review of empirical sources is rigorous and comprehensive. He describes the pain and exhaustion he and his companions endure, along with their growing camaraderie and sense of achievement, as they trek the rough roads and bushy terrain of Innu Meshkenu, and he pauses intermittently, as if to catch his breath and reboot his perseverance, to consider the dire and disturbing statistics on aboriginal health. His pauses last as long as his peripatetic narrative, implying the proportionate amount of thinking this kind of walking both calls for and engenders. Opening on a stroll with “Walk Glasgow” (funded by a non-profit called “Paths for All” and Scotland’s National Health Service), the “Mind” chapter reports directly the testimonies of participants who believe walking has saved them from depression and isolation. It then segues to current medical research to present evidence on how walking delays Alzheimer’s, reduces 2

anxiety and subdues ADHD. Lastly, it reports how war vets on leave from combat duty undertake epic journeys along the Pacific Crest Trail, the Great Divide Trail or the Appalachian Trail (or a combination of the three) to be freed of the symptoms of PTSD. In the “Society” chapter, Rubenstein tells of donning a flak jacket to walk with cops on their beat in North Philadelphia’s most violent neighborhood. Prepared for confrontation but meeting mostly respect, he explains how patrolling is radically more effective by foot than by car. Why? Because the former allows cops and residents to get to know one another and to share neighborhood concerns. By restoring foot-patrol, he elaborates, city police are better able to prevent the petty street-crime (burglary, vandalism, etc.) that leads to more serious crime. In “Economics” he develops this theme of walking as a mode-of-urban-renewal by outlining the cost-effectiveness of replacing car-friendly with pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. As well, he observes how the moral and psychological destitution that ails poor, working-class counties can be most efficiently relieved by improving (access to) local forests and woodlands. His “Politics” chapter further reports on how campaigning candidates and caring cabinet ministers best come to know and serve their constituency by walking door to door. “Soft fascination” is the term Rubenstein accords walking’s cognitive state of perceptual drift that stimulates unfettered, free-association thinking. Such a relaxed state of mindfulness, he confirms, not only relieves the walker of anxiety and depression, and focuses attention-deficient brains, but also inspires new forms of creative imagination and experimentative engagement. If only Rubenstein’s prose could stir such transcendent drift or aspire to the peripatetic virtuosity of a Virginia Woolf. Instead, his hyper-attention to secondary literature tends to mire his insights in prosaic detail. Often he advocates more than he reveals so that “soft fascination” becomes, 3

paradoxically, a mantra of hard-headed proselytization. To who, then, does Rubenstein address so ardent a mission? – clearly not the residents of the developing world where walking is a dangerous and demanding employment (as it is, say, for the Sherpas of Nepal) or a certain exposure to brutal violence (as for girls and women of northern Nigeria, rural India). Rather, he explicitly appeals to members of the metropolitan middle-class who have yet to experience walking for its more-than-utilitarian functions. To entice this class, he features walkers who are worldly, charismatic (politicians, activists, peace pilgrims) and offbeat, eccentric (street-artists, flaneurs), as well as routinely athletic (mail-carriers, dog-walkers). Rubenstein, himself, seems most taken with Rory Stewart, a Tory MP from Cumbria who walked across rural Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, India and Nepal before setting out on foot to meet every farmer and villager across his sparsely populated constituency of Penrith and the Border. Another favorite is Matt Green, a NYC transportation engineer who quit his office job to be outside on the and imaginatively self-employed in walking every street of every borough. Rubenstein might have investigated that most rarified class of walkers who feel “called” by none other than the walk itself. But all of his walkers harbor a cause. Even Matt Green keeps busy tallying errant street signs and other urban oddities. Some “find” themselves via walking’s soul-searching facilities. He mentions Chris Strayed, a young woman who overcomes a history of self-abuse by trekking the PCT and who pens her progress in her best-seller Wild. But he neglects to mention Robyn Davidson, another young woman who, with three and a half camels and a dog, treks seventeen hundred miles across the deserts of western Australia–not to escape inner demons or to reclaim her humanity, and not to draw attention to herself or to a higher aim, but simply and purely to discover what limitless walking alone makes possible. 4

Focused on the powers of the pedestrian act, Rubenstein aptly favors the quotidian over the epic walk. And what could be more quotidian than walking your kids to school? His chapter on “Family” features himself and his daughters on this daily routine cum ritual. As he presents it, the walk to school is a practice of everyday life that cultivates the arts of urban navigation and a rite of passage for those new to a world beyond the family home. Their passage takes a critical turn when a car runs over his ankles as they cross a busy intersection. His daughters remain unhurt but become enlightened about the importance of being ever-alert however well-trodden their route, while he, lucky to suffer only minor injury, proceeds to lobby the municipality to rezone school areas for improved traffic control. Eventually, father and daughters graduate from walking to school to hiking long and wild stretches of Ontario’s Bruce Trail. The chapter ends on the prospect that these walks will engender an evolving, trans-generational legacy. If walking nurtures familial bonds, the bonds of walking are not always familial. Walking possesses a libidinal dimension that Born to Walk somehow bypasses, though love of walking is the book’s implicit prime mover. A chapter on “Sexuality” might have investigated how Ryan Larkin’s film animation “Walking,” (which Rubenstein Platonically praises) famously eroticizes Edweard Muybridge’s classic, slow-motion footage of walking’s kinesthetics, or how Walt Whitman wrote many of his poems to the cadence of cruising Manhattan. City-lovers are walkers no less than nature-lovers, and all species of city-walkers add a little cruising to their flânerie. Manifold LGBT communities and rainbow coalitions evolve from a walker’s erotic attachment to the streets, an eroticism that street-walkers share but fail to monopolize. Few books treat walking so big-heartedly and open-mindedly as this one or with such exploratory, wide-ranging study, and with a slight digression on “ambulophilia” it might just have covered walking’s every power. 5

~~~ Dianne Chisholm has known the physical, mental, social, political, creative and erotic joys of long walks in open country (Alaska, Baffin, Bolivia, Patagonia, Peru, Mongolia, Nepal) and short marches in big cities (London’s Take-Back-the-Night, New York City’s and San Francisco’s Pride,), as well parades down high street (with the Edmonton All Girls’ Drum & Bugle Band).

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