Walking
EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is an abridged version of Chapter 32 of “Adrift in America,” a work found in the nonfiction section:
El Dorado, Arkansas. April 15, 1989.
El Dorado, Arkansas, is going to be different from Eldorado, Oklahoma, and I hope my legs are up to it. I step carefully out of the truck into the parking lot beside Howard’s News Stand. The weather is sunny and dry, but the mid-morning temperature still hasn’t gotten out of the 50s, and I am a little stiff as I start negotiating the potholes, curbs and inclines of downtown El Dorado.
When I was in my teens and 20s, exercise was mostly contact sports and strength training. Power and speed. By the time I was in my 30s, it was running and eventually jogging. Stamina. By my 40s, I was tired of being chased by dogs and honked at by motorists, so I shifted to walking, which you can do in street clothes and not even be suspected of exercising. And now that I’m near 50, I’m not as interested in speed, power or even stamina. I’ll settle every day for just plain movement.
Eldorado, Oklahoma, was an easy walk. The town is flat and regular, and its one highway, Route 6, has level shoulders that are kind to the feet and ankles. In three or four miles, you can walk around Eldorado literally – all four sides – and then pass through it a few times with distance to spare. It is a quiet little town of brick and sandstone storefronts and a wide main street where people leave their pickups right in the middle, straddling the yellow line, if they feel like it. The architecture is a mixture of Hispanic and Indian, as were many of the people I saw wandering the streets or riding the Southwest Transit shuttle buses, although those who own and run things seemed to be of northern European heritage. It was the local postmaster, B.W. “Bo” Boaldin, a tanned man in his mid-40s with a Jimmy Carter smile, who told me about the dozen Eldorados and El Dorados in the United States. He looked in his ZIP code book. Yep, about a dozen, he said.
Ah, middle age. No matter how much I have stretched in the truck, it will still take me at least a quarter mile to get into the rhythm of walking. I listen to my breath – inhale one step, exhale one step, inhale more deeply through three steps, exhale slowly through five steps, then begin again, inhale one, exhale one, inhale three, exhale five. When the cadence becomes regular, I lengthen my stride.
What a pleasure it can be to walk. As the body becomes accustomed to daily walks, the muscles of the legs, torso and arms learn to do a counterbalanced ballet that has each side of the body alternating between reaching and pushing as the head moves steadily forward without bobbing. It’s a wonderful dance – the original human dance – and a wonderful way to travel. The mind soon forgets about the body and drifts into other observations. Roadside objects a mile away are in view for 15 minutes as they grow to full size and pass behind your field of vision. To a car at highway speed, the same mile of objects would be grown and gone in only a minute.
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in three, breathe out five. I think of da Vinci’s drawing of the man in the circle. One of the man’s legs, turned sideways and extended, is intersected by the circle at the bottom of the foot. Another part of the circle intersects the hands on extended arms. The radiuses are the same, and the drawing makes it clear not only that a stride is physically similar to a reach, but also that both are the same length and that each is just about half the man’s height. Every two strides (a pace), a person travels his or her height, a ratio I have found to be strikingly accurate. The other half of this ratio – that a person’s height equals the distance he or she can reach with both arms extended sideways – has been used for centuries by sailors. When the ancient mariner wanted to know if the water was over his head, he threw a full reach of rope on a weight over the side. Eventually, a six-foot reach of rope became a fathom.
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in three, breathe out five. As my legs and arms reach, they are measuring fathoms.
Walk to fathom. Walk to fathom, fathom.
– Sid Leavitt
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