I'm Walkin', Yes, Indeed

My favorite cities, the ones I know best, are the ones I have walked, often for many miles, over many years – New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris and, at the humbler end of the urban spectrum, Albany and Schenectady, in upstate New York. In 1975-76, I returned to Cleveland, my hometown, and I didn’t own a car. A friend and I walked everywhere, or rode the bus. We wore knapsacks, usually filled with books, and this earned us stares on Cleveland’s West Side, and an occasional rousting by cops, who work a peculiar algebra of their own: long hair + backpack = dope. Except we weren’t holding, because we weren’t entirely stupid, even in our 20s.

That’s how I navigated and explored the invisible maps of my seemingly familiar home turf. In a car, you sacrifice detail and nuance for speed and convenience. Walking, you have no buffers. From 30 years ago, I remember a poster for a martial arts tourament taped to the front door of a bodega: “Kung Fu for Christ.” I remember tramping past a vodka distillery and debating whether we could get a contact high from the emissions. I remember children feeding flies to spiders at a bus stop, like a vision out of Sam Peckinpah. I remember a hand-written sign in the window of a small grocery advertising “patatas” [potatoes]; stopping by a junk store and finding a volume of Eugene O’Neill’s plays signed by O’Neill; and a girl in a diner having a seizure while her mother slapped her and said, over and over, “Now you stop that!”

So much of the literature of walking is devoted to rural scenes. Walking, after all, is organic and prophylactic, isn’t it? What better way to traverse meadows and woodland glens? Look at Rousseau, Johnson and Boswell, Coleridge and other English Romantics, Thoreau and, more recently, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Well, yes, but what about Dickens, Baudelaire, Joyce and Walter Benjamin? What about the boulevardier, the man-about-town and the flaneur? I thought about this yesterday when I started reading Lights Out for the Territory, by Iain Sinclair, a visionary and very English chronicle of his tramps about London. The book defies description, and I’m enjoying it immensely. I’ve never read Sinclair before. He’s a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, and this book is big and elastic enough to contain anything Sinclair has ever seen, read or imagined while traipsing about London. Here’s a description of his method:

“Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself. To the no bull-shit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siecle decadence, a poetic of entropy – but the born-again flaneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything.”

This makes me envious of Sinclair for living in a walkable city. I live in Houston, the fourth largest city in the nation, and the largest without zoning. The latter fact makes for architectural and environmental monstrosities, but also for weird juxtapositions and eccentricities. But Houston, larger than El Salvador, is designed exclusively for the automobile. Pedestrians are an endangered species. The sprawl, coupled with work and family obligations, makes the sort of meandering all-day hikes without itinerary I used to make impossible. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin writes that the movements of the flaneur are characterized by “undecidedness” – a serendipitous quality that responds to chance encounters. To walk forgetfully as I used to do, without goal, open to random experience, is a pleasure I have sacrificed. Writing of Baudelaire, Benjamin said: “An intoxication overcomes the one who walks for a long time aimlessly through the streets.” Today, regretfully, I can’t afford to be less than sober.