The Long View: Walking along the shores of Point Reyes

Point Reyes National Seashore, California

“Whenever the intensity of looking reaches a certain degree, one becomes aware of an equally intense energy coming towards one through the appearance of whatever it is one is scrutinizing.”  John Berger

               
When my cousin, Don, asked me where I wanted to walk while I was visiting him in the Bay Area, I had only one answer: Point Reyes. I’d first saw those redwood forests, undulating hills of scrub, those cliffs and long beaches, while camping with my parents in the sixties, and then again in college when for a time I lived in Berkeley. In my mind, I have held images of those vast stretches of coastal lands though no doubt they have merged with other coasts and seascapes I’ve seen in my travels. Seeing them again has made me wonder why it is that we find such pleasure in gazing at expanses of land and water.  

                The first few days in the Bay Area, my eyes began to adjust to the sights of the sea and the hills. Driving about, walking up and down the streets and through the parks in San Francisco, the eye must take in more and more than in the Midwest. The landscape has layers, and a simple glance offers a foreground and then seemingly an expanding background, as the horizon takes you further and further away from the place where you are. There’s a visual hiccup for those not used to the vistas, and I had to stop and adjust my glance, once tripping on a curb as I was struck by the clouds filling in the bay and covering the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s not that street life in San Francisco or Berkeley isn’t interesting, but again and again I found myself drawn to the longer view.  

                At Point Reyes, I was lost in conversation with my cousin as we meandered through the succession of plant communities toward the hidden shore.  When I wasn’t thinking of what my cousin was saying, I was thinking of how easily conversation can come sometimes while walking with those we know well. Subjects and emotions emerge from the land and silences naturally arise between bends along the trail and glances off into the hills and foggy skies. The randomness of ideas and memories bring relief to our scripted inner stories and concerns, and there’s such a relief in that.

                I thought, too, of just feeling my body walking; something that I’ve learned to do, knowing walks are rare and our steps through landscapes are finite. The sensations of walking in a given land are like a certain musical score that I have to listen to very carefully to appreciate.

                And then, there it is, the seascape, immediately arresting my inner monologue as I was thinking of something to say to my cousin. I stopped. Began to walk, and stopped again.  Thought of taking a photograph, but then let my eyes succumb to the seductive powers of the vistas of land and sea. The eye moves or is pulled to far reaches of distant forms—cliffs or rocks in the sea or banks of fog lifting over the golden hills, then the eye runs along the curve of the shore, like a child having to experience the entire length, and when you finally feel yourself take a breath, you notice the careening gulls break the static picture or realize that only a few yards before you a bush is of a color you’ve never really seen before. The whole landscape seems to have been illuminated and infused with energy, making you think that up until now you’ve been walking like some kind of zombie.    What happens when we see these vast spaces open and open out before us?  What causes us to feel so alive? Is it the sea and our ancient memories of it? Is it the liberation of our gaze? Is it that our perceptual organs are more fully tested? Is it that the visual data is so vast and nuanced that the mind must break its patterns of seeing and analyzing? Or is it the light itself that magically alters something within us, making us feel or imagine the space with its color and texture within our body.  

                I’ve often hiked among the Dunes in Indiana for something of the same feeling: that moment of perceptual shock, when the vast blue of Lake Michigan spreads literally as if we are creating it, flooding the flatness with our eyes, the water taking us to the far ends of the horizon as we stand on top of the two-hundred foot dunes. We have little topographical variation here in the Midwest, so these moments while hiking are rare and wonderful. It’s not the same looking out your condo window on the 45^th floor in Chicago, as enjoyable as it is. The view must be there before the naked eye. We must feel ourselves apart of the landscape.  There once were miles of dunes along the Lake, some towering as high as 300 feet, but of course these lands were sacrificed to industry and the political careers of men when the park was created not long after Point Reyes. (Both are National Parks devoted to America's shores.)  And I thought about this, taking in the miles of unobstructed views in this National Seashore of Point Reyes, and how valuable it is to walk and gaze and expand our limited horizons.

The Trash Man of Hollywood Beach

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, and county commissioners."  
Edward Abbey

Hollywood Beach, Chicago

Perhaps you’ve seen them in a park or along a shore near where you live—the ones   stooping down and picking up trash, a plastic bag or two or three hanging from an arm or attached to a belt loop. Maybe they have an old dog tagging along behind them, but usually they’re alone, and older. Almost always men. (Though I’ve seen women, too.)



Montrose Harbor Dunes

You wonder at first, are they with some group doing community service of some kind? But no, they’re there almost every day.  They’re not to be confused with the beachcombers—the ladies who salvage bits of lake-polished glass. Or the men in their infernal metal-detectors with earphones, hoping to turn someone's loss into treasure.  No, these are of another eccentric tribe that beaches and city parks create--the people who pick up trash, the trash men, as I call them.



Whiting, Indiana Beach (British Petreleum in Distance

I’d met one man a few years ago on a walk I took to Indiana. I’d seen him often, watching him from afar, a short stocky man, with weather worn clothes and hat, old tennis shoes, glasses, energetic for an older man (maybe late 70’s or early 80’s). He seemed almost in a hurry as he tottered Chaplin-like, balancing two plastic bags on each sun-tanned arm, as he went about his daily chore. I’d kind of felt sorry for him as I have others like him I’ve seen, eccentrics, I imagined, lonely, widowed, no doubt suffering from mild obsessive-compulsive disorder, having, needing to make their morning rounds. Or so this is how I explained these types of aging men I've seen.

It was an extraordinary beautiful summer morning along Chicago’s lake front and I was in an expansive mood, under the spell we put ourselves into when we are on a purposeful journey. Walkers and hikers know what I mean. We set ourselves a goal and define it as something of value, and suddenly we see the world anew.   So when he appeared as I thought he would, I went right up to him and introduced myself and told him (almost as a kind of confession). I had a camera around my neck. I told him I’d seen him so many times gathering trash and wanted to thank him for it. “You inspire us out here,” I said, gesturing to the Polish ladies getting ready to take their morning swim.

He stammered. And I realized I’d scared him. He was older than I thought, but as he talked, his body seemed to become younger and more animated. “Please don’t take my picture, I don’t’ want any publicity, I’m nobody important. I just come and do this because I like to help. Keep the beach clean. Make it safe.”

“How long have you been doing this,” I asked as he waved at some older couple he knew who passed.

“I’ve been coming . . . a long time. Over twenty five years. I can’t remember.”

He went on to tell me the story of how he’d begun his cleaning up of the beach. His daughter apparently cut herself badly on a piece of glass and with the help from the lifeguard’s bandages he got her to a hospital. “It was terrible," he said as if still seeing her foot, shaking his head, "so much pain and blood.”

After that, he told me he felt it was his duty to clean things up. "You know, it could happen to some other children, stepping on the glass, they can’t see it in the sand. They're children. I just thought I should do it.”

But he obviously cleans up more than glass, and now he hits two beaches, Hollywood and Foster, a good half mile or more of beach and lakefront.

And then he was off down the beach, heading for another plastic bag, a solitary Starbucks cup rolling in the surf.

Chidago Lakefront, between Hollywood and Foster Beaches 

It’s Earth Day, and as usual school kids everywhere will be dragging plastic bags around on beaches and parks, neighbor groups tidying up neglected lots and planting trees, and the Sierra Club will be out somewhere battling invasive species for the day. On Hollywood Beach, my hunch is a man will be out there feeling somewhat more at home with so many following his lead.

The other week I was walking along the lake shore, a bit overwhelmed with the world and "the cruelist month" as Elliot called April, and I saw some trash and naturally picked it up, then a few more yards down, a black plastic gently swayed as the waves flowed over it a foot below the water.  I looked around to see if anyone was watching me (why I have no idea), and I took off my shoes and waded into the freezing surf and retrieved it. I walked on, picking up this and that, scattered on the surf.  I was glad to have something to do to eclipse my manufactured melancholy. 

Montrose Harbor Beach, Chicago

I could become a "trash man" like the man at Hollywood Beach. I’d have to practice, but I could do it.

BASHO'S JAPAN: A WORLD A WASH IN TSUNAMIS

 “There you stand, but a mountain may be there.

Instead: it is not unlikely that the earth

May be yourself.         

                                                  Matsuo Basho

Perhaps it is nostalgia, a feeling I was sure I’d never know or have, but I’ve become aware of my body’s love for land as I age. I must admit that for a long time I never much cared for artists or writers who waxed on and on about nature or painters who would stand before an easel and paint scenes. Learning that Cezanne painted the same mountain over a hundred times (Mount St. Victoire in Provence) or Thoreau making a big to do about walking about the outskirts of Concord, Mass., I could never quite get it. How quaint and anachronistic, I thought.


It might be due to the environment in which I was seeded—the flat, farmlands of central Indiana, where I could climb up in a tree and see nothing but manipulated land for miles, every acre cleared, tilled, drained and put to good use. Like everything else—plants, animals, people, machines— the value of land depended on how much you could squeeze out of it.

Walking began to shift my perspective on landscape, slowly though. As I have tried to understand and write about what happens to the body and the mind when we spend long days wandering through landscapes, I have noticed that it’s the land itself that gives us our sense of wonder.


Even in Chicago and along the southern shore of Lake Michigan where I walked last summer, walking over asphalt and concrete and through industrial lands of Northern Indiana with its tank farms and brown fields, I began to feel something I’d not felt before—the land as a force that is shaping us even as we pretend that it is us that is shaping it.


Nostalgia actually comes from the Greek root “nostos” (a return home), and “algia” (the suffix meaning pain), hence the word often has a connotation that implies a bittersweet feeling for something lost from the past. Another clue to its origins might be from the Old English or Norse, which gives us the word “nest” from a related root “nes.” These derivations made me wonder: do we feel nostalgia when we sense we’ve lost our nest, our sense of home?


Watching the earthquake and the tsunami that has shaken Japan and the world, I feel the loss and fear generated by the images and horrific sounds of raw footage. The children and older people, the lost family members, the loss of homes and life and cities all sickened me. But it was the nuclear disaster that triggered some other form of loss that I’ve been feeling since walking through the industrial landscape of Northern Indiana this past summer. It reminded me, too, of the losses suffered in Katrina and Haiti as well as the man-made disasters of BP’s oil spill and the sludge spills of coal wastewater and destruction of mountains I’ve seen in West Virginia. The loss is everywhere if you look. For those who live in Illinois, don’t forget over 7,000 tons of nuclear waste sits in similar cooling pools. (No state has more.) The world is awash with tsunamis slowly rolling in all around us, particularly for people who live in vulnerable places. My friend, the environmental writer, Rob Nixon calls these slow forming environmental disasters aptly “slow violence.”


I turned to Basho, the 16th century Japanese poet and nature writer, the morning I read of the Japanese quake. And I thought of him, the older man walking with his paper rain coat and satchel of ink pad and paper to write his gifts of 17 syllable haiku as he wandered through the same areas that were affected in the Far North of Japan.

Here he is describing the bay of Matsushima along the same coast where the tsunami hit:        
                          "Tall islands point to the sky and lvel ones 
                           prostrate themselves before the surges of water.
                           Islands are piled above islands, and islands are
                           joined to islands, so that they look exactly like
                           parents caressing their children or walking with
                           them arm in arm."  from The Narrow Road to The Deep North

 And reading him, I was reminded of the humility he taught as he walked so lightly on the earth, observing and marveling at all forms of nature before him along his path through his beloved island home of Japan.


This sense of nostalgia is not despair or sentimentality. In fact, it’s a sign of life in us, a vibration that is there if we listen.

Spider, are you

crying—

or the Autumn wind?  

MAD ABOUT WALKING AND WORKER'S RIGHTS IN MADISON

“. . . Today as I stand before you and think back over that great march, I can say, as Sister Pollard said—a seventy-year-old Negro woman who lived in this community during the bus boycott—and one day, she was asked while walking if she didn’t want to ride. And when she answered, "No," the person said, "Well, aren’t you tired?" And with her ungrammatical profundity, she said, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested."
                   From Martin Luther King’s Speech to marchers after the Walk to Selma, Alabama

For the past several years I’ve been exploring the wonderful trails and walks of Wisconsin, specifically those in and around Madison. I’ve been led on my walks by my good friends, Anne McClintock and Rob Nixon (writers of extraordinary heart and intellectual integrity who teach at UW). They’ve introduced me to the network of trails around Madison and its lakes, greenway, and UW’s campus as well as hiking in Devil’s Lake State Park and the 1200 mile Ice Age Trail that meanders through the state and other parks and preserves nearby. After the big snow of the week before, I was eager to get out and “blow the stink off” as my father would say.


Of course, all week I’d been following the pro-union rallies and protests against Wisconsin’s state budget bill and getting first hand reports by Anne and Rob. (See Anne's photos below.) And the next morning, our first walk was the one through campus, down famed State Street where we met the throngs of folks who’d been circling the State Capital for days.

What a scene.

I knew it would be big and loud but I’d not expected such joyous solidarity: school children in support of their teachers with banners marching, nurses and the doctors to support them, snow removers and sanitation workers, police, students (of course), school teachers, and fire fighters and emergency workers. A parade of red and flags and outrageously funny and inventive home-made signs.


Organized marches and taking to the streets are powerful forms of democratic action and speech. We’ve seen many in the past month in the Middle East and it has reminded us of what can happen when people stand together against governments or powers that assume a weak and indifferent public. And this certainly was the case in Madison. And yet here, what struck me was how civil people were. On Saturday when 70 plus thousand attended, including a few thousand to support the proposed budget, I watched two men debating on the capital steps their opposing views. Rare in our polarized times.  How proud people were to be there and to support people who work for them. How proud workers felt to be recognized. When some men came into the rotunda directly from their jobs as fireman and city truck drivers, roars went up. The budgets are complex and deficits are real in America, but what impressed me was the sense of solidarity of people walking in circles with friends and children wanting to express their concerns together and not just grumbling alone in front of a TV or in front of a computer.

Gandhi marched to the sea to protest British tyranny. Martin Luther King led marches throughout the South and North for civil rights. And leaderless movements and demonstrations have been sprouting and roaring around the world in the past few years for peace and environmental sanity and now for freedom and democracy in the Middle East. They all demand that people get up, drop their fears and cynicism, and walk together to show their strength and cohesion.


After the cheering and clamor of the protest, we headed to UW’s Arboretum to take a stroll in the late afternoon chilly sun. Out walk took us a good four miles as we circled around the lake and through a subdued wooded residential section of the city and then along the new and old trees of this great center of ecology began by Aldo Leopold. We talked some of the protest but as we often do we recalled episodes of youth in different parts of the world where we grew up and how those lands shaped who we became, for Rob  South Africa and for me similar territory back in Indiana. At the end of our walk, we watched a marsh hawk gliding through an opened field and disappear behind the old black oaks with their wiggly squiggly branches against an evening sky.

WISDOM FROM MY MOTHER AND MOROCCO

While most of America was under snow last week, I snuck down to Florida to spend some time with my parents. On my way to the airport, I nearly got into a traffic accident as a trunk squeezed my taxi nearly into a parked car. The cab driver, a young Moroccan man in a hooded sweatshirt, shrugged his shoulders, sighed some prayer to Allah and we went on. “I don’t get upset any more at these things,” he told me as if explaining to himself. We’d bonded and he went on to give me his philosophy of driving he’d picked up from an old Indian man he knew from his cab company: “Doesn’t pay to rush. You do your job and thank God, for what comes to you. In the long run, you are happier, you don’t get so much of the stress, and you are thinking more of God. And this is the better way.” He was happy to tell me this. We talked on about politics in America and in North Africa. He was excited about events there. (Though he reminded me that, like so many immigrants from North Africa, he’d come here to find work as there was little chance for him there.) Yet he was proud of his country. He told me that Morocco was the first country to recognize America after its independence.

When I told him, I was going to visit my parents in Florida. He turned around for the first time, smiling under his hood. “You are a good son.”

I sighed. My parents are aging and it’s hard sometimes to watch this. My mother is struggling with dementia (or Alzheimer, no one knows). My Moroccan cab driver heard the sigh. “Tell me, when you come back from visiting your parents, how do you feel?”

“I feel . . . I feel always better. You’re right.”

“I know I’m right. They took care of us. Now we take care of them.” (He’d told me that he sends money home as often as he can, and he’d helped pay for their new house along with his brothers.)

In northern Florida, I spent every day walking with my mother on the beach and into the inter-coastal dunes and oak and manzanita groves on the barrier islands where they spend part of the winter. Each morning, we walked an hour or so. And at night after my parents went to bed, I’d walk back on to the beach, where it always gives me the sense that you are walking in space, as the sound of the surf and soft sand seems to lift you out of your small thoughts and up into the stars.

But it’s with my mother where I always seem to learn something new about walking, which is to say, something I’d ignored about what happens to our body when we reconnect to the land around us. When my parents came to this part of Florida twenty years ago I found the area of quaint beaches and the endless inter-coastal wetlands boring. Over the years, in my visits I’ve hiked about and kayaked and fished and found more fascinating each year. This is the area, I’ve learned, where the Spanish first landed in the continental US. It’s also the same area (roughly) where Charles Bartram, the 18^th century Philadelphia naturalist, made his drawings and observations about natural history as part of his walks through the Southeast. Bartram’s Travels, chronicled with a lyrical but lucid prose, is often credited with being a major influence on the Romantic poets Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well as a hundred years later, inspiring a young John Muir, who trekked from Indiana to these same wetlands to follow in Bartram’s footsteps.

With my mother, we walked as naturalists, too, picking up seashells, pointing at the pelicans and skittering sandpipers, marveling at the osprey with the snake dangling over the telephone wires where he perched. We always make a pilgrimage, a long walk around the beach to Fort Matanza National Coastal Park. A wonderful park with interpretative board walks along the shore and coastal waterway. Here we invariably meet my parent’s neighbors out for their morning walks. There, we find our prize, nesting in the great Spanish oaks, the great horned owl, warming her egg. My mother has a hard time spotting it but feels the excitement and presence of the wondrous owl just the same.

Over past few years with onset of memory loss and the cognitive impairment of Alzheimer’s, my mother’s pace has slowed. She can’t always discern the level of the ground from shadows and changes of light. The beach is easier for her somehow. Perhaps, she trusts it from all the years she’s walked on it, relying more on the feel of her feet than on what her mind might misinterpret. She’s more relaxed and thus more lucid. But, then again, so am I.

Walking gives her a sense of agency and adventure and certainly a sense of joy and freedom. And this, in fact, is extremely important to all of us, but especially those suffering from memory loss and cognitive impairment. Recent studies have shown that walking three or more times a week for at least a mile has a marked improvement on brain plasticity and cognitive health.

Why? Circulation and heart rate are improved, of course, but perhaps more importantly the intricate relationships in the brain circuitry are maintained via the variety of actions being carried out by the body as we walk. Think about it. Orbetter feel it next time you walk. We think, we move, we see, we feel, we haveemotions, all in fractions of seconds as we simply take one step. Link.

As much as I can, I try to slow to her pace, noticing the ferns growing on the mossy limbs, the raccoon tracks in the sand, listening to the cardinals overhead. But I’m still too fast. And then my mother asks, from behind. “You don’t like to walk slow, do you?” I turn. She’s looking out at something in the wooded undergrowth of the oak groves, and if talking to it and not me, declares to all who might walk too fast in the world: “I liked to walk slow. It’s better that way. More interesting.” And then finding me again, “There’s so much here to see, isn’t there?”

From my Moroccan cab driver to my mother, I’m trying to get the message.

Open Lands and Ragdale

“The health of the eye demands a horizon. We are never tired, so long as we see far enough.” R. W. Emerson

Something happens to perception and thus to our very well being when we are afforded access to natural spaces and open lands where we can walk, gaze, wonder at the elemental world that somehow we lose sight of in our urban life of work, possessions, and technology. I don’t believe we have evolved quite so far as to ignore our essential affinity with our nomadic roots and for our need to roam and wander.



A couple of weeks ago I spent several days at an artist’s retreat, known as Ragdale, that is located on a ridge near the shore of Lake Michigan in Northern Illinois. For those who may not have heard of a place like Ragdale or of someplace like an artist’s colony, imagine a place where you are invited, honored no less, because of the value of your work as a writer, or composer, or artist and given two or four weeks to work without interruption. Where you are given a quiet space to think and doodle and sleep and stare and hopefully create. And you are fed by a gourmet cook who treats you like a prince or a child or a tired soul or whomever you are when you show up to imbibe with your other colonists at supper. And, in this case, at Ragdale, a place that is adjacent to acres and acres of prairie, marsh, and a wooded creek, all preserved by a band of good folk who recognized the value of these spaces and preserved it as well as those today who maintain it, such as the citizens of Lake Forest and the Open Lands.

I’d not even finished unpacking my bags before I marched right out even though the sun had just set. Darkness and the cold made it just that more enticing, and I found myself losing myself in the woods, my eyes not used to the darkness and I nearly walked into the creek bed. But I just wanted to be in the middle of it, just to hear the place, and sink into it a little, be for a while in the land and feeling it there, feeling its darkness and winter brittleness.

That first night it snowed about four inches, beautiful soft wet flakes that fell lighting up the darkness, and by morning the trees and prairie grass were covered, creating that purificatory ritual we all know that comes with the first snow. The patterns made you wince when you had to make the first foot tracks in the snow, reminding me of what it feels like sometimes when I walk at the Indiana Dunes and you don’t want to mar the magical windscapes of sand. But I did, and ran about like a boy, stopping to see if the snow would mold easily into . . . something, I mean I’m no Andy Goldsworthy but I began imagining a snow fort on the edge of the prairie under a few trees. At dinner that night, almost every one of the artists had made a similar excursion into the snow and prairie, and I whispered to the paper-maker and artist next to me, Melissa Craig, if she wanted to make something with me. “Sure! I’ve been going out and finding all kinds of interesting things in the woods.” Of course, that is what she does in her work, find ways to use the actual natural world as the very medium of her work. (Here you can see what she’s doing with her paper making and sculpting and organic use of color in creating a fungus like bar code that reads: “DO NO DAMAGE."

I walked around every day of my 12 day stay, watching and walking about in the snow through this precious oasis that is painstakingly and lovingly restored to its original and evolving ecological niche. But each day, I’d see something I’d not noticed or appreciated before, either because of the light, or the weather, or my own mood. One day, I decided to walk on the ice of the creek, seeing or hoping that it was as hard as it appeared. From inside a ditch, looking up in to the brambles and branches of the cottonwoods and other hardwoods that create the canopy over the creek, I realized from this perspective, from below ground, that this is not only another view but another world, even in winter.


Other artists made other discoveries, British poet, Cheryl Moskowitz, wrote this about one outing of hers where she came upon a deer:

Out there in the cold you don’t expect to see anyone.
Glad if you don’t, actually.
Time to be alone, find a stump,
brush the mound of snow off
sit for a while by the creek that’s all froze up
and listen, like the deer do.

You are a stranger here
the birds know that -
calling out to one another in their strange tongue
retreat, retreat, retreat.

And all at once she’s there,
one side of the Dharma wheel.
Chestnut markings like a dark target
framed against the vast white
and so are you.

I don’t think I’ve ever gone to Ragdale and not heard of some reference to the prairie or to some insight that it evoked. Here’s another image from poet Beth Brandt who very much works with natural imagery in her work:

Earth

How it

is dust

rut mound

mountain

bone-dry

bone-chilling

black.

What it

hides what it

keeps. How it holds

you up weighs

you down draws

you in. The gravity

of it turn of

it pull of

it when

it’s midnight

in November

and you can’t

sleep.

But, oddly, as the days wore on, I found myself transfixed in my walks by not just the natural landscape but the the electrical towers rising out of the ground, at the fixity of the rusted steel of a train trestle and the trains that went by that I could hear at night in my studio. And I wasn’t the only one, Cheryl told me on the last day she made a video with her I-phone of a train moving through the landscape as she stood in the woods listening, and listening to her video myself, I was struck by the disappearance of sound as the train faded from view, leaving the woods and making me hear it anew. Here it is, listen to the end of the video. We think sometimes that these environments are sullied by the ways of humans. But all spaces have something of the wild still echoing through. We just have to give over to the place as it is and spend some time there, watching and listening and absorbing what it has to offer.

Walking and the Brain

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it . . . if one keeps on walking, everything will be all right." Soren Kierkegaard

Despite the many anxieties and crises of our time, we are also living in era of revolutionary developments in the fields of science, particularly in the study of the human brain. Every month we are learning more about how the brain functions, and consequently, beliefs about learning, memory, the imagination, emotion, and a whole host of other brain functions now must be re-evaluated. We now know, for example, that the brain evolves and changes as we age, countering long held beliefs that past a certain age in childhood the largely remained unchanged. We do in fact lose brain cells or neurons as we age but the brain’s ability to make new pathways or synaptic connections between neurons is virtually limitless. No, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Environment, experience, exercise, attitude, social engagement, and intellectual challenges are profoundly important for the on-going development of the bran and it’s health.

Recently, several studies have caught my attention that relate to walking and spending time in nature. Last week, in fact, a major study done at the University of Illinois by Kramer and Moss who study the role of how exercise affects the brain, they found that regular walking (forty minutes 3 days a week) dramatically affected brain connectivity and thus enhancing cognition. This was true as well with older adults, a helpful sign for people suffering from memory loss, dementia and Alzheimer's.

Another study at the University of Michigan looked at how where we walk affects brain function and concentration. In the study, one group of graduate students walked in urban an area—along busy commercial streets with traffic and little natural buffering, and another group walked along paths in more natural environments of parks with trees, grass, lakes, etc. Afterward the two groups were given basic cognitive tests, recalling lists, etc. And the difference in cognitive function was clear: those who walked in natural environments were much better in their scores. A similar study at Michigan also tested three groups for the role of nature on brain function. In this study, one group was wired as they watched a video screen of a natural environment, another group simply looked at a wall, and a third actually sat in the same natural area viewed on the screen of the first group. The result? The levels of brain activity i.e. the stimulation of various parts of the brain was most pronounced in the group sitting outside viewing the natural environment. But most interesting to me was that the levels of those looking at a wall and at the video image of nature was virtually the same.

Walking in nature seems so benign. But walking is actually much more of a complex physiological activity than we think; it involves multiple areas of the brain, which is why it is so beneficial. In nature, we must also negotiate pathways and environments that are unpredictable and highly stimulating. Motor function and perception are profoundly linked and being aware of this relationship enhances not only the pleasure but also the long-term health of our brain. Our brain is pattern maker and a pattern decoder. Every day we create new patterns by what we do, think, feel, and experience. And one pattern to weave into our lives is very simple: walking.

Where Am I?

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw

Or heard or felt came not but from myself;

And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Wallace Stevens from “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”

A bird, blackish brown in the intense summer afternoon light, is walking on water. Well, not on the actual water but on golden green lily pads, skillfully hop-flying, then step, step, step, moving just fast enough not to sink. Pin oaks, I see, and white birch, young sycamore. Water stretches into a thick woods and appears to curve as if it might be a river but it isn’t, it’s a marsh, a very old one, one that somehow survived over hundred years of American industrialization. Sedge, that ancient plant of prehistoric times, grows out of the rubble I’m walking on, limestone and slag and railroad spikes.

A marsh hawk startles the heavy afternoon heat, its white and brown belly, as it sweeps down over the marsh. A white egret lopes over the water and disappears into the darkness of the tall stand of sycamore shielding the marsh from the highway beyond. Moments later a heron labors to pick up speed to rise over the trees. Two goldfinch, blurs in the sunlight yet identifiable with their undulating speed, trigger the memory of other summers and other places where I have stood stock still and felt that strange sensation deep in the belly of my body wanting to lift and follow what I was seeing.

Where am I?*

Where am I? That’s a good question. But is it a question of place? Or is it a state of mind that I’m in as I walk through this marsh? A reciprocal experience of the land imprinting itself in me as I walk through it.

Like many people, I could tell the story of my life by describing the places where walking somehow figured in my education and experience. I’ve hiked since I was a teenager, along highways, up mountains, through deserts, along borders, through savannahs, along lakes and rivers, down streets of cities, and into and out of my wayward emotions and imagination. Your legs turn out to be allies, and as Nietzsche, a walker himself, would say, they often can offer infinitely more wisdom than our best thinking.

My recent interest in walking began as a way to combat serious bouts of depression that not even years of study and practice of yoga seemed able to help me handle. I hiked as a way to counter spells that sunk me every winter. As I began to hike more and more, in places of profound beauty and in places familiar and local, I began to notice how the simple act of walking offered more than benefits to my physical and mental health. Walking began to make me see or feel so much more of what was going on inside and around me. Walking I’m learning has so much to do with developing the body/mind’s ability to perceive and read the rhythms and relationships that bind us to the elemental world: to rock and water, wind and weather, sky and space. And perhaps most important of all, walking alerts us to how our health depends on the health of the land in which we live and work and walk.

*These observations about walking were inspired by a walk down an abandoned railroad track through the Clark and Pine Nature Preserve in Lake County, Indiana a few miles from Gary. It is a remnant of the vast marsh and interdunal ecology that once covered the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Surprisingly, the marsh flourishes, teeming with life and birds, though it is next to an abandoned steel processing factory, a gypsum plant a mile to the east along Lake Michigan, Gary’s Sanitation Works and acres and acres of wastelands that is a Federal Superfund Site.

Walking To The Indiana Dunes

People usually consider walking

on water or thin air a miracle,

but I think the real miracle

is not to walk either on water or in thin air,

but to walk on earth.

Thich Nhat Hanh

This week I made a pilgrimage of sorts. One that began at my own door step in Rogers Park, then 19 miles along the Chicago Lakefront, through the industrial cities along the shore of Lake Michigan, Hammond, Whiting, East Chicago, Gary and finally to the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, some 50 plus miles in total. I did this in two days.

I tried to stay along the lake as much as possible, but when you leave the southern neighborhood of Jackson Park in Chicago, the lake disappears from view. Once in East Chicago by the Majestic Star Casino, I illegally slipped through a fence and touched the water. But I had to wait some 24 miles until I got to West Beach in the National Lakeshore until I could finally feel the cool water on my tired hot body.

Why do such a thing?

I wanted to walk this route to ask the question: why isn’t there a walking route linking Chicago’s magnificent lake front park to the patchwork of wetlands, prairies, woodlands and towering sand dunes that make up one of the few urban National Parks, the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore?

There are plans for a green way called the Marquette Plan to do such a thing, but the momentum, money and will to do it seems more wishful than real. I stayed in a Casino my first night, the Majestic Star, which along with the other casinos in the area are supposedly aimed at redeveloping the region by making an entertainment and recreation zone. Slot machines stretch the idea of entertainment, not to mention recreation or redevelopment. And of course, in a casino the brownfields and industrial wastelands that surround them are conveniently out of sight.

But I also took this walk to prove something I’ve been wondering about for the last few years as I’ve walked in all kinds of more traditional so-called ‘natural’ landscapes—deserts, mountains, forests, sea shores. Would my body and mind respond in similar ways, feeling revitalized and awakened from nature and exercise, if I walked through my own neighborhood and the city lakefront and then into one of the most industrialized and polluted landscapes of America? And further, would walking to the dunes make me appreciate the fragile beauty and ecological miracle of this landscape more than by driving there and taking a little walk through the park?

The body and the legs do more than just hold us up and carry us about back and forth to work. Like the antennae of insects, they read the landscapes and negotiate through them learning where to go and where to find nourishment and safety. The body isn't a machine we turn off on and on. Walking all those steps made me consider my connection to this landscape where I've lived for three decades. And despite the harshness of the highways and disfigurement of the landscape, I sensed it's grandeur, its timeless presence, enduring no matter what we puny humans think we can do with it. From the ground, I felt so many emotions, from rage to awe, from joy to sadness, from humiliation to wonder. We think we know where we live like we think we know our own body, but take a little walk or rather a long walk in the land where you live. And I guarantee you'll discover something about the very ground you drive and walk over and it will be your body, your feet, that will teach you.