Back on the boulevard, a young woman from Hong Kong asked me to take a picture of her with the Statue of Liberty behind her and then with the huge golden MGM lion across the street, and she looked ecstatic in both shots. Fat people and thin people, people in baggy shorts and in sleek dresses, a few children and a lot of old people streamed around us, and I handed the camera back and continued south with the crowd, to the last station on these stations of the odds, the Luxor, whose pyramid shape and sphinx say ancient Egypt, but whose shiny glass on which lasers play at night says technology. The newlyweds I had seen before were there in the entryway: she had laid aside her coat and purse to pose for his camera in front of one of the mock-Egyptian statues. I wondered about them, about why they had chosen to spend the first hours of their honeymoon strolling the Strip, about what past they brought to this encounter with global fantasy filtered through the Nevada desert’s climate and gambling’s economy. Who am I to say that because these people who streamed by to my right and my left were Las Vegas tourists they did not have other lives: that this English couple might not take their next vacation in the Lake District, that the old French couple might not live in Paris or near Plum Village where the Vietnamese Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh teaches walking meditation, that the African-Americans might not have marched in Selma as children, that the beggar in a wheelchair could not have been hit by a car in New Orleans, that the bride and groom might not be Japanese climbers of Mount Fuji, Chinese descendants of mountain hermits, southern Californian executives with treadmills at home, that this Guatemalan handing out helicopter-ride coupons might not walk the stations of the cross in her church or once have promenaded the plaza in her hometown, that bartender going to work might not have gone on the AFL-CIO march across the desert? The history of walking is as expansive as human history, and the most attractive thing about this pedestrian oasis in the middle of suburban blight in the middle of a great desert expanse is that it hints at that history’s breadth—not in its fake Rome and Tokyo, but in its Italian and Japanese tourists.
Las Vegas suggests that the thirst for places, for cities and gardens and wilderness, is unslaked, that people will still seek out the experience of wandering about in the open air to examine the architecture, the spectacles, and the stuff for sale, will still hanker after surprises and strangers. That the city as a whole is one of the most pedestrian-unfriendly places in the world suggests something of the problems to be faced, but that its attraction is a pedestrian oasis suggests the possibility of recovering the spaces in which walking is viable. That the space may be privatized to make the liberties of walking, speaking, and demonstrating illegal suggests that the United States is facing as serious a battle over rights-of-way as did English ramblers half a century ago, though this time the struggle is over urban, not rural, space. Equally scary is the widespread willingness to accept simulations of real places, for just as these simulations usually forbid the full exercise of civil liberties, so they banish the full spectrum of sights, encounters, experiences, that might provoke a poet, a cultural critic, a social reformer, a street photographer.
But the world gets better at the same time it gets worse. Vegas is not an anomaly but an intensification of mainstream culture, and walking will survive outside that mainstream and sometimes reenter it. When the automotive strip and suburb were being developed in the decades after World War II, Martin Luther King was studying Gandhi and reinventing Christian pilgrimage as something politically powerful at one edge of this continent, while at the other Gary Snyder was studying Taoist sages and walking meditation and rethinking the relationship between spirituality and environmentalism. At present, space in which to walk is being defended and sometimes enlarged by pedestrian activist groups springing up in cities across the United States, from Feet First in Seattle and Atlanta’s PEDS to Philly Walks and Walk Austin, by the incendiary British-based Reclaim the Streets, by older organizations like the Ramblers’ Association and other British insurrections for walking and access, and by pedestrian-favoring urban redesign from Amsterdam to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Walking traditions are maintained by the resurgence of the foot pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain and the thriving one in Chimayó, New Mexico, the growing popularity of climbing and mountaineering, the artists working with walking as a medium and the writers with it as a means, the spread of Buddhism with its practices of walking meditation and circumambulating mountains, the newfound secular and religious enthusiasm for labyrinths and mazes. . . .
“This place is a maze,” grumbled Pat when he found me in Caesars Forum, the arcade attached to the casino. The Forum is the capstone of the arch, the crowning jewel of Vegas’s recreation of the past. It is an arcade in exactly the sense Walter Benjamin described Parisian arcades—he quoted an 1852 guidebook that said, “Both sides of these passageways, which are lighted from above, are lined with the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, even a world, in miniature,” and added, “The arcades were a cross between a street and an interieur.” With its arched roof painted to look like the sky and recessed lighting that changes from day to twilight and back every twenty minutes or so, this one is more so than Benjamin could have imagined. Its curving “streets” are disorienting and full of distractions: the stores full of clothes, perfumes, toys, knickknacks, a fountain whose backside is a huge tropical fish tank, the famous fountain of nubile gods and goddesses who periodically “come to life” during a simulated thunderstorm with laser lightning snaking across the skylike dome. I had visited the arcades of Paris only six months before, and they were beautiful dead places, like streambeds through which water no longer runs, with half their shops closed and few wanderers along their mosaic’d corridors, but Caesars Forum is constantly thronged (as are the arcades of Bellagio, modeled after Milan’s famous Galleria). It is one of the most financially successful malls in the world, says the Wall Street Journal, adding that a new addition is planned, a re-creation of a Roman hill town with occasional appearances by horse-drawn chariots. An arcade was never much more than a mall, and though a flâneur was supposed to be more contemplative than the average mall rat, shallow gentlemen are as common as soulful shoppers. “Let’s get out of here,” I said to Pat, and we finished our drinks and headed for Red Rocks.
Red Rocks is as open, as public, as Las Vegas Boulevard, but nobody is promoting it, just as no one (unless they’re selling gear) is promoting the free activity of walking in preference to the lucrative industry of cars. While tens of thousands of people wander the Strip, perhaps a hundred or so at most roam the larger terrain of Red Rocks, whose spires and buttresses are far taller and more spectacular than any casino. Many people only drive through or step out long enough to take a photograph, unwilling to surrender to the slower pace here, a twilight that comes only once a day, wildlife that does as it pleases, a place with no human trace to structure one’s thoughts but a few trails, climbing bolts on the rocks, litter, and signs (and an entrenched tradition of nature-worship). Nothing happens here most of the time, except seasons, weather, light, and the workings of one’s body and mind.
Musing takes place in a kind of meadowlands of the imagination, a part of the imagination that has not yet been plowed, developed, or put to any immediately practical use. Environmentalists are always arguing that those butterflies, those grasslands, those watershed woodlands, have an utterly necessary function in the grand scheme of things, even if they don’t produce a market crop. The same is true of the meadowlands of imagination; time spent there is not work time, yet without that time the mind becomes sterile, dull, domesticated. The fight for free space—for wilderness and for public space—must be accompanied by a fight for free time to spend wandering in that space. Otherwise the individual imagination will be bulldozed over for the chain-store outlets of consumer appetite, true-crime titillations, and celebrity crises. Vegas has not yet decided whether to pave over or encourage that space.
That night we would sleep out near Red Rocks, in an unofficial campground with figu
res silhouetted against the small fires burning here and there under the starry sky and the glow of Vegas visible over the hill. In the morning we would rendezvous with Paul, a young guide who often drove out from Utah to climb here and who had invited Pat to climb with him. He would lead us along a trail snaking up and down across small arroyos and a dry streambed, past the gorgeous foliage I remembered from earlier trips, junipers with desert mistletoe, tiny-leafed desert oaks, yuccas, manzanitas, and an occasional barrel cactus, all stunted and spread sparsely by the rocky soil, aridity, and scattered boulders in a way that recalls Japanese gardens. Still limping from a fall six months earlier, Pat brought up the rear, while Paul and I talked as we went along about music, climbing, concentration, bicycles, anatomy, apes. When I turned back to look at Las Vegas as I had so often looked toward Red Rocks the day before, he would say, “Don’t look back,” but I would stare, amazed how thick the city’s smog was. The place appeared to be a brown dome with a only few spires murkily visible within it. This state of things whereby the desert could be seen clearly from the city but not the other way round seemed as neat an allegory as I’d ever met. It was as though one could look back from the future to the past but not forward from this ancient place to the future shrouded in trouble, mystery, and fumes.
Paul would lead us off the trail into the brush that led up steep, narrow Juniper Canyon, and I would manage to heave myself up the various shelves where the rock grew more and more gorgeous, sometimes striped red and beige in thin layers, sometimes spotted with pink spots the size of coins, until we were at the foot of the climb. “Olive Oil: This route ascends obvious crack systems for 700 feet up the south side of the Rose Tower,” I would read in Pat’s battered American Alpine Club Climber’s Guide for the region. I lounged and watched them climb with ease up the first few hundred feet and studied the mice, who were less glamorous than the white tigers and dolphins of the Mirage, but livelier. Afterward I would turn around and spend the afternoon wandering in flatter terrain, ambling along the few trails alongside the clear rushing water of Pine Creek, exploring another canyon, turning back to watch the shadows over the hills grow longer and the light thicker and more golden, as though air could turn to honey, honey that would dissolve into the returning night.
Walking has been one of the constellations in the starry sky of human culture, a constellation whose three stars are the body, the imagination, and the wide-open world, and though all three exist independently, it is the lines drawn between them—drawn by the act of walking for cultural purposes—that makes them a constellation. Constellations are not natural phenomena but cultural impositions; the lines drawn between stars are like paths worn by the imagination of those who have gone before. This constellation called walking has a history, the history trod out by all those poets and philosophers and insurrectionaries, by jaywalkers, streetwalkers, pilgrims, tourists, hikers, mountaineers, but whether it has a future depends on whether those connecting paths are traveled still.
Notes
1. TRACING A HEADLAND: An Introduction
ref “An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness”: Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in The Natural History Essays (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1980), 99.
ref It was nuclear weapons that first led: My early writing on walking and on nuclear politics appears in my 1994 book Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
2. THE MIND AT THREE MILES AN HOUR
ref “I can only meditate when I am walking”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1953), 382.
ref “In one respect, at least”: John Thelwall, The Peripatetic: or, Sketches of the Heart of Nature and Society (1793; facsimile reprint, New York: Garland Publishing, 1978), 1, 8–9.
ref Felix Grayeff’s history: Aristotle and His School: An Inquiry into the History of the Peripatos (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1974), 38–39.
ref The Stoics were named: Christopher Thacker, The History of Gardens (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 21, is my source for the information on the stoa and the Stoics. Bernard Rudofsky’s Streets for People: A Primer for Americans (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1982), also gives a précis of this information.
ref “For recreation I turn”: Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Oscar Levy, trans. Anthony M. Ludovici (New York: Doubleday, 1921), 23.
ref “He used to come”: Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory, quoted in A. J. Ayer, Wittgenstein (New York: Random House, 1985), 16.
ref “In order to slacken my pace”: Rousseau, Confessions, 327.
ref “Behold how luxury”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “First Discourse” (“Discourse on the Arts and Letters”), in The First and Second Discourses (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964), 46.
ref “wandering in the forests”: Rousseau, “Second Discourse,” ibid., 137.
ref “I do not remember ever having had”: Rousseau, Confessions, 64.
ref “Never did I think so much”: Ibid., 158.
ref “thinking over subjects”: Ibid., 363.
ref Boswell: “Dialogue with Rousseau,” The Portable Johnson and Boswell, ed. Louis Kronenberger (New York: Viking, 1947), 417.
ref “Having therefore decided to describe”: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Second Walk,” in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1979), 35.
ref “Wherein lay this great contentment?”: “Fifth Walk,” ibid., 83.
ref “What had at first been”: Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1942), 45–46.
ref “Strangely enough, my imagination works best”: Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 6:113.
ref “In order to bear mental tension”: Ibid., 5:271 (1849–1851).
ref “This very moment there is an organ-grinder”: Ibid., 5:177 (1841).
ref “Most of Either/Or was written only twice”: Ibid., 5:341 (1846).
ref “overwhelmed with ideas”: Ibid., 6:62–63 (1848).
ref “My atmosphere has been tainted”: Ibid., 5:386 (1847).
ref Husserl described walking: “The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism,” in Edmund Husserl: Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, Harvester Press, 1981). I benefited from Edward S. Casey’s interpretation of this dense essay in his The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 238–50.
ref “If the body is a metaphor”: Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender-Scepticism,” in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 145.
3. RISING AND FALLING: The Theorists of Bipedalism
ref “Human walking is a unique activity”: John Napier, “The Antiquity of Human Walking,” Scientific American, April 1967. Napier is one of the earliest to push the history of walking back further into prehuman history and insist on its formative importance there.
ref “point out parallels”: Adrienne Zihlman, in “The Paleolithic Glass Ceiling,” in Women in Human Evolution, ed. Lori D. Hager (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 99. Zihlman and Dean Falk’s readings of Lovejoy and the broader gender politics of human evolution in this book and in Falk’s book Braindance (New York: Henry Holt, 1992) have been immensely helpful to my own reading.
ref “This is like a modern knee joint” and following: Donald Johanson and Maitland Edey, Lucy: The Beginnings of Humankind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 163. See also C. Owen Lovejoy with Kingsbury G. Heiple and Albert H. Burstein, “The Gait of Australopithicus,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 38 (1973): 757–80.
ref “In most primate species”: C. Owen Lovejoy,
“The Origin of Man,” Science 211 (1981): 341–50.
ref “Bipedalism . . . figured”: “Evolution of Human Walking,” Scientific American, November 1988.
ref Dean Falk’s attack on Lovejoy: “Brain Evolution in Females: An Answer to Mr. Lovejoy,” in Hager, Women in Human Evolution, 115.
ref Jack Stern and Randall Sussman: Interview with the author, Stonybrook, New York, February 4, 1998. See also their comments in Origine(s) de la Bipédie chez les Hominidés (Paris: Editions du CNRS/Cahiers de Paléoanthropologie, 1991) and articles such as “The Locomotor Anatomy of Australopithicus afarensis,” American Journal of Physical Anthropology 60 (1983). Representations of hominids in deep forest appeared in National Geographic in 1997.
ref 1991 Conference on the Origins of Bipedalism: The three anthropologists at the Paris conference were Nicole I. Tuttle, Russell H. Tuttle, and David M. Webb; their paper “Laetoli Footprint Trails and the Evolution of Hominid Bipedalism” appears in Origine(s) de la Bipédie; the quoted passages appear on 189–90.
ref “One cannot overemphasize”: Mary Leakey, National Geographic, April 1979, 453.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 39