Wanderlust: A History of Walking (20 page)

The literature of the long-distance walk is a sort of downhill slope. Toward the bottom come books by people who are athletic walkers but not necessarily writers, for the necessary combination of silver tongue and iron thighs seems to be a rare one. The most impressive of the contemporary long-distance walkers I have read—there are many now—is Robyn Davidson, who didn't exactly set out to write about walking at all, but did so brilliantly in the course of her
Tracks,
a
book recounting her 1,700-mile trek across the Australian outback to the sea with three camels (sponsored, like Jenkins's odyssey, by the National Geographic Society). Midway in her journey, she explains its effect on her mind: “But strange things do happen when you trudge twenty miles a day, day after day, month after month. Things you only become totally conscious of in retrospect. For one thing I had remembered in minute and Technicolor detail everything that had ever happened in my past and all the people who belonged there. I had remembered every word of conversation I had had or overheard way, way back in my childhood and in this way I had been able to review these events with a kind of emotional detachment as if they had happened to somebody else. I was rediscovering and getting to know people who were long since dead and forgotten. . . . And I was happy, there is simply no other word for it.” She brings us back to the territory of the philosophers and the walking essayists, to the relationship between walking and the mind, and she does it from a kind of extreme experience few have had.

The 1970s seem to have been a golden age of long-distance walks; Jenkins, Davidson, and Alan Booth all set out in the mid-1970s. Booth's delightful
Roads to Sata: A Two-Thousand-Mile Walk Through Japan
is a milestone in how far the literature of walking had come. An Englishman who had lived in Japan for seven years and come to know the language and culture well, he is unfailingly humorous and modest, a great evoker of place and recounter of comic conversations, respectful but not reverent about the culture. He describes his trip—dirty socks, hot springs, sake and more sake, comic and tragic figures, sultry weather, lechers of both sexes—with élan. He comments wryly, “In properly developed countries, the inhabitants regard walkers with grave suspicion and have taught their dogs to do the same,” but enjoys himself all the same. Yet like most of these travel books, his is not really a book about walking. That is to say, it is not about the acts but about the encounters, just as
A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf
is really about botany and natural epiphanies—and
On the Road
and
Easy Rider
are only implicitly about the internal combustion engine and its implications. Walking is only a means to maximize those encounters and perhaps test body and soul.

The test is central to Ffyona Campbell's prolific walks, as recounted in her book
The Whole Story: A Walk Around the World.
The daughter of a harsh military man, she seems to be on a quest to prove herself to him and to herself, with her walking an obsessive activity not unlike her sister's anorexia (which crops up in
her book). In 1983, at the age of sixteen, Campbell successfully walked the length of Britain—a thousand miles—sponsored by London's
Evening Standard
and seeking to raise money for a hospital. She then set out to walk around the world—not literally, for the continuous line that links up many walkers' narratives has nothing to do with her: “The Guinness Book of Records defines a walk around the world as beginning and finishing in the same place, crossing four continents, and covering a total of at least 16,000 miles,” says the preface of her book. She set off across the United States two years later, Australia five years later, and the length of Africa eight years later, finishing up eleven years after the English walk with a trek northward from Spain to the English Channel. It is as discontinuous as could be—she flies back to Africa and the States to complete segments she left out earlier—and only a kind of accounting holds it all together as a single act.

Perhaps it is a mistake to include Campbell in the literature of walking, even though she has produced books, but she is certainly part of the culture of walking. There is another ancestry for her in the pedestrian athletes of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, who seemed indifferent whether they went their thousand miles around a track or down a road, and who were the subjects of heavy betting. After all, almost no landscape appears in her narratives of several continents; we cannot in it trace an inheritance from Wordsworth. Yet the notion that walking is somehow redemptive and walking farther is more so seems to have taken on a fearful life of its own, and surely this is something of a Victorian heritage, and those Victorians were themselves heirs of Wordsworth. Such is the winding road down which history comes, now with one set of desires in view, now with another. Like Davidson, Campbell seems driven, but Davidson represents a more intellectual, insightful version of the wounded self seeking redemption through an ordeal, and comes equipped with vastly more literary and landscape sensibility. The fierce alienation is much the same, the sense of a young woman clinging to her stubbornness and her arduous goal because that's all she has. Jenkins is softer, less locked up, maybe because it's easier for a man, maybe because he's more openly a seeker: he knows what kind of pilgrimage he is on.

To some extent Campbell resembles the Walkathon walkers, in that she is often walking to raise money for a cause (or more often looking for a cause to represent so she can also raise money for her expeditions, which with support staff, publicity, and so forth were often expensive). Still, to walk fifty miles in a day is
remarkable, to get up and do it again the next day is stunning, and to do it day after day across the Australian outback alongside a road in ugly weather is brutal. Campbell did it, walking 3,200 miles across that continent in ninety-five days, a world record. Her legs are indefatigably strong and relentless in their pursuit, but nothing is left in her walks but accomplishment—no scenery, no pleasure, few encounters. For 20,000 miles she is struggling to understand herself well enough to outwalk her suffering, but she is alarmingly unclear about her values, seeking corporate sponsorship and media attention at some points and condemning journalists and capitalists at others, insulting people who drive cars on her second walk in the United States, after having been trailed across the country by a motor home driven by her support staff the first time. Her book ends with an anecdote that undermines all her effort, one of many passages of fuzzy reverence for indigenous peoples. It is a tale of the military men who challenge some aboriginal Australians to a footrace across the desert, which the latter abandon to track down honeycomb. Telling it, she suggests she is on the side of the aborigines in disdaining rigid goals, quantifiable experience, competition, even record-keeping or -making, as deeply flawed ways of being in the world. The tragedy is that all along she has been on the side of the military men.

Perhaps Campbell shows us pure walking. It is impurity that makes it worthwhile, the views, the thoughts, the encounters—all those things that connect mind and world through the medium of the roving body, that leaven the self-absorption of the mind. These books suggest how slippery a subject is walking, how hard it is to keep one's mind on it. Walking is usually about something else—about the walker's character or encounters, about nature or about achievement, sometimes so much so it ceases to be about walking. Yet together all these things—the canons of walking essays and travel literature—constitute a coherent, if meandering, two-hundred-year history of reasons to walk across the land.

M
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M
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A
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Ffyona Campbell's tale of the military men racing across the Australian outback toward the finish line and their aboriginal rivals straying from it to gather honeycomb suggests some of the various ways and reasons to walk and to live, or at least some of the questions. Can one weigh public glory against private pleasure, and are they mutually exclusive? What portions of an act can be measured and compared? What does it mean to arrive, and what to wander without destination? Is competition an ignoble motive? Can the soldiers be imagined as students of discipline and the aboriginal men as students of detachment? After all, there are pilgrims for whom arrival at their journey's end is spiritual consummation, but there are other pilgrims and mystics who wander without cease or destination, from the Chinese sages of antiquity to the anonymous nineteenth-century Russian peasant who wrote
The Way of a Pilgrim.
These questions about how one travels and why become most pressing, or at least most evident, with mountaineering.

Mountaineering is the art of getting up mountains by foot and occasionally by hand, and though the climbing is usually emphasized, most ascents are mostly a matter of walking (and since good climbers climb with their legs as much as possible, climbing could be called the art of taking a vertical walk). In the steepest places the steady semiconscious rhythm of walking slows down, every step can become a separate decision about direction and about safety, and the simple
act of walking is transformed into a specialized skill that often calls for elaborate equipment. Here I want to address mountaineering that includes climbing but leave aside the separate discipline of climbing without mountaineering, a somewhat artificial division, but one with reasons. The latter is a recently explored side canyon in the history of mountaineering in which technique has been vastly refined to ascend ever-more-challenging surfaces. A supremely hard climb can be less than a hundred feet long, and a single move can become a famous “problem” to be worked out by intense application and training. And while mountaineering is traditionally motivated by a taste for mountain scenery, technical climbing seems to involve other pleasures. Since the eighteenth century, nature has been imagined as scenery, and scenery is what is seen at a certain distance, but climbing puts one face-to-face with the rock, with a wholly different kind of engagement. Perhaps tactile encounters, sensations of gravity (and, sometimes, mortality), and the kinesthetic pleasures of one's body moving at its limit of ability are an equally valid if less culturally hallowed experience of nature. With climbing, sometimes scenery disappears altogether, at lest in the rapidly proliferating indoor climbing gyms. Too, walking fosters one kind of awareness in which the mind can stray away from and return to the immediate experience of traversing a particular place; rock climbing, on the other hand, is demanding enough that one guide told me, “Climbing is the only time my mind doesn't wander.” Climbing is about climbing. Mountaineering, on the other hand, is still about mountains.

Most standard histories of mountaineering and of landscape aesthetics start with the poet Petrarch, “the first man to climb a mountain for its own sake, and to enjoy the view from the top,” as the art historian Kenneth Clark put it. Long before Petrarch climbed Italy's Mount Ventoux in 1335, there were others ascending mountains in other parts of the world. Petrarch prefigures the Romantic-generated practice of traveling among mountains for aesthetic pleasure and getting to their summits for secular reasons. This history of mountaineering really begins in Europe in the late eighteenth century, when curiosity and changed sensibilities spurred a few bold individuals not just to travel through the Alps but to try to get to their summits. The practice was gradually consolidated into mountaineering, a set of skills and assumptions—for example, the assumption that getting to the top of a mountain is a uniquely meaningful act, distinct from walking among the passes or foothills. In Europe mountaineering developed largely as a gentleman's pastime and a guide's profession, since the former so
often relied upon the latter; in North America the first recorded ascents were made by explorers and surveyors in far remoter places (some ascents in the Alps could and can be watched through telescopes from the villages below; some in North America took weeks of wilderness trekking to reach). Of course, as the great surveyor and mountaineer Clarence King recounts, when in 1871 he got to the top of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous forty-eight states, he found that “a small mound of rock was piled on the peak, and solidly built into it an Indian arrow-shaft, pointing due west.” Mountains attracted attention and walkers long before romanticism spawned mountaineering.

A lone peak or high point is a natural focal point in the landscape, something by which both travelers and locals orient themselves. In the continuum of landscape, mountains are discontinuity—culminating high points, natural barriers, unearthly earth. On mountains, latitude's imperceptible changes can become altitude's striking transformations. Ecology and climate change rapidly from balmy foothills to glacial heights: there's the timberline and, farther up, what could be called the lifeline, beyond which nothing lives or grows, and, above about 18,000 feet, what mountaineers call the death zone, the icy low-oxygen realm where the body starts to die, judgment is impaired, and even the most acclimated alpinists lose brain cells. Up high, biology vanishes to reveal a world shaped by the starker forces of geology and meteorology, the bare bones of the earth wrapped in sky. Mountains have been seen around the world as thresholds between this world and the next, as places where the spirit world comes close. In most parts of the world, sacred meanings are ascribed to mountains, and though the spirit world may be terrifying, it is seldom evil. Christian Europe seems to be alone in having seen mountains as ugly and almost hellish realms. In Switzerland, dragons, the souls of the unhappy dead, and the Wandering Jew were supposed to haunt the heights (sentenced in the legend to wander the earth until the Second Coming because he slighted Jesus, the Wandering Jew suggests that European Christians often took a dim view of wandering as well as of Jews). Many seventeenth-century English writers express their detestation of mountains as “high and hideous,” “rubbish of the earth,” “deformities,” and even damage caused to a formerly smooth earth by the Deluge. So though Europeans led the world in the development of modern mountaineering, that mountaineering came out of romanticism's recovery of an appreciation for natural places that much of the rest of the world had never lost.

One of the first individuals whose ascent of a mountain is recorded is China's “First Emperor,” who in the third century
B
.
C
. drove his chariot up T'ai Shan against the advice of his sages, who thought he should walk. Better known for starting the Great Wall and for burning all the books so that Chinese history would start with him, the First Emperor may have eradicated the record of those who ascended before him. Most people since have walked to T'ai Shan's summit—for many centuries on the 7,000-step staircase leading from the City of Peace at the foot of the mountain through three Heavenly Gates to the Temple of the Jade Emperor on top. American writer and Buddhist Gretel Ehrlich walked up T'ai Shan and other mountain pilgrimage sites in China and wrote, “The Chinese phrase for ‘going on a pilgrimage,' ch'ao-shan chin-hsiang, actually means ‘paying one's respects to the mountain,' as if the mountain was an empress or an ancestor before whom one must kneel.” In the fourth century
A
.
D
. a very different kind of pilgrim climbed mountains on the other side of Eurasia: the Christian pilgrim Egeria. Almost no trace of her but her pilgrimage diary survives, though that manuscript suggests she was an abbess or other religious figure of some stature and that Mount Sinai deep in the Egyptian desert was among the sites of Christian pilgrimage then. She was guided by resident holy men through “the vast and very flat valley where the children of Israel tarried during those days when the holy man Moses climbed the mountain of God” on their flight from slavery in Egypt. She and her unnamed companions scaled the nearly 9,000-foot peak of Mount Sinai on foot—“straight up, as if scaling a wall.” Egeria noted that “this seems to be a single mountain all around; however, once you enter the area you see there are many, but the whole range is called the Mountain of God.” For Egeria, Sinai was the mountain on which God had descended and Moses had ascended to receive the Tablets of the Law: climbing it was a profession of faith in Scripture and a return to the site of its greatest moments. Since her time stairs have been built up Sinai too, and one fourteenth-century mystic ascended them every day as his religious expression.

Mountains, like labyrinths and other built structures, function as metaphorical and symbolic space. There is no more clear geographical equivalent to the idea of arrival and triumph than the topmost peak beyond which there is no farther to go (though in the Himalayas many pilgrims circumambulate mountains, believing it would be sacrilegious to stand on the summit). The athletically gifted and enormously ambitious Victorian mountaineer Edward Whymper said of
reaching the top of the Matterhorn, “There is nothing to look up to; all is below,” in a telling mix of literal and figurative language. “The man who is there is somewhat in the position of one who has attained all that he desires—he has nothing to aspire to.” The appeal of climbing to the top of mountains may also be drawn from language metaphors. English and many other languages associate altitude, ascent, and height with power, virtue, and status. Thus we speak of being on top of the world or at the top of one's field, at the height of one's ability, on the way up; of peak experiences and the peak of a career; of rising and moving up in the world; to say nothing of social climbers, upward mobility, high-minded saints and lowly rascals, and of course the upper and the lower classes. In Christian cosmology, heaven is above us and hell below, and Dante portrays Purgatory as a conical mountain he arduously ascends, conflating spiritual and geographical travel (starting with what modern climbers would call a chimney: “We climbed up through the narrow cleft, / rock pressed in on us from either side, / and that ground needed both feet and hands”). A walk uphill traverses these metaphysical territories; a goalless ramble across the same mountain moves through very different metaphysics.

In Japan mountains have been imagined as the centers of vast mandalas spreading across the landscape like, in one scholar's words, “overlapping flowers,” and approaching the center of the mandala means approaching the source of spiritual power—but the approach may be indirect. In a labyrinth one can be farthest from the destination when one is closest; on a mountain, as Egeria found, the mountain itself changes shape again and again as one ascends. The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an allegory about this perceptual paradox. Thoreau noticed it and wrote, “To the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form,” and that form is best apprehended from a distance. In every print but one of the Japanese artist Hokusai's famous
Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji,
the perfect cone of Mount Fuji looms largely nearby or small far away, giving orientation and continuity to city, road, field, and sea. Only in the print of pilgrims actually ascending the mountain does the familiar shape that unites the other prints vanish. When we are attracted, we draw near; when we draw near, the sight that attracted us dissolves: the face of the beloved blurs or
fractures as one draws near for a kiss, the smooth cone of Mount Fuji becomes rough rock rising from underfoot to blot out the sky in Hokusai's print of the mountain pilgrims. The objective form of the mountain seems to dissolve into subjective experience, and the meaning of walking up a mountain fragments.

A walk, I have claimed, is like a life in miniature, and a mountain ascent is a more dramatic walk: there is more danger and more awareness of death, more uncertainty about the outcome, more triumph at what is more unequivocally arrival. “To climb up rocks is like all the rest of your life, only simpler and safer,” wrote the British mountaineer Charles Montague in 1924. “Each time that you get up a hard pitch, you have succeeded in life.” What fascinates me about mountaineering is how one activity can mean so many disparate things. Though the idea of pilgrimage almost always seems to be present, many ascents derive their meaning from sports and military action as well. Pilgrimage draws meaning from following hallowed routes to established destinations, while the most revered mountaineers are often those who are first on a route or summit, who like athletes make a record. Mountaineering has often been seen as a pure form of the imperial mission, calling into play all its skills and heroic virtues, with none of its material gains or oppositional violence (which is why the superb French alpinist Lionel Terray called his memoir
Conquistadors of the Useless
). On March 17, 1923, while on a speaking tour to raise money for an Everest expedition, the great mountaineer George Mallory apparently got exasperated with the continual questions about why he wanted to climb it, and uttered the most famous line in mountaineering history, the one sometimes cited as a Zen koan: “Because it's there.” His usual reply was, “We hope to show that the spirit that built the British Empire is not yet dead.” Mallory and his companion Andrew Irvine themselves died on that expedition, and mountaineering historians still debate whether they got to the summit before vanishing. (Mallory's battered, frozen body was discovered seventy-five years later, on May 1, 1999.)