along Tewksbury Hollow Road, Auburn Township, Pennsylvania
I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.
― John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
I really like the fawns, he said, especially the fawns. I was walking down Pennsyvlania Route 6 to the intersection and was just about to turn onto Tewksbury Hollow Road when he pulled up beside me. He idled there in the center of the road, an older gentleman who leaned out from his open window into the morning air. His pickup had some serious battle scars, and its antenna hung unnaturally from the hood like a dislocated limb. It took me a few seconds, but then I realized that he must’ve been watching me watching the deer that had come out of the trees to graze in the clearing yesterday.
Did you get a good picture of them? he asked. And it was clear that he’d seen me photographing a doe and her fawns about 300 yards from the road. I did, I said. And though for a moment I wondered if I should be wary–after all, here was a strange man who’d been watching me and now sat idling in the center of the road–I began to tell him all about the deer in southeast Iowa, about the bucks I’d seen walking across my back yard last fall. And when he motioned up the big hill to the south and told me that he lived way up at the top in the house with all the stacks of cut wood, I found myself wondering what it would be like to ride up with him and to look out over the hollow from such a magnificent vantage point.
These are the perks of a good walk. You see things. You meet people you probably wouldn’t otherwise meet. You hear your feet on the road and fall into a rhythm as familiar as your own heart beat. I suspect that if there was a charge for all these perks, we probably couldn’t afford them. They’re that precious.
During the three weeks I spent in northeastern Pennsylvania, I walked daily along Tewksbury Hollow Road. Each morning, I set out from my lodgings, but, as John Muir writes, I was really going in. Into a world where fields of goldenrod flanked the road; where a great blue heron stalked the perimeter of a pond covered in algae; where the rain brought spotted red newts onto the road and sent the stream–previously just a trickle–crashing over the rocks like a full-fledged river; where the hardwoods arched over the road in a canopy so dense that I walked for yards in near darkness; where the cattails had burst, and the milkweed pods had just begun to spill their milky floss; where deer dotted the tree line, and somewhere, deep within the forest, black bears slept. Each day, I was walking into another world, and I marveled at the new things I encountered there.
In his essay, “Walking,” American author Henry David Thoreau writes: I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. I confess that there were days I walked down Route 6 and onto Tewksbury Hollow Road bodily but not necessarily spiritually. My body struggled with the humidity and with one wicked hill that literally took my breath away and often caused me to stop, mid-hill, to regulate my heart which was hammering against my chest. During these moments, it was challenging to be there in spirit. Still, there were more times when my spirit grabbed me by the hand and pulled me down the road. Even now, weeks after I’ve returned home, I walk the road in my mind. As I mind-walk, I see each bend, each sunny field, each tree stand, and cabin.
Rebecca Solnit, author of Wanderlust: A History of Walking, examines the many benefits of walking. She writes:
For [Jane Austen and the readers of Pride and Prejudice], as for Mr. Darcy, [Elizabeth Bennett’s] solitary walks express the independence that literally takes the heroine out of the social sphere of the houses and their inhabitants, into a larger, lonelier world where she is free to think: walking articulates both physical and mental freedom.
Oh, to be taken out of the social sphere and ushered into the larger, lonelier world where you are free to think! This is it, exactly. A good walk opens up real space to flex your mental muscles. It pays no heed to your reputation or attire. You can be unabashedly yourself. You can make unfiltered exclamations when something catches your fancy. Will you look at that! I often say to no one in particular. There’s no etiquette about this sort of thing on a good walk. And truth be told, most drivers or passersby who might be alarmed if they saw you talking to yourself are probably texting or scrolling through social media, so they won’t register an occasional Oh, wow!
You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to. J.R.R. Tolkien is keenly aware that a good walk has the power to sweep you off to places you’ve only imagined. Or perhaps to places you’ve never imagined. I’ve been so wholly swept away that I lost complete track of where I was and how I got there. For minutes or hours, I’ve walked into great tales in which, as heroine, I met every challenge and vanquished every evil handily. I’ve been swept into other ages and other places, and all this sweeping became, in the words of poet Robert Frost, a momentary stay against confusion. I gratefully let myself be swept into all sorts of worlds, and as I walked on, the miles kept the pain and terror of this world at bay.
On my very last walk down Tewksbury Hollow Road, I met a man I’d seen walking a few days before. We met in a sunny spot of the road where the morning sun burst through an opening in the upper story of the poplar and oak trees hemming the road. For 15 minutes, we stood and talked about all sorts of things. As if we’d been friends for years. As if we’d expected to find each other at this very time on this very road. As if the bounty of the day depended upon our meeting. A great walk can really deliver the goods.
