works of wanderlust

Tag: walking

  • Tracks in the Mud

    There were imprints of multiple bike tire treads in the dried mud.

    This particular corner is not exactly technical, but it would inevitably pose a challenge for a novice off-road cyclist. The hairpin turn is at the lowest point of a narrow runoff trench, a kind of wrinkle in the landscape where water might escape down into the valley-proper but which now, in the late spring, was barely damp. The hairpin turn is to be found at the lowest point in a narrow trench down which the trail skirts a rapid descent and counterpart ascent leading to or from, depending on one’s perspective, the hairpin turn in question. That is to say, the hypothetical adventure cyclist may round a corner on the path and encounter a descending hill tracing down along the side of the trench and then at the bottom of the hill be made to take a sharp turn before ascending back up the far side of said trench to resume their slog through the river valley trail.  There is no other way around, save for taking a completely and altogether different path.

    There were imprints in the dried mud indicating that this represents a common scenario.

    But I was on foot.

    I rounded the corner and shortened my stride to accommodate the fifteen meters of downward grade, my hand instinctively brushing up towards the branches of the nearby trees as if I should, could, would grab a bit of the foliage if my feet slipped on a bit of loose dirt and knocked me off balance.

    I didn’t fall. Instead I found myself at the bottom of the hill down which I had just walked and the bottom of a second hill I was destined to climb and standing at a sharp hairpin corner down low in a wrinkle in the landscape looking towards the dried mud where a number of dried bike tire tread tracks had hardened into their familiar waffle-print patterns.  

    It was quiet. Unnervingly quiet. 

    The trail running in and through the landscape here, a hundred or so meters into the woods and away from the suburban neighbourhoods nearby, was already insulated from the usual hum of sound from the city. But somehow, the little rent in the path, this dip and turn and wrinkle was like descending between two soundproofing berms and completely shutting out whatever remaining noise had penetrated the woods. Here, I might just have found one of the quietest places in the city.

    The sunlight pinched down between the scraggly poplars. The air carried the heavy scent of the spring mulch rotting on the forest floor. The wind stirred now and then, just a trivial gust and enough to stir the newly budded leaves glowing that radiant green of freshly popped foliage.

    One path. Uncountable tread tracks traced through the dried mud. And me, on foot, looking down at the silent hairpin turn a hundred meters from civilization.

    For every person who descended into this trench there was one journey, but an infinite variety of paths. No one who entered this turn came into it at the same angle, speed or trajectory, and likewise, no one left it alike any other. Each path was unique. Each journey was personal. 

    I stepped past the dried tread tracks, glimpsing over my shoulder through the rift in space I had just traversed. That was mine. And I climbed back up the other side of the trail, back up and out of the wrinkle in the landscape, and tried to figure out exactly where I had ended up.

  • works of wandering

    As of two o’clock in the afternoon I have logged nearly seventeen thousand steps. Walking. Wandering. Vaguely destinationed towards places where I could sit and write after walking and reading and trying not to trip and fall flat on my face.

    I’ll be the first to admit that I had no real plan about what to write in this blog. Maybe that was on purpose. Maybe. But too, correlating with that lack of a plan came a lack of a name. Anything I have written in the last decade or so has pretty much started with a clever name after which the words on the corresponding topic seemed to flow with clarity and abandon. I had no real plan this time, though, and so when the blogging software asked me to type in, dammit, something, anything, what are you calling this blog, man? I typed in something about “wandering” and off I went to post.

    This struck me as an adequate title, at least to start. Why? Well, obviously because as it stands I seem to be doing a lot of wandering lately. Literally and figuratively. Wandering through life. Wandering through my career. Wandering the trails. Wandering up and down and back and forth and wherever the trail seems to be taking me.

    So that the first few of my posts have been about wandering and walking is, perhaps, no surprise.

    And so that I spent my latest day off walking until my feet hurt was, perhaps, also not much of a surprise.

    This may turn into a blog about wandering after all.

    As of two o’clock then I have wandered at least ten kilometers through the trails and streets and neighbourhoods, and though I have found myself having not gone very far nor accomplishing very much, I have logged some serious wandering steps to that specific nowhere in particular.

    I have been inclined to write for as long as I can remember. I would even suggest that there has never been a conscious moment in my life when I have not felt that my purpose—my raison d’etre as it were—as a sentient human being wandering around with my senses alert and recording was not also part of some grand universal plan to turn those thoughts and observations into words on a page. 

    Sounds like an ego thing.

    If that sounds egotistical, it should not. 

    I usually struggle to find any other equally driving force behind my own existence, as if my fingers are simply the equivalent of whatever constitutes the USB port of the universe and my role is to turn everything I see, think, and hear into data output. It’s a silly idea, but rationally it’s not a terrible thing to have a role that one can articulate—even a role as silly as being a data port on a computer analogy. I wander and I write and then I wander some more and I write some more. Click save…aaaaaand writing to disk.

    So here I am, writing some more.

    Writing about writing. Writing about wandering and then writing about wandering and then writing more about the irreducible loop I find myself in writing such things before I go out and wander and write and wander and write some more.

    I have been trying to write an introduction to this blog. I don’t attempt to do that because I expect some grand audience to dive into these words and make sense of them, or to make sense of me, but rather to try to formalize this role I have taken upon myself: recorder of things, stenographer to the universe, guy with a keyboard and a website. This is important shit, after all. These are big shoes to fill. If I don’t know what I’m doing here, what’s the point. I gotta make sense of it if no one else but for myself.

    As of two o’clock in the afternoon I had logged a helluva lot of wandering steps and typed a few hundreds of words and landed in a cafe where I could sit and channel all that data into a keyboard. And out the metaphorical data port comes this: a purpose and maybe the best explanation that I can muster.  These are works of wandering the world and wherever, opening my eyes to the universe and logging it into yet another website. 

    You want a reason for something or anything at all? I write because it is who I am, and I can’t explain why else.

  • book reviews: april flowers

    I just posted about my newfound enjoyment of walking and reading and so I figured now may be as good as time as any to start doing some light logging of the books I’ve been reading while out and about.

    Is it any surprise that two of those books are literally books about walking?

    How… um… on point.

    A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

    I’ve never actually read a Bryson book. I think it must be the kind of thing that appeals to middle aged folks who find themselves compelled to read travel stories from their aging counterparts. Or maybe that’s just what I am now and I’m projecting. Whatever. I’ve seen his books all over and had this kind of edging towards curiosity about them, but—well—I had other stuff to read first, y’know. But then the digital library recommended this one and I bit. Bryson has a vibe, I’ll give him that. He’s a storyteller and can turn a months long hike through the wilderness into a compelling dramatic narrative of a frustrating bro relationship. I could feel the pain of the walk, but also the pain of tolerating someone who is glumming on your good time. I got it. I soaked it in. I read the thing in three days. I’m not ready to hike the trail, but I definitely felt like going for a long walk alone afterwards.

    The Witcher: Blood of Elves by Andrzei Sapkowski

    To be completely fair, I’ve been trying to read this book for at least two years. I bought the box set on a boxing day sale in like, I wanna say 2023–but I’m pretty sure it was 2022. I was into the game on my playstation for a while and the lore struck me as wild, so, ka-ching. It’s been sitting on my nightstand with a bookmark one chapter in for all that time, always somewhere about third or fourth in the stack. Always. But it was available to borrow immediately from the public library as an ebook the day I unwrapped the new Kobo from its box and so it was pretty much the first book I loaded onto the device. I mean, sure, paper copy… but I actually read the digital one. That said, it took me until about half way through to really get into it. There was so much damned lore and backstory that I was trying to piece it altogether in my head for a lot of the opening chapters. Somehow it’s written both simply while tying itself in knots. I liked it in the end, but that first bit was a slog to be honest.

    In Praise of Paths by Torbjorn Ekelund

    Ok, so as far as philosophical essays on the joy of travelling through space and time while on foot goes, this is the book they could sell at Ikea and it would fit right in on any of the Kallax or Lack shelves. Yeah. Right. I know. Norway is not Sweden, but the vibe from those Scandanavian countries is all mashed together in my head and sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong place. I like Ikea and I like this book and the ideas is spurred to life in my head. It made me yearn for that last bit of icy snow to melt from the paths around here so that I could get back out on the trails and go for a stupidly long walk. Long walks were on my bucket list for when I took my career break and sometimes while I’ve been out wandering I do feel like I’m wasting time when I should be sitting at a desk writing something or coding something, so getting a swift kick in the reminder that sometimes the walk is the whole point made this a worthwhile read.

  • books if by foot

    I bought a new ebook reader.

    I mean, I don’t really want to go on and on about it. I don’t think I need to elaborate too much on the simultaneous desire to read more “literature” versus doomscrolling on the net. I don’t think I need to bemoan the need to get away from suckling at the teat of Amazon whose billionaire owner has leaned hard into modern corporate fascism. I don’t think I need to to explain the simple techno-joy in upgrading a beloved device to a newer, fancier version. I don’t think so.

    But I upgraded.

    I bought one of the nicer Kobo colour ereaders.

    What I wanted to write about instead of all those other things was that I’ve taken to walking while I read. You know—going for a stroll outside along the clear and obstacle free asphalt paths with my ebook in my hand and just snarfing through a half dozen chapters.

    I’ve completed three books inside of one week, and I’ve got three more on the go. Three!? Yeah. Some fiction, some light non-fiction, and then a big old economics text for when I’m freshly caffienated.

    I dunno.

    Maybe it’s a phase.

    Maybe I’ll get over it. Maybe I’ll trip and hurt myself. Maybe I’ll decide I’d rather look at nature than another screen. But for now, the spring muck is still pretty brown and the world is still pretty empty and the book reader is still pretty new, and I’m enjoying checking some books off my reading list from somewhere besides the couch.