Walking is the obsession underneath all of it. I will cross a city on foot before I take a cab across it. A hike is never the detour. It is the plan. I walk every city I visit the same way, on foot. It is a daily practice.
I don’t plan a walk around the famous sights. I keep time unstructured, and that is how I stumble onto what the box-tickers miss, steering clear of the hype and the stereotypical bucket list for the less-traveled path. The walk is not how I get to the sights. It is the sightseeing itself, slow and unstructured, through side streets and everyday life, daily life and culture, with more time outside than in curated museums. The streets show the present culture, outside any museum framing. A place is most itself where nobody arranged it for visitors. And a route tells you where to go, while a walk tells you where you are.
On foot I meet the city at walking speed, and details have time to register. And being present on a walk means moving at the city’s speed instead of rushing past it. I am not passing through. I am in it. The walk slows me to the place, and what I notice is whatever the street offers at that speed. Walking speed is noticing speed.
Home or away, the method holds: I walk the city I live in the same way I walk a city I am visiting for the first time, on foot, without a fixed route. A cab would get me there faster. Faster is the cab’s job. The walk’s job is the ground itself, street by street, at the speed where a place stops being a destination and starts being somewhere you are.
Until recently, most of my walks were alone. Sometimes a friend would join for a stretch, short or long. Now I have found someone as crazy as me, and most of my walks are with my wife.
Crazy, here, has a specific shape. It means walking in the weather anyway, pointing at what others walk past, and listening to strangers’ conversations like they are part of the walk. She does all three, cursing included.
Our walks are a mix of talking, quiet time, and noticing time. What I have learned is that the couple who don’t find silence uncomfortable are at peace with their partners. The quiet belongs to the walk as much as the talking does.
The modes change without announcement. Talking runs out and the walk goes quiet. Quiet runs out and something catches an eye. Nobody decides the switch. The walk decides it, the way an unstructured walk decides its own route.
We point. We love overhearing people’s conversations, and sometimes we both get a good laugh or a shock from a story that was never meant for us. I have walked slow on purpose when I was interested in a story from the folks walking behind me, just to keep the story going a little longer.
When someone nearby is on their phone, that is when it gets interesting. I only hear one half, so I play the other half myself, guessing what the person on the other end might have said or thought from the answers I can hear. I tell her my version. My version is the second half of a conversation neither of us heard.
Mist and fog put a new shade on the city, colors go quieter and edges soften until the street you know looks like a street you haven’t quite seen before. And then the roads become a mirror, the asphalt mirror, where puddles randomly expand the landscape and the building and the light and the sky all come back on the ground, broken a little by the water.
There are two cities then. One above, standing in its light. One below, lying in the water, broken a little and moving when I move. I walk between them, on the ground that holds both.
Snow works on a different schedule. Whiteouts have a different beauty. It only lasts while the storm is fresh and it’s storming.
Then it rains. The street darkens. The puddles gather.
Rain saves its beauty for afterwards. And during the rain, the world seems to slow down, people and traffic and me with them, streets going moody under the clouds, with the sounds. I stop rushing with it, and the city stops rushing too.
Slowing down with the city does not feel like falling behind. The whole street is doing it, people and traffic and me with them, so there is nothing to catch up to. The walk keeps its own time.
She tries the rain and snow walks. She curses while she does them, and she swears she will never do it next time. But she does. The cursing is part of it now, and so is the coming back. The swearing never sticks. The walking does.
At night the mirror changes. In daylight, the sky and the buildings come back in it. But at night the city light comes back in it, and the puddles brighten the outside as the light falls into them and comes back up. The lights double too, stretched and broken on the water.
If I am out, I don’t need to find the mirror. But I remember how I used to look forward to nights after rain on the Jersey City waterfront, where a puddle would give a perfect reflection of the New York City skyline. Like a mirror. The whole city, standing in the water, and the puddle holding it still.
Looking forward to it was part of it. The night after rain was already good before I got there, because I knew what the puddle would do.
It works best on a street you already know. A new street in rain is still new in every way, and you cannot tell what the rain did from what you never saw. A known street in rain is the same street, changed. Same street, different weather, different city. And the change is the whole point, with the rain making it visible. So the mirror matters most on a familiar street, because there it is the rain’s work, not the street’s newness.
The same street, walked in sun, in rain, in snow, stays the same even as everything about it changes. Sun shows it as it is. Rain doubles it on the ground. Snow whites it out while the storm is fresh. And the walk carries you between three versions of one street.
Rain makes something photographed a million times by a million people look different when you walk past it. And you can bend for a different angle, with some reflection in it. No two puddles are equal. And each rain gives a different photo through its intensity, its cloud, the sky it creates.
My mood decides whether I shoot. And sometimes I only walk through it. Sometimes I shoot. Sometimes both. The walk does not need the photo. When a photo happens, it comes from the walk.
A hike is never the detour. It is the plan. That is the same rule as the walk. The long way is the thing itself. The long way through a place beats the short way past it, because the long way is where the place actually happens, and a hike is that same walk, only longer, with the city left behind.
The long way is usually the point. In rain, the long way has a mirror in it.