WALKING LIKE AN ARROW

(Photo of and by Colin Fletcher. Courtesy of UCSC Colin Fletcher Archive, MDHCA, Colita Publ.)

I’m a great fan of the late Colin Fletcher, another Brit who, like me, went native in California.  Fletcher is the author of The Complete Walker, a book I initially resisted.  Who needs a handbook to be told how to walk? But Fletcher delivers his information with wit, commonsense and good humor, and completely won me over.  If some of it seems a bit obvious – pack lightly – there are some unexpected delights in there too, including his Second Law of Thermodynamic Walking – “Give your balls some air.”  Fletcher also wrote The Man Who Walked Through Time about hiking the Grand Canyon, and The Thousand Mile Summer  about hiking along the entire eastern edge of California.

Fletcher is pretty much the opposite kind of walker from me.  He’s a fan of the solitary three day hike through the untamed wilderness, whereas I’m more in favor of an eight hour walk through the mean streets of a city, with a dive bar the end.  

Nevertheless, I just found this wonderful passage in one Fletcher’s less well known books (less well known to me, anyway), The Secret Worlds of Colin Fletcher.  It runs:

“Yes, looking back on my life – on the part of it that was over – there could be no doubt: walking had somehow become one of its underpinnings, shorings, props, whatever you wanted to call it.  In mock-macho mood I’d even said that maybe life was all “wine, women and walking.”  From time to time I had wondered just what I would have done without the walking.  That question was stupid though.  Invalid.  Without the walking, ‘I’ would have been somebody else – would not have evolved into what was currently ‘me.’”

I agree absolutely with every word of that.  I wish I’d said it.  I’m sure I will.

The Colin Fletcher website is right here.  http://www.colinfletcher.com