In general I like to have a destination when I walk, even if it’s only the local book store or supermarket. But since I lead a sedentary life, working at home, once in a while I step outside my front door and simply walk around the neighborhood for half an hour or forty five minutes, for the sake of a break, and in the belief that walking is in itself an inherently good thing.
As I was growing up, whenever my dad or granddad or one of my uncles went out for no apparent reason, my mother or one of the other female relatives would always ask where they were going and why. More often than not, the reply was, “There and back to see how far it is.” This meant, essentially, “Mind your own business.” But it’s a phrase I often find myself using, and in my own case it means that I’m going out walking for the sake of walking.To some limited extent this is what the psychogeographers mean when they speak of “locomotion without a goal.” I don’t have a route planned, and I don’t have a destination in mind, beyond the fact that sooner rather than later I want to end up back where I started.
I like to say I live on the “lower slopes” of the Hollywood Hills, hilly for sure but not those vertiginous crests and canyons you get up in the heights, and it’s undeniably pleasant, but I’m sure some of my higher altitude neighbors would think I lived in a slum. The houses tend to be quirky because they’ve been shoe-horned into quirky bits of land, and there are all the usual Hollywood Hills features, palm trees, banks of bougainvillea, the occasional and always empty swimming pool, the not quite convincing security signs that say “armed response,” though you wouldn’t want to put them to the test.
Having lived in the same house for seven years or so now, I’ve walked and continue to walk all the streets in the immediate vicinity, but I don’t walk them all “equally.” There are certain streets I walk all the time, certain streets I go along only once in a while. And there are certain streets I walk hardly at all, for perfectly good reasons, because they’re so steep, or because there’s a blind corner and no sidewalk and I don’t want to get run down by some twerp in a Range Rover who’s on his cell phone, wheeling and dealing while he drives. Or because the houses have vicious dogs in their yrads, and OK, the dogs are behind fences or railings but some of these beasts look like they could chew through chain mail. Who needs it? On the other hand, I don’t want to feel I have to avoid certain places in my own neighborhood, so I walk along these dodgy streets once in a while, climbing one in three gradients, risking vehicular death, with Hound of Baskerville-style howls echoing after me.
One of the pleasures of walking the same route regularly is that you observe how things change. You see trees and plants growing, coming into flower, fading, maybe dying. You notice that somebody’s got a new car, a new fence, a new spouse, a new baby. You see that a house is being refurbished, and then you see it go up for sale. And then somebody moves in, then a year later it all happens again.
Of course there are some spots that I always hit, view points, scenic overlooks. One of them looks west over the Hollywood Freeway, toward the ocean, though from that particular place there are mountains blocking the sightline. And sometimes the air itself is a blockage.
Another one looks east, through somebody’s euphorbia and cactus garden to give a hazy view of downtown. From there you also see Western Avenue, running due south, dead straight, as far as the eye can see, further than you’d ever want to walk.
And when I walk with other people, I always take them past the Samuels-Navarro house, designed by Lloyd Wright in 1928, and later owned by Diane Keaton and Christina Ricci, among others. I regard people’s reaction to the house as a kind of a Rorschach test. If they say, “What a great house,” I know they’re part of my tribe. If they say, “What’s that weird ugly monstrosity?” then I know they’re not.
This being the Hollywood Hills I only see a very few fellow, solitary walkers. It’s rare enough that we always nod a kind of greeting but I’ve never had a conversation with any of these people, whereas I chat all the time with people who are out walking their dogs. I learn the names, the ages, the personalities, the frailties, of the dogs, but never anything at all about the owners.
I don’t usually carry my camera with me, because it seems to get in the way, both of walking and observing, but as you see, once in a while I do take it, and sometimes I’m very glad of it, when I see that impossible to repeat moment: a blimp, a deer, an inflatable dinosaur, the smoke from a fire in Griffith Park.
Heraclitus says, and I believe him, that you can’t jump in the same river twice. By that token, I suppose you can’t walk in the same street twice. So I also wonder if you can ever go home twice. Or once. By the time you get home from a walk, home is no longer precisely what it was when you left. While you were out walking, the butterfly of chaos theory flapped its wings; the universe, and your home, will have changed forever. Of course this is no reason not to go walking: since all is flux, the butterfly would have flapped its wings in any case. And for that matter, the very act of going for a walk will (in however slight a way) have changed you too. That’s a very good reason to go walking.
