OF WALKING AND SCALDING

We’re inclined to think that walking is a pretty simple and straightforward business, and yet as I wander through the world I find a staggering number of signs telling me how to walk, where to walk, and far more often, where not to walk.

Some of these signs are obviously intended to be useful, and actually are.  Most of us are grateful to know that there may be rattlesnakes in the area or that we’re in danger from other pedestrians and forklift trucks (a double threat if ever I heard of one).

But some seem a little superfluous, such as this one at edge of the Ubehebe

Crater in Death Valley. 

I mean, if you’re too dumb to realize that walking around the edge of a 600 foot deep volcanic crater might be a little risky, you’re probably too dumb to take any notice of the sign.

Some seem more general and philosophical – such as this one:

although if you ask me pedestrianism, and indeed life, is always about crossing the line, one way or another.

Some are more simply inscrutable.  Like this one:

 OK, so climbing on groynes may be forbidden, but the guy on the sign isn’t climbing, he’s just walking.  So does that mean that walking on groynes is OK, but climbing isn’t?  We may never know.

Some seem to contain simple philosophical truths, this one for instance, telling us that a parking lot is not a pedestrian walkway, which I’m happy to accept and agree with, but I think what they’re really saying is “keep out.”

One of my favourite, though ultimately very melancholy, signs comes from the Desert Tortoise Preserve outside of California City, a sign that is genuinely surprising and informative: 

Who knew that desert tortoises urinated if you get too close?  Who knew that urination could lead to death? That’s quite an evolutionary disadvantage I’d think, but I do like the bold use of italics and exclamation mark on DIE!

But now, just last week, I found a new favourite at the Hot Creek geothermal area up by Mammoth Lakes. 

Scalding water, unstable ground: has walking ever seemed more exciting?

WALKING WITH MITTENS AND HITCH

This may surprise you.  It certainly surprised me.  Last night I dreamt that I was walking in a strange city with Mitt Romney.  He was on some kind of political walkabout, meet and greet, but it was just me and him.  We walked together down a long narrow alley, and at the end it opened into a vast cube-shaped courtyard, with four high, windowless walls and one of them had a sign for a “Chapel of Rest.”  There was one old woman sitting on the ground with her back to us.  The walls were made of some kind of curious brickwork, very thin brittle, bricks, in many different shades of red and brown, and Romney talked about this, showing himself to be very knowledgeable about the history of bricks.  And in the dream I thought to myself well you know, a man who explores a strange city like this and knows about the history of bricks can’t be all bad.

In some oblique way I think this was related to the Kelvedon Hatch Secret Nuclear Bunker (above), in Essex, which I visited when I was England last month.  The whole place is a temple of cold war gloom and obsolete office equipment, and it has a long narrow entrance corridor, which could well have been a precursor of the long narrow alley I walked down in the dream with Mitt.

The late Christopher Hitchens was somewhere in the dream too.  He was alive, but already terminally ill, and I argued with some heckler on Hitchens’ behalf: a thing he would surely never have required in life.  I think he was there in the dream because of the time he was walking down a street in Beirut, strolling “in company … on a sunny Valentine's Day  … in search of a trinket for the beloved and perhaps some stout shoes for myself” and defaced a poster from the Syrian Social Nationalist Party because it bore what he described as a "spinning swastika," and was duly beaten by SSNP heavies.  A bit of political graffiti that actually meant something.

BACK IN THE LOW LIFE AGAIN

I realize that despite the title of this blog, I’ve not been doing very much walking in Hollywood lately.  The reasons are explicable enough.  I’ve been finishing a novel, I’ve been away, and the weather has been punishingly hot.  On the first day of October the temperature around these parts hit the high nineties.  Come on.  That’s not right.

So it was good to get out last week, walk from the lower slopes of the Hollywood Hills and head down for lunch at a little place on Melrose Boulevard - Melrose being the southern boundary of Hollywood in most people’s estimation – and then I walked back again.  It was about a 3 and a half mile walk in each direction, and it did punch a bit of a hole in the day, but that was the idea. Of course I saw the “typical” Hollywood stuff, which in some ways was a bit predictable: the big cacti, the stylish architecture, the cool old cars, the interesting people.  But a walk in Hollywood is never wholly predictable.

As I walked along Hollywood Boulevard, for instance, there was a parade, or I suppose motorcade, of vintage police cars.  My first thought was OK, well maybe this is just the kind of thing that happens in Hollywood on a weekday afternoon, but I discovered later that it was an event “to increase awareness of public safety officers,” and the cars were driving from the Los Angeles Fire Museum to Broderick Crawford’s Walk of Fame star – not a huge distance.  And it’s true - nothing heightens your awareness of cops like hearing sirens, seeing a bunch them packed into old cars and glaring out the windows at pedestrians.

Broderick Crawford - good looking cop.

Of course there was feral furniture: mattresses, couches, a gigantic mirror  There even seemed to be some feral art – though it could just have been a piece of old board with paint on it, but who am I to judge?

Everyone says that LA is the most suburban major city in the world and that’s probably true – but it did strike me on my walk just how industrial parts of Hollywood are.  The industry in question happens to be the movies, but a warehouse or storage facility for movie equipment or props looks much like a warehouse or storage facility for anything else. 

And then right there on La Brea Avenue there’s the Cemex cement works, churning out lord knows how many tons of ready mix, right across the street from the Target and the Best Buy.  How many major western cities have one of those in the middle of a shopping area?

And of course I saw some fellow walkers – not so very many but enough, a combination of the cool and quirky, those who were working too hard at being cool and quirky, and those who were just downright quirky.

There were graffiti-slash-street art, naturally – some Bansky-esque stenciling – which is getting a bit old, surely, although it hasn’t got to look actually retro just yet.  And I saw this extraordinary graffito on Melrose itself:

When did anyone last feel the need to write Bill Cosby’s name large on the side of anything?  And did it have some connection with the vaguely lewd ad for pants on the bench next to it? Or with the pita store behind it?  I don’t know. Every city has its mysteries, and some just have to remain that way.

NAKED RAMBLING

Spare a thought today for Stephen Gough, also known as the Naked Hiker or the Naked Rambler.  He’s the English ex-marine who has turned his whole life into a legal campaign about being allowed to walk naked in public.  I’m sure there are places where this wouldn’t create much of a stir but for one reason or another quite a bit of Gough’s naked walking, and far more of his legal troubles, have occurred in Scotland where the old Puritan tradition remains strong.

And there’s no denying that things have got a little out of hand.  In the last few years Gough has spent more time in prison than he has walking.  He now refuses to wear clothes at any time, so he’s been naked in court – leading to contempt charges, and has refused to wear clothes in prison, leading to him being kept separate from other prisoners (which is certainly the way I’d want to do my time in prison), but the objection is that he’s cost the tax payer an arm and a leg.  Also, in the past he’s started walking naked the moment he leaves jail, leading to his re-arrest and a further waltz round the legal ballroom.

Anyway, if the BBC is to be believed, he was today allowed to walk naked out of Perth jail and wasn’t immediately rearrested, which sounds like a step in the right direction, though I assume it’s only a matter of time.  Gough also used to have a rather winsome girlfriend who walked naked with him, at which time he got a good deal more sympathetic press coverage.  No mention of her in the recent reports.  Now, it seems, Stephen Gough walks alone, and it seems that he smiles rather less than he used to.

LOST IN SPACES

While I was in England I read Simon Armitage’s book Walking Home subtitled “Travels with A Troubadour on the Pennine Way.”  It’s a terrific account of walking the 250 plus miles of the Pennine Way in the “wrong” direction, north to south, the trip made a good deal more arduous (in my estimation) because each night our author gives a poetry reading.  Blimey. I’d have been on my hands and knees by the end of that.

(Photo: Jonty Wilde)

I do maybe half a dozen readings a year (not poetry admittedly), and although I enjoy them well enough, I do find them surprisingly knackering.  The idea of doing one more or less every night for three weeks after a hard day’s walk, sounds like it would become absolute torture.  Or maybe it works another way.  Maybe you’d just go into a fugue state: walking, reading, sleeping; walking reading, sleeping, for as long as it takes.  Although to be fair, Armitage keeps his wits about him throughout the book. Not so much in this picture, perhaps:

There were two things that really surprised me (in a good way) in Walking Home.  One, that Simon Armitage used to have ambitions to be a cartographer.  How often do you hear somebody say that?  Although in his case he did have the benefit of a geography degree.  I too, in idle moments, have thought it might be very cool to be cartographer, although without ever really knowing what that entails, and certainly without having a geography degree.

The second surprising thing is his description of getting lost while walking.  He writes, “I have noticed a very alarming and rapid change in my psychology, as if the claustrophobia and disorientation brings about a particular condition, the symptoms of which include fear, panic, and loss of logical thought, but also less expected and harder-to-define sensations akin to melancholy, including something like hopelessness but also close to grief.”

What interests me about this description is the extent to which I recognize all these symptoms except the very last one. The fear, panic, and loss of logical thought are, I assume, what everybody feels when they’re lost, and that naturally enough leads to hopelessness.  But I pretty much thought I was the only one who experienced melancholy, that sense of “I’m lost and alone in the world, and what else could you expect, and why does it even matter?”  But I’ve never made that final leap to grief.  Perhaps I haven’t been sufficiently lost.

I did, however, get thoroughly lost last month while I was in London, not in any life-threatening way, but because London is a place that I flatter myself I know pretty well, and because I even had a map, it was unusually humiliating. I’ve written elsewhere about being lost (mercifully, briefly) in the Australian desert, and that was certainly scary, but being lost in a place you think you know is actually even more disorienting. 

My plan in London was to do a short walk to see two ruined city churches, St. Dunstan-in-the-East (above) and Christ Church Greyfriars (below) – both more or less destroyed by German bombs in the Blitz, but the ruins preserved as deconsecrated war memorials. The route from one to the other inevitably takes you past St Paul’s Cathedral which miraculously survived the Blitz, though it does have shrapnel scars.

I decided to start at St Dunstan’s, and Monument looked like the nearest tube, so off and I went, came up out of the station – which had the exits marked with street names - and I stepped into the city and I had absolutely no idea where I was.  I couldn’t tell which street was which, which was north or south, east or west, and I set off along Gracechurch Street, and found myself approaching London Bridge which I knew was wrong.  I stopped, turned back, walked for a bit, and felt more lost than ever.

I decided there’d be no shame in consulting the map, which I thought I’d have no need of, but I got it out, and you know as a sometime wannabe cartographer, I reckon I’m pretty good with a map, but this time I couldn’t make any sense of it whatsoever.  I’d look at, think I’d worked it out, start walking in one direction, and a couple of minutes later realize I was obviously heading in the wrong direction again.  This happened time after time.  It became frustrating; it became absurd, though it never quite became comical.

It was infuriating but also, per Armitage, a deeply melancholy experience.  I was lost in some deeper, non-geographical sense. It wasn’t simply that I didn’t know where I was, where I was going, or how I was going to get there to get, but rather that, after a while, I no longer understood why I wanted to go there at all, and in some odd way I felt like I didn’t even know exactly who I was.  Was I losing my mind?  Was the Alzheimer’s kicking in?  It really didn’t seem to matter.

Well inevitably I got over it before very long, found my way, found the churches, had a good (modest) walk.  And I know you could make too much of this, but there was something salutary in the experience of being lost.  As a psychological, existential, maybe even cosmic dilemma, it's actually far more interesting than knowing exactly where you are all the time.  But to appreciate it, it does have to come to an end.  Being lost only makes sense if, in the end, you find yourself again.