NOW, AND NOW AGAIN

I’ve said it before so it must be true – one of the best thing about walking is the way it sharpens up your perceptions – the more you walk the more you look the more you see.  Just basic rocket science.

And I suppose there’s an argument that if you go away from home you may in fact observe with less acuity, because you’re seeing things for the first time, and so you only notice what’s new and obvious.  Whereas if you stay in you own neighbourhood and walk variations of the same old route time after time, day after day, you end up looking at the same things with the different eyes.

And so the lockdown might be construed as some grand experiment in the nature of perception.

This being so, I’ve been walking while paying attention to three minor Nicholson obsessions: benches, arrows, and cars in gardens.  I’ve always looked at these things in various locations, and sometimes I’ve taken photographs of them, but right now I’m only looking at the ones within walking distance of home, although admittedly I’m also thinking about more distant examples I saw in the past.

This for example is a bench at a gibbon sanctuary somewhere up the Interstate 5 in California – pretty fancy:

but now I find myself looking at this one in the neighbourhood:

This is an arrow in the zoo in Tokyo:

and this is an arrow which has suddenly appeared on the road surface very close to where I live:

This is a car in a garden in Los Angeles:

and this is a car up the road by the (now open) garden centre:

And of course there is death with variations everywhere you go. These critters were shot dead in the desert somewhere near Yucca Valley:

and this is a swan on the shore of the River Stour.  I don’t know how it died, but it makes me realize that I never saw a dead swan before.

THE LONG WALK AWAY FROM HOME

As we celebrate hundred year old Captain, now Colonel, Tom Moore for his walking and charity fund raising efforts – 100 laps of his 82 foot garden, 30 million quid, do let’s, spare a thought for the heroic failure of Martin Echegaray Davies, a man who two years ago set off walking from to Patagonia to Alaska.  

         It was intended to be a walk of just under 19,000 miles, but after he’d completed 14,287 of them he arrived at the border between North Dakota and Canada, where Canadian officials, responding to Covid-19 fears, told him his travel was non-essential, and so they wouldn’t let him.

Having sat in a motel for a week, weighing his options, he decided to go back home, and managed to get on a flight organized by the Argentinian government.

There are two unusual aspects to Davies’ walk as far as I’m concerned.  First that he took a trolley with him, containing camping equipment, weighing 140 kilogrammes, and flying Welsh and Argentinian flags, and secondly, that along the way he took 1,718 selfies with people he met along the way. He has a Facebook page where these are displayed.

He said he didn’t think he was likely ever to complete the walk, which of course reminds us of the great Sebastian Snow who planned to walk a similar route (though without trolley or selfies) from Tierra Del Fuego to Alaska, but gave up when he reached Panama City.  He was sick and tired and he’d simply had enough.  That sometimes happens to walkers, you know.

THE BEARD AND I

A good few years back I interviewed Peter Beard ‘on stage’ in a bookshop in New York.  (Yes, yes, my life used to be far more glamorous than it is now). Beard was absolutely the easiest man to interview.  Any question, whether about Africa, or Andy Warhol, Karen Blixen or the elephant that gored him, produced a long, articulate and (naturally) highly opinionated answer.  I could just have held up flash cards.  I now realize I should have asked him about walking.

I didn’t walk with Beard but I often walked in SoHo and went into his gallery-cum-archive: The Time is Always Now.

But he was obviously something of a walker.  He was known to his friends as Walkabout for his tendency to wander off on adventures.

And when he wandered off from his home in Montauk a little while ago, and we know that wandering is a symptom of dementia, a number of us thought he might have decided to end it all by walking into the sea – a very brave and elegant way to go.  But in fact no, he walked into the woods, where he was found dead not so very much later, by a hunter.

But the thing I remember best about my Beard ‘conversation’ was when he said he’d been into a toy store in Manhattan, probably Toys-R-Us which was still in business at the time, and tried to find a toy animal that in any way resembled a real animal.  He had of course failed to find one because all the toy animals were cute or cuddly or anthropomorphic.  This made him very angry.  And as the years have gone by I’ve come more and more to think that his anger was absolutely justified.  And if an elephant gores well, that’s exactly the kind of occupational hazard an animal lover has to expect.

          This is him, recently gored:

WHITE SANDMAN

As we try to fill our days by tidying up our lives, I was digging through the archive and I found this old picture of me, not looking my very cutest, at White Sands National Park in New Mexico.

I was walking there, as you do, and I found the thing that I’m holding, which I think is a piece of some experimental aircraft or rocket or missile, found among the dunes, and I only picked up for the photo op, although sometimes I wish I’d put it in my back checked luggage and brought it home to England.

After I’d done my walk, I called in at the Ranger Station to look at the postcards and souvenirs, and I said, casually, to the ranger behind the desk that I’d seen bits of aereonautical debris among the dunes, and the ranger said sternly, ‘Whatever you do don’t pick them up.’  He didn’t say why, but I'm assuming it was because the debris had all kinds of weird and dangerous chemicals on it.

I said nothing but I’m still glad I got the picture.  I got this one too.  It's arty.  You can take the man out of the Volkswagen, but you can't take the Volkswagen out of the man.

DRIFTING STILL

Just so you know, I’m keeping on walking – in accordance with government guidelines, naturally.  There are lots of cats and birds just walking in the road – because there’s so little traffic.  There is also an increase in road kill – not cats, but pigeons, plus the occasional rabbit and hedgehog.

But how about this for a surprise – growing up in the road between the tarmac and the kerb – garlic!!  Or so I thought.  Greener people than me have suggested it's probably chives, and they're surely right.  But it does smell very garlicy.

So I don't know if it’s some wild variety or an escapee from somebody’s garden.  It smells great, and in general I believe in foraging but somehow gutter garlic or even gutter chives seems a bit unappealing.  Call me overdelicate.
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And I talked to my neighbor a couple of days later - she tells me they're all escapees from her front garden - and she doesn't like the taste of chives!!