Rebecca Solnit: Wanderlut, a history of walking

One Word Summary: Space-Time
More Words: Wow! I relied heavily on my dictionary while reading this book. The reading went slow, and even slower during the chapters I didn't fancy. It took about six months to digest. Usually I'm too impatient to tackle longish projects, but this was a very good book. It's an education. Solnit is thorough, thoughtful, and witty. I'm not a poet or a philosopher or any type of mover and shaker but I am a walker. In the last six months I've felt more conscious of the space outdoors- appreciative, protective, and while I've been luxuriating in the freedom of my feet I've also been chaffing at their limitations. I wish people would park their cars. I wish it were easy to fetch groceries with two young children on foot. I wish communities were designed for pedestrians.

Viking (Penguin Group) 2000

Quotes: I've flagged so many passages. Here are three chosen at random.

They have castigated her cross-country walk across
the boundaries of decorum; she is mocking their garden propriety by suggesting
that they have become part of the garden's array of aesthetic objects, objects
that she can contemplate as impersonally as trees and water. That evening Miss
Bingley strolls about the narrower confines of the drawing wroom, where all the
Netherfields characters but Jane are gathered. "Her figure was elegant, and she
walked well," says Austen. The acuity of idle people about each other's conduct
extended to critiques of movent and posture, and a person's walk was
considered an important part of his or her appearance.

The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship - around participation in public life.

What exactly is the nature of the transformation in which machines now pump our water but we go to other machines to engage in the act of pumping, not for the sake of water but for the sake of our bodies, bodies theoretically liberated by machine technology?

Lyanda Lynn Haupt: Crow Planet essential wisdom for the urban wilderness

One Word Summary: 2030
More Words: This is an essential book. It is very good. I meant to read Rare Encounters with Ordinary Birds, but I'm glad I spent time reading this first. My copy is full of flags to mark passages or phrases I want to remember. Honestly, my first reaction when I pick up a book that uses the word 'wild' or 'wilderness' abundantly is to put it right back down again. Fast. Not because I don't care that our planet is dying... it's such a serious topic and I'm usually reading to escape responsibility. It's hard to be reminded that there is so much more I could be doing when I can barely keep my children alive. Well I read this book and in the beginning and sometimes in the middle I rolled my eyes because Haupt is such a hippie throwback, but I have to respect her because she's not afraid of me or anyone. She's smart, thoughtful, compassionate, and doing her very best. This is a good book, and it's full of references to other great books.

Quotes:

We are being called upon to act against a prevailing culture, to undermine
our own entrenched tendency to accumulate and to consume, and to refuse to
define our individuality by our presumed ability to do whatever we want.
p6

There is, then, roughly one crow per family. I like to think about this
when I set the table for dinner; I imagine a dark visitor, our allotted crow,
perching on the back of a chair with one of our best china plates in front of
it, waiting for spaghetti. p 27

There will be no embalming of hearts today, thank you very much. "I have
lost the idealism of my twenties, as I feared I would," wrote Annie Dillard.
Yes, but there is more to it than that. I realize that in giving birth, managing
a household, raising a child, and composting potato peels in a city, I have
learned some things about wilderness that even Thoreau could not have known.
p94

To think that it somehow shows greater intellectual discernment to stuff
compassion away for the sake of scientific distance is an error, one that does
not sufficiently allow the range of the human animal's complexity. We can think
and feel compassion at the same time. p135

It is difficult to say sense of wonder in this millennial moment,
when sleek, cynical, pop-nihilistic writing seems to be a sign of intellectual
rigor and rightness. p156

We practice wonder by resisting the temptation to hurry past things worth
seeing, but it can take work to transcend our preconceived standards for what
that worth might be. p157

But in the places that humans and animals intersect most frequently - urban
and suburban neighborhoods where people do lots of driving - we are afforded an
uncommonly regular view of the wild's most compulsory, most intimate moment.
p191

...crows are so entirely relevant to our place on a changing earth, to
"reimagining a different future." They bring us into direct contact with the
utterly essential, with what we prefer to avoid, with what the corporate-driven
individual consumerism that runs more rampant now than ever in history contrive
to hide, with the lesson we most dearly need to comprehend: that we are all
nearly dead. That in light of that fact, just perhaps, our relentless, frenzied,
earth-killing, over-outfitting of our temporal bodies and homes is the tiniest
tad misguided. What was this body again? Oh yes, that heap of blue flesh lying
on the soil, being picked at by the crows. p202

I see them, and think that if I were a bird, I would want to fly like a
crow - with enough of a brain to love it. p207

It was 1949 when Aldo Leopold wrote, "In our attempt to make conservation
easy, we have made it trivial." He had no idea.

Most people don't realize that a wing - in spite of the radius, ulna, and
humerus - is not like an arm. It's more like a heart.

I hadn't seen Charlotte for nearly a week and was beginning to be
concerned. Finding her again, I smile. Charlotte might be thin and slumped, but
she managed to learn to fly on one leg - no mean accomplishment. I wonder, what
does it mean to have no hope when there is a radiant, earth-loving child singing
in the bathroom and a broken-legged bird that has learned to fly in your tree?
Still, it seems that the best prospect for a flourishing, ecologically vibrant,
evolutionarily rich earth would be a massive, brutal overturning of the human
population followed by several millennia of planetary recovery. Surely this
doesn't count as hope. But here we are, intricate human animals capable of
feeling despair over the state of the earth and, simultaneously, joy in its
unfolding wildness, no matter how hampered. what are we to do with such a
confounding vision? The choices appear to be few. We can deny it, ignore it, go
insane with its weight, structure it into a stony ethos with which we beat our
friends and ourselves to death - or we can live well in its light. p215

In the monastery library, I find this definition: hope is "that virtue by
which we take responsibility for the future."

Action List:
Install a bat box beneath the eaves of my home, when I own a sfr
Learn about my neighbourhood trees
Invest in a field guide for the trees (first)
Begin drawing again
Spend more time outside doing nothing
Write a thank you letter to Adam Lindsay

Wilderness Bibles and Other Books Gleaned from the Bibliography:
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Living with Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest by Russell Link
Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
The Sense of Wonder by Rachel Carson
The Essays of Henry David Thoreau
Origins: A short etymological dictionary of Modern English
Finding Order in Nature: The Naturalist Tradition from Linnaeus to E.O. Wilson by Paul Farber
Benedict's Rule: A Translation and Commentary by Terrance Kardong

Geoff Nicholson: The Lost Art of Walking

I really ment to read Wanderlust: A history of walking by Rebecca Solnit. Near the end of Lost Art I started to wonder why my copy of 60 Hikes within 60 miles, would quote this book. I came up with one good idea. Urban Hiking, particularly hiking through parking lots. I bet it's all the rage in major metropolitan areas. Anyhow, I'm glad I made a mistake and got to read this book too.

First, I should say Geoff Nicholson is irreverently funny. The back jacket reads "Nicholson's Books aren't for the faint of heart". It's practically a challenge to all lily livered people out there, including me. Of course the back jacket is all about praise for Bleeding London, but still the quote says 'books'. So don't read this book if you're easily offended, or if you don't know how to laugh.

Ultimately Lost Art is a great reference book. It's full of trivia about walking, historically and culturally. Nicholson wrote a lot about people who walk or walked, which I thought was great. My favorite chapter was THE WALKING PHOTOGRAPH. And Nicholson's opinion of the psychogeographers and the walkers-in-nature made me laugh. It also made walking more accessible to me, since it is possible to walk anywhere and I always sort of thought you had to drive to the mountains first. The chapter about ECCENTRICS, OBSESSIVES, ARTISTS reminded me of my brother. He's probably a compulsive walker, and I'm sure his walks are chemically enhanced. He's also a littel perverse (Nicholson favourite word, I'm tired of it). Walking with him is always an adventure. What I like best is the bibliography, there are two. There's the traditional one at the back, and then there are all the books named through the text. It's a gold mine of great reading.

Quotes:

Speaking of the birth of the antichrist on June 6, 2006: "Even the Antichrist surely wouldn't hit his stride on the very day he was born." p107

"I'm a big fan of walking in parking lots, partly because it's simply a perverse thing to do, but also because it's a small act of reclamation and defiance. Taking a walk, even just a shortcut, through a parking lot is a way of saying that this open space, and sometimes it can be the only open space for miles around, isn't the sole province of cars and drivers. And if there's a chance of being run down by cars maneuvering into or out of parking bays, then so be it." p156

"It's strange what you find yourself seeing when you're ninety years old and have been walking in the desert for nine consecutive days." p173

"In the course of writing this book I've spent time watching children walk, and they're all over the place, no rhythym, no balance, no sense of purpose. Maybe it's because they don't have anywhere to go." p222

Rick Van Noy: A Natural Sense of Wonder [Connecting Kids with Nature through the Seasons]

At first I thought this book was a series of selfcongratulatory essays written by the worlds greatest tree hugging dad. I'm ashamed to own such meaness of spirit, but I am please to admit I was wrong. Anyhow I am now motivated to read Thoreau, to invest in maps and field guides, to find a place to swim outdoors, to learn to ski, to buy rubber boots, to hike the east coast. Really though I just want to be outdoors with my kids more. Van Noy shares some of his triumphs, and some of his mistakes. He tells about all the cool adventures his famly has had, and reveals that his kids still have mundane toys and watch too much TV. He admits to mistakes, and swearing, and yelling. He offers practical advice and he subtly hints that raising kids outdoors takes work. Plus the Notes at the end of the book is great place to look for more reading ideas.

While Van Noy wants parents to turn off the TV and even park the car more often so that children can connect with nature, he's also concerned about the health of our planet. He believes that if our children learn from nature and love the natural world they'll take better care of it. I agree with him.