Imagine the pleasure a hiking columnist feels when coming across a well-written, succinct, short book titled “In Praise of Paths.” In this 2020 translation from the Norwegian of a 2018 book, hiker and editor Torbjorn Ekelund celebrates the many joys and advantages of simple walks in and near “nature areas.” Since he’s confined to lovely Oslo, the natural areas where Ekelund finds “paths” and trails generally remain close to town, and he discusses a dimension I’ve termed adjacentcy.
In this threatened Anthropocene Age with a planet overcrowded with humans and their vast animal herds, an intrepid hiker can head out on trails that begin very close to the city and quickly find solace in wild solitude. Locally, we can think of Rattlesnake Canyon, of course, but also Nira Camp and Reyes Peak, both of which lay within a two-hour drive from Santa Barbara.
Ekelund, a healthy man, collapsed and after time in the hospital learned he has epilepsy — and in Norway, this means loss of your driving license. Since he enjoyed hiking, suddenly he either biked or walked everywhere and began to appreciate the elimination of automobile locomotion for meandering around on foot. He likes to quote Werner Herzog in the book: “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.”
I completely agree. When I stopped driving for some months after suffering a stroke, and hiked and walked even more than ever, it’s completely true that we apprehend the cosmos, society and nature differently when on foot rather than in a car (or bus or train, or even on a bike).
The author reminds us of the obvious but often overlooked basic fact that we still have Stone Age emotions and brains but dwell in a dazzling tech reality stressing nonfoot transportation. As we’ve become a terribly sedentary population, there have been attendant health issues involved with the end of walking (for most western humans), yet Ekelund is less interested in these than in the new thinking that arises when we walk a lot more frequently.
He points out that the idea of “a journey on foot” has lost its original purpose — all the Stone Age nomads walked and ran everywhere. Today, if we make a long walk, we immediately call it an immense journey, or brag about doing part of the John Muir Trail or the epic Canadian Great Divide Trail, or even locally our magnificent local Condor Trail of 400 miles. Ekelund emphasizes regular daily walks and hikes, and he eventually got to a place where he moved 12 to 18 miles daily (it’s unclear how he managed his workload).
Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Peace Pilgrim, Friedrich Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard were all great walkers who deeply valued the time they gave to moving around and the thoughts that arose during these ambulatory periods. Ekelund even creates a classification of types of walking, including practical walking, sauntering, strolling and true hiking. At times, he isn’t very politically correct, since he states, “Older people tend to saunter,” and strolling “is a distinctly bourgeois form of walking” (!).
He equates “hiking” with “wandering,” and connects it to the German term Wanderung. There is a hierarchy then in types of walking for this author. He states that hiking “implies thinking important thoughts and taking in the landscape’s aesthetic qualities.” We have to ponder what the Norwegian means, but he adds that hiking occurs exclusively on “paths,” and we think of the English Romantic era’s wandering poets of the 1880s and Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”
The ecosystems and arid landscapes here in Southern California don’t quite fit some of Ekelund’s points, and I would add long-distance backpacking and “bushwhacking” to his classifications of walking.
Ekelund wisely skips over most of the recent medical and scientific information supporting the enormous health benefits of consistent walking and hiking. If readers want hard medical support for the incredible benefits of constant hiking, see the Shane O’Mara book in the 4.1.1. However, a reviewer pointed out how O’Mara’s main new information supports the idea that consistent walking/hiking provides small but cumulative and significant positive changes for brain health. As a stroke survivor, as a septuagenarian, but especially as a fellow who likes engaging with humans in spirited dialogue, brain health becomes an extremely high priority.
The world’s largest religions all make heavy use of the path metaphor, too. I have made literal “pilgrimages” to Jerusalem, to sacred temple sites in Malaysia, south India and elsewhere, and of course observant Muslims must undertake the holy Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. In the old days, before planes and trains, sincere Muslims might walk for months to reach Mecca and then, again, walk, around the sacred Ka’aba stone the requisite seven circles. While I can’t really prove this, I believe the Stone Age Chumash made their own kind of pilgrimages (on foot, naturally!) from coastal village sites like Syuxtun to pictographic and sacred sites over on the Sierra Madre Ridge near Sapaksi.
Yet this is, then, the essential point about walking and hiking: When hiking, I have to pay extremely close attention to the literal path right in front of me. In 49 years of hiking this backcountry, I’ve tumbled and hurt myself a few times when my concentration flagged and I missed a hole or small boulder. I’ve also gotten really lost a couple of times, and you never forget that (or the SBCSAR helicopter thundering overhead in 2012!).
“Staying on the path” teaches the avid hiker instantly and indelibly, even with pain or embarrassment or, yes, significant injuries. Yet, it is exciting and enormous fun and certainly is “natural” to our Stone Age bodies and minds.
The great travel writer Bruce Chatwin once wrote that his god “is the God of Walkers. If you walk hard enough, you probably don’t need any other god.” Without hyperbole, I can assert that I’ve been walking and hiking hard for many decades — one finally finds an existential joy just moving along. It might be around in Alice Keck Park in town or forging along fiercely on the Condor Trail near the remote Sisquoc River.
Ekelund has noticed how when hiking hard and longer, his concentration and focus improve mightily: “The farther I walked, the freer my brain became. It entered into the flow zone, just as my body did. It was no longer controlled … .”
Rush to the “flow zone,” and haul your children along with you to explain the joys of hiking and walking in California!
4-1-1
» Torbjorn Ekelund, “In Praise of Paths — Walking Through Time and Nature” (Greystone Books, 2020); Shane O’Mara, “In Praise of Walking” (Norton, 2020); Bruce Chatwin, “In Patagonia” (1977).
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in the Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read additional columns. The opinions expressed are his own.
