Seattle is almost always listed as one of the best walking cities in the US. In fact it is one of the things I find most appealing about living in downtown Seattle. Within minutes we can get to the new Olympic Sculpture Park, the Myrtle Edwards Park that edges Elliott Bay, and Seattle Center – home of every festival ever invented.
But walking in a city has more to recommend it than parks and gardens. It is, in fact, the city itself with its tall buildings and rushes of people that I find most seductive. I love the practical benefit of walking to baseball, football, ballet, symphony, rock concerts, grocery stores, shopping, great restaurants, and more coffee shops than most of us really need without firing up the car and searching for a parking place. I love the community and connectedness of seeing familiar faces and discovering new ones, of waving to the shop keeper down the block, picking up bread at Macrina’s, and stopping in for a few words with my favorite barista. Instead of moving anonymously from one point to another as you do in a car, I love connecting the dots to make a coherent whole of the landscape.
Books have been written on what makes for a good walk and a good walking city. One of my favorites is Wanderlust, A History of Walking by Rebecca Solnit. Among many other things, she says: “I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought, or thoughtfulness.”
There is much more in the book. She describes city walking and walking in the wilderness, the history of walking as a pastime, and the place that walking has held in literature. She writes about pilgrims, women of the night, and those of us who just like to wander through cities. She even wonders, as I often have, why so many people will climb on a treadmill (essentially a mind numbing activity) while avoiding a walk around the block.
Image: Walking lets you go your own way, April, 2007.
