Morning Walk
It is a gray morning after heavy rain last night, our neighborhood closed in by heavy mist. It is the sort of mist beloved of computer game programers because it reduces the need to draw detailed backgrounds. The world shrinks to a 50-yard circle.
Deprived of vision, I concentrate mostly on sounds: my own feet scuffing along the dirt and gravel road, the dripping of drizzle through the leaves of the alders, a dog's persistent barking several blocks away (makes me glad I have cats), the overhead drone of a single aircraft and--once--the haunting cry of a loon.
Walking feels good. On this, my third morning of walking, I feel only a bit of stiffness in my tendons. My troublesome feet--to my surprise--grow less painful as I walk. I recall as I trudge along that Mom walks almost daily in Fairbanks, up and down Badger Road. Grandma used to walk, too, after she moved to the senior citizens' housing. So I guess I come from a lineage of walkers.
Of course, human beings are walking animals. That is our signature stance. Millions of years of evolution have shaped our joints and bones. I feel the fluidity of motion, the thoughtless ease of it, putting one foot in front of the other, striding down a foggy country road in Alaska. My mother walks in Fairbanks, my grandmother walked in Washington State. Going further back, my ancestors walked the prairies of the midwest and the forests and towns of New England. Before that, over many countries, the DNA I carry in my cells walked many far and foreign roads, a long line going back to that distant mother in Africa some 150,000 years ago.
Deprived of vision, I concentrate mostly on sounds: my own feet scuffing along the dirt and gravel road, the dripping of drizzle through the leaves of the alders, a dog's persistent barking several blocks away (makes me glad I have cats), the overhead drone of a single aircraft and--once--the haunting cry of a loon.
Walking feels good. On this, my third morning of walking, I feel only a bit of stiffness in my tendons. My troublesome feet--to my surprise--grow less painful as I walk. I recall as I trudge along that Mom walks almost daily in Fairbanks, up and down Badger Road. Grandma used to walk, too, after she moved to the senior citizens' housing. So I guess I come from a lineage of walkers.
Of course, human beings are walking animals. That is our signature stance. Millions of years of evolution have shaped our joints and bones. I feel the fluidity of motion, the thoughtless ease of it, putting one foot in front of the other, striding down a foggy country road in Alaska. My mother walks in Fairbanks, my grandmother walked in Washington State. Going further back, my ancestors walked the prairies of the midwest and the forests and towns of New England. Before that, over many countries, the DNA I carry in my cells walked many far and foreign roads, a long line going back to that distant mother in Africa some 150,000 years ago.
