I have been off my beloved streets, more homebound than not for three days now, hobbled by what I fear is a broken little toe and amused hardly at all by the irony of every physical step being a pain while immersed deeply, from my reclining position, in the literature of walking. While reading about walking is never as good as an actual walk, at least it does not require 10—or any—functioning toes to go about its business.
These are the consolations a devout walker clings to when denied his daily wanderings.
Such a simple thing, a walk is, yet with such overwhelming evolutionary force behind it. In her Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit traces the invisible evolutionary string pulling us aright from our four-legged ambulation to our eventual “bipedalism.”
After this life- and consciousness-shattering development, nothing was the same for homo sapiens and the earth we came to rule with...
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