Despite its (fairly frequent) snarkiness, and despite the fact that several sections read like strings of facts or anecdotes connected only loosely, I did enjoy this book, which is as much about Nicholson’s own walking experiences and philosophy as it is about, as the subtitle puts it, “The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism.” It’s not my favorite book about walking—that’s still Wanderlust by Rebecca Solnit, which I wrote about here—but it was often interesting and full of things I didn’t know. Sometimes this was less than ideal—a section on words/expressions for walking in different languages was full of information but it felt mostly like surface tidbits that I was never going to remember, though it was fun to learn that the Dutch have a verb, “ijsberen, which means pacing to and fro (ijsbeer being the Dutch word for polar bear)” (24). The whole chapter on walking in movies and music felt mostly like a recitation of song titles and song lyrics and movie moments, and I felt like Nicholson didn’t have that much to actually say about his subject matter here. And once in a while, Nicholson’s comments on other people’s approaches to walking felt like they passed from snark to meanness. For example: I agree with Nicholson’s point that many people who say they love “walking in nature” really mean they love “to walk in managed nature” (177), but he’s pretty snippy about the folks he calls New Agers. Like when he writes this: “Here’s a blog entry from Stephen Altschuler, who calls himself The Mindful Hiker, which is also the title of a book he wrote: “Walking is not anything separate from life,” he bleats.” (175). Ouch.
But other chapters were more interesting: I liked the chapter about walking in LA: the personal experience of the city combined with the historical facts of the city; walking as remedy for melancholy for Nicholson and then Nicholson’s walks down LA streets I’ve never seen, through a whole city I’ve only ever seen on TV and in the movies, to places where Raymond Chandler lived, or to places that feature in his Philip Marlowe novels. I liked reading about walking artists and eccentrics, like Mudman (the artist Kim Jones, coated in mud and wearing a sculpture of wood), Steve Gough (who twice walked from Land’s End to John o’ Groats—naked), the Old Leatherman (who walked a 300-mile circuit in CT and NY for 30 years in the mid/late 1800s), Peace Pilgrim, and of course, Richard Long, whose work I’m always happy to read about. And Captain Barclay, whom I’d never heard of, who did a “thousand-hour” walk, in which he walked a mile in each of one thousand successive hours in June-July 1809. (Nicholson decided to do his own small imitation of Barclay, walking fifteen miles in fifteen hours, one mile in each hour. Walking fifteen miles is easy enough, Nicholson notes: it’s the planning and resting of this particular kind of walk that’s the challenge of it.)
I liked, too, the chapters on London and New York, excellent walking cities where I have my own favorite routes and walking-places. The London chapter has bits of Thomas De Quincey, a Blitz-centered walking tour near St. Paul’s, and a visit with Iain Sinclair, plus Nicholson’s own London walking, including a day in 2006 when he decided to make six round trips along Oxford Street. The New York chapter has a lot in it about psychogeography—a fair bit of the chapter is devoted to the Conflux festival, though Nicholson was less satisfied by his Conflux experiences than I’ve been by mine.
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