"No," I said at length. "Nothing."
Katz considered the implications of this, looked for a moment as if he might say
something, then shook his head stoically, and returned to his dinner.
Wow here's a thought to consider. Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz
and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all
trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in
a car. On average the total walking of an American these days--that's walking of all types:
from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls--adds
up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day. That's ridiculous.
When my family and I moved to the States, one of the things we wanted was to live in
a traditional small town--the sort of place where Jimmy Stewart would be the mayor, the
Hardy Boys would deliver your groceries, and Deanna Durbin would forever be singing at
an open window. Perfect little towns are not easy to find, of course, but Hanover, where
we settled, comes close. It is a small, typical New England college town, pleasant, sedate,
and compact, full of old trees and sunny steeples. It has a broad green, an old-fashioned
Main Street, a handsome campus with a settled and venerable air, and leafy residential
streets. Nearly everyone in town is within a level, easy stroll of the post office, library, and
stores.
But here's the thing: hardly anyone, as far as I can tell, walks anywhere for anything. I
know a man who drives 600 yards to work. I know a woman who gets in her car to go a
quarter of a mile to a college gymnasium to walk on a treadmill, then complains
passionately about the difficulty of finding a parking space. When I asked her once why
she didn't walk to the gym and do five minutes less on the treadmill, she looked at me as
if I were being willfully provocative. "Because I have a program for the treadmill," she
explained. "It records my distance and speed, and I can adjust it for degree of difficulty."
It hadn't occurred to me how thoughtlessly deficient nature is in this regard.
At least in Hanover she could walk if she wanted to. In many places in America now, it
is not actually possible to be a pedestrian, even if you want to be. I had this brought
home to me the next day in Waynesboro, after we had gotten a room and treated
ourselves to an extravagant late breakfast. I left Katz at a laundromat (he loved doing
laundry, for some reason--loved to read the tattered magazines and experience the
miracle of stiff, disgusting clothes emerging from big machines fluffed and sweet smelling)
and set off to find some insect repellent for us.
Waynesboro had a traditional, vaguely pleasant central business district covering five or
six square blocks, but, as so often these days, most retail businesses had moved out to
shopping centers on the periphery, leaving little but a sprinkling of banks, insurance
offices, and dusty thrift stores or secondhand shops in what presumably was once a
thriving downtown. Lots of shops were dark and bare; nowhere could I find a store at
which to get insect repellent. A man outside the post office sugested I try Kmart.
"Where's your car?" he said, preparatory to giving directions.
"I don't have a car."
That stopped him. "Really? It's over a mile, I'm afraid."
"That's OK."