longer walks in an arboretum near his place or along the canal near
mine. He was happier and mellower after his accident, and, walking,
he often brought up pleasant reminiscences (as opposed to
ruminescences) and some pretty sappy sentiments. I haven’t seen any
studies on nature and sentimentality (hear that, Bratman?), but the
connection wouldn’t surprise me. One day, as we returned to my front
steps, Dad thanked me. “You are the light of my life,” he said.
“Wait a minute!” protested his wife, Galina. He laughed.
“You both are.” We had a group hug, reminding me that nature is,
truly, best shared.
To motivate myself to get out walking more, I found a study I
could join, a big, old-fashioned study with questionnaires.
I learned that Lisa Nisbet at Trent University was sending over
9,000 people out into the verdure for the May-long “30 x 30 nature
challenge”—30 minutes a day of walking, for 30 days in a row). I
signed on. My first task was to answer a fairly long questionnaire
designed to ascertain our general mood state, vitality, activities and
“subjective connection with nature.” That done, I set out for my
walks, generally down to my usual path along the C & O Canal, but in
one case along a park in the late evening in downtown Helsinki, where
a man stood in a clearing and waved his penis around.
When we are determined to hobnob with greenery every day, most
of us will, inevitably, encounter setbacks. Over the course of writing
this book, I was jumped by numerous rogue and grimy dogs and
splattered with mud by bicyclists. I broke a finger when my own dog
lunged for another dog on a crowded park trail, wrenching her leash
around my hand. I was stung by four bees, three in D.C. One morning
I was seized by an unstoppable urge to go to the bathroom and
hurriedly plunged into the dark creekside thickets of my
neighborhood park (please don’t tell the listserve). I consequently
contracted poison ivy. The Lyme disease came later, from Maine.
It’s not easy being outside everyday. Either a lot of people in