The Thinking, Walking Biped, part twelve. The Perfect Exercise

Walking is, at least for people like me, the perfect exercise. Just this morning I walked 11 kilometers. Most other kinds of exercise result in strain and injury, especially to joints. Pascal Picq points out in his book (reviewed earlier) that slow, long-distance running and walking is something that humans do much better than any other species, especially the ones like cheetahs that can run much faster but only for short distances. And even older humans, who are no longer athletic in other ways, can run or walk for long distances; geriatric marathon runners are actually quite common, though often unnoticed because they finish last. But they finish.

Walking is slower than running, which means that the walker is less likely than the runner to trip over or step on things in the path or, if so, to sustain injury from them. An injury can take an old body a long time to recuperate from. I have required physical therapy for things that, as a younger man, I would hardly have noticed.

Walking is almost perfectly aerobic. That is, your muscles can keep working for long stretches of time because your circulatory system can provide them with all of the oxygen that they need (that is what aerobic means). And the body can also keep itself cool during long walks.

There are three ways that an object, such as your body, can keep cool even while generating body heat during exercise.

• The first is through what is called radiant heat transfer. Your body emits invisible light, just off the red end of the spectrum, which is why it is called infra-red. It is, in fact, a kind of energy and to lose this energy means you will cool off. How much energy you lose is not completely under your control. It depends on your environment and how hot you are. Deep space is almost at absolute zero, and when you lose infra-red light into outer space—even into a clear blue sky—it is gone forever. You cannot speed it up or slow it down. This is why you feel a chill if you sleep out in the open, but not if you sleep under a tree or a roof. The tree or roof is not at absolute zero.
• The second is sensible heat transfer—sensible as in the fact that you can feel it. Your molecules conduct some of their energy to the air, that is, if the air is colder than you are, which is usually the case. You have some control over this. You can alter the amount of surface area you expose to the air by curling into a ball (to hold in the heat) or extending your arms (to release it). There is always an unstirred boundary layer of air next to your skin, especially when that air is trapped inside of fabric. To cool off, wind is your friend.
• The third is latent heat transfer—from the evaporation of water. Water constantly evaporates from you, especially from your invisible sweat. Your sweat glands allow water to evaporate before it has a chance to become visible on your skin or clothes. People who have defective sweat glands easily overheat. Again, wind is your friend—it not only blows away sensible heat but also water vapor.

You cannot do much about radiant heat. But walking or slow running allows sensible and latent heat to keep you cool. I need the exercise for my body but also to keep my mind active. I will walk all I can for as long as I can. If someday I can only hobble, I will still be healthier for having walked (around 90 kilometers a month) as much as I do.

The Walking, Thinking Biped, part eleven. Social Nature Walking

A lot of us like to walk along in nature and have our own thoughts and insights. As soon as you get even one more person, there is the possibility of having quotidian conversation, not very different from what you would have in an automobile, drive out the appreciation of the natural world. I have frequently had this experience when leading students on hiking field trips. They can walk all day and see almost nothing they will remember.

That is, unless the hike is specifically designed to enhance observation and the ability to integrate with nature. This may be nowhere better seen than in scouting groups. I was, for several years, a Boy Scout. Though I was the one most interested in nature, the others got really good at rock climbing, tying knots, erecting tents, building camp fires, rappelling across creeks, and even the use of Morse code for long distance communication. For us, the Boy Scout Handbook and the Army Field Survival Manual were central texts (which included how to distinguish edible vs. dangerous plants). I was about the only boy who saw the spiritual dimensions of nature, which is why I was chosen to give the Sunday morning sermon at the Boy Scout Camporee in Tulare County about 1968.

There can be an even larger social context. In Europe, especially Germany, hundreds or thousands of people like to go on mass hikes together. The movement is called Volksmarch and its theme song, as far as I can tell, is The Happy Wanderer:

I love to go a-wandering along the mountain track

And as I go I love to sing, my knapsack on my back.

Sometimes sharing a trail with other hikers is not particularly pleasant. While I was hiking in the Black Hills of South Dakota, parents with two adolescent children singing, as they walked, “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, ninety-nine bottles of beer.” I’m sure you know or can guess the next ninety-eight verses. I found this incredibly annoying. But then I told myself, the parents are taxpayers just like me, their revenues sustain the National Forest Service, just like mine. Even when we are alone in a forest, we depend on the social network, which sustains the forest.

Edd's Land: A Novel of Four Cherokee Brothers in Early Oklahoma, a novel by Stan Rice, part one. Edd Making the Best of It

Author Stan Rice has just published the third of three novels (Edd's Land) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about four Cherokee brothers in early Oklahoma.

Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle:

Four mixed-blood Cherokee brothers, and the white swindler who steals their land and oil allotments, greet Oklahoma statehood in different ways. Edd Hicks loses not just his land but his fiancée to Averd Hargrove, a Claremore banker. Edd remains confident and upright, and brings order to his farmland and family. Frank Hicks learns confidence as he plots his dramatic revenge against Hargrove. Lon Hicks leaves his past behind in pursuit of a failed Hollywood career. William Hicks is ill with tuberculosis when he meets the great Oklahoma socialist crusader Kate Barnard. Frank, to the disapproval of his racist family and friends, falls in love and moves in with Bert Hicks, a black woman descended from slaves owned by Frank’s ancestors. Frank nearly gives up on his plan to scalp Hargrove until he sees Hargrove leading a lynch mob against Bert’s brother. The net effect of the vast wealth of the former Cherokee Nation is that Edd’s daughter Nina finally gets enough money back from the United States government to buy a new pair of shoes.

Edd Hicks (a real person) was one of hundreds of Cherokees who received a land allotment in northeastern Oklahoma at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was a self-educated man, he upheld and championed education wherever he lived, which was always in Oklahoma. He was fully aware of the injustices and cruelties committed by the white government of the United States against the Cherokee tribe. This included the Trail of Tears itself, but also the process by which farmland was allotted to Cherokees in Indian Territory by white overseers. Each adult Cherokee was given a certain amount of land, but when all of the allotments were added up, there was a lot of land left over, which was given to white people. In addition, the allotment commission often appointed dishonest guardians or overseers for the Cherokees (see the next essay). Edd knew all of this, but also that there was nothing he could do about it. His solution was simply to get whatever land he was given, and grow food and a family on it.

Edd was an upright man. He was very righteous, without looking down on people who were not as religious as he was, including his brothers. He even forgave the brother (Lonnie; see later essay) who stole money from the family. He was proud to raise all of his own food. On paper he was poor, but his family never went hungry.

Edd’s career did not get off to an easy start. He was looking forward to the twentieth century, in which the Cherokees could finally settle down on their own land. And he was engaged to a beautiful woman, Mary Carter. But then Mary’s disreputable brothers forced an end to this engagement. What was Edd’s response? He just went ahead with his farm, and hoped to find a woman who would be his wife. He did. He made the best of his circumstances, not looking back to the past, and he had to admit that he probably ended up better than he otherwise would have—certainly better than his brothers.

Elizabeth’s Exile, a Novel of a Cherokee Refugee, by Stan Rice, part five. What Is Faith?

 

Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

Of course Rice, a botanist and evolution author, would revere Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist who was Charles Darwin’s main defender in America. Gray promoted Darwinism even though he was a conventionally and seriously religious Christian.

And Gray promoted the protection of Black people as far as he could in Boston. While even white Northerners were prejudiced against Blacks (they thought slavery was wrong, but had no particular love for Black people), Gray taught Sunday School for Blacks.

But Rice totally made up the stuff about Asa Gray being a leader in the Underground Railroad, which escorted escaped slaves to freedom. This is perfectly credible—especially since Gray would have had the perfect excuse to be in the borderlands of the Union and the Confederacy, searching for new plants—but it just didn’t happen. This is fiction; there has to be something that is not completely historical. Rice also invented the part about Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit being an Underground Railroad leader.

But Rice gives us some insights about the Christian faith in these examples. Elizabeth had to lead some of the slaves blindly in the darkness without any assurance that their rescue would be successful. That is, her journey was based on faith, not on evidence. As the Bible says, we walk by faith, and not by sight. One of Elizabeth’s sections of the novel ends with these words: “This is faith. I walk where I cannot see, leading people I do not know, toward a salvation that may not be there.”

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part ten. Walking and Creativity

Many of the most creative minds have had their greatest inspiration by walking out in nature. There did not have to be an actual correspondence of what the mind saw and the act of creativity; it was simply the inspiration of the mind prompted by the overall beauty of nature. There have probably been more poets who have done this than who have not. It was also a common practice among composers. For example, Antonín Dvořák would walk every morning at dawn while jotting down musical ideas. He did this every morning along the Turkey River when he visited Iowa in 1893, and then play the organ at the Catholic church. Gustav Mahler was famous for having a composer’s hut in the Alps away from his summer house during the summer when the opera, which he conducted, was not in session. He did not just hide in this hut, but walked on the surrounding forest trails.

Sometimes there was actual nature imagery in the music, aside, that is, from the thunderstorm in Beethoven’s Pastorale symphony (number 6) or in the second part of the Rossini’s William Tell overture. I am thinking again of Mahler. One time, in his childhood, Mahler had been left in the woods alone by a father who forgot about him. His father ran back to rescue him, only to find little Gustav sitting in rapt wonder at the natural world. The memory of this experience did not leave him. According to one documentary, this memory appears at the very beginning of Mahler’s first symphony, where the offstage trumpets represented distant bird calls and the cuckoo call, starting in measure 25 in the oboe, actually was a cuckoo that he heard.

Many other creative people have walked in nature to get at least a general inspiration: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, Richard Wagner, Victor Hugo, and even Pierre Curie.

Here is an example of what I am not talking about. The great Roman orator Cicero used the natural world to help him remember his speeches, which he presented without notes. Or so I have read once in a speaker’s handbook long ago. He could remember each portion of his speech, but he sometimes had difficulty remembering which portion would come next. But he was very familiar with his garden walking path. So what he would do was to recite each portion of his speech as he went along the path. Then, while speaking, he would imagine himself walking on the path. Each thing he saw reminded him of which topic was next. This is not an example of walking and creativity, since the topics and the objects did not need to have any real correspondence; it was just Cicero’s memory prop.

An experiment at Stanford in 2014 confirmed that walking enhances creative thinking. This is yet another example of how science confirms what we have known, or think we have known, all along.

Elizabeth's Exile, a Novel of a Cherokee Refugee, part four. How Do You Face Disruption and Tragedy?

Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

 

Any event as big as the Trail of Tears cannot be fully presented in a novel. The novel must focus on one or a few people and their experiences. Rice focused on Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit, whom he identifies in the author’s notes as his third great grandmother. By focusing on one or a few individuals, we can see the individual disruptions that occurred within the overall Disruption known as the Trail of Tears.

In Elizabeth’s case, the main disruption (aside from losing her home and land) was her husband James, a white man. It turned out that he had misrepresented himself to her when they married: he had a white wife and family just over the border in Mississippi. She sued him (historical fact) and won possession of all property and goods—all of which she lost when she had to get onto the Trail of Tears. In Rice’s novel, James was with her on the entire journey. Though James was probably an evil man, Rice treats him sympathetically as a tragic character who just wants Elizabeth to forgive him, which she never does. Despite this disruption, Elizabeth remains positive and strong on the entire trip.

The same cannot be said of Elizabeth’s daughter Minerva, who came of age on this journey. She is spunky and wise, and seems to be very strong. But then she is violated by a slimy preacher named John Schermerhorn and this, Rice suggests, ruined her ability to trust that anything good could happen in her life. Minerva was—historical fact again—married six times and died at the age of forty. She was married briefly to one of the novel’s main narrators, Lewis Hicks, her second husband, but had a child by her third husband while she was still married to Lewis. Rice uses this story in his novel, but adds in ideas from the Biblical story of David and Bathsheba and Uriah the Hittite.

Rev. John Schermerhorn was a historical figure who was every bit as slimy as Rice portrays him. I think Rice might have had to invent this character, had he not actually existed. He was infamous among all the Cherokee women for trying to hit up on them. They called him Devil Horn. He was the same man who had supervised the Treaty of New Echota in which illegal representatives of the Cherokee tribe signed away their rights to their Appalachian homeland.

Rice includes other historical events such as the murder of the Cherokee leader Doublehead—by his fellow Cherokees, as well as the murders of John Ridge and Elias Boudinot. Nobody in the tribe reveres Doublehead, who was also called Babykiller. But to this day some Cherokees despise, and others revere, the efforts of Ridge and Boudinot to protect the Cherokees from white oppression, although their compromises (including the Treaty of New Echota) proved ultimately futile.

Rice also includes Asa Gray, the Harvard botanist. Gray was, in fact, a defender of the rights of free Blacks in the North, but I suspect Rice has invented all the details of Gray being a leader in the Underground Railroad.

Rice ends the novel from the viewpoint of Edd Hicks, one of Minerva Pettit’s grandchildren, who regrets all the oppression in Cherokee history but who has resolved to make the best of whatever situation he is in. He is the focus of the third novel in the series, Edd’s Land, reviewed later in this blog.

Elizabeth's Exile, a Novel of a Cherokee Refugee, by Stan Rice, part three. What Was Andrew Jackson Like?

Author Stan Rice has just published the second of three novels (Elizabeth’s Exile) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download. This second novel is about a Cherokee woman, Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit who, in middle age, walked with a contingent of other Cherokees on the infamous Trail of Tears from the Appalachians to what is now Oklahoma, after losing their land and possessions. As Rice’s novel explains, this was totally illegal, as the law under which Andrew Jackson prosecuted this Trail of Tears was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

As in any novel written by a Cherokee author, president Andrew Jackson will appear as an evil man. And that is because he was. Rice would have to totally alter the historical background of the novel in order to make Jackson appear even the least bit heroic

But there are a significant number of white Americans who idolize Andrew Jackson. Their spiritual leader is Donald Trump, who has a Jackson portrait prominently displayed in the White House.

I then realized something about Rice’s novel. The way he portrayed Andrew Jackson was, in fact, very much as we know Donald Trump to be. Rice was modeling Jackson after Trump, including his anger, his vanity, and his racism—even his facial expressions. Rice even put some of Trump’s words into Jackson’s mouth.

To this day, most Cherokees resent having the face of Andrew Jackson on the twenty dollar bill. When a new series of twenty dollar bills came out a couple of decades ago, Jackson’s face was still on it, but larger. A Cherokee artist told me that this was fine with him; it just made the target a little larger for Cherokee bullets. He was joking of course, because most Cherokees are poor enough that they cannot waste a twenty dollar bill on target practice.

During the Biden Administration, the opportunity came along to have a different face on this bill. The federal government was planning to issue new currency featuring the face of Harriet Tubman, who was one of the driving forces behind the Underground Railroad. She earned her place in American history. But Donald Trump, offended by the thought of having her on American currency, canceled these plans and insisted on keeping Jackson’s face on the currency.