The Thinking, Walking Biped, part fourteen. Dreamscapes

When we walk, we each see our world in a different way, and differently at each stage of our lives. Let me tell you a personal example of this.

I grew up at the base of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California. I could see the snow-covered peaks of the mountains in the clear air of winter, and I occasionally visited the magnificent forests of giant sequoia trees. But what I saw every day was the foothills. They were covered with grass. The only trees were oaks that grew amidst granite boulders on some of the hills. I am still not sure why the trees grew only amidst the boulders. Perhaps it was fire, or perhaps it was cattle, both of which could kill trees on smooth ground. But even on the smooth ground, there were occasional boulders, some of them large and craggy. They reminded my childish mind of menhirs and dolmans and other works of human art.

Boulders on smooth hills made me feel like I was looking at a heavenly landscape. Even today I have occasional dreams of entering an enchanted realm of boulders and grass. These are almost the only really beautiful dreams I have. Thankfully, I don’t have many nightmares. Most of my dreams are busy and stupid and quickly and thankfully forgotten.

The magical landscape of boulders and grass is not the real landscape. The weeds amidst the grass, such as fiddlehead Amsinckia, and even the grass itself, especially the wild oats Avena barbata, left prickles in my socks. Most of the year, all the plants had died back to the ground. Everywhere was the scent of cow dung. That is the reality. But that is not what I dream.

To get to the biological field station where I taught botany one summer, I drove through northeastern Kansas. There are interesting parts of Kansas, but this was not one of them. It was absolutely flat and often nothing but wheat fields was visible. Fortunately I had not passed judgment on this land, for it is where one of my students was from. “It is the most beautiful place on Earth,” she said. And she was right, about her dreamscape.

This sort of dreamscape is not reality, nor is it illusion. It is a transformed reality. I wonder if any other species of animal has this kind of imagination. And I wonder how much it is the product of our long history, and much longer prehistory, of long distance walking, of tribal leaders imagining themselves on the top of a distant mountain.

Maybe this is where the human obsession with heaven comes from.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part thirteen. Ticks

Of course, walking is not entirely safe. There are numerous dangers on the trail, such as hostile animals. Few of these dangers remain in the walking areas available to most pedestrians, at least, the larger animals such as wolves and bears. But there are plenty of small invertebrates such as mosquitoes, chiggers, and ticks waiting to afflict you. They have no evil intention; it is just that you are, along with other mammals, their major source of food.

Ticks like to wait on the tips of leaf blades near paths. This is where they have the maximum chance of an animal brushing against them. This happens mostly in areas where lots of animals roam, therefore they are unlikely to do this in the middle of your yard. But in a forest or field, where deer and people are likely to pass through, there can be lots of ticks.

A tick bite by itself may not be a major concern, but various disease microorganisms use ticks as a vector to get from one animal to another. A major example in North America is Lyme disease (caused by the bacterium Borrellia burgdorferi and spread mostly by deer ticks). But it is not the only example.

Whenever the weather is warm, some people like to hike. This includes amateur walkers who have little experience with hiking outdoors. As you might expect, it is advisable to wear pants rather than shorts if you plan to leave the trail. During peak vacation times, health authorities often warn people to check themselves for ticks after brushing against grass. Authorities such as the U.S. Forest Service advise a “full body tick check” after you get home from your hike.

A full-body tick check can be done alone when you are naked in front of a mirror. Although this is better than not doing one at all, it is best done with a significant other. (I told my students about this one time. One student asked, where do we find a significant other? I think he must have been a social loser… If I’d been thinking, I would have said, “You can get anything on Amazon,” but I didn’t think of this snappy response until it was too late.) Reasons for this include:

• Ticks love to insinuate themselves into the deepest, warmest crevices of your body, and they will crawl a long ways to find such places. The reasons should be obvious. In deep crevices, they are protected from being scratched or brushed away. This is a real danger to ticks when they get on primates, with dexterous fingers. There is not much a cow or deer can do to scratch away a tick.
• It is difficult for one person to bend around and look in a mirror at their dorsal surfaces and nether regions. You would probably be in a physically uncomfortable position looking closely at your own butt in a mirror.

A mutual tick-check is a good test for the intimacy of a sexual relationship: Do I trust you enough for a tick-check? The standards of trust for a tick check might even be higher than those for sexual intercourse. Unlike sex itself, the tick-check forces you to look closely at body regions where one seldom looks during sexual intercourse. If you are worried about bad smells, take a shower first; showers seldom dislodge ticks. In the sexual regions of the body, especially if hair is present, there are more surfaces for a tick to hide than you could imagine. And it is not just the nether regions. Ticks—some of which are very small and require close observation—can also hide in the folds of flesh underneath female breasts. But don’t ignore the back, neck, shoulders, and legs, as well as armpits and behind the knees. See the website here.

In earlier centuries, people had so many parasites that a walk in the woods would make little difference in their parasite load. Those days must have been wonderful for ticks.

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.

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.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part eight. Famous Nature Walks: Henry David Thoreau

Probably every American student has had to read something by Henry David Thoreau. His literary immortality is thus guaranteed forever. Pretty good for a man who never had a steady job. He published a few books, gave a few talks, and walked for (he says) four hours every day as he lived out his life in Concord, Massachusetts during the middle nineteenth century. He was one of many writers who walked a lot; Thoreau mentions William Wordsworth as a writer who walked. He was a friend of (and, I suspect, a dependent upon) Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Thoreau is most famous for living out in the woods (on Emerson’s land) in a little hut that he built himself, at very little expense near the shore of Walden Pond. In case you think he lived in the hut all of his life, this is not true: he only lived there a couple of years. He just wanted to prove that it could be done.

I thought I would find a well-thought-out explanation of how and why he walked in his essay Walking. Given the essay title, it was not an unreasonable thing to expect. But in this essay, Thoreau actually had very little to say about walking other than that he would start off with no clear destination in mind and usually find himself heading southwest “toward Oregon” (which is not southwest of Concord).

But maybe this is the point. He would start walking with no particular topic to think about or problem on his mind. He would wait until he saw something that made him think, and then he would write about it later. That’s what I do, only I do not have a very good memory, so I make notes on my cell phone to remind me what I was supposed to write about. Thoreau was very observant, although (or because) he did not know what to observe.

He noticed patterns that others overlooked, especially Emerson. Emerson thought in big brush strokes and ignored details (or, in some cases, made them up). It was the details that mattered to Thoreau. As I walk around in French forests, I notice that the wild cherries ripen first, then the wild blackberries a couple of weeks later, and the wild dewberries last of all. Blackberries and dewberries look enough alike that it is easy to mistake one for the other. Thoreau had to notice the seasonal patterns of flowers and fruits, as he was passionate about eating wild fruits, especially huckleberries. I also eat wild fruits on my walks, cherries first in the summer, then blackberries, then dewberries toward autumn. Thoreau said that young people can learn more about the world in a day of huckle-berrying than a year of learning Latin.

One major example of Thoreau’s attention to detail was that many people assumed the pine woods had always been pine woods and the hardwood forests had always been hardwood forests. But Thoreau saw birds in pine trees dropping hardwood seeds onto the ground. Apparently pine woods became hardwood forests, which, when they burned or were cut, reverted to being pine woods. Thoreau may not have been the first to come up with this ecological observation, but he certainly came up with it himself. He even reconstructed the population history of pine woods by counting tree rings.

Thoreau was also a man of scientific faith. That is, he wrote down observations in his voluminous notebooks for which he had no use, but which he thought might be useful to somebody someday. Among his observations were the dates on which various species of wildflowers bloomed in the spring. He was not the first person to keep such records, which we today call phenology; in Japan, some records of cherry blossoms go back for centuries. But Thoreau’s records came in very handy when modern botanists such as Richard Primack and Abe Miller-Rushing compared Thoreau’s data with recent data. The flowers bloom much earlier today than they did in Thoreau’s time, consistent with global warming. Many other scientists, including me, have come up with similar results based on entirely separate sets of plants.

Another thing about Thoreau’s scientific faith. He kept walking because you never know what you might see, and if you are not out walking you might miss it.

And us modern scientists acknowledge the details that Thoreau noticed on his nature walks, even though he did not set out with the intention of noticing them.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part five. Famous Nature Walks: Rousseau Thinking about Himself

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (he called himself J.J.) was a famous writer and thinker of the eighteenth century. His specialty was to pugnaciously disagree with political and religious philosophers. One of his ideas was the social contract. He said that humans were basically good—not passionately good, but inclined to enjoy being good to one another. They did not need political systems (kings, knights, dictators, etc.) or religions (the threat of excommunication and hell) to be good, but just to be given the chance to form a contract of goodness with one another. I realize the full idea is more complex than this, and you are welcome to read more about it.

Rousseau was a great and almost daily walker. It is easy to assume that he used his daily walks to think of new and inspiring ideas about which to write. He stopped in a wooded area after visiting Diderot in prison in 1749. The hike was only three miles, but it is where he had his revelation about the social contract. This was not a wilderness area, but within metropolitan Paris. Still, it was not in a house or library or church, at least. Many writers, including myself, get a lot of ideas while walking. Is this why Rousseau walked?

For the most part the answer is no. His personal views can be kindly described as utter despair, and were most likely paranoia. His daily walks were to forget his past and to be the good man that Nature intended him to be. He described ten walks in his Reveries of a Solitary Walker. None of them were actual walks that he had taken, but were mostly unsorted piles of gripes and complaints. In his First Walk, Rousseau said that nobody could force you to be miserable. He was calm, because, he said, there is nothing more his enemies could do to him. He continued his self-pity in Walk Three, where he said he hoped for little, and received less. But he kept walking, saying that “I need to endure the miseries of my life.” He almost gave up trying to figure out his tribulations; I found myself wishing he had, in fact, given up. He said Solon, the Roman thinker, learned something new every day. But Rousseau said his old brain was worn out and he could not learn anything new. I just hope that as I get older I will never believe this about myself. He believed himself to be the most miserable of humans because literally everyone hated him, except his wife. And so on, with Walks 8, 9, and 10. He had to be a solitary walker, he said, because to understand society he had to stand outside of it. Also, I’m not sure he would have been such a good traveling companion for anyone.

He had some reason to be paranoid. When he lived in Môtiers, France, his house was stoned, breaking his window. The hostility of the local people was probably because he questioned the goodness of religion. During Rousseau’s life, many pamphlets were published against him. Some were apparently written by Voltaire. As Will and Ariel Durant describe it,

In Voltaire and Rousseau we see again the old clash between intellect and instinct. Voltaire believed in reason always; but Rousseau had little faith in reason; he desired action. In spite of his disagreement, Voltaire respected Rousseau’s right to speak what he believed in… Voltaire didn’t agree with Rousseau’s denunciation of civilization. He informs Rousseau that man is by nature a beast of prey, and that civilized society means a chaining of this beast…

But I have not seen evidence (not being an historian, this is not surprising) that people were preparing false and defamatory documents to be inserted into his works to be “discovered” upon his death. Rousseau was not an easy man to like; he could like you and then, as with David Hume and Dénis Diderot, change his mind about you completely.

For most of his life, Rousseau’s walks were nearly blind, as he thought only about himself. He looked at his path only enough to keep from tripping over sticks and stones. But for a brief time, this was not the case. See the next essay.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part four. Famous Nature Walks: Petrarch and the Great Mt. Ventoux hoax

I first heard about the Italian poet Petrarch’s famous ascent of Mt. Ventoux in southern France (April 26, 1336) during a high school humanities class. Petrarch supposedly presaged the Renaissance by making this artistic, as opposed to religious, pilgrimage. Some people have called him the first mountain climber because he made his ascent for no reason other than to see the view. An earlier monk (Jean Buridan) had ascended it on his way to see the Pope at Avignon, to make meteorological observations. And other people had probably climbed this mountain for strategic or economic reasons. Petrarch said he met a shepherd on the lower slopes of the mountain who claimed to have been the only person to have climbed the mountain, and he said it was just a bunch of rocks and not worth the effort.

How different it is today. Thousands of people hike, bike, or drive on this mountain. Its steep incline is a famous point on the Tour de France.

Many scholars have concluded that Petrarch did not climb this mountain at all. It was all a hoax.

Here are some reasons for believing the ascent of Ventoux to be a hoax. Petrarch mentions precisely nothing about the natural wonders that he would have seen all around him. Foremost among these is the wind. Ventoux means “windy.” The mistral winds average 90 kilometers an hour for 240 days a year. Mt. Ventoux sticks up into a mass of cold air that moves from the north to the Mediterranean. No mention of it. Also, Mt. Ventoux is famous for its white limestone cap visible from a great distance. No mention of this either. A lot of the bare limestone has resulted from deforestation, which might not have been as extensive in the fourteenth century as today. But most mountains in France have been deforested, and yet few have such visible summits. Certainly there would have been something that Petrarch might have noticed, had he actually been there.

Perhaps most of all, Petrarch made his entire ascent and descent in one day, then went back to the inn and wrote about it before supper. Might we suspect Petrarch, not noted for physical prowess, to have exaggerated his vigor a little bit? Conveniently, he had no eyewitnesses other than his little brother.

Instead of Petrarch being an early Thoreau or Muir, he was actually writing in the tradition of pilgrimage fiction, a tradition that began before Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and has continued long after C. S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress. Petrarch wrote about how he kept taking descending trails, hoping to find an easier path, only to have to climb back up and do it the hard way. This, he said, is a symbol of how, when we choose the easier path in life toward spiritual salvation, we have to keep starting over and over again. Bunyan could have done no better.

So if Petrarch is to be remembered today, and taught about in humanities classes, let it least be for something he actually did or wrote, and not for the Mount Ventoux hoax.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part three. Jesus

In the past, great religious leaders did a lot of walking. More recently, they have preferred limousines and jets paid for by rich donors who think God wants them to do this. Mahatma Gandhi did a lot of walking. In 1944, a back country preacher named Guy Howard published his biography, Walkin’ Preacher of the Ozarks.

Jesus of Nazareth walked everywhere during his short ministry on Earth. He gave the impression of wandering aimlessly—at least, he did not explain his itinerary to his disciples. He wandered in the desert, and took his disciples north into Galilee, the country-bumpkin part of Israel where he was born. He briefly rode on a donkey, when he triumphally entered Jerusalem on his last Passover.

Can you imagine how different Jesus’ impact would have been on his listeners, and on history, if he had ridden around on a horse and preached down at the people, with his sword sticking out?

He certainly gave the impression of poor planning in his walks. He did not arrange for his disciples to have enough food for them to eat, and wouldn’t you know it, he was leading them right through Samaria. Samaria was the place with the remnants of the northern kingdom who worshipped in a way Jerusalem Jews considered unholy. Righteous Jews did not want to even be in Samaria, much less get caught there without food. The disciples went off to find food, leaving Jesus alone at a well.

We see now that Jesus had planned it this way all along. A woman came to the well to draw water. She noticed Jesus did not have a bucket and wondered if he would like a drink. He offered her living water, which confused her. He surprised her by telling her about her past: she had had a succession of lovers. It couldn’t get much worse for a righteous Jew—having a personal conversation with a Samaritan woman of loose morals. The disciples were not pleased. Long afterwards, Christians realized that Jesus was teaching them, and the Samaritans, something important about how God does not look down on certain cultures of people.

Jesus summarized his whole way of life as not just walking, but walking on narrow, difficult paths. It is on such paths that you learn about the world and about yourself. Can I, in fact, complete this path, and more, can I learn from it and enjoy it? “Enter in at the narrow gate,” he said. “For the way is narrow and the path difficult that leads to life, but the way to hell is smooth and wide.” I preached a sermon on this topic to a bunch of Boy Scouts about 1969, when I was a scout myself. We were camping and hiking in the lower Sierra Nevada mountains.

As a botanist who walks nearly every day, I can tell you that the easy roads are mostly bordered by weeds; to find the beautiful wildflowers, you need to hike the narrow trails.