TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071089/07108900.000

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6KB | 122 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 70

Walking on the Wild Side


By Lance Morrow


    The part of the self that is Toad of Toad Hall took to the
open road again.

    The interior Toad rhapsodized, "Walking is the finest thing
in the world, but wild walking like this is finer still."

    Toad's muscles glowed with well-being. He sported a touraco
feather in his slouch hat. He had walked for days out of
Kitich, a remote, beautiful camp on the Nyeng River in Northern
Kenya, and now was skirting the Mathews Range in sandy, thorny
country. Vultures wheeled over a distant lion kill. Toad was
walking through heaven.

    This was the line of march: first bright Lutupen, the
Samburu guide, with his spear and tribal finery, the
yellow-and-black-bead cords crisscrossed on his chest, the tops
of his ears sprouting the bead horns that gave the Samburu
warrior, Toad thought, an air of medieval imp. Toad admired
Lutupen's sense of style. Lutupen had slipped a trapezoid of
broken mirror under his bead headband for decoration, so that
he now had a kind of third eye, a window in the center of his
forehead that flashed as he slipped along through the forest.

    After Lutupen came the mule, Miss Mule, policed by another
Samburu warrior named (it is true) Livingston. After Miss Mule
at a cautious distance marched Toad and friends -- the guide
Chrissie Aldrich, the Kitich Camp manager Ian Cameron and the
others. And last, the ten donkeys that carried water and food
(short rations that got shorter as the days passed and the wild
walking grew more wonderful). The donkeys advanced along the
trail like a party of schoolgirls in dove-gray uniforms,
sociable and disorderly, the sheer din of their progress driving
off elephants and lions and all other wilder beasts as Toad's
parade advanced. Toad surveyed the line of march with a jump of
pleasure. En passant with his olive-wood walking stick, he poked
cannonballs of elephant dung and judged how long ago the beasts
had passed. Now and then they came upon Samburu tending herds
of high-humped Boran cattle. But mostly they walked in solitude.
Toad savored the wild walker's joys -- the peace of utter
remoteness, the little thrill of vulnerability and self-testing.

    The jerry cans on the donkeys' backs got lighter. Toad the
linguist asked Lutupen in Swahili, "Wapi maji?" (Where is
water?) Then after finding a few dung-fouled cattle watering
holes, he learned to be more precise: "Wapi maji mazuri?" (Where
is good water?) At length they fell to quarreling over water and
stopped speaking to one another for hours at a time.

    One day, pointing the march back into the mountains, on
steep, thickly wooded tracks, thirsty and quarrelsome, they came
upon an emerald pool in the forest, a sweet, shaded secret. Toad
drank water for half an hour without stopping. That night they
slaughtered a goat and feasted. Lutupen hung the remaining goat
meat in a tree above him as he slept curled up on a flat rock,
and in the morning Toad found leopard tracks around the camp.

    But that day as Toad tramped on through the undiscovered
country, his eye was suddenly transfixed by the sight beside
the old cattle track of four Eveready size-D batteries lying in
the dust. It was as if a passing whaleship had answered Ahab:
"The white whale? Yeah, we killed him yesterday." An old joke.
Toad suffered a deflation.

    Well, he reflected later, the planet can no longer sustain
the luxury of pure wild walking, which may in any case carry a
certain taint of the elitist or the narcissist, a demand for
virginity. (Americans and Europeans have always liked to think
of themselves as the first white men ever to have walked into
some wild place.)

    Wild walking intoxicates the Toad. But all walking is a
matter of style. In finer sensibility, Toad might admit that a
tramp through hyena droppings would rank pretty low on the
evolutionary scale of walking.

    William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge did not
fight over drinking water as they rambled through the Lake
District. In any case, the important thing to Toad was that
walking put the mind in motion, and might even set poetry in
motion. A line of verse is a march of poetic feet, the trudge
of iambs and shuffle of dactyls, the ambulations of language.

    Toad simultaneously loved walking as an escape from
thought, a way of setting the world itself astir, like a
cycloramic dream, so that it flowed through his eye to his mind
at the speed that suits the total creature best -- all higher
speeds being a mere greed for frivolous accelerations, for wind
in the face.

    The best walking is a liberation, and a way of thinking. A
creature like Toad is not a tree, but is designed to move
across earth's surface, perpendicular to gravity and companioned
by time. Somehow walking, thought Toad in his mellower moments,
makes time a passage that is not only bearable but also sweet
and festooned with an everlastingly changing array of scenery.

    So many kinds of walking did Toad savor. Beach walking took
him along the edge of eternity. Night walking carried him
through another mysterious fluid, darkness. Walking populated
his solitude with multitudes of fancies and inner images, and
let his mind roam up and down in time. Yet walking in the city
also gave him sometimes an ecstatic solitude -- a paradoxical
apartness and serenity.

    Conversation, Toad thought, was best when walking, since
talk itself is an ambling. Toad even talked better to himself
when walking -- though if he moved his lips when doing it, he
looked like a street crazy. It was at last in the walking that
Toad's soul, he found, was most at rest.

    Toad yearned always for the wild walking, of course. But he
sighed the sigh of resignation. The whole world now is a beaten
track. Even if Toad went to the moon for a hike, he would find
footprints there.