You should read The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

Robert Macfarlane. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. NY: Penguin, 2012.

This is the kind of book I like to read slowly and savor. Macfarlane’s descriptions of walking and thinking inspire me to think about thinking while walking. There’s a tradition of this throughout history, but until Macfarlane’s book I hadn’t put the pieces together: Australian Aboriginal Songlines, the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, Edward Thomas and Robert Frost’s ‘talks walking’, and as I read elsewhere recently, Ludwig van Beethoven working out musical composition while walking. I do it, too. I think about problems that need solutions, or how I’m going to frame a piece of writing, or how I’m going to start a difficult conversation. Maybe it’s the act of walking that gets the blood circulating or the oxygen powering the brain.

Macfarlane’s walks are trail walks, and usually in the United Kingdom. His descriptions of the geology and geography sent me to my reference shelf more than once to look for maps, definitions, and photographs of things like chalk. He walks on chalk, gneiss, flint, silt, snow, and ice, and is conscious of every surface under his feet. He describes how footprints in the snow rise up as the wind blows the loose snow away from the solidly frozen prints. Wow.

My best walks are on sand, at the beach where I walk barefoot except in the coldest weather. Macfarlane discusses walking barefoot and the sensuousness of it. You feel the trail underfoot and remember it differently, he says, than if you walk it in footwear. I think the most compelling part of the book for me was his description of walking next to the 5000-year-old footprints preserved in the silt. My beach walks send my brain in three directions: what I’m seeing at the moment (birds, boats, people); memories of ‘talks walking’ with people (my father, cousins, nephew, old boyfriends); and the history of this favorite beach (whaling, World War II, the opening of the ferry).

Macfarlane considers water paths, too: sea routes. These are traveled by sailors over and over, and they share information about hazards and storms. People along water routes share culture, too. I’m reminded of the towns and cities on the Danube River and how musicians have traveled the river for centuries sharing tunes (a kind of oral history), techniques, instruments, and notation more so than with musicians further inland. Wolfgang Mozart was dissatisfied with his hometown of Salzburg and floated south on the Danube to Vienna where he thought he would have better opportunities. Gustav Mahler was moved north on the Danube by Emperor Franz Joseph so that he could raise the standards of the Vienna Court Opera. There are many such connections between the cities on the Danube water trail.

I was wondering in the first few chapters when this book might have been written. I was reading on my Kindle, and I’m not as adept as I should be flipping around on that thing. So rather than walking over to a computer to look up the publication date that I hadn’t noticed thus far, I challenged myself to look for clues. I pictured a thin, fifty-something, English professor in an Argyle vest, smoking a pipe while walking the chalk trail in the 1930s. Soon I encountered references to Guns N’ Roses, Antiques Roadshow, and the movie Matrix. The book was published in 2012 when the author was 36. Aside from those references, though, I contend the stories and descriptions in this book could have taken place anytime in the last century. The nature experience is pure, without interference from popular culture or current events.

The reader is introduced to some interesting people during the author’s walks. The poet Edward Thomas sounds like he was a difficult person to know, but he was a thinker and a walker. For him, paths “connected real places, led outward to metaphysics, led backwards to history and inwards to the self.” He’s on Macfarlane’s mind throughout the book, relevant to much of what Macfarlane is trying to express. Richard Holmes, a writer of biographies and the of world of biography writing, said that writing a biography resembles “a tracking of the physical trail of someone’s past.” Isn’t much research like that, though? His book Footsteps (1985) is now on my list. Eric Ravilious painted the chalk trails and much of the South Downs area of England, and in doing so Macfarlane says, supplied him with a mental landscape of the trails he was walking. A quick Google search revealed that Ravilious is quite popular in the UK with exhibits opening here and there and a long list of books about his paintings.

This book will stay with me for a long time. It was an enjoyable read on one level, but on another level inspired me to get out and walk and think. I believe I will not be able to take a decent-length walk from now on without thinking about Macfarlane’s book. I’ve been gushing about it to my thinking and walking friends. And as with most of my favorite books, it encouraged further reading on Edward Thomas, Richard Holmes, Eric Ravilious, even Robert Frost who made an appearance…and walking.