Photo by Tyler Nix on Unsplash

We live in a car culture. I was reminded of this recently when a potential landlord in the small town of Moab, Utah raised doubts about my ability to make it here without an automobile. I pointed out that I had walked from one end of the town to the other several times already and could always rent a car if I really needed one, but this didn’t seem to reassure him.

I’m not anti-car. Indeed, within a week of the above exchange, I purchased a van. So many here live out of their cars due to the lack of housing. My circumstances quickly compelled me to join them, at least for the summer. In addition, for any escape to the backcountry to be possible a vehicle really is necessary. All that said, I’ve come to appreciate the leisurely pace of a good walk after living years without wheels of my own and I don’t see my recent purchase changing that view much.

As I write this, I’ve only been living in Moab for about two weeks. Though this is far from my first time here, I’ve never actually attempted to live here. Spending my first week or so walking as opposed to driving around town has already provided me with a much greater understanding of where things are located relative to one another than I could ever gain from a car or by using Google Maps.

Furthermore, it’s much easier to develop familiarity with the businesses and other institutions lining Main Street when sauntering by them in no particular hurry to get anywhere. That’s not the case when we are driving. Our attention is on the traffic, bicyclists, and pedestrians sharing the road with us instead of the unique features, natural or cultural, of the area being driven through.

The city’s parks are all located off the main road running through the center of town, making them unlikely attractions for the hundreds of thousands of seasonal tourists that begin arriving with the first signs of spring. Likewise, events not related to off-roading or mountain biking advertised in local papers and on flyers pinned up here and there are hardly going to get the attention of someone trying to fit in as many experiences as they can in the least possible time.

Walking is an activity for the leisurely tourist intent on embedding themselves in the culture for an extended period or for a local seeking to develop a more intimate long-term relationship with a place. It is best suited to a life that is not built around firm deadlines and strict routines that leave little room for spontaneity or serendipity. It is an activity that has more to do with putting down deep roots than checking off places and experiences on our bucket list.

A recent Guardian article describes one of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic as a renewed interest by many in walking their local communities, in the process often discovering them as if for the first time. “The pandemic has sharpened a collective appreciation of wandering our cities with fresh eyes, exploring the streets we shunned in the pre-lockdown days, when walking was merely about hurrying from A to B,” the author of the piece states.

The article mentions a website called CityStrides that enables users to track the streets of their city they have run or walked so far. Its users are encouraged to aim for the stars by visiting on foot every single street within their city. For a resident of the city of Glasgow, there are 6,000 streets to visit. In San Fransisco, the total is 2,237.

As daunting as walking even a little more than 2,000 streets may seem, it’s our largest cities that pose the greatest challenge. London, for example, has more than 39,000 streets, and unlike Glasgow and San Francisco, “no one is yet close to completing” them all.

Interestingly, however, someone from my current part of the world now living in London is giving it a go. Again, according to the Guardian, “Noelle Poulson from Utah in the US blazed a trail by walking every street within London’s congestion zone — about 400 miles, she says.”

According to the City of Moab’s website, it has just twenty-six miles of street within the city limits. In other words, Noelle Poulson has already walked the equivalent of roughly sixteen Moabs. I’m tempted to call the man who decided against renting to me on the grounds my lack of a vehicle would make it impossible to get around town (and thus make a living) to tell him about her, but I know it wouldn’t do any good.

Our technologies are wonderful things. They’ve made life easier for all of us and enabled us to shrink the world to the point that I’m almost as likely to meet someone from Europe at the small Moab hostel where I’m currently staying as I am another American.

That said, our technologies have also stunted our capacity to intimately know people and places much closer to home. While becoming Facebook friends with people on the other side of the world, our neighbors are often complete strangers to us. We drive through communities on our way to work or the grocery store listening to music or national and international news oblivious to the lives going on just outside the air-conditioned comfort of our automotive shell.

While taking a long walk along the Appalachian Trail, the writer Bill Bryson gained a valuable insight that those navigating the world solely via plane, train and automobile have lost. He wrote, “The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.”

Photo taken by author on a long afternoon hike in Arches National Park just outside Moab, Utah.

Few would suggest it’s necessary for us to give up entirely the conveniences our cars and other modes of transportation provide, though making profound changes to how we relate to and use them is critically important from an environmental perspective. However, a culture that can no longer even imagine walking as a means of getting around, let alone a preference for it, risks being accused of having become a slave to its technology rather than its master.

Walking restores us to the pace our ancestors knew, slowing us to a speed at which the sights and sounds around us can be broadly taken in while enabling connections between seemingly unrelated aspects of reality to be uncovered. A walk liberates us from the tunnel vision speed imposes freeing us to hear the birds sing, feel the breeze on our face, and observe people going about their daily lives without having to worry about driving into a telephone pole. These may seem small and unimportant in an age in which it’s possible to travel around the world within hours and send messages at the speed of light, but I would argue it is precisely because we live at such a time that a good walk has never been more important.