Hereford

 

“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: everyday I walk myself into a state of well being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts…never trust a thought that did not come by walking.”

                                    -Friedrich Nietzsche

 

I really like the thought behind these words.  When they come from a book encouraging pilgrimage, it adds an even more interesting light.  When I was in England, I was glad to be doing all the walking.  However, we, and I mean we, were always walking to a destination and always in a group.  Walking had become a mode of transportation, something lost in the minds of Americans.  Though this might explain some of the thinner profiles of Europeans, it did something to take away from what walking does for the soul.  We were always walking to something, never walking for the sake of the activity itself.  Walking lacking the soul experienced in the quote above.  Something in the whole experience was missing.

 

When we finally arrived on a day when I refused to be a part of the group for a while, part of me felt sure that I would be missing something significant; something at Churchhill’s garden or the Inklings intimate pub would gather all the loose stands of the trip together and encapsulate them all under one banner, creating worth in a journey as I could breathe in a final sigh of relief in a new found enlightenment.

 

I would know why I had come.  I would know why I had taken up the journey.

 

But I just couldn’t do it, I was exhausted from people.  So I stayed in.

 

This, of course, could only last so long.  The only people who continually stay in are hermits and prisoners.  After the clatter of the house dies down, my back began to feel confined in the small bed in the spare room with a host of books I’d never read lining the walls of the narrow space.

 

I climbed out of bed, looked around the corners carefully half expecting inhabitants until I could confidently conclude that I, for the first time in days, was alone in a beautiful silence.  I was almost giddy watching television and eating my morning cereal on the couch in solitude.  But as I have come to know about myself, nervous feet are inevitable and just as I would find my room too restraining, so too would I also find the house in which I was staying.  I laced up the spare key to the house in my running shoes and grabbed a rain parka in case the dreary, always ominous-looking English skies decided to drop a shower from the heavens.  In my pockets I stuffed a small journal and pen alongside a copy of The Illustrated Man.  A copy of short, science fiction stories  seemed appropriate as I made my way into an unknown land full of foreigners with voices and words both familiar and unfamiliar.

 

Somewhere in the anxiety of not knowing my way around and not knowing what I was looking for in the first place, I began to walk.  Not walk in the transportation sense but in the way Nietzsche had put it.  Naturally, I was putting right in front of left and repeating the process as I moved along the streets and sidewalks about town.  But for the first time during the expanse of the trip, I felt that I could wander.  I felt I could speak with my soul in the blissful experience of my mouth being closed and no attentiveness charged to my ears.

 

I walked out the door and across the paved streets of the brick chic’ condo that had been my home over the recent passing days.  I used a stationary Alfa Romeo as a land mark since all of the housed looked exactly the same.  The street-namers must have been hit by the same writer’s block bug as those from across the pond in my home country.  “Steeplechase,” this, “Overbrook,” that.  Not once along these streets or their counterparts in America had I seen any kind of steeplechase, brook, or any kind of wildlife after which they were so un-aptly named.

 

“Same-ness” street would intersect “Look-a-like” lane at the cultasac on “Cliché” corner…apparently people need fancy street names no matter which country they live in.

 

An original thought had entered my mind.  I’d gladly accept a cynical thought at this point, at least it was mine.

 

I came out of the development area and turned towards downtown on the main street.  Tramping down damp streets all the while paying close attention to the traffic that came from the opposite direction from which I was familiar.  Turning a slight right at the motorbike shop, across from the town Primark, I could see the skyline of the nearing city.  The steeple of a nine hundred year old church rose high above all other buildings.  While crossing the near ancient bridge I paused to admire the stonecutting work from a time period when electricity could have been nothing more than a farfetched dream of the future.  Avoiding cyclists and walkers I leaned over the edge to peer down into the brown river thick as soup after the constant rains over the past few days.

 

Two hours at Starbucks only momentarily quelled my wandering mood.  Off the main streets and into the quaint back alleys and cobblestone walkways becoming more and more emboldened to explore the roads less traveled.  </s

pan>Along a back passage between two aging building I found myself browsing a cigar shop going out of business that weekend.  I bought a small flask and asked the man behind the counter if he could suggest a preferred brand of cigars.  Slim, mini cigars, hand rolled Cuban style.  More than likely, I determined, this world renowned rolling style was more so borrowed by the Cubans than invented.  I wished the owner well on his retirement as I hoped secretly that he thought I might be a Canadian considering the current international reputation towards Americans.

 

“Far too nice to be a Yank,” I imagined him turning to say to his wife and coworkers as he watched we walk briskly from the sweet tobacco and low light of the shop and disappear into the bright lights of the outside world.  It was a strange fantasy to wish that people do not know your own true identity.

 

“…To an unknown country where I shall have no past and no name, where I shall be born again with a new name and an untried heart.”

 

Though I has not read these words, I know this was the feeling I was experiencing at the time.  Even if it was just for a day, even if just for a few short hours, I would be the happy traveler whom smiled and exchanged pleasantries with a stranger on the cobblestone streets of the old English town.

 

Outside the cathedral of that dominated the skyline, I rested myself on an old stone wall that had to be just as impressive in age as the building a few steps away.  The abundance of passers-by provided ample entertainment as I stopped for a quick moment to gather my thoughts.  Opening the case, I breathed in a quick breath of the aroma as the outer seal was broken.  A quick strike of a match and the aroma increase three times over as the scent filled the air; a quick puff and then a full drag is one is not supposed to do with cigars.  I took it all in.  I crossed my legs and leaned back to fully appreciate the fresh flow of nicotine as it rolled throughout the capillaries of my body.

 

Though I had walked through the Cathedral the day before, it was as though I was seeing it for the first time in that instant.  Glaring up at the towering structure I was stunned, wondering internally how such a construction was possible prior to the days of modern technology.  I might have been fifty yards away from the entry way of the structure, but it was on that wall that I allowed my fingers to graze the ancient stone wall.  It was that moment that walking had delivered me to a destination.  It was in that moment that I first began to travel.

 

I had much to think about on my walk home.