Pedestrian Society
An old friend recently went on holiday to London—his first trip abroad. Since we both grew up around here, in the rural hillscapes of southern West Virginia, it caused me to reflect on the most radical difference between life in rural America and cosmopolitan Europe: walking.
Evolutionary biologists tell us we are a species built for walking. Assuming we’ve never flown on our own power, aren’t born in water, and didn’t arise as a species with horseless or horsed carriages, that seems rather obvious. Plus, the bipedalism thingy. But in America our legs might eventually become forgotten appendages, as mysterious to our heirs as their appendices. We Americans took to individual motorized mobility as soon as Henry Ford opened it up to all, and we haven’t looked back since. For a long time we didn’t even bother installing pedestrian accommodations along new public roads. Out here in the countryside, the ratio of roads without sidewalks to those with them must be well over a hundred to one.
I lived in Cologne, Germany, for large chunk of the 1990s, and I never owned a car. I had various bicycles and monthly subscriptions to the public transit system, and most of the time I walked. For miles on any given day that I was out of the house. I’d walk to local shops for groceries, beer, smokes, and other essentials. I’d walk to the university, to the foreign language school where I taught, and to government offices to take care of whatever bureaucratic stuff needing taken care of. I’d walk to parks, restaurants, cafés, and nightclubs to meet friends, often staggering back home after it all closed down for the night, long after the last light-rail train had made its run.
Somewhere in our not-too-distant past in America, we, too, walked all over the place to get around. I don’t know of any sources for good historical information on it, but I strongly suspect that not every household had horse-drawn carriages on hand for local jaunts to town and such. Horses are a costly extra mouth to feed when most of your time is spent figuring out how to feed a house full of people in the months of the year when there are no crops to harvest. There was no motorized transportation, and taking a horse to get from one side of a pasture to the other as one might today take an ATV would have been a nonsensical idea. Or so I assume.
Compared to Europeans, we Americans prefer the speed and efficiency of driving everywhere to walking anywhere. Maybe the difference in mobility accounts for the differences between American and European wealth—with even the richest Europeans having significantly lower average incomes than Americans. Our commerce moves faster, meaning that our economy moves faster. That movement grows the economy.
This is not to advocate for one society over another, per se. Since we are built for walking, it does seem that walking does us good all around. It isn’t taken seriously as exercise because it lacks the clear benefits of cardio workouts. It doesn’t involve strenuous exercise of the sort that helps build muscle. Yet it is known to enhance your mood. Going outside for a walk can clear the mind. Or, in today’s world, it gives you the chance to listen to music or audiobooks over wireless headphones.
Walking might be more popular in America if Americans thought it served a purpose, but most consider it either a time-consuming inconvenience, or something that you drive to in order to engage in it as a focused leisure-time activity. It isn’t considered a means to an end of getting things done. Maybe it’s a cultural difference that is a side-effect of our wealth. Once you give up walking for personal motorized transit, you never look back.
Taking a horse to get from one side of a pasture to the other isn't nonsensical at all. Going to the trouble of tacking one up to do that would be nonsensical, unless it was one hell of a big pasture.
All you need is the ability to grab a handful of mane to heave yourself up onto the horse's back trick-rider-style from the ground, and a horse that will stand for you while you do that as it has something in mind other than carrying your backside anywhere. Once this is accomplished, just grab a couple of hands full of ears, point its nose the way you want to go and say git!!
Fair warning: results may vary.
It's helpful if you have one of those horses that thinks the grass is always greener on the other side of the pasture. Both of ours do. But that side always seems to be the side where they are, and we aren't for some reason.
Sudden Russian death syndrome update!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-deputy-minister-pyotr-kucherenko-dies-after-slamming-fascist-invasion-of-ukraine?ref=home?ref=home