On Walking

     This isn't my usual sort of post--not political, not organized or angry or anything, just a scattered account of this restlessness that's gotten worse lately, and turned up in this very strange wandering session last Saturday. I haven't parsed the significance, if there is some, and I don't think myself really the type to delve into philosophical meaning, at least not right now, but I just want to record this, and maybe come back to it sometime.
     So. I'd just gotten off the train after a LGBTQ festival thing, and I was walking home when I took a detour off on a side street that ran past my first elementary school. I realized I was walking very slowly, sort of meandering, but meandering always had this light quality to it, like one was so wrapped up in the day or their thoughts that it just carried them around, buoyed them. I was wandering, which has a foggier, heavier pull to it.
     I started out singing Rise Against songs, because that's what I do when I walk, I sing--but by the time I got to the elementary school I'd moved on to Jackson Browne and Roz Brown. I walked past this little woods path that goes along an aqueduct, and I usually dislike woods and walking, but I deliberated for a few moments and then swerved to walk along the aqueduct. I'd sort of expected it to be enclosed and sheltered and quiet, a little enclave next to a school parking lot on a Saturday, but instead it edged up against people's houses, right into their backyards. I could see kids playing on a trampoline and I could hear a baseball game going on and it wasn't any kind of quiet retreat like I suppose I was looking for. I wasn't planning to sit on a log and think Deep Thoughts, per se, but I just wanted it to be quiet, to be alone.
     I walked up to a baseball diamond and felt very much like the scary punk kid who's always skulking in the background of public parks, the one the parents shield the children from. So I walked back the way I came and just kept going till I got to the library, taking all the back roads so I wouldn't have to decide whether or not to go home, since I really didn't want to go home just then but if opportunity presented I would have to choose, and I'm not so good at that.
     I got it in my mind that I needed to find this book by Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, which I'd heard of but not felt the need to read before, since walking and wandering had never been something I'd been compelled to do--I mean, I walk to school every day and I've never felt so restless, so in need of someplace to wander, and keep wandering. But the library didn't have the book, so I got out several other Rebecca Solnit books and now am plowing through them. One's called The Field Guide to Getting Lost, and I guess I was a little lost on Saturday, or trying to find a place where I could find things or figure things out, but I couldn't get lost enough maybe. (Though I did wear my combat boots to pieces walking all over my town.) I want to travel desperately, though I think I've probably romanticized it in my head and the world's nowhere safe enough for me to traipse off to all these countries I want to see without some preparation, but I could list handfuls in an instant if you asked me where I want to go--Morocco, Iran, Venezuela, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Kiribati, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Mexico... It goes on.
     I'm always threatening to go run away to Mexico or Canada or planning to drive across the country with my friends once I can drive and can get or rent a car, and now I know why, and what I want to find on that journey. I want to get lost, and I want to become found.