Introduction

Dissolved by Walking

I’m on a solo walk through a part of Winnipeg where a high school friend once lived. I’m back for a few days in the city where I grew up, and now I’m doing what I often do: walking to let multiple associations rain down on me. I’m deep into my ragged and rattled memory of a place, which I like to think of as Barbara Kingsolver has described it: memory as “related to truth, but not its twin.” I’m looking for my old friend’s house and trying to recall details. It was one of the smallest on the block, I think, and stucco with painted yellow accents – what would have been called “harvest gold.” I pass the house, or think I pass it, and am turning my memory over and over like a worn sock, wondering if I can mend it, when I see a path to the river. It leads through some bushes, the grass worn down to dirt by neighbourhood kids and dogwalkers. I push past some bushes and enter a clear space with a big sign warning of the dangers of getting too close to the riverbank, which I read and then, of course, move around to get closer to the river. The Assiniboine River is big and beautiful, flowing in its muddy way. I grew up walking along this river, and going to bush parties beside it. I miss having easy river access where I live now, in Waterloo, Ontario, and I love that I found this neighbourhood spot. I bend to take a photo and then I slip in the mud behind the sign. I slide a few feet toward the riverbank but dig in before my legs go over. I’m prone and alone, with muddy knees and hands, out of view of passersby but well in view of a sign that told me explicitly not to do exactly this. I get up, crawl carefully back to safety and work on brushing the worst of the mud away.

I spend the rest of the day a bit grimy, intentionally not returning to the place I was staying for clean clothes. I wanted to live with the consequences of my actions – a small price to pay. The dirt on my jeans reminded me that to walk, especially alone, especially if you are not cis-male, abled and white, is always a risk. The territory can be as familiar as the taste of your own spit or as strange as a moonscape, but walking invites newness, which involves delight and apprehension, though not always in equal measure. Walking invites thinking differently, breathing differently; it invites the vagus nerve to work its electric magic on your nervous system.

Not too long ago, I was out walking near my place in Waterloo and heard an amazing voice belting out a run of notes. I found the singer, a young Black woman in a snug green toque and camouflage-patterned tights, striding along the park’s perimeter, just letting her voice soar. I can’t sing like that kick-ass woman who I only saw for thirty striding seconds, but she reminded me to hum as I went, and that walking makes the private public, sometimes in beautiful ways. I liked her sense of risk and her sense of place; it’s hard, some days, to access either – to love the local when the local doesn’t love you back.

The much-quoted Latin phrasesolvitur ambulando – “it is solved by walking” – always makes me a bit suspicious. Walking can give us a new perspective on what ails us, and some things can be solved by walking it out, walking it off or walking away, but it depends on the problem. Who is it who is doing the walking? Where and how? Does “walking well” necessarily in