FullReads

If, however, your truantry is domestic, and the scope of the seven seas with glimpse of Bagdad is too broad for your desire, then your yearning may direct itself to the spaces just outside your own town. If such myopic truantry is in you, there is much to be said for going afoot. In these days when motors are as plentiful as mortgages this may appear but discontented destitution, the cry of sour grapes. And yet much of the adventuring of life has been gained afoot. But walking now has fallen on evil days. It needs but an enlistment of words to show its decadence. Tramp is such a word. Time was when it signified a straight back and muscular calves and an appetite, and at nightfall, maybe, pleasant gossip at the hearth on the affairs of distant villages. There was rhythm in the sound. But now it means a loafer, a shuffler, a wilted rascal. It is patched, dingy, out-at-elbows. Take the word vagabond! It ought to be of innocent repute, for it is built solely from stuff that means to wander, and wandering since the days of Moses has been practiced by the most respectable persons. Yet Noah Webster, a most disinterested old gentleman, makes it clear that a vagabond is a vicious scamp who deserves no better than the lockup. Doubtless Webster, if at home, would loose his dog did such a one appear. A wayfarer, also, in former times was but a goer of ways, a man afoot, whether on pilgrimage or itinerant with his wares and cart and bell. Does the word not recall the poetry of the older road, the jogging horse, the bush of the tavern, the crowd about the peddler’s pack, the musician piping to the open window, or the shrine in the hollow? Or maybe it summons to you a decked and painted Cambyses bellowing his wrath to an inn-yard.

One would think that the inventor of these scandals was a crutched and limping fellow, who being himself stunted and dwarfed below the waist was trying to sneer into disuse all walking the world over, or one who was paunched by fat living beyond carrying power, larding the lean earth, fearing lest he sweat himself to death, some Falstaff who unbuttons him after supper and sleeps on benches after noon. Rather these words should connote the strong, the self-reliant, the youthful. He is a tramp, we should say, who relies most on his own legs and resources, who least cushions himself daintily against jar in his neighbor’s tonneau, whose eye shines out seldomest from the curb for a lift. The wayfarer must go forth in the open air. He must seek hilltop and wind. He must gather the dust of counties. His prospects must be of broad fields and the smoking chimneys of supper.

But the goer afoot must not be conceived as primarily an engine of muscle. He is the best walker who keeps most widely awake in his five senses. Some men might as well walk through a railway tunnel. They are so concerned with the getting there that a black night hangs over them. They plunge forward with their heads down as though they came of an antique race of road builders. Should there be mileposts they are busied with them only, and they will draw dials from their pokes to time themselves. I fell into this iniquity on a walk in Wales from Bala to Dolgelley. Although I set out leisurely enough, with an eye for the lake and hills, before many hours had elapsed I had acquired the milepost habit and walked as if for a wager. I covered the last twenty miles in less than five hours, and when the brown stone village came in sight and I had thumped down the last hill and over the peaked bridge, I was a dilapidated and foot-sore vagrant and nothing more. To this day Wales for me is the land where one’s feet have the ugly habit of foregathering in the end of the shoes.