Free Range - On Being Pedestrian

I like walking aimlessly around town. It’s puzzling that such a seemingly harmless predilection should arouse feelings of guilt, but it does. After all, as bipeds we’re designed to walk. Walking is our default speed – or was until we tamed some quadrupeds and invented the wheel and SUV. To be pedestrian is also to be average and ordinary.

The guilt might arise from the New Zealand inclination to favour brisk outdoorsy forms of getting about. Thankfully we’ve never been keen on goose-stepping, but we heartily approve of hiking and tramping.

Modes of locomotion with less thrust and purpose arouse suspicion not admiration. Slow aimless walking, particularly in an urban setting, smacks of furtiveness (prowling, lurking) or indolence (dawdling, wandering). Loitering can easily turn to criminal intent. It’s a small step from lingering to malingering.

I blame my fondness for urban pedestrianism on genetics – my mother’s family tree is generations-deep in bustling urbanites busy flogging cheese and meat and fish from their market stalls in London. Transplanted from big-city London to small-town New Zealand, my maternal grandmother would “light out for the territory” on foot each day until she was well into her seventies. But unlike Huck Finn, she headed into town, not away from it. She called it ‘going for a mooch’.

Invariably she’d return with a slice of fresh ham for my grandfather’s lunch and a handful of sweets she’d stolen from the Pick’n’Mix counter at Woolworths. But she brought back other, stranger, things too. A rusted tobacco tin full of old postage stamps. Six turquoise birds’ eggs tucked into a bed of cotton wool in a shoe box. Sometimes my grandmother brought back only anecdotes, but they seemed exotic when recounted in a state house at the wrong end of town.

I learned the art of the mooch from observing her. While other kids might have been learning bush walking and bird watching, I was learning town walking and people watching.

The trick to finding urban treasure is being attentively inattentive, to expect without expectation. If this sounds like a koan, don’t forget that Buddhist practice includes walking meditation. In this meditative state you notice the presence of things and you notice the absence of things; what changes and what remains the same. You notice rhythms and patterns and inflections.

About the time I began mooching, I also began listening to a radio show called Night Beat. Each episode began with the sepulchral tones of Randy Stone, night reporter. “The city,” he’d intone, “has a thousand stories … and this is one of them”. I understood perfectly.

When I mooched with my grandmother I had exactly this sensation of discovering stories. My grandmother and I, and all the people and things we saw, were characters in stories we wrote by walking. Town was the place which contained all of us within some other larger story.

Have I persuaded you that, despite all appearances to the contrary, a stroll about town is actually a demanding feat of urban imagination? If so, you’ll forgive me if I set off now on a bit of guilt-free pedestrianism.