I love walking for relaxation, certainly for exercise, maybe for time to think out a problem, or maybe just to enjoy the beauty of the passing scene, but I've never thought about it as deeply as the reviewer D.T. Max has, or certainly as much as the author Geoff Nicholson has. I enjoyed reading the review, enough so that I will look it up for more extensive reading. Read the whole review here.

If golf is a good walk spoiled, then walking is a great game made dull. How sluggish locomotion is, compared with the speed at which the mind absorbs new images and information. The brain strains at the body’s tether, seethes for new scenery, new stimulation, bridles at the slow feet below. Look at that tree with such lovely orange leaves, how pretty it is. . . . A minute later: the same tree, the same leaves, still good looking. Walking is adding with an abacus, it’s space travel on a donkey.


All the same, many people do it, and clearly Geoff Nicholson, the British author of “The Lost Art of Walking,” is among them. “I’ve strolled and wandered, pottered and tottered, dawdled and shuffled, mooched and sauntered and meandered,” he brags at the beginning of this pleasant tour of the literature and lore of ambulation. “I’ve certainly ambled and I could be said to have rambled. . . . I’ve also shambled, but I don’t think I’ve ever gamboled.”

It's getting to that time of winter where I begin to get a little antsy waiting for Spring to arrive. According to my Baseball spring training countdown widget, it is 29 days until it begins; the spring thaw has not yet arrived, in fact the worst is yet to come with Febrary being the cruelest month in our winters with March always waiting, or lurking is a better word with a surprise or two in the way of snowstorms.

So it is time for we natives of the midwest to sit back again and dream a little of our favorite summer places. For me one of those is a walking and/or biking path that runs between Mt. Vernon Ohio and Kenyon college in Gambier. The small river called Kokosing runs beside the wooded path that meanders through hillsides and over one-time railroad trestles and bridges. Deer can be seen from time to time appearing from the wooded hillside investigating we humans and then turning and scampering back into the woods. The walk is not too long, about three to four miles one way, but in the serene and peaceful surroundings in the beautiful springs we are blessed with and/or the brisk fall months it cannot be surpassed.

So for a little while longer I will think back on those times and dream of the times ahead when we can again walk and talk over our past and future. It's a wonderful setting in which to put everything into perspective or maybe nudging a little into the wishful kind of talk. But anyway my partner of these fifty-two years will be able to again walk the path, at least an abbreviated portion of it, as she has a surgically mended knee ready for a test drive on the walk.

I can't wait.

My state has some of the best walking and bike riding trails in the USA.

How many times have you heard that boast from people you meet and the conversation gets around to walking and exercise? I'm sure many times. One thing the states have done right by its citizens is converting old rail lines to walking paths while maintaining as much natural beauty as possible. MY trail runs beside a river where canoe enthusiast make their way down the river as I walk the paths. I've had deer come out of the woods beside the path and greet me warily before turning around and scampering away.

In my good days when I still had two natural hips and my bosom buddy, my wife, had two good knees, we would walk, or I should say we could, and did just once to prove we could, walk the roundtrip distance which totaled about nine miles. Those days are gone, of course, but we can still motivate at a ambling kind of pace for a couple miles on good days. But we do it now for the beauty and inner peace it brings us, not for exercise. Our state has many trails that we have yet to try out. We won't get to all of them I'm sure, but knowing they're there for us if we feel up to it brings us a measure of happiness and anticipation.

Our current favorite trail has a stopping off place at Kenyon college, where we usually call it a day, and visit a deli on campus and get a couple hot dogs and a couple cans of pop (soda) and take over a bench near middle path, under some shady trees, and watch the students go about their business and talk about the days when we were young. We never get tired of that. If our body parts have cooperated that day and we were able to walk enough of a distance to chew up some calories, we will treat ourselves to a yummy candy bar too. Ah, life is good.