Walking

The younger you are, the more the surrounding landscape influences you.

When I was grown but still young, I lived in Pocatello, where I invented the "four park challenge." I tried to make this a well-known observance among humanity, but only a handful ever knew of it, only a few ever did it, and only I really appreciated its great value. I am being and will be overdramatic about it now, and I was back then, at once self-aware and bemused but dead serious about it. To fulfill the four-park challenge, you must start after dusk at your own doorstep and walk to four different parks before walking home. Simple, but sublime in a quiet town like Pocatello when you're 23 years old and full of romance and loneliness and bemused self-consciousness and studying broadly everything in the world as an undergraduate.

When you get to the second or third park, it is best to lay on your back on the cool grass and feel the breeze and listen to a dog barking or a screen door opening and shutting somewhere. You don't think about the reason; you think about yourself. You imagine yourself as the subject of a coming-of-age novel or an interesting movie. You listen to the trains downtown and the trucks on the interstate on the eastern hill. You watch out for cops a little bit because the sign says you are beyond park hours. You daydream about what would happen if a cop did come to find you laying in the grass under a Juniper tree.

If you are with a girl, you try to make her happy by talking about interesting things. (If I would have ever had the right girl with me, I would have tried to memorize a certain Emerson quote or a Whitman poem. That's the kind of romantic, self-absorbed undergrad I was.) You stretch your arms and legs out, like the valley and the town that you are traveling tonight stretches around you.

I do not now have the luxury of regularly observing the four-park challenge, although Boise would be a fine place for it. When my daughter is old enough to enjoy walking several miles and hours beyond her bedtime, I will teach it to her.