An albino squirrel

Why walk?

This morning I saw an albino squirrel, a homeless man surrounded by books, seven live ducklings and one dead one. Oh, and the US Capitol.

I saw all this because I was able to head out on a long dawn walk around Washington DC - always the main compensation for battling a six hour time difference that’s seeing me wake up at 3am in my hotel room.

Yesterday I wandered around a residential area off around the H Street corridor, where the state of the tiny terraced gardens in front of each town house was the guide to the wealth (or otherwise) of the residents. Every fifty yards along H Street NE the quality of the shops took a hit, with more security measures and more clouds of marijuana smoke (just after dawn). It was a step-by-step guide to how the city slewed from law-makers to the unfortunate corners with scary murder rates.

Today the focus of the walk was the Capitol, past the huffs and puffs of jogging staffers, and the slowly ambling black guys with the clothes worn to a shine and a bag or shopping trolley full of whatever they still owned. There was one immense oak tree and a confused rabbit nosing around a security barrier. The sheer bulk of American cars is shocking, especially for me living halfway up an Italian hill built for spindly Fiat Panda 4x4s. I spent a while unpicking the glorious statues on either side of the memorial to General Grant. They are extraordinary.

That’s why I walk. You see much more, the shape of a city, the life, the details. You’re in the geography, rather than zipping over it. It takes time to get from here to there, and walking is (still) the main human measurement of our movement over land. Walk and you understand scale.

And it’s not just about the sights. Because walking forces you to make your way between places, you see the in-between, you see the connective tissue. It’s like when we had to listen to an entire LP rather than just a pop star’s hits. And I mean that in a good way; if you know how to interpret those in-between spaces then it’s (nearly) all killer, no filler.

An example: when I walked those 53km across Singapore for my book on that remarkable country, I deliberately kicked it off by snaking through the south-west corner of the island. That meant industrial estates, heavy industry, oil and gas infrastructure. Long, dustry stretches dodging trucks on the verges of roads to nowhere. But if you don’t visit that grimy underbelly, you don’t understand how Singapore’s development miracle was rooted in leveraging the island’s geographical position for oil refining and manufacturing in the 70s and 80s. Look at glitzy Singapore, the shopping and the airport, the iconic chewing gum ban, and you miss all that. More than that; you miss out on the bits that are parts of the lives of the people who live and work there.

On a related subject (my ten walks that explain the Netherlands), the last time I posted I was half way through my research trip to NL, and had just ticked off two of the walks (Westland and Zeeland). By the end of the week I’d completed two others (Rotterdam and Flevoland), spent time on a fascinating dairy farm, and met up with a Dutch-Moroccan policeman. More of that all later, when I’ll continue to waffle on about how ten walks explain everything.