Walking

I’ve been writing about various topics in American history for these last few weeks, attempting to find in our understudied American past a reasonable path forward into our shared American future. But this week I thought I would go off in a different direction entirely.

Last week, a snowy owl appeared in Central Park. For some, this must have sounded at first like a non-event—the park, after all, is filled with birds! But the owl’s visit actually was remarkable, and in several different ways.

For one thing, the last time a snowy owl was spotted in New York City was apparently in 1890, a cool 131 years ago. (I’m speaking, of course, of living birds, not dead ones. In the latter category, there’s a stuffed snowy on display in the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West that none other than the eighteen-year-old Theodore Roosevelt shot somewhere on Long Island in 1876. Nor is that one the Museum’s only stuffed snowy—they apparently own another twenty or so, but only the one shot by a future President is on permanent display.) For another, the owl hung around just long enough for  its presence to be noted and recorded, and then promptly vanished. In our world, celebrity is considered—at least by non-celebrities—a desirable status to be sought after rather than quickly fled. And yet, unlike most of Snowy’s avian predecessors among famous New York birds (long-time celebrity red-tailed hawk Pale Male, for example, who spent decades flying around in the Park when not ensconced at home with his chicks and his impressively long succession of mates on the roof of his adopted Fifth Avenue home), Snowy Owl spent a bit of time showing her (or his) stuff, then went off to wherever it is snowy owls hang out when they’re not attracting huge crowds of well-wishers in Central Park.

But for me personally, Snowy Owl—who didn’t even hang around long enough to be named by his admirers—was a visitor from a different part of my life.

When we moved from Germany to western Canada in 1986 so that I could serve in the first of my three pulpits, we basically had no idea at all what we were getting into. I would have googled British Columbia, but Google was only founded in 1998. Nor was the early version of the Internet that sort of did exist available for use by regular people like ourselves. I did check in our local branch of the Heidelberg public library to see what I could find, but they didn’t have much of a selection of books about Canada at all, let alone specifically about Vancouver or its environs. So we were left on our own to pack up and hope for the best. Eventually, we found our way, got used to a new set of daily norms, adjusted to living in a place where most people spoke English. We moved into a house. We bought a car. And we acquired a dog, a first for me if not for Joan. (The late and much lamented Hector was still a real, if ghostly, presence in Joan’s life when we first moved to Canada. But she was ready, or ready-ish, to move on and I was certainly ready to support the idea.)

And that dog—a succession of dogs, actually—brings me to the topic of snowy owls. I grew up in Queens. Owls were not in abundance. I remember my childhood mostly fondly, but Yellowstone Blvd. was not a place of great (or any) physical beauty. But now I actually was living in a place of almost unimaginably stunning physical splendor. (Tourism B.C. doesn’t use the slogan “Super, Natural British Columbia” for no reason.) I took to walking the dog along a path that meandered along the banks of the mighty Fraser, B.C.’s longest river. And it was there, at the bottom of No. 3 Road where a half-mile or so of the dyke walk was specifically designated for off-leash dog walking, that I met my first snowy owls.

Let me draw the picture just a bit more precisely. This is young me we’re conjuring up—I was all of thirty-three years old when we moved to B.C., younger than both my sons are today—and the dogs, serially, were all black labs. So here I am walking one of the dogs along the Fraser. To my right, seals are having a grand old time frolicking in the water. Across from the water, to my left, are huge pine trees featuring gigantic bald eagles’ nests in their crests. (I was born and raised an American, but have seen our national bird living in the wild—or at least not living in a zoo—only in Canada.) And in the lower branches, apparently unconcerned by the neighbors upstairs, were—depending on the season—a few or many snowy owls looking out at the world and thinking, I always imagined, how lucky they were to be owls and not dogs, eagles, or seals. Or, for all I knew, people.

I never really understood the concept of walking before I moved to B.C.  

Last week I wrote about a speech Lincoln gave at the Springfield Lyceum in 1838. So it was only thirteen years later that Henry David Thoreau gave a speech at the Concord Lyceum in Massachusetts that he eventually delivered another ten times in different venues and which was eventually published in The Atlantic in 1862. The speech was called, simply, “Walking.”

For Thoreau, walking was not just exercise, but a kind of conscious effort to leave civilization, represented by town and house, and step into Nature itself. He writes in his essay, “I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts, or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.”

I suppose that’s clear enough. Maybe he’s being a bit harsh, but the author is just warming up. “Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind,” he goes on to observe, “will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will fall off fast enough—that the natural remedy is to be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and callus of experience.”

There was a time in my life when I would have been incapable of understanding what Thoreau was trying to say. And then I moved to Canada and began to walk the same stretch of the dyke path for thirteen consecutive years. Day in and day out. The same path. The same river. The same trees. I would once have imagined that to be the most boring assignment possible. But it turns out Thoreau was completely right. And, indeed, as I walked through the years I noticed things Queens-me and Manhattan-me would have been incapable of noticing: the way alluvial mud smells slightly different in late fall and early spring, the way the pitch of frogs’ croaking rises during the springtime mating season, the way the activity level of seals, eagles, and owls changes as the temperature rises. We had many visitors too. From time to time, a vulture or an osprey would show up. One memorable time, a walrus made a brief appearance before vanishing into the waves. It was like living in the Wild Kingdom, except that my immersion in Thoreau’s writing allowed me to picture the experience not as a TV show that I had somehow stepped into, but as a time machine that had somehow propelled me back to Old Concord and allowed me to walk along with my silent but fully present partner, a man whose orientation towards nature and its mystic dimension became mine as well.

I loved the owls most of all. I knew their reputation as the wisest of birds and they seemed that way to me too, quietly sitting on their low boughs lost in thought, observing the world, taking it all in. When we finally left Canada for California, I took one final walk on the dyke with Harry, our final B.C. dog. The seals weren’t around. The eagles were off doing whatever they did when not perched atop the evergreens along the Fraser. But the snowy owls were there, watching us silently, bidding us farewell, saying nothing. And in saying nothing also saying everything and, at that, allowing Nature—which (or do I mean whom) Thoreau qualifies as our “vast, savage, howling mother”—to wish us Godspeed and good fortune on our journey into an uncharted future.