I’ve got the itch, and I’ve got it bad.
All my posts in recent days have pointed to it. I want to cross lots, I’m recklessly in need of a disciplined schedule, I feel smothered and suffocated by greenery. My mood since we got back from visiting family in Michigan and Ohio has pointed in one single direction: anywhere but here.
I have, you see, a serious case of the itch. Wanderlust. Itchy feet. The antsy, unsettled jitters. I thought that driving 12 hours to Michigan, 3 hours to Ohio, then 12 hours back home would alleviate some of my post-dissertation restlessness, but it hasn’t. I want to go somewhere, anywhere, and I want to go now. I don’t want to wait until I’ve caught up with this week’s backlog of course-prep (a carry-over from last week’s trip home), nor do I want to wait until the bulk of my summer teaching obligations are done in July. Right now, I want to toss on some comfy sandals, grab a lightweight bag, and start walking. Like Huck Finn, I have no desire to be “sivilized” for I’ve been there before. Instead, I want to “light out for the Territories.”
It doesn’t help, I’m sure, that this week I started teaching another semester of my famous American Literature of the Open Road class at Keene State College. Professors with chronic bouts of the itch should not be allowed to teach such courses. It’s Dangerous to have itchy professors reading and discussing texts such as Whitman’s “Song of the Open Road” and Thoreau’s “Walking.” Today for the second time this week, I led a discussion on Mary Austin’s short story “The Walking Woman“–first with my Monday night Women’s Lit class, and today with my Open Road students at Keene State–and this double-whammy has left me twiddling my toes with restlessness: the sun is shining, the air is warm, and I want to be on a path, sandal-clad, walking.
Reading “The Walking Woman” with my Women’s Lit class was particularly evocative. We read and discussed Austin’s story of a woman who “walked off all sense of society-made values” and was “healed at last by the large soundness of nature” alongside Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” about a new mother who goes crazy because her physician husband prescribes the so-called “rest cure” as treatment for her postpartum depression. The difference between the two texts is suggestive. In Gilman’s story, medical science as embodied by husbands and male doctors encloses hysterical women in domestic spaces where they become increasingly helpless, weak, and deranged. In Austin’s story, one woman uses her own two feet to escape the obligations of kitchen, bedroom, and nursery, discovering in the process both physical health and a philosophical sense of life’s meaning. In her wandering, the “Walking Woman” discovers that beyond the “looking and the seeming” of lady-like behavior, contentment is a matter of embracing the experiences of life’s journey.
With spring in the air and the albatross called “dissertation” off my back, I’m ready to wander. Several weeks ago I ran into a former student at the laundromat where he was washing (and packing) several loads of clothing before setting out on a roadtrip to Arizona; it took a conscious act of determination to stop myself from grabbing him by the shirt and shouting “Take me with you!” After spending ten years juggling diss-work with teaching, housework, and life-in-general, I don’t feel like doing nothing, exactly. Instead, I feel like going somewhere where my body as well as my mind can wander. Although sitting motionless in the sun on a beach sounds divine (La Boca del Cielo from “Y tu mama tambien,” itself a quintessential road-trip movie, immediately comes to mind), more alluring is the thought of going somewhere, anywhere, where I can walk, walk, walk until my legs can walk no more.
Last summer, the hill country north of San Francisco served this purpose. Over the course of five days in Marin County, I walked over 50 miles in day-trip long segments, walking each day until my legs ached and my sandal-clad feet were as brown as the earth. Every evening I’d return to the city to eat, shower, then sleep like a rock until morning when I’d repeat the process all over again. There’s nothing like a day’s worth of walking to tire your body and soul into deep, restful sleep; there’s nothing like a day’s worth of walking to bring you out of your academia-addled brain and back into your body, rooted to the earth down to your dust-covered toes. From now through the end of June, my teaching schedule keeps me here in Keene, so I’ll have to do my day-trips close to home. Tomorrow, though, I’m declaring a mental health day, a day to wander and roam until my feet at least are too tired to itch for the time being.
May 20, 2004 at 7:41 pm
If you walk in certain areas, you WILL feel the itch. I suggest coating yourself with “Ben’s” before your journey π
I understand the drive to explore, too. Fortunately New Hampshire offers up a grand buffet of options within a close proximity. There is always the “auto road” to the peak of Mount Washington. I guarantee you will feel the ache from that hike. And, think of the spectacular views in the process. I was just up that way, though didn’t “reach the peak” on that particular occasion.
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May 21, 2004 at 12:28 am
This entry struck a couple chords with me. First, though you’ve been talking about, well, tresspassing lately, I didn’t remember my own childhood lot crossings until this entry. I lived in a walled subdivision as a child that backed up to a creek, across the creek was a big swamp that you could only legally access by a mile long walk around the subdivision. One of my neighbors, though, had a bridge. My brother and I would sprint as fast as we could from the sidewalk through their yard and over that bridge into the swamp. I had forgotten about that.
Second, I’m struck by how walking is now rather impractical for me since I’m having a hard time standing up. I’ve got some sort of virus and I’m pretty much stuck in doors. Talk about cabin fever…I just want to get out! But every part of my body wants to stay in bed.
I’m writing down the things I want to do so I don’t forget about them when I can do them agian.
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May 21, 2004 at 11:50 am
Switzerland is great for walking. The whole country is shot through with “Wanderwege.” Just thought I’d stoke the wanderlust a bit more.
Kevin
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May 22, 2004 at 7:06 pm
Ron, I got the “biting bug itch” on my hike yesterday, and I’m ever on the lookout for poison ivy to avoid *that* itch (especially since I like to hike in sandals). I’m not familiar, though, with “Ben’s”: is that an insect repellent? The only Ben-like lotion I’m familiar with is the ever popular Ben-Gay, and that’s something I need to use *after* hiking, not before! π
Hank, I hope you’re feeling better! It stinks to be sick & stuck inside: I’d be tempted to find a lounge-style lawn chair to catch some zzz’s outside…
Your memories of that childhood subdivision reminds me of an essay I assign to my freshmen comp students about a gated community where everything is “perfect,” “clean,” and “safe.” The essay ends with the narrator interviewing an adolescent boy who, like you, sneaks off to find the one spot of wildness in the subdivision, a filthy sewage ditch that runs under one of the walls. Thoreau was right when he said in “Walking” that people crave Wildness and that cities will import it at any price!
Kevin, when we lived in the Cambridge Zen Center, we had friends who were visiting the States from Switzerland, so we heard all sorts of wonderful stories about their homeland. If I had the nerve to give up my settled life & hit the road, I could probably stay with them awhile, then leapfrog from Zen Center to Zen Center. In the meantime, though, I (like you) am tied to an academic schedule & other responsibilities…alas. Perhaps what I need is to hit the lottery big-time so I can travel without heed to expense! π
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