I don’t like to think of myself as someone who hobbles. I like to think of myself as someone who can walk endless miles — over moor and mountain — without flagging or feeling anything but exhilaration, but I tripped over the coffee table in my living room three weeks ago and broke a toe. I think I broke a toe. I broke something in my right foot, and should probably go for an X-ray but am choosing to just leave it alone to heal itself, on the principle that you “can’t do anything for a broken toe anyway.”
It was actually worse than that. It wasn’t actually a coffee table, it was the low, green-painted antique wooden trunk dating to the mid-19th century upon which I keep a Votivo candle in Red Currant scent, a vase of flowers from the yard (whatever’s in bloom, even if it’s just Buddleia, or holly in winter), and a book that makes me look like a homeowner of intellectual substance (Elaine Pagels, “The Gnostic Gospels”). And I didn’t trip over it, exactly, either. That sounds much more active than what happened. What happened was that I stood up from the couch — stone cold sober — and, while centering my gravity, sort of jammed my foot into the trunk accidentally and quite slowly. My “core” isn’t as strong as it used to be, apparently. Age humbles and humiliates us.
And so, two weekends ago when I was at my niece’s graduation from Dartmouth and we roamed in a family clan all over campus, from party to party, I was, unfortunately, the slowpoke holding up the rest of the wolfpack. And so, this week, I have been insisting my children walk Sweetpea for me.
This broken toe is my excuse for having an empty head this month, free of interesting thoughts. It’s impossible to have a new idea without walking. I believe this firmly. I’m completely convinced that neuroscience will bear me out, eventually. My theory is that it’s to do with human evolution, moving on two legs, eyes scanning the horizon for predators or prey; the brain is engaged in some way that it’s not when your gaze, like a lizard’s or even a fox’s, is directed downward to the ground or obscured by high grasses. We — I.M.H.O. — developed our unique capacity for reflection because we were a walking and nomadic species.
All of my best ideas, anyway — all of my ideas, period — stem from engaging in one of two human activities. The first is reading actual physical books that you hold in your hand and can look up from, from time to time, to stare into the near distance and ponder and reflect upon. (Audiobooks and podcasts, and all streaming, don’t allow for this reflection and therefore are the enemy of intelligence and innovation, again I.M.H.O.). The second is strolling along from here to there, with at least enough breathing room or vista around you to allow your thoughts to wander through the trees and across the meadow to the mountain.
My possibly broken toe seems to be connected to a previous injury, possibly. An old weak point. What happened, previous-injury-wise, was that I thought it would be cute to walk the full length of Long Island wearing green Wellington boots.
When I was in my early 30s, I took two weeks off from work so I could walk the Paumanok Path from Montauk Point to Rocky Point (125 miles) and then walk an interconnected series of trails and sidewalks (another 60 or 70 miles) all the way across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan. This was an ambitious plan. I was going to write a novel that followed a linear and geographic narrative rather than one based, in the usual way, on a chronological sequence of events. It would begin in the east, by the Lighthouse, with childhood and a rural landscape and progress westward toward the city, adulthood, urbanity, and confusion. I would walk the length of Long Island and compose the story on foot.
This was the late 1990s, when green Wellington boots (now so common) were an aesthetic urgency — beyond a necessity. It was the moment in fashion history when chic women, ahead of the curve, were replacing their flares with pants tight and narrow enough to be tucked into high and narrow knee boots (but before the next moment, which came just after the turn of the millennium, when we urgently needed a closetful of long tunic tops to wear over skinny jeans or leggings). And so it made sense to me to walk the woods, the dells, the garbage dumps, the highway bypasses, the beaches — in orthopedically idiotic footwear. And I kind of broke something in my right foot, just by walking too far in Wellington boots that allowed my feet to sort of swish around inside the “toe box.” I only made it to Tuckahoe before it became apparent that I had broken something in my right foot and wouldn’t make it to Manhattan.
None of this is preventing me from ordering tourist brochures from expedition outfitters and planning my next exciting trip (for some obscure date at which I will be flush with cash and fighting fit): a walking tour called “the West Highland Way” that takes the intrepid and tireless walker from Milngavie (just outside Glasgow) to Fort William in the Highlands, passing through Loch Lomond, Rannoch Moor, and Glen Coe. Realizing I was the sweating plodder — the slowcoach, as the British say — who held up the progress of our family party on grad weekend was a reality check. How have I become the slow one? The problem walker? And how does it happen that it’s my bones, of all goddamn things, that are letting me down? I keep annoyingly thinking of that chart of human progress in silhouette, from the crawler to the running man to the old figure bent over a cane. It’s later than you think.