A MOUNTAIN VIEW: Images on foot

By LIZA FIELD/Columnist

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

--William Wordsworth

As airports turned into confused jams of travelers last week, many flights having been canceled for airlines to allow overdue craft inspections, I happened to be reading some comments from those of an earlier world who regretted even rail travel and recommended people take their excursions by foot. What would they say, today, of our climbing fuel prices, crowded highways, airline troubles?
Thoreau notoriously preferred to walk 40 miles to a destination rather than buy a rail ticket to get him there. He figured it saved time (even the work hours required for a ticket purchase) just to set out on foot. But more importantly to Thoreau, the journey itself opened up its riches of scenery, adventure, insights and beauty, as it would not open to one inside a passenger car.
Wilkie Collins, in 1850, wrote “Rambles Beyond Railways,” insisting that the passenger life removed one from everything live and exhilarating.
“You, who in these days of vehement bustle, business and competition, can still find time to travel for pleasure alone—you, who have yet to become emancipated from the thraldom of railways....patronize, I exhort you, that first and oldest-established of all conveyances, your own legs!”
Today, compared to our complex, unwieldy transportation systems, the idea of train travel sounds archaically simple. But it’s useful to see how the first versions of mechanized “riding,” of passively “being transported” from point A to B, missing the entire life of the place between, struck those who lived through this early transition.
The Romantic writers who countered their society’s infatuation with the Industrial Age, included numerous walkers. Dorothy Wordsworth and her brother William took their frequent “rambles” across England’s Lake Country, near their home—20 and 30 miles in a day.
On April 15, 1802, Dorothy wrote in her journal of the flowers that would inspire her brother’s famous “host of golden daffodils” poem. As she kept meticulous notes of their hikes, and nobody had a camera, William would often ask his sister to read from her journals to remind him of these travels. From her following entry, he was able to evoke in his mind the memory of this particular hike:
“Under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore. I never saw daffodils so beautiful; they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones...and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.”
In the following journal entry, she wrote of another lively walk. “I was delighted with what I saw. The water under the boughs of the bare old trees, the simplicity of the mountains, and the exquisite beauty of the path. I hung over the gate and thought I could have stayed for ever.”
“There was the gentle flowing of the stream, the glittering, lively lake, green fields, behind us a flat pasture with 42 cattle feeding. To our left, the road leading to the hamlet. The sun shone on the bare roofs. The people were at work ploughing, harrowing and sowing; lasses spreading dung, a dog’s barking now and then, cocks crowing, birds twittering, the snow in patches at the top of the highest hills, purple and green twigs on the birches, the moss of the oak glossy.”
Upon returning home, she soon “found William writing a poem descriptive of the sights and sounds we saw and heard.”
It occurs to me, reading these lively excerpts and poems, that the ability to evoke a scene, a vivid moment in one’s life, seems relative to how present and alive one felt at the time. If we aren’t fully where-we-are, it’s difficult later to remember that time or place or event.
Perhaps we’re most fully where-we-are, when going “andanté,” at a walking pace, rather than zooming across the skies or highways. Even our time as “passengers” behind the window of electronic monitors, where we can download an entire day’s stream of passing impressions, will likely not lodge very long in our memory or become part of the interior landscape of a lifetime. We become spectators, not pilgrims.
And so we find another of foot-travel’s many assets. In the excerpt quoted from Wordsworth’s “daffodils” poem, above, he describes reliving this brief scene of April flowers “oft, when on my couch I lie.” He sees them with “inward eye”—these flowers long blown off their stalks and gone forever—as if they still lived.
As his friend Coleridge later wrote of this in “Biographia Literaria,” “in what words shall we describe the joy of retrospection, when the images and virtuous actions of a whole well-spent life, pass before the conscience which is indeed the inward eye?”
I don’t know “in what words we shall describe it,” for at the moment, I’m indoors, sitting stock-still at a keyboard, before a computer screen. So until this evening’s hike jostles that description free, here follows a concluding imperative from Collins, for transforming a passenger society into pilgrim souls.
“Walk, and be merry; walk, and be healthy; walk, and be your own master!--walk, to enjoy, to observe, to improve, as no riders can! Walk and you are the best peripatetic impersonation of holiday enjoyment that is to be met with on the surface of this work-a-day world!”