Notes from a Year of Walking

I. The First Week

He started on the second Monday of January, in twelve-degree weather, because nothing about the decision was romantic. The coffee maker was broken. The couch had a stain on it from a glass of red wine knocked over in November and never properly addressed. The apartment, in short, had stopped offering me anything I wanted to sit inside of at six in the morning.

So I put on a wool hat, two pairs of socks, and the kind of insulated boots a person buys for shoveling and then forgets about until a hip starts to hurt. I went out the door. I walked east on Burlington Street toward the river, crossed at the pedestrian bridge below the Iowa Memorial Union, turned south along the path, and walked until my watch said two and a half miles. Then I turned around.

The first week, my face hurt. My ears hurt. The skin on the knuckles of my right hand cracked along the line where I gripped a thermos I had filled with the worst coffee of my life, brewed in a saucepan because I refused to buy a new machine until I understood whether I was actually going to keep doing this. I want to be honest about something.

The thing is, I did not begin this experiment because I had read a book or listened to a podcast or fallen in with any particular school of thought about ambulation, longevity, or the male body at fifty-three. I began it because I had been writing badly for about a year and I suspected, without being able to prove, that the writing was bad because I was no longer in contact with anything except my own apartment and the screens inside it. A man who sees only the inside of his own thinking tends to write sentences that sound like the inside of his own thinking. Which is to say, decorated, defensive, and overlong.

The first observation I wrote in the notebook, after that first walk, was this: salt truck, idle, in front of the Burge dorms, driver eating a sandwich from foil. Nothing more. I went home, sat down at the kitchen table, and worked for three hours on a piece about a closed brake-shoe plant in Belvidere. The work was no better than it had been the day before.

But I had seen the salt truck. I had something the day before had not given me. ## II. What I Thought It Would Be

On the morning I started, what I expected was a long, slow conversion narrative. I expected to lose fifteen pounds, sleep deeply, become evangelical about cold air, and write something worth keeping by April. I expected to feel, after a month or so, that I had unlocked some quietly available human technology that everyone else had forgotten about. None of that is what happened.

Or, more accurately, some of it happened in the wrong order, and the parts I thought would matter mattered less than parts I did not anticipate at all. I lost about nine pounds, but not until summer, and only because I had also stopped drinking beer on weekday evenings. The sleep got better in March and worse again in October when my downstairs neighbor began running a small online business that involved a printer he turned on at four-thirty in the morning. The evangelism never came.

To put it less politely, I have read enough lifestyle prose in my working life to know what it sounds like, and I did not want to add to it. What I did not expect was that the walking would change my relationship to the town I live in. I had lived in Iowa City for almost ten years when I started. I thought I knew it.

I had a barber and a hardware store and a route to the post office. I knew which stoplight on Gilbert was timed wrong. I knew the names of two of the women who worked the counter at the bakery on Market. But knowing a town from a car, or from a desk a block off the river, is not the same as knowing it from a five-mile loop walked at roughly the same hour every morning for three hundred and sixty-five mornings.

The difference is not subtle. It is the difference between a photograph and a film, except both the photograph and the film are of your own life. ## III. The Loop

Here is the route, since this essay will keep returning to it and I should be honest about the geography. I leave the building at Linn and Bloomington. I walk south on Linn to Market, west on Market past the bakery, south on Gilbert to Burlington, east on Burlington to the river. I cross at the pedestrian bridge.

I walk south along the east bank to the railroad bridge, cross back on the railroad bridge’s pedestrian walkway, and come up the west bank to the bridge I started on. Then I reverse the first leg and come home. It is, depending on how I measure, between 4.8 and 5.2 miles. It takes me about an hour and twenty minutes when I am not stopping.

It takes longer when I am, which is most days. Two things about this loop are worth saying. The first is that it is not a beautiful walk. The Iowa River, in the stretch I cross, is not picturesque in the way that midwestern rivers can sometimes be when the sun is low.

It is mostly a working river, channeled, with concrete banks in places, and the path along it passes a parking ramp, a power plant, several utility buildings, and a long stretch of dormitory backsides. There are trees, and there are stretches where the water and the bank do a passable imitation of pastoral. But mostly the walk is a walk through a small midwestern university town’s plumbing. The second thing is that the loop changes very little.

The same buildings are there every morning. The same signage. The same crosswalk buttons that do not actually do anything but that everyone presses anyway. What changes is the light, the weather, the people, and what I notice.

Which turns out to be most of what there is. ## IV. February: Learning to See Again

By February I had begun to understand that I had been looking at my own town for nine years without seeing very much of it. I do not mean this as a confession of failure. I mean it as a description of how a working adult lives in a place. You move through your town with errands in mind.

You drive to the grocery store, glancing at three intersections. You walk to a restaurant, registering the sidewalk only as a surface that needs to be navigated. The town becomes a set of routes connecting nodes of purpose. The space between the nodes goes dark.

What walking does, and what nothing else I have tried does in quite the same way, is light up the space between the nodes. Five miles is too long to spend thinking about anything productively. The mind, after about forty minutes, runs out of grievance, plan, and rehearsed argument, and it begins, almost against its will, to look at things. In February I noticed, for the first time, that the older brick building on Linn just south of Market has a date stone reading 1894 and a name I cannot now reproduce because I never wrote it down.

I noticed that the third house from the corner on Bloomington had a porch light that was on every morning I walked past it, regardless of season, regardless of whether anyone was home, regardless of dawn. I noticed that the man who walked an enormous and incredibly slow basset hound on the river path at six-twenty wore the same pair of running shoes for the entire month of February, and that the shoes were not in any sense running shoes, and that the dog, on cold days, would stop walking entirely and have to be lifted bodily up the embankment to the path. These are not, I admit, observations of any consequence. But the part that catches me, when I look back at the notebooks from that month, is how much of what I now think of as my mental picture of this town was acquired in those eight weeks.

The town I lived in for nine years and the town I started living in that February are, in some way that is hard to articulate, two different towns. The second one has more in it. ## V. The Notebook

I had carried a notebook for most of my working life. Six years at the Rockford Register Star will do that to a person. You learn to write down what people say while pretending you are not. You learn to keep the pen low and the page small.

You learn that a quote you trust to memory will betray you by six o’clock and you will spend the evening trying to reconstruct it from the shape of the sentence. But the notebook I started carrying in January was different. It was a smaller one, a Field Notes, the kind you can buy at the hardware store now, and I kept it in the inside pocket of my coat where I could reach it without taking my glove off entirely. I had decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that I would write down anything I noticed that I would not have noticed from my couch.

This is a rule with hidden teeth. You think, at first, that it will catch big things. The sunrise over the river. The light on a brick wall.

In practice, almost nothing big qualifies, because almost nothing big is specific to walking. The sunrise can be seen from a window. The light on the wall is on the wall whether you walked past it or not. What the rule actually catches is the small, useless stuff.

The salt truck and the foil sandwich. The torn poster for a band that played the Mill in 2019 and is somehow still partially adhered to a utility box on Burlington. The fact that the woman who runs the bakery comes out at six-fifteen, every morning, to put down a saucer of milk for a cat that I have never actually seen drink from it. The smell, distinct and unmistakable, of the cardboard recycling truck on Wednesday mornings.

By March I had filled the first notebook. By June I had filled three more. By December the stack of them was something I had to think about where to put. I have not gone back through them in any systematic way.

I will, eventually. But the notebooks were never the point. The point was that the act of writing things down made me see them. A man with a pen in his hand looks at the world differently than a man with his hands in his pockets.

This is one of the few things I have learned in twenty-five years of doing this work that I am willing to state without qualification. ## VI. What Happened to the Writing

I should address, since I started this experiment in part to fix my writing, what happened to my writing. It got better. But not in the way I expected. I had expected, vaguely, that the walks would give me something to write about.

That I would come home flushed with observation and produce small, jeweled essays about a torn poster or a basset hound. I tried that, in February and March. The pieces were terrible. They had the quality of someone trying to make a meal from a single ingredient because he was proud of having grown it.

The basset hound did not need an essay. The basset hound was a basset hound. What actually changed was the prose I wrote about other things. I was working, that spring, on a long piece about the closure of a small foundry in Indiana, one of the last gray-iron places that still cast custom parts for old industrial equipment.

It was the kind of piece I had written ten or twelve times in my career, and I knew the moves: the interview with the owner, the description of the shop floor, the broader context about the trade, the closing image of the locked door. The piece I wrote that April was, I think, the best one of those I have done. Not because the foundry was more interesting than the others. It wasn’t.

It was because, somewhere in the middle of writing it, I noticed I had stopped reaching for abstractions to make the sentences feel important. I was reaching for the things in the shop. The grit on the rim of a coffee cup. The particular black of the sand in the molding station.

The way the owner’s left hand, which had lost the tip of the ring finger to a press in 1987, sat on the table during our conversation in a position that was not quite comfortable. I had been, before the walks, a writer who reached for a noun when a noun would do. I now believed I had been overrating my own performance. The walks had made me hungrier for specifics.

Five miles of looking at brick and sidewalk and bare tree and water surface had retrained the appetite. When I sat down to write, I wanted things. And when I wanted things, the writing got better. What I keep coming back to is that nobody told me this.

I had been a working writer for a quarter century. I had read essays on craft. I had taught a workshop, once, for a summer at a small college in Ohio that does not need to be named. Nobody had ever said: if your prose is decorative, your eye is starved.

Walk for an hour. Eat with your eyes. The prose will follow. I am not saying this is the only mechanism by which prose improves.

I am saying it was the one I had been missing. ## VII. The Question of Coffee

I should say something about the coffee, since it was nominally the thing I gave up. I did not give up coffee. I gave up coffee on the couch. The distinction matters.

Coffee on the couch, for me, had become a way of starting the day without actually starting it. I would sit, I would scroll, I would drink, I would refill, and at some point an hour and a half later I would find myself in the same position I had begun in, having read several articles I would not remember by lunch and having entered the workday with an irritability I could not source. When I started walking, I moved the coffee to after the walk. I would come home around seven-thirty, take off the boots and the coat, brew a pot the right way, and sit down at the kitchen table with the notebook open.

I would copy out, in slightly longer form, the notes I had taken on the walk. I would drink the coffee. This sounds like a small change. It is not.

The coffee, taken after exertion, in a room I had earned my way back into, tasted different. I do not mean this metaphorically. I mean that the taste was different. The first cup was the best one of the day, and the second cup, taken about forty minutes later, was the last one.

I had been drinking, by my own estimate, between five and seven cups a day before the walks. I was now drinking two. The headache that the reduction should have produced never showed up. I assume the walks displaced it.

Whatever low-grade chemical signal my body had been sending to demand the third and fourth cups was being answered, apparently, by an hour and a half of cold air and footfall. This is the kind of detail that the wellness industry would like to package. I would prefer not to package it. I will say only that the coffee was better when I drank less of it, and that the change required no willpower whatever, which is the only kind of behavior change I have ever found to be durable.

VIII. The People on the Path

The river path, at six in the morning, has a population. I came to know it, the way you come to know the regulars at a diner you eat breakfast at three times a week. There was the man with the basset hound, whom I have already mentioned, and who I eventually learned was named Walter. Walter, not the dog.

The dog’s name I never got. Walter walked the dog every morning at the same time for the first nine months I was walking, and then in October he stopped, and I did not see him again until late December, when he reappeared without the dog and with a different coat. I did not ask. There are some things you do not ask a man you have been nodding to for a year.

There was the woman who ran. She ran the path in the opposite direction from my walk, which meant we passed each other twice in a loop, at predictable points: once near the railroad bridge, once near the pedestrian bridge. She wore reflective gear in winter and almost nothing in summer and she ran at a pace that did not change between seasons. She never looked at me.

I never looked at her, after the first month, because it had become clear that looking was not part of the arrangement. We were two solid objects passing in space, and the politeness of strangers in a small town consists, partly, in respecting the privacy of other people’s routines. There was the older couple who walked together holding hands. They walked slowly, and they talked the whole time, and I could never catch what they were saying.

I tried, once, on a cold morning in March when there was almost no other sound on the path, and I picked up only the word “Sheila” and what I think was the phrase “again with the carpet.” I never tried again. Whatever they were talking about, on a riverbank at six in the morning in March in Iowa, holding hands at seventy, was not for me. There were the runners in groups, who I did not learn to distinguish from one another. There were the students, occasionally, going home from somewhere, in clothes that did not match the weather.

There was a man who fished, who I will return to, because he matters. What I want to say about these people is something I do not know how to say without sounding sentimental. So I will try to say it plainly. I came to feel, by about June, that I was part of a community of people who had agreed, without ever saying anything, to share a piece of land at a particular hour.

We did not know each other. We owed each other nothing. We were not friends. But we recognized each other, and we adjusted our paths slightly when we passed, and on the rare mornings when one of us was missing, the others noticed.

This is, I think, what a town actually is. Not the festivals and the slogans and the chamber of commerce brochures. The people who pass each other at six in the morning and nod. ## IX.

The Man Who Fished

He fished from a folding camp chair on the east bank, about thirty yards north of the railroad bridge. I first noticed him in April, when the weather had warmed enough that fishing was plausible, and I saw him every morning, weather permitting, until late October. He was older than I am. I would guess seventy-five.

He wore a brown canvas coat in cool weather and a short-sleeved shirt in warm weather and the same khaki hat throughout. He used a spinning rod with a green handle. He had a small white bucket beside the chair, and a thermos, and a tackle box that was held shut with a strip of electrical tape. I never saw him catch a fish.

I want to be careful here. I am sure he caught fish. He fished every morning for six months. The Iowa River is not a dead river.

But in the roughly hundred and fifty mornings on which I passed him, I never observed a catch. He sat. He occasionally reeled in slowly. He occasionally cast.

He looked at the water. He looked at the bridge. He looked, sometimes, at me, and nodded, and I nodded back, and that was the entirety of our acquaintance. For a long time I thought about him as a kind of figure.

The man who fishes and does not catch. The patience figure. The figure of the river. I considered writing about him in those terms.

I rejected the consideration, because to write about him in those terms would be to use him for something he had not consented to be used for, and because the actual man, in the actual chair, was not a figure. He was a retired man who liked to fish. But here is the thing I want to record, because it is the kind of thing I would not have known without a year of walking past him. In late September, on a morning that was unusually cold for that time of year, I came around the bend by the railroad bridge and the chair was set up but the man was not in it.

The rod was leaned against the chair. The bucket was beside it. The thermos was on the ground, capped. There was no fisherman.

I slowed down. I looked at the chair for what was probably twenty seconds. Then I saw him, about fifteen yards downstream, standing very still at the water’s edge, looking at something I could not see. He was not fishing.

He was looking. Whatever he was looking at, he looked at it for the entire time I was on that stretch of path, and probably for some time after, because when I crossed the railroad bridge and looked back, he was still there. I have thought about that morning, off and on, for several months now. I do not know what he was looking at.

A bird, possibly. A piece of debris. The light on the water. I do not think it matters, particularly.

What matters, to me, is that a man who I had categorized as a fisherman turned out, when no one was watching closely, to be a man who fished partly as a pretext for standing by the water and looking at things. The fishing was the alibi. The looking was the activity. I recognize the version of him in myself.

The walking is the alibi. The looking is the activity. I do not know if he knew this about himself. I doubt he would have said so if he did.

X. What the Body Did

I am supposed to say something, in an essay about walking, about what the body did. I will try to be brief, because the body’s report on a year of walking is less interesting than the mind’s, and because I have read enough of the other kind of essay to know that the genre is overpopulated. The body did this. The hips, which had been complaining for about a year, stopped complaining by April.

The left knee, which had been complaining for about three years, complained more in February and then stopped complaining by May and has not complained since. The lower back, which had been the chronic site of complaint for the past decade, continues to complain, but less, and at later hours of the day. The feet developed a callus on each heel that I find faintly comical and that my podiatrist, when I mentioned them in November, declared to be entirely normal. The weight loss I mentioned.

The sleep improvement I mentioned. The blood pressure, which I had not been monitoring closely, dropped from a number that had been concerning my doctor for several years to a number that did not concern him, which he attributed to the walking and to which I had no contrary explanation to offer. The thing I did not expect was the appetite. I had assumed that walking five miles in the morning would make me hungrier, and that I would have to manage that, and that this would be an inconvenience.

What actually happened was that my appetite became more orderly. I ate more breakfast and less of everything else. I stopped snacking after about three in the afternoon, not because I had decided to, but because I had stopped feeling like it. The relationship between exertion and hunger turned out to be, for me, more complicated than the simple addition I had expected.

The body, given a coherent morning, asked for coherent food. I do not know if any of this is generalizable. I suspect it is, in the way that most physical-activity findings are. I am a sample of one.

But I am a sample of one whose body, at fifty-three, told him repeatedly through the year that he should have started this earlier. ## XI. May: A Hard Morning

I want to record, because the essay so far has been mostly about gains, a morning in May that did not go well. It was a Thursday. The weather was fine. I had slept badly, for reasons I no longer remember.

I went out at the usual time, walked the usual route, and somewhere on the east bank of the river, about a mile into the walk, I began to cry. I cannot tell you why. There was no proximate cause. There was nothing I had been working through.

I had not been recently bereaved. The crying was not the cathartic kind that resolves something. It was the leaky kind that happens when a body that has been running a system at higher pressure than it can sustain decides, without consulting anyone, to vent. I kept walking.

I did not stop. I crossed the railroad bridge and came up the west bank and came home and washed my face and made coffee and sat down at the table and worked. The crying, when I tried to examine it later, did not produce any insight. It had not been about anything.

It had been a leak. What I noticed, after that morning, was that the walks had become the place where the body did its undisclosed work. I had been operating, for years probably, on the assumption that my body and my mind were running roughly the same accounts. The walk, on that May morning, was the first piece of evidence I had that the accounts were not in fact reconciled.

There were debits on the body’s side that the mind had never seen. I am not making a large claim here. I am not saying that walking gives you access to your unconscious or any other formulation of that kind, which I would not use anyway. I am saying that an hour and twenty minutes alone, with nothing to do but move, will occasionally cause your body to do something your mind has no explanation for.

And that this is, I think, a feature rather than a bug. A life in which the body never gets to vent is a life in which the venting happens elsewhere, in worse forms. ## XII. The Argument Against

I should put the other side of this on the page, because I have been one-sided so far, and because the people I trust most as readers are the ones who notice when an essay is doing all its work in one direction. Here is the argument against what I have been doing. It is self-indulgent. A man who has the time and the body to walk five miles a morning is a man who has resources that most people do not have.

I am self-employed. I set my own hours. I do not have small children. I do not work a shift.

I do not have a forty-five-minute commute. I am able-bodied. The walk, for me, is a discretionary practice subsidized by every privilege of my situation, and the essay I am writing about it is, in some sense, an essay about privilege described as discipline. I accept this.

I will not pretend the walk would have been available to me at thirty-two, when I was working sixty-hour weeks at the paper and had a baby in the house. It was not available to me then. It is available to me now. The honest thing to say is that I am writing from a stage of life in which certain options have opened up, and that the practice I am describing is not a moral achievement but a use of available time.

The other argument against is more pointed. The walk is, on some readings, an avoidance. It is a way of spending ninety minutes a day in a state where no one can reach you, where no one can ask anything of you, where the only thing you have to do is keep moving. It is, in this reading, a daily withdrawal from the obligations of being a person who is in contact with other people.

I think there is something to this, and I want to be careful about it. There were mornings, especially in the fall, when I noticed that I was looking forward to the walk in a way that felt less like anticipation and more like flight. The walk was the part of the day in which I would not have to deal with anyone, including the people I love. I do not want to make too much of this.

Most adult life requires daily structures of relief, and a five-mile walk is, as relief goes, more wholesome than most. But I do not want to write an essay that pretends the walk is purely a practice of attention. Some of it, for me, is a practice of absence. I leave for ninety minutes.

I am not available for ninety minutes. That is part of why it works. The honest accounting, I think, is that any daily practice of solitude has costs that fall on other people, and the costs in my case fall mostly on my partner, who has been, this entire year, more patient with my reorganization of the morning than I have been entitled to expect. She gets up after I do.

She has her coffee in the kitchen I have left clean. She does not say much about it, but she has noticed, and what she has noticed is something I should pay attention to, and have not always. ## XIII. June: The Light

In June, the walk became, for the first time, easy. The cold was gone. The light at six was full. The path, by then, was crowded enough that I had to share it but not so crowded that I felt unwelcome on it.

I record this because I want to be honest about the fact that the practice was not uniformly difficult. The story of a year of walking is not the story of a year of grim discipline rewarded by transformation. It is also, in places, the story of a year in which the practice became one of the things I most looked forward to, and in which the looking-forward-to was itself one of the gains. In June I learned the names of three plants I had been seeing for nine years and not registering.

I learned them by photographing the leaves with my phone and identifying them later with an app whose name I will not bother to record because by the time anyone reads this it will be a different app. The plants were prairie dock, compass plant, and culver’s root. They grow in a small restored patch on the west bank, just south of where the path bends away from the river. I had walked past them every morning for five months without noticing they were not weeds.

I would not have been able to tell you, before that, that I was the kind of person who did not know native prairie plants when he saw them. I would have said I was someone who knew his region. The walk taught me, repeatedly, that I had been overestimating what I knew. The town, the river, the plants, the people.

I had been, in the term my grandfather used to use for people who lived in a place without paying attention to it, a tenant. The walk made me, slowly and unevenly, less of a tenant. ## XIV. The Question of Phones

I made a decision early on, and I want to record it because it is the kind of decision that gets glossed over in essays of this kind. I walked without headphones. I walked with my phone in my pocket, off, but available in case of emergency. I did not listen to podcasts.

I did not listen to music. I did not listen to audiobooks. I did not return calls. I did not look at the screen.

This was not because I have a principled objection to any of those things. I listen to podcasts in the car. I listen to music when I cook. I am not in the camp of people who think that the phone is the source of all modern decline.

I think it is a tool, and like most tools, it works better when you use it on purpose. But the walk, for me, would not have done what it did if I had spent it listening to other people talk. The walk worked because nothing was being piped in. The signal was the river, the air, the path, the people, the buildings, the plants, the weather.

If I had been piping in a five-hour podcast about the history of the Roman Republic, which I would have enjoyed, the signal would have been the podcast, and the river would have been a backdrop, and the looking would not have happened. I am aware that this is the kind of statement that becomes, in the wrong hands, a prescription. I do not want to prescribe. I want to record.

The walks worked, for me, without input. They might have worked differently for someone else with input. I am not the person who can say. ## XV.

The Sentence That Costs Something

I have a rule about writing that I formed about ten years into the work and have not seen any reason to revise. A sentence should cost the writer something. Otherwise it is decoration. What I mean by cost is this: the sentence should require the writer to put down, in language, something he would prefer not to.

Something that was hard to see, hard to admit, or hard to hold still long enough to phrase. Sentences that come easily, in my experience, are almost always sentences that have been written before, by someone else, and that the writer is simply rehearsing. A sentence that costs the writer something is a sentence that did not exist until he wrote it, because nobody else had occasion to see precisely the thing he is describing. I bring this up because the walks, over the course of the year, made it easier to write sentences that cost me something.

I had not expected this. I would have predicted, if asked in advance, that the walks would generate raw material, which I would then process into sentences by the usual means. What actually happened was that the walks changed the means. Specifically, I think, they slowed me down.

A year of walking makes you a slower person. Not physically — I walk at roughly the same pace I started with — but mentally. The cadence at which you process information adjusts to the cadence at which you can absorb it on foot, and that cadence is much slower than the cadence at which information arrives on a screen. After a few months, I noticed that I was sitting longer at the table, looking at a sentence longer, before deciding what to do with it.

I was also more willing to throw it out. The sentences that cost me something, by the end of the year, were coming more often. Not because I had become a better writer in any general sense. I do not think I had.

But I had become a writer who was willing to wait. The patience came, I am quite sure, from the path. ## XVI. August: Heat

August in Iowa is its own argument. The walks, in August, were not pleasant in the way that the walks in June had been. They were humid, and bright, and full of insects, and by mile three the sweat had soaked through the back of the shirt I was wearing in a pattern shaped like a continent I could not name. I almost stopped.

I want to record this, because the essay would be dishonest if I pretended there was no point in the year at which the practice felt like a thing I was about to abandon. What kept me walking in August was not discipline. I do not believe in discipline as an explanation for anything, mostly because the people I have known who have done difficult things over long periods do not describe themselves as disciplined. They describe themselves as people who, having done a thing for long enough, no longer find it possible to stop doing it.

The doing is no longer a choice. It is part of the shape of the day, and removing it would require more effort than continuing. That is what kept me walking in August. The walk was, by August, no longer a practice I was sustaining.

It was a thing my mornings did. If I had skipped a morning, the day would have felt malformed. The fact that the walk was uncomfortable, in August, was a feature of the walk, not a reason to stop. I had walked in cold.

I would walk in heat. The point was not the comfort. The point, by August, was not even the looking. The point was that I had become someone who walked in the morning, and the morning, accordingly, was someone who walked.

I want to say one more thing about August. It was during August that I had, for the first time, the experience of not noticing the walk while doing it. I would arrive home and realize I had no notes. The walk had occurred, the body had moved through it, but the mind had been elsewhere — probably working through the structure of a piece I was writing about a meatpacking plant in Storm Lake, possibly just woolgathering.

This bothered me, the first time it happened. I felt that I had wasted the walk. I no longer think that. A walk during which you fail to notice the walk is still a walk, and the body still got it, and the unconscious did whatever it was going to do with the time, and the writing on the meatpacking piece, that afternoon, was better than it had been the day before.

The walk does not have to be observed to work. This was, I think, the lesson of August. ## XVII. The Town in Winter Again

In November the cold came back. By the second week of December the path was icy in patches and I had switched to a pair of microspikes that strapped over the boots. The light was different again — flat, gray, low, the kind of light that does not get out of bed properly until ten. I was, by then, walking in something close to full dark for the first half of the loop.

The people on the path had thinned out. The runner was still there, in more reflective gear. The basset hound was gone, and so, intermittently, was Walter. The fisherman was gone for the season.

The couple who held hands were sometimes there and sometimes not, depending on conditions. The cardboard truck still came on Wednesdays. I noticed, in early December, that I was looking at the same buildings I had been looking at in January and seeing different things in them. The brick building on Linn, the one with the 1894 date stone, had a small crack in the parapet I had never registered, and now could not stop noticing.

The house with the perpetual porch light had its porch light replaced sometime in October, and the new light was a slightly different color, more blue. The bakery had repainted its trim. This is the gift, I think, of staying. The same loop, walked for long enough, becomes a record of small changes that no one else has bothered to record.

I am not the historian of my block. I am not even the historian of my own attention. But I am, by virtue of a year of walking, the only person I know of who can tell you that the porch light on the third house from the corner of Bloomington and Linn was replaced sometime in October of last year and is now slightly bluer than it was. This is not knowledge that anyone needs.

But it is knowledge that exists, and that did not exist before I walked the loop enough times to acquire it. ## XVIII. What I Would Tell Someone Who Asked

I would tell them this. Do not begin with intentions. Begin with a route. Walk it the first morning in whatever you have.

Do not buy gear. Do not download anything. Carry a small notebook, or do not, depending on your relationship to writing things down. Do the same route the second morning.

Do not try to do five miles immediately. Do whatever you do, and then do a little more the next week, and a little more the week after. Do not bring music. If you cannot stand silence, bring music for one week, and then try a week without, and decide.

Do not bring company unless you genuinely walk well with that company, which most of us do not. Do not turn it into a fitness practice. The fitness will happen on its own and is not the point. Notice what you notice.

Do not try to notice more. The noticing will expand on its own, the way a muscle expands when you ask it to do small things repeatedly. Do not write essays about what you notice for at least six months. The early notice is mostly noise.

The late notice is the part that has the signal. Expect the walk to fail for stretches. Expect to hate it in August. Expect to skip a day here and there.

Do not catastrophize the skipping. The walk is not a streak. The walk is a relationship with a piece of ground. Expect the relationship to change you in ways you did not request and would not have endorsed in advance.

You may, for example, find yourself caring less about things you used to care about. You may find yourself caring more about things you would have considered, before, beneath your attention — a porch light, a torn poster, the color of the sand in a foundry’s molding station. You may find that your prose gets slower and more particular. You may find that your relationships at home require a small but real renegotiation, because you are now a person who is gone for ninety minutes in the morning, and that ninety minutes has to come from somewhere.

You may find that the coffee, when you finally drink it, tastes different. That last one is the part I have been least able to explain and least willing to give up. The coffee at the kitchen table at seven-thirty, after the walk, with the notebook open and the boots steaming by the radiator, is the best part of the day. I do not know why.

I have stopped trying to know. ## XIX. The Necessary Observation

On the three-hundred-and-sixty-fifth morning, I walked the loop the way I had walked it on the first. I did not plan a ceremony. I went out at the usual time. The temperature was nineteen degrees.

There was no wind. The river had ice along the banks but was running clear in the middle. The path was salted but not slick. I wore the boots and the wool hat and the same coat I had started with, which was now in worse shape but still functional.

At the bend by the railroad bridge, where the fisherman had sat from April through October, the chair was not there, of course. It had not been there for two months. I had stopped looking for it. But on that morning, for whatever reason, I looked.

The chair was not there. The bucket was not there. The rod was not there. The bank was bare, and the water moved past it the way water moves past a bank in January, which is to say steadily and without comment.

I stood there for what was probably ten seconds. Then I kept walking.