Last fall I completed a project where I had people take me to local places that, though perhaps not special in any obvious way, carried significance for them. It was an effort to reintroduce myself to my hometown after several years away, and to share that experience with other long-term residents for whom the place may have grown a bit stale.
The initial idea was not to do places, but routes. I captured footage of our drives out to the various locations and audio of our visits, but it was for a public show and it proved difficult to condense the full experience into something digestible. For my walking practice, I've been revisiting this idea but focusing less on trying to document every aspect of the experience and more on the experience itself.
To do this I've been joining notorious local walkers on their routes, and talking with others in town about their relationship to walking and why they walk or drive where they do (initial skepticism to hearing I'm taking an art class on walking has proved a good conversation starter).
Most conversation on walking deals with urban/suburban or wilderness environments, and small towns don't quite fit into either category. There are sidewalks most places, but they vary widely in quality. The entire town is walkable in terms of distance, but because something a half mile away is deemed "across town" it can feel like a long distance in a relative sense. There are no walking trails, but with so little traffic, most streets are open to a variety of transportation modes.
To my surprise, a lot of the shifts from downtown to urban core to suburban are still present if you look carefully. About six blocks in any direction from the main intersection, sidewalks suddenly stop. Rapid development is hardly an issue, but new businesses still stretch out to fill available space or get close to the highway leaving Main Street hollowed out.
Notes on a couple of the walks I've been on:
LaNorma
LaNorma lives across the street from me. I often see her walking by my front window. She was just leaving for a walk when I arrived home one day, so I tossed my stuff inside and set out in the same direction. It took about a block and a half to catch up. We talked about the neighbors on her side of the street — there are a row of duplexes, so most are single, elderly, but very independent women with grandkids about my age.
She tries to walk about 12 blocks per day, but weather is a major factor. Rain, extreme cold, and extreme heat were all issues. The day we walked was incredibly windy, so she only made it about 10. She tried to vary her route, but retraced steps to stay on the nicer sidewalks — though she was unafraid to cross the street at a diagonal in search of a smoother path.
It made me think about the common practice of walking on the street — great for me, but dangerous for someone who moves at a slower pace. In a town with a large elderly population and a good number of young families, walking transportation should be all the more valued. We agreed to do it again.
Marlin and Cheryl
Katherine and I see these two out walking almost every night. They generally complete a wider loop around town and almost always use the street. We have a shared interest in exploring small towns — though my Nissan looks nothing like their Harley Davidson — and when I brought up my walks around town they said they often stop in other towns with walking trails to see how they've implemented them.
Cheryl was on the town Tree Board that was looking into constructing a walking trail the around town, but said it would require the involvement of several private entities for both funding and permissions.
A major part of this trail would involve converting the former rail passage through town into a walking/biking trail. Inside city limits this might be doable, but efforts to convert the entire former railway into a biking trail were opposed by strongly by some local landowners. Marlin explained that when the rails were torn up the land returned to the surrounding landowners who are concerned they could be held liable for claims made on trails running through their property.
Rural towns tend to have a strong sense of community, but the idea of shared "public" land is often viewed with skepticism or even hostility. The railroad could take land using money and force, but to willingly relinquish control is a tough proposition. This paradox of being pro-community but anti-public is something that I want to keep exploring.
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