My perceptions of distance have altered quickly. In a car, or even on a bike, you see a landmark on the horizon – a church tower, say, or a tall tree on a hill – and you spend ten minutes watching it steadily growing bigger and bigger and then suddenly you’re there, adjusted to its scale. Walking, you barely notice it change. It stays the same size and it stays the same size, and it stays the same size and it stays the same size, and then you watch the ground for a while and when you look up it’s fractionally bigger – or maybe that’s just a trick of the eye. It can be agonising – the trick is to stop caring. After all, if I was in a hurry I wouldn’t be walking in the first place. I’ve been thinking of those fairytales about castles that never draw closer, no matter how long a traveller walks, always teasingly keeping their place on the edge of the horizon. I know where those stories come from now, and imagine the way they were dreamed up by walkers, one step after another.
Walking has also made me consider the urban landscape differently. There’s a huge difference, I’ve discovered, between walking on soft grass or mud and walking on a high-impact surface like tarmac or on pavements. Hard surfaces jar the bones of the legs, sending regular shock waves through the body, and caused agony in my shins in the first few days. For this reason I’ve become obsessed with finding low-impact passageways through towns, clinging to any grassy verge, strip of mud or municipal lawn, doing everything I can to avoid the harder ground. Pavements are more obstructions than aids. This marks me out as a different type of walker to the strollers in the streets. I am not walking in town, I am walking through town, and these narrow corridors of soil are my connection back out to the countryside, a tenuous but traceable thread that strings one green space to the next.
The environment I’m in, I’ve noticed, determines people’s perceptions of me. Along the river path on the bank of the Rhine, people see my muddy boots and rucksack and sleeping bag and two-week beard and recognise me as a walker – one of their own, doing the same thing as them, only going a longer distance. When I’m in a city centre, eating bread and cheese on the steps of the cathedral, I morph suddenly into a tourist – what else could I be? But in the spaces in-between – nowhere lands like industrial zones or urban sprawl or outer suburbs, flanked by highways and motorway bridges and factories and out-of-town car showrooms, far from beauty either rural or urban – then I don’t belong in any category at all. People stare from passing cars, shooting me baffled and suspicious glances, as if I must be lost or desperate or doing something vaguely illegal. This isn’t a walking-designated zone, there is no clear reason for me to be here – I am out of place. Between country and city, in these no-mans-lands, I can only be perceived as a vagrant.
