Why I Walk

Why I Walk

Once long ago when I was living in a dingy one-bedroom apartment working a dead-end job I started having panic attacks. They were far worse at night, when the gloom of winter had a tight grip on me. Each night without fail I’d wake up at about two o’clock shaking in terror. Remarkably, I learned that you could have panic attacks while sound asleep. I’d come to consciousness, not wondering if, but knowing with absolute certainty that in about an hour I’d be dead. That is the nature of a panic attack. You don’t think you’re dying, you know it.

I’d jump up, pace my room, get dressed, shoes on, keys and wallet in pocket, and get ready to rush off to the emergency room, if I could make it. Most of the time, I didn’t go. I simply paced until I regained control. I started sleeping fully clothed, shoes and jacket on and everything, in case I had to rush off to the hospital. Time was critical. Maybe in a last-ditch effort they could save me. That’s what I thought. A few times I actually drove there and walked around the parking lot for hours watching the bright neon light that read emergency. If it came down to it, I could go in there. You’d be surprised the things you see late at night in winter on the hospital grounds. There was the dense fog descending and the street lights trying to penetrate through, a lone raccoon, darkly silhouetted, waddling out from behind the dumpster, a lone car engine trying to crank over after the night shift, a slouching janitor shambling out of the automatic sliding doors to empty the trash, and me thinking I was going to die on my feet traipsing across the parking lot, which was much better than sitting around waiting for it to run me down like the grim reaper.

            I didn’t think anything could be done for me, to cure my terror-ridden mind in the dark hours of those long-ago frigid dawns. Sometimes I’d walk all night until it got light before the fear finally dissipated enough so I could drive home and get a couple hours of sleep before work. I had a dismal job in a windowless factory making computer wafers.

The fear always dissipated if I walked long enough. Sometimes in the day I’d have the panic too, but being around other people helped. The nighttime was always worse. I used walking to rid my fears of some phenomena I did not understand. It was like that movie Speed. If I slowed down a bomb would go off, probably in one of the arteries of my brain and I’d die on the spot. Or my aorta would implode. You see, when you’re in the midst of a full blown panic episode you’re not thinking straight, just in a state of flight or fight from the crippling dread. I would have run, but I was too afraid to muster the concentration for that. I needed it to battle the fear. I used walking to keep myself together, every day for hours until one day after about two months the panic vanished as mysteriously as it had come. I think the lack of nature had made my brain ill, and the walking healed it. In the years afterwards it never really came back. Oh, I get afraid sometimes. Who doesn’t? Of what, I’m not really sure, probably that I’ll sit around too much doing nothing and my life will pass me by. I vowed to keep walking so that it would never come back again. I wouldn’t wish that kind of terror on anybody.

            I walk long distances. I have too. I spent three summers walking across Alaska. I walked across Oregon and Washington, parts of Borneo, and s short stint in the Amazon. I go for a walkabout every year. If I can do it for two months I seem to remain pretty bullet proof to the panic returning. Now I’m on my way across Canada, from the Yukon River to Quebec. Well, of course I don’t really think I’ll get that far, and I don’t care. Maybe I’ll decide to go somewhere else instead. I just need to be on the move and this gives me a destination to shoot for. Walking is good, but other forms of bodily movement work too I think, canoeing, cycling, skiing, rowing, walking, whatever. The key is to use my body so my brain won’t get all jammed up and unravel out of control. I cannot let my mind get away from me ever again, so I’ll keep heading east every summer through the wilderness. I’d like to hike Mongolia, the Chaco Boreal, and the Tumucumaque Range someday. They say there are people there who still feel free. The wilderness setting works better for me than a city. There are no damn distractions, things to get in the way that really don’t matter one smidgen in the big scheme of things.

I have a Buddhist partner now, which is perfect for me. She says to the effect of what I already know; that you don’t have to really be anything, except a speck of dirt floating free in the universe; to reach a high state of nothingness so to speak. She tries to get that by sitting for long periods of time meditating, chanting; emptying her mind of all the garbage we fill it up with in the smart-phone modern world. Today is worse than ever for that. I tell her that what she is doing is virtuous. I told her about my panic attacks years ago and that I need to be on the move, steady and rhythmically to reach the state of nothingness, or tranquility, or whatever you want to call it, that she talks about. She understands. There is more than one way to reach this peaceful state. My favorite travel writer, the late, great Bruce Chatwin once said something like, people get depressed because they stay in one place too long. I understand those words better than ever, so this is why I walk in the wilderness every year. I made it across the Olgilvie Range this summer, my body suffering, but my mind becoming unbreakable, an immovable rock in a raging river.

I’m feeling as placid as ever at home now. I go for long bike rides daily, and I race every fall. It’s not for the ego aspect of it. It’s all for the sake of retaining my serenity. With a healthy body comes a healthy mind, and vice versa. Next summer when I start out from the middle north region of the Yukon and head east through the vast tundra and taiga, I’ll have that clearly on my mind while aiming for the empty horizon in the wild, northern sky. I walk for the health of my brain as much as for anything else.