(r)amble -- Part One

In April of 1985 I changed from a mostly sedentary, pack-a-day smoker to a mostly sedentary EX-smoker, and promptly put on 15 pounds of unwanted weight. Someone (alas, I no longer recall who this very useful person was) suggested that I start walking every day, and see whether that made any difference to the avoirdupois. I lived at the time in North Berkeley, at the corner of Spruce and Rose. So one morning I donned suitable clothes and shoes and started walking up Spruce Street. In rather short order I was breathless and mildly sweaty, and in a little more than half an hour, always following the gentle incline of Spruce Street, I was at the intersection with Grizzly Peak, a winding road that follows the ridge-line of the Berkeley hills. I had covered a distance of roughly two miles. On the return trip I walked down the other side of Spruce Street, and re-entered my apartment feeling like a million dollars. Thus began my story as a neighborhood walker.

To amble is to walk slowly; to stroll. To ramble (according to the two definitions I have just culled from my dictionary) is to walk about casually or for pleasure; or to follow an irregularly winding course of motion or growth [I deliberately leave to one side another definition perhaps serviceable to a person who blogs: "to speak or write at length and with many digressions."]

As a general thing, I did not in those early years, and I still do not, exactly amble. On the contrary, one of my brothers once remarked that, in order to keep up with my walking, he had to break into a little jog from time to time. Certainly in the early years, because my object was to ditch some of the poundage I had accrued when I quit smoking, I walked at the briskest pace I could manage which, as my lungs gradually recovered from 17 years of abuse, turned out to be pretty darned speedy. And since Spruce Street was a steady climb, it was as aerobic a thing as I had ever done: I got plenty sweaty on the uphill, and took to carrying a bandanna so that I could mop my brow as I climbed toward Grizzly Peak.

And the weight did come off, steadily if not quickly. But long before I had begun to reap that benefit, I was already hooked on my morning walk: I liked the pace, I liked being up in the early morning, I liked the places my feet took me, I liked being able to see things right next to me from the sidewalk instead of dashing past them on the road, and I liked the lovely vista that rewarded me when I got to the top of the hill. It was almost immediately my custom after that first successful expedition to take roughly the same walk five mornings a week, and to try to take a similar walk at least one of the days of the weekend (though not quite at the crack of dawn).

Over the decades since this auspicious beginning, I have been a walker in various places I have lived in the Bay Area; during my Paris year I was absolutely a walkin' fool, no matter what the weather. And in the neighborhood where I live now, though the 6:00 a.m. four-miler has fallen by the wayside, I try to get in a couple of leg-stretchers most weekends, even if it just means doing all my errands walking.

Next time: what's so good about walking the 'hood