Dr Dreadful’s Letter From America: The Impractical Art of Walking

You know how if you’re female there are some things you don’t do, especially after dark? Once the sun goes down, the world for the fairer sex becomes a Clockwork Orange-y hell, the shadows filled with predators ready to pounce on your purse or your modesty in the blink of a streetlight.

The reasons we have this not entirely accurate notion are many, but include the influence of American film and television, particularly shows like Law and Order and CSI, in which women (and men) meet nocturnal doom with such frequency it’s a wonder any of them emerge into the morning light to cultivate the next generation.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see how I was taken aback by what happened to me one evening shortly after my arrival in the United States seven years ago. It was dusk – the last sunlight was gone but it was still just light enough to see – and I was walking along a quiet road which cuts through the university farm near where we live; following it from our apartment to meet my wife as she got off work. It was as pleasant a walk as a city built on the grid system on an utterly flat alluvial plain can offer: a three-mile trek past fields and silos and agricultural aromas reminding me of home, with the sky deepening to gas-flame blue and the first stars coming out.

A car passed me going in the opposite direction, slowed, u-turned and pulled up alongside me. The driver, a woman, asked if I wanted a lift somewhere. I looked at her rather oddly for a moment, more in surprise that she seemed oblivious to the possibility of my having a concealed butcher knife about my person than anything else. My resemblance to Freddy Kruger is passing at best, but in the available light we might as well, from her point of view, have shared a womb. So, in what I judged to be the woman’s own best interests, I declined. Besides, I was liking the walk and don’t much enjoy conversing with strangers.

After she’d driven off, it occurred to me that the reason she’d stopped was that she was surprised as well – enough to override any fear she might have had of ending up in several pieces in a shallow grave somewhere. Scratch that – she was so surprised that she’d not only stopped, she’d actually turned around and been prepared to take me in the opposite direction to the one in which she was traveling. And the reason for her surprise was that I was walking.

Fresno - not a walker's paradise...

The United States does have its ‘walking’ cities: places like New York, Chicago and San Francisco where for a variety of reasons it’s impractical to drive, or in many cases even to own a car. These cities all have excellent and comprehensive transit systems which make it easy to ride between any two points; and where the bus, the subway or the trolley don’t go, it’s an easy matter to cover the remaining distance on foot.

But by and large, walking just isn’t something you do in America. The country isn’t designed with pedestrians in mind. Fresno, California is typical of many newer American cities: it’s sprawling. A population of 500,000 is stretched across an area more than half the size of Greater London. The city blocks are half a mile on each side, bounded by main thoroughfares which are four to six lanes wide. To cross these without falling foul of the jaywalking laws, you must use a crosswalk, usually controlled by a light which remains green for pedestrians for about five seconds at a time. Getting all the way across in one shot requires, at the very least, a gait something like an Olympic race walker’s. Away from the main roads and into the neighbourhoods, you’re lucky if the streets even have sidewalks. There are so few opportunities for pavement-pounding that it’s a wonder the shoe industry in the US isn’t in perpetual crisis.

The distances pose many practical problems. The ‘local’ store might be a mile or two away. There’s no public transport except for a handful of taxis and the lumbering and thinly-spread bus network, which on a good day can take an hour to get you from the outskirts to downtown. Walking gets you nowhere fast. The wide main streets and the four freeways do. You need a car.

But I’d just arrived from England, where I’d been used to walking a mile and a half to and from work every day. I didn’t have a driver’s licence yet and was already starting to see the effects of American cuisine on my midriff. I was still enough of a new immigrant to see the absurdity in driving three miles to the gym in order to walk for three miles on a treadmill. Nevertheless, I needed to get some exercise, and three miles was no distance at all to me.

Fast forward seven years. The nearest supermarket is indeed more than a mile away. It’s a trip I now wouldn’t dream of making on foot – over a distance which, when I was younger, I would walk once a week, uphill, carrying four heavy bags of groceries from the bus stop to our house. Of course, food is cheaper here and I can afford to buy more of it, but that’s hardly the point.

Another consideration is the scenery. Walking is all very well in San Francisco or New York, where there’s always plenty to see and do on the way and you can always jump on a bus which is actually going where you want to go if you get tired. But in a city like Fresno, trudging over flat ground for block after identikit block, towards traffic lights marking intersections which never seem to get closer, gets old pretty quickly. There’s also the fact that this is the second most polluted county in the entire country, not to mention triple-digit summer temperatures, to take into consideration. Jumping into the car to go even a short distance doesn’t, for the most part, take a second thought.

People do walk – those who can’t afford to run a car or even take the bus. I’ve not yet reached the point where the sight of someone strolling down the side of the road would have me slamming on my brakes, flinging open my passenger door and inviting them to take a load off. In fact, with the price of gasoline careening off the scale, things look as if they might come full circle. Instead of driving to the store, I might slip a backpack on and ride my bike – or, good heavens, even walk. If I do, I doubt I’ll be recklessly offered any more lifts. Especially not by someone going the opposite way. They wouldn’t be able to afford it.