WHEELS FOR SPEED

Evening Star, Issue 22516, 8 December 1936, Page 7

WHEELS FOR SPEED

. LEGS FOR JOY POPULARITY OF HIKING The first three decades of the twentieth century might very appropriately be called the “ speed age.” But are signs not appearing now. that the pendulum is commencing its backward swing, and that we are beginning, dimly yet, of course, to perceive that true wisdom lies m “making haste slowly,” writes James Kerr in the ‘ Cornhill Magazine,’ London. Possibly nothing is more reassuring in this respect than the present-day revival of the ancient art of walking. By this I do not mean simply walking a few city blocks in preference to taking the street car—but walking, tramping, hiking for the sheer joy of it. In Britain this renascence has been very marked for some years past, and it is spreading over our Western Continent also. Residing as I do on the British Columbia coast, it is my good fortune to see every week-end, the year through, groups of young men and women (and some older ones, too) heading for the trail leading to some mountain cabin or other, and thereby laying by a store of health and vitality for the week, whether spent in school, business, or elsewhere. There are two distinct classes of hikers or walkers—thosb who fare forth for the day, turning their faces homeward at nightfall'; and the others, who take to the road for a week or two, and even longer, at a stretch. This class, as we know, is being encouraged in England and Scotland, by the establishment of hostels conducted on a simple scale in parts of the country away from the main roads and inaccessible to ordinary vehicular traffic.; These hostels provide bed and break-' fast at a moderate charge, as well as facilities for doing one’s own cooking; and the number of such places is being increased yearly. Walking has always had its distinguished votaries, and we are in good company when we take it up. In Trevelyan’s ‘ Clio * the reader can almost feel the wind on his face. Carlyle was an untiring walker, and he often went alone in the silence of the moors and hills, on one occasion covering a good 54 miles from dawn to late evening. /Wordsworth, residing in the mountainous Lake District of England, was also an inveterate walker. His friend de Quincey held that with these identical legs Wordsworth must have traversed a distance that would have taken him _ seven times around the world, adding that to this mode of exercise “ he was indebted for a life of unclouded happiness, and we, for much of what is most excellent in his writing.” James Bryce has been noted, for mountain-climbing; Hudson, for his walks among the hflls, moors,, and beechwoods of England and across, the stern reaches of Cornwall. In'.America, Emerson’s Monadnock is notable; and Thoreau’s, wanderings through the White Mountains, his pilgrimages along Cape Cod, and the ascent of Katahden are all deeply interesting. There are various “ schools ” of walking. One school is that of the road walbers who might be termed the Puritans of the religion, yet they number Stephenson among them as their chief bard: “ Boldly he sings, to the merry tune he marches.” Shakespeare seemed to prefer the footpath way, with stiles, to either the high road or the moor. Wordsworth preferred the lower fell tracks, above the high roads and below the tops of the hills. Shelley used to roam cross crountry over Shotover and in thePisan forest. Coleridge is known to have walked alone over Seafell. Keats, Matthew Arnold, and Meredith were “ mixed walkers ” —on and off the road. It is somewhat,, remarkable that Edward Bowen left no walkin'* songs, though he himself was the king of the roads. The road, walkers seldom meet “ the moving accidents of flood or field ”; the sudden glory of a woodland glade; the old farmhouse sequestered deep in rural solitude; the deep slow-flowing stream that we must jump, or wander along to find the bridge; the blue smoke , curling upwards from the cottage in the quiet of the early dawn. These and a thousand other chances are the heart and essence of walking, but they do not belong to the road. In a real hiking trip Nature becomes your teacher, and from her you will learn who you are, and what is your special quest in life, and whither you should go. You relax in the presence of ,the great healer and teacher, and you turn your back to civilisation and most of what you have learned in schools and colleges. Eroni. day to day you keep your log, and you will soon have the inborn realisation that you are gradually becoming an artist in -life; you are experiencing the real delights of the age-old art of walking and'that it is giving you' an artist’s joy in creation. : In one of his essays, Hazlett remarks —“One of the pleasantest things in the worldi is going on ,a journey, but I like to go by myself. I can enjoy society in a room; but out-of-doors nature is company enough for me. Give me the clear blue sky over my head, and the green turf beneath my feet,, a winding road (mark you, winding) before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking. It Is hard if I cannot start some game on these lone heaths. I laugh,' I run, I leap. I shout for joy.” ; On the other hand, says Sterne—“ Give me a companion by the way, be it only to mention how the shadows lengthen and the sun declines.” There is possibly no greater test of friendship than in going on • a walking tour together. It makes you self-revelatory. You comment on nature, hooks, people, but almost inevitably you talk of yourself. The chief urge of the wander-spirit is curiosity—the desire to know what is beyond the next turning of the road. Like the prospector for gold, the born wanderer is always expecting to come upon something very wonderful—just beyond the horizon’s rim. Even if only in small measure, the hiker is a pilgrim. His adventure is a spiritual adventure, or it is nothing. It has often been remarked that nothing in the present seems so good as that which has passed; a present which is silver to-day become golden in retrospect. It may he that you lie down in a matter-of-fact mood to sleep under the stars; you may ask for nothing beyond a good night’s sleep. But perhaps years later, you look back with a sigh, and say: “How wonderful it was; I was happy then.” Yef despite the passage of the years, why should the earlier experience not be an oft-recurrent one Let us catch the; spirit of renascence ; let us exult and sing with a poet of today : “So follow the road over the hilltops and down, ' There’ll be meadow and bushland, and ridges of brown, , there’ll be dawns when the-earth is acquiver with light, There'll be friendship and laughter and camp fires at night, The shine of a mountain, the gleam of a sail, And home like a star—at the end of the traiL”