Walking every street
I’ve never been to Peoria, and even though I live in Chicago–which some have argued is a state of its own–I do consider myself an Illinoisan. So I paid attention to this article about two women from Peoria who succeeded in walking every street of their city:
…Walton Road was the only public street in Peoria, Ill., that Mary Hosbrough and Jennifer Jacobsen-Wood had not walked. So, before dawn on a Friday in February, the pair set out through the slush to conquer that stub of concrete on the fringes of the city limits, pausing only to take a few photos and return a runaway shopping cart to a Walmart corral.
Walking every street, no matter what–as a venture seen all the way to completion, this sounds tedious. I walk most places I go, too, but there’s a big difference between walking everywhere you have to go in town, and walking everywhere there is to go.
Still, if you’re up for it, a walk marked by such thorough dedication seems worth it. If walking does one thing, it diminishes the sense of empty space, growing the proportional sense of place, all with distinctions and features open to description. As these women found out, sometimes noticing a place gives one the standing for ordinary description :
Sidewalk coverage in Peoria is spotty. Drivers can be oblivious to pedestrians.
But walking will always show things hidden. The price of moving faster than a walk is not just the cost of fuel to get there, but the loss of something seen along the way
…surprising delights (like the plastic coyote stationed without explanation near a golf course)
“Walton Road,” the last unfinished street in their project, reminded me of Walden, another work of art/performance with a figure who strolls everwhere:
“I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys; instead of the wind among the pines I heard the carts rattle. In one direction from my house there was a colony of muskrats in the river meadows; under the grove of elms and buttonwoods in the other horizon was a village of busy men, as curious to me as if they had been prairie dogs, each sitting at the mouth of its burrow, or running over to a neighbor’s to gossip.” (Thoreau, Walden, “The Village,” 167)
Sources
Thoreau, Walden. Princeton, [1854] 2016.