The Thinking, Walking Biped, part seven. Famous nature walks: Alexander von Humboldt and John Muir

Alexander von Humboldt was one of the great travelers of world history. He went all over the world, hiking in mountains everywhere. His spirit of exploration inspired generations of scholars after him, including Charles Darwin who took Humboldt’s book with him and followed his footsteps in South America.

But Humboldt did not just travel and hike. He made scientific observations which would later prove fundamental in the study of geography, particularly plant geography. Lots of people have noticed that trees tend to be found higher on mountain slopes, but Humboldt was the one who discovered that trees were higher on the south-facing than on the north-facing slopes. This is evidence that temperature and humidity are the important factors: the trees prefer the cooler temperatures and more humid conditions of the north slopes. After Humboldt’s detailed observations, the patterns of nature started to make sense.

Perhaps most famously, Humboldt ascended the slopes of the Andean volcano Chimborazo, in Ecuador. Because the top is covered by a glacier, and because of the crevasses, Humboldt could not actually reach the top of Chimborazo. When I climbed up the slope of Chimborazo in 1989—likewise not reaching the top—I felt inspired not just by the amazing geography but by the fact that almost two hundred years earlier, Humboldt had stood in that very spot.

 

It is particularly inspiring to stand in the exact location of an historical event. I have had this experience numerous times, including when I walked on part of the Cherokee Trail of Tears, but also on a remnant of the Native American trails near Tulsa, Oklahoma, and also a World War One graveyard in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace, France. I walked to these places.

The image of John Muir is inseparable from the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. It seems that he walked practically everywhere in the Sierras, and not just during nice weather the way I did in my Sierra explorations. He would not hesitate to climb a tree during a fierce snowstorm and revel in the forces of the wind. He seemed to need only a blanket for shelter and only bread and tea for nourishment.

The Thinking, Walking Bipded, part three. Jesus

In the past, great religious leaders did a lot of walking. More recently, they have preferred limousines and jets paid for by rich donors who think God wants them to do this. Mahatma Gandhi did a lot of walking. In 1944, a back country preacher named Guy Howard published his biography, Walkin’ Preacher of the Ozarks.

Jesus of Nazareth walked everywhere during his short ministry on Earth. He gave the impression of wandering aimlessly—at least, he did not explain his itinerary to his disciples. He wandered in the desert, and took his disciples north into Galilee, the country-bumpkin part of Israel where he was born. He briefly rode on a donkey, when he triumphally entered Jerusalem on his last Passover.

Can you imagine how different Jesus’ impact would have been on his listeners, and on history, if he had ridden around on a horse and preached down at the people, with his sword sticking out?

He certainly gave the impression of poor planning in his walks. He did not arrange for his disciples to have enough food for them to eat, and wouldn’t you know it, he was leading them right through Samaria. Samaria was the place with the remnants of the northern kingdom who worshipped in a way Jerusalem Jews considered unholy. Righteous Jews did not want to even be in Samaria, much less get caught there without food. The disciples went off to find food, leaving Jesus alone at a well.

We see now that Jesus had planned it this way all along. A woman came to the well to draw water. She noticed Jesus did not have a bucket and wondered if he would like a drink. He offered her living water, which confused her. He surprised her by telling her about her past: she had had a succession of lovers. It couldn’t get much worse for a righteous Jew—having a personal conversation with a Samaritan woman of loose morals. The disciples were not pleased. Long afterwards, Christians realized that Jesus was teaching them, and the Samaritans, something important about how God does not look down on certain cultures of people.

Jesus summarized his whole way of life as not just walking, but walking on narrow, difficult paths. It is on such paths that you learn about the world and about yourself. Can I, in fact, complete this path, and more, can I learn from it and enjoy it? “Enter in at the narrow gate,” he said. “For the way is narrow and the path difficult that leads to life, but the way to hell is smooth and wide.” I preached a sermon on this topic to a bunch of Boy Scouts about 1969, when I was a scout myself. We were camping and hiking in the lower Sierra Nevada mountains.

As a botanist who walks nearly every day, I can tell you that the easy roads are mostly bordered by weeds; to find the beautiful wildflowers, you need to hike the narrow trails.

 

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part three. Epic Journeys

A lot of the celebrated epic journeys in human history have been on foot. The alpine ice man Ötzi was beginning such a journey when he was shot in the back with an arrow five thousand years ago. These journeys show up in literature and movies a lot. One recent example is the movie Revenant with Leonardo di Caprio.

I will tell you about one such journey you’ve probably never heard about, from the 1959 French movie La Vache et le Prisonnier (the cow and the prisoner). We think of Nazis as keeping prisoners in special camps, such as the one in The Great Escape. But there were so many prisoners of war that the Nazis had to literally “farm out” their prisoners to farms and ranches in the countryside. German farmers, rather than soldiers, kept the prisoners from escaping, which they could not do anyway since their only garments marked them as prisoners. This was the same thing that the American army did with German prisoners in sending them to agricultural work camps in California. I grew up across the street from the ruins of one such work camp in Lindsay, California.

One prisoner in the movie had a brilliant plan. He took a cow from the farm where he was interned, got a map, and decided to walk back to his home in France. The German farmers who watched him did not care very much if he escaped. The only enthusiastic Nazis were the officers. But the prisoner had an excuse: he said he was taking the cow from the farm where he was imprisoned to another farm; that is, it was part of his work to take the cow someplace else. He had one humorous mishap after another until he finally got on the train to Strasbourg. The movie was famous enough in France that many cows were named Marguerite in honor of the cow that helped the man escape.

Many epic journeys are on foot. I tell about more of them later. The more on foot, the more epic the journey.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part two. Joe Amato on foot

As explained in the previous essay, walking has been perhaps the single most important evolutionary innovation for the human body and the human mind. Is it too much to attribute the evolution of human intelligence to walking? In the essays that follow, I will describe and analyze numerous examples of people who, throughout human history, have done their best work and their best thinking while walking on foot, even when other means of transportation were available. And sometimes not.

As the late Joe Amato explains in his book On Foot, for most of human history walking has been the only available, or reasonably available, option for going from one place to another. Until quite recently, roads between human towns—everywhere in the world—were scarcely better than trails, hardly suitable for wagons or even horses, unless conditions were perfect. As I explain in Forgotten Landscapes, Native Americans built a civilization on trails that connected cities and large villages. Amato makes it sound as if even the much-praised Roman roads were not too good for most of their length. It is a miserable story of humans trying and often failing to travel to new locations.

As soon as other conveyances became available, Amato explains, they instantly created a hierarchy—those who could ride a horse or in a carriage had higher status than miserable pedestrians, and so it remains even today. In America, if you are on foot, people in cars think something must be wrong with you. This attitude is not as prevalent in France, where I now live.

But even in modern warfare—that is, before the age of missiles and drones—most of the movement was on foot. Chevaliers rode on horses, some soldiers rode in tanks, but most of them have been and are infantrymen.

But also throughout history, people have chosen to walk, sometimes very long distances, on foot even when it makes no logical sense to do so. The immediate example everyone thinks of is pilgrimages. Pilgrims considered it sinful to do their pilgrimage some other way, although rich pilgrims often figured out a way to justify it.

When I first met Joe, he was walking. He was my colleague at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, where I worked until 1998. In 1993, he had just published a book about a pyramid scheme that took place right in Marshall. It involved getting farmers to plant Jerusalem artichokes (Helianthus tuberosus), a kind of sunflower with a big starchy root. The roots could be used to produce biofuels. This is all very well, but the corporation that promoted it made all its profits off of getting farmers to sign up for it. Joe called his book The Great Jerusalem Artichoke Circus. I was the new botanist at the university, and Joe wanted me to speak at the book launch.

I think Joe appreciated nature walks very much, but that is not what he was doing that day. He was walking around and around in the interconnected hallways of the university. In Minnesota, the winter wind on ice can blow you down. The university system decided to build Southwest State to be a campus where you could go anywhere without stepping outside. It was an intentional magnet for all the disabled students in the state university system. Joe wouldn’t let even major heart surgery stop him: he had just had major heart surgery when I met him. He lived another forty years. He was an offbeat genius and very amiable.

The Thinking, Walking Biped, part one. Pascal Picq and Human Evolution

This essay begins a series about the importance of walking in human evolution and history.

Cogito, ergo sum, said Pascal, or someone. I think, therefore I am. In French it would be je pense, donc je suis. But one French writer, an anthropologist named Pascal Picq, has changed this a little. He says, je marche, donc je pense. I walk, therefore I think. He has made the case that we are not just bipeds who think, but we think because we are bipeds. He attributes the evolution of human intelligence not just to the fact we are bipeds, but because we are bipeds who can walk and run for long distances, with outstanding endurance not found in other mammal species. Maybe this is obvious to you, but I’d never thought of it until I read Picq’s book La Marche.

Picq overviewed the history of scientific explanations for why humans walk upright. This has always been somewhat of an enigma. Quadrupeds can run a lot faster than we can. Anthropologists have come up with all kinds of advantages that bipedalism conferred on our ancestors, such as being able to look out over the vegetation to see either danger or opportunity, or to use our forelegs as arms that can carry things such as food and kids and weapons. Long distance migration is what evolution has favored in our species: even old people can walk long distances unless they have health problems or are injured (I do it nearly every day), and there are a lot more elderly marathon runners than elderly speed sprinters.

While these things are all true, Picq has added another: bipedalism has altered the evolution of our minds. Bipedalism (as in Australopithecus) preceded intelligence (as in Homo), and here are some reasons why.

Humans are superb wanderers and have been so throughout our evolutionary history. National Geographic writer Paul Salopek is retracing, on foot, the epic journey of humankind from our African genesis to the end of the journey in South America. Other mammals run faster, but do not migrate as far as humans have. Starting about a hundred thousand years ago, prehistoric humans spread from Africa to every continent except Antarctica. These migrations set up an advantage for intelligence, because our ancestors had to decide whether to migrate (that is, is migration worth the cost of leaving home), and then how to get someplace and know that the new place was where we wanted to stay. This required superb observation and memory of the environment and ability to analyze opportunities. This was true on the short scale (we want to go this way, but there is a river, and we have to figure out how to cross it, which may involve turning around and going back the way we came) and the long scale (we want to get to that hill, from which we can see into the distance and plan what to do next, if anything). Homo sapiens was apparently better than this than Homo neanderthalensis. Our intelligent ancestors also had to think ahead about, and remember, the migration routes and habits of their prey. Neanderthals killed mastodons; humans planned ahead about where the mastodons would be before trying to kill them.

In all these ways, our thinking evolved as a series of logical steps. That is, it required reasoning ability. A primitive (or modern) philosopher or scientist will try out ideas to see if they work, then come up with a backup plan if it doesn’t. This, Picq speculates, uses a similar mental network to figuring out where to go and how to get there on foot.

On top of all that, walking and running makes us feel good and releases us from stress. Picq said he got some of his best ideas while walking. I have the same experience. And perhaps the best example is Charles Darwin, whose “walking path” at Down House was where he got, and perfected, his major ideas. He did not get them sitting at his desk. Many famous composers, as well as other scholars, carried writing equipment with them. I have heard that Beethoven and Dvořák wrote musical ideas as they walked (see a later essay on this topic). Today, we have cell phones on which the thinking walker can record ideas.

According to Picq, what science and philosophy needs more of is people who walk and think, rather than sit at desks and read what other people have written.