Commuting by Foot

New York, NY - Peter - Wednesday, April 10th, 2002 : goo

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I'm a fan of public transportation; living amidst the world's densest urban hodgepodge makes that a given. But even when I was growing up in more distant, more rural places, I enjoyed the 4-stops-to-downtown-25-cent city bus ride.

I'm also a fan of the changing of seasons, and it seems that this winter to ante-spring phenomenon has lured me from the heated confines of avenue-routed subways and crosstown busses, planting my feet firmly on the pavement.

The past few days, I've walked home from work, and its amused me how enrapturing the exceedingly banal activity of putting one foot in front of the other can be. Lately, as the weather has sublimated from the rock-hard deep freeze of winter to the tepidly taunting breezes of spring, its been enough to put a certain amount of rhythm in my step, enough that I've begun to really appreciate the miles that bisect my city, the lengths that measure up my commute.

Commuting by foot is an experience in itself. I'm seeing things i've passed countless times, but never appreciated; the change of the sidewalk pavement textures, the rusty traction on the hulky steel subway-vent grates, the layer on layer of asphalt patchwork in the streets, all bisected by the fading, reflective white layers of crosswalk cross-hatching.

A majority of the blocks I've been walking are ones I usually traverse subterraneanly, via subway, so the fresh scenes these avenues and streets contain at street level are a new adventure.

Perhaps its odd to think of "adventure" as pounding the pavement in one's hometown, but there's something glorious about walking amidst the parallel urban paths that have been hoofed by infinities of feet, through seemingly all eras of time. There's also something nice about walking the entire breadth of Manhattan, from York Avenue in the east to Broadway in the west, on the diagonal, and pacing 36 blocks uptown.

There's something transfixing in the rhythm of those blocks, yes. Something rewarding enough to make me want to do it every day.

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