I could ride my bike.
I could take the bus.
I could walk.
My parents bought my my first Schwinn when I was seven; thereafter they considered me on my own, as far as covering any distances were concerned. The bus was only a quarter, when I needed it.
Being a middle class family we did have a car, but it was reserved for my dad. Children were not welcome in it; and even his own wife was more an imposition than an honored guest inside it.
So I grew up walking. Grade school was a block away. High school was eight blocks away; but in those medieval times an eight block walk was not considered any kind of a hardship. I walked it through cloudbursts and blizzards and the numbing arctic temperatures that a Minnesota winter can concoct. My long johns were snug and rubbed like a cheese grater.
And when I grew old enough to get a driver's license, I ignored the opportunity. Never took Driver's Ed. Never wanted to own a car. For by then I was not only inured to walking, but actually enjoyed my rambles. Besides, getting a license meant getting a car, and getting a car meant earning money, and I was dead set against such a demeaning expedient. I had better things to do, like watch John Gallos introduce Laurel & Hardy movies on WCCO TV.
When I joined Ringling Brothers Circus right out of high school they provided me a room on the train and a bus that took performers back and forth between the train and the arena. So I still didn't need a car. I banked my thin income as a clown, saving for a rainy day and a new pair of sneakers -- as I kept wearing mine out at regular intervals.
As the years rolled by I found one position after another that did not require a car. I depended on no machine to move me about -- just shank's mare. It gave me a wonderful feeling of independence, as well as keeping the weight off.
One of my favorite walks was to and from Brown Institute of Broadcasting on Lake Street in Minneapolis. I was studying to receive a broadcast certificate, and lived some six miles from the school. So I walked along East River Road, from University Avenue to Broadway, and then cut through some neighborhood streets to arrive at the school bright and sweaty each morning. The dappled greens in summer, with the playful aroma of sewage and disintegrating carp, made the walk more therapy than exercise. And during the stern winter months, when plows threw up banks of snow nearly as tall as I was along the city streets, I savored the challenge to my progress as a mountain climber does the glacier that bares his way.
But then I got married. And learned to drive. And bought a series of cars to tote the wifey and the kiddies around in.
I pass over those frenetic years, gratefully. Suffice it to say I drove carefully and steadily, and never received a single ticket or was involved in a traffic accident in over 30 years.
Retiring at last to my one-bedroom apartment in Provo, Utah, to be close to a flock of developing grand kids, I once again eschewed owning any motor vehicle and reverted to my old tramping habits. I ambled up and down the Provo River Trail during the torrid heat of a desert summer as well as during the mild winter months, nothing like Minnesota, when the clouds and mist screen the mountains like a curtain of dirty cotton. It is pleasant to run across a tarnished plaque by the Daughters of the Utah Pioneers, attached to a ruined millstone, or discover an abandoned set of concrete steps that lead nowhere in particular. There are horse chestnuts to collect in the fall, as they drop from the trees. I don't know what they're good for, but I collect 'em anyways.
But now the gods of perambulation decide to toy with me. I have osteoarthritis in both my knees, and my walks have perforce become truncated. A few blocks is all I can manage. Still, that is enough to get to the supermarket, the Rec Center, and the Provo Library. So though my physical boundaries may have shrunk, I don't feel as if my world is circumscribed at all.
Besides, I always wanted an excuse to carry a cane like Charlie Chaplin . . .
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