A Walk to Nowhere
In which I walk 60 miles in one day and then, later in the month, am overwhelmed by a sense of doom.
Hello!
On the first Saturday of this month, I did my annual(ish) walk around Lake Washington.
Let’s start with the stats that people most frequently ask about: I left the house around 4:30 in the morning and got home around 10 pm. According to my Pedometer++ app, it was 109,284 steps, and 60.4 miles. I walked from the Chief Sealth Trail to Beacon Hill, then over to 23rd Ave, up to the Burke Gilman Trail at Husky Stadium and along the Lake Washington Trail around the top of the lake. I took the Kirkland Connector Trail south and then got a little lost amid the construction south of Bellevue and fumbled my way through the neighborhood of Woodridge until I picked up the Lake Washington Trail south in Factoria again, then looped up and over to the Chief Sealth Trail home.
And to the frequently asked physical questions: My feet were not blistered, I’ve never lost any toenails while out on any of my walks, and while I was a little stiff the next morning I was totally fine by about 10 am the next day. I didn’t sit down or really stop for breaks aside from waiting in line for coffee, the bathroom, or groceries. And rather than stopping for meals, I ate a steady rotation of protein bars. I also drank a lot of Gatorade and once I got home I ate a lot of bananas and guzzled some pickle juice.
In terms of equipment, I swear by my Brooks Cascadia 18GTX trail runners and my Danish Endurance socks.
As to the more philosophical matters: I am the kind of person who enjoys rituals, but I’m also the kind of person who is deeply suspicious about whether rituals are a good thing in and of themselves. I enjoyed taking part in National Novel Writing Month, for instance, until I began to suspect that the exercise wasn’t improving my writing at all, and that I was instead just getting good at writing 50,000 words in the month of November.
Similarly, this tradition of walking around Lake Washington has caused me to wonder if maybe, rather than improving my health and testing my physical limits, it’s just making me very good at the very highly specialized talent of walking around Lake Washington in a single day. I’ve learned, for instance, where all the bathrooms are and I’ve timed my breaks for coffee and hydration to fit perfectly within those prescribed stops. The walk now runs like clockwork, which almost flies in the face of the challenge of an all-day walk.
These walks also used to leave me completely flattened. One time, I was lying on the floor swearing that I’d never walk around the lake again. The last time I did the walk I added an extra few miles to the loop and I was so exhausted that I couldn’t see straight. But at the end of this month’s walk, I wasn’t particularly tired in any meaningful way—in fact, I walked an extra half-mile past my house because I was at 59.5 miles and I wanted to break the 60-mile barrier. So if the point of the walks is to go as hard and as long as I possibly can, I guess this year’s walk was a failure.
But the real point of these walks, I think, is to hit a mental and physical point that I wrote about in the Seattle Times a few years back:
“I do them to chase a magic moment that often arrives sometime around the 30-mile mark, after I’ve listened to all the podcasts in my phone. There’s a point where the volume on everything — the traffic noise, the pink and purple sprays of wildflowers, my nattering thoughts — turns way down, and then goes completely silent.
“In those moments, I’m not even myself. I’m just a pair of feet measuring my brief journey through the universe, one step at a time.”
I think of this state as a kind of ego death: All the countless worries and random thoughts and observations that make up what I believe to be me—those ambient traffic sounds in my brain of thoughts darting to and fro—just sort of fade away. There’s nothing to think about aside from the next step.
Using that metric, this was my most successful walk yet. I was in that state of walking meditation for roughly three hours, from Renton to home. It’s never been that sustained for that long. Even more unusual, I felt weirdly high from the experience for the next three days.
I walked the me right out of me.
I’ve Been Writing
I spotlighted 11 of May’s best new paperback releases.
I also checked in on three local bookstores that have made big shifts in the last year: Nook & Cranny Books moved from Capitol Hill to the University District near Ravenna Park, Paper Boat moved to the Junction at the heart of West Seattle, and Couth Buzzard Books changed ownership and opened a brand new fancy food service counter.
And I celebrated the opening of the Seattle area’s first brick-and-mortar romance bookstore—Hardcovers, up in Mill Creek.
I’ve Been Reading
If you’d like to read a smart person write about the importance of bookstores, Jeff Deutsch’s In Praise of Good Bookstores is probably exactly what you’re looking for. These types of books often strike me as a little too grating and navel-gaze-y, but this was the right book at the right time for me, given the current anti-intellectual and anti-free-speech activities of the Trump Administration.
I enjoyed Jessica Anthony’s political novel Enter the Aardvark, but her third novel, The Most, is even better. It’s a very short novel about an abnormally warm day in the fall of 1957, when a housewife decides to go into the pool and just stay there. Her husband and children are dismayed—what will the neighbors think?—but she refuses to leave the pool for hours and hours. This is a book about marriage and adulthood that doesn’t feel cliched.
Edward Ashton wrote the sci-fi novel that became the basis for the excellent Bong Joon Ho movie Mickey 17. His latest sci-fi novel, The Fourth Consort, is probably not worthy of that high of a level of adaptation. Instead, it’s a fun sci-fi novel about a guy who accidentally joins the harem of an alien queen (but not in a fun, sexy way.)
It’s easy to understand why the promotional materials want to compare Liann Zhang’s novel Julie Chan Is Dead with R.F. Kuang’s novel Yellowface. Zhang’s plot bears a lot of similarities to Kuang’s excellent novel. It’s about a poor young woman named Julie Chan who learns that her estranged twin sister, a wealthy social media influencer, has died. Rather than mourning her sister, Chan decides to take her sister’s place. But this book goes to very different places than Yellowface. It’s a broader, more fantastical novel and it would perhaps be more aptly titled Escape from Influencer Island. I didn’t enjoy it as much as Yellowface—that’s one of the best books I’ve read in the last five years, so it’s a tall order—but I had a lot of fun with it.
I enjoyed The Thursday Murder Club, which is soon to be adapted into a miniseries by Netflix, but by the time the charming protagonists discovered that a second murder had happened I found myself wishing they had solved the crime already. A little too long for what it is, but enjoyable.
James Morrow is one of the most important authors I encountered in my youth. His satirical—some might even say blasphemous—novel Only Begotten Daughter, which I discovered when I was in my teens, opened the world up to me in ways that I’m still discovering. In his latest works, Morrow has been exploring two of his biggest fascinations—his admiration for Charles Darwin and his love of black-and-white classic monster films. Behold the Ape combines evolutionary theory with a feminist take on King Kong in a showbiz satire that doesn’t hit the heights of Morrow’s best work but which clearly belongs on the same shelf as those books.
Utopias on Puget Sound, 1885-1915 is a fairly dry and academic study of intentional communities in the Puget Sound area around the turn of the 20th century. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it to anyone for casual reading, but I hope some author is reading this book and planning to turn one of its stories into a full-length novel, because this region is full of people who tried to build utopias and that is fascinating and fertile ground for fiction.
And finally, I read a pair of books about the embarrassing habits of rich people. Survival of the Richest is a short and entertaining book about super-rich people trying to build apocalypse-proof bunkers that will allow them to survive the end of the world. (Spoiler alert: They will not survive the end of the world.) More Everything Forever is a book that pokes plenty of holes in the growing obsessions of the super-rich, including the nonsensical belief that a “singularity” is coming that will bring about a technological paradise, eliminating death and aging; and the moronic philosophy of “Effective Altruism” that basically only exists to fluff the egos of rich people and make them feel as though they’re the all-important saviors of all humanity.
Does Something Gotta Give?
I turned 49 this month. The day before my birthday, I walked past a notice stapled to the front of a bar. It was a public health notice warning the community that a person with measles had been at the bar on a certain date, and advising anyone who was at the bar on that date to keep an eye out for measles symptoms within a given timeframe.
So I’ve lived nearly half a century, and this was the first public notice of a measles outbreak that I’ve ever seen in my life. The image stuck very firmly in my head and I haven’t been able to shake it. Not to be superstitious, but it had the feeling of some kind of a portent.
That’s what the news feels like to me right now. Every headline could be the first ten minutes of a disaster movie—aggression between Pakistan and India, Israel’s latest ground operation in Gaza, old-fashioned diseases roaring back and thriving thanks to anti-vaxxers, instability in international relations.
It’s important to not give these eerie feelings too much credence. But it’s hard for a pattern-recognizing primate to ignore the lessons we learned before. We saw this already in the first Trump Administration—specifically, in 2020 with Covid. It started as an item low on the front page of a news site, and then it slowly spread to consume everyone in a global conflagration.
Because the same guy is back in the White House dumping the same buckets of chaos all over the mechanisms that run the world without any reason or sense of responsibility, this moment feels much like that pre-Covid moment to me. Pick any news site and read the headlines and it all feels like a game of societal Russian roulette: Which potential disaster is going to be the one that takes off and personally affects every human on the planet?
I don’t want to be a downer. I don’t really believe in the end of the world, as such—every person who lives long enough will eventually see the world that they grew up in wither and die and be replaced by another one. But rarely in my lifetime has the world felt so primed for the unfettered release of chaos as it does right now.
Now, chaos isn’t always a bad thing. Society can also make great progress in moments of chaos. So I guess what I’m saying is keep your eyes open and keep your imaginations primed. There could be danger right ahead, but there could also be opportunities to build good new things.
Take care,
Paul