What to do
Fruitful wandering requires that you slow down
‘[W]e have the tendency to run into the future in order to look for happiness,’ wrote the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. ‘Running has become a habit … Many of us have been running all our lives.’
A culture of headlong rushing emphasises completion of the journey over the journey itself. It assigns greater importance to arrival at some destination than what happens on the way. To wander you need not eliminate purposefulness, only clear a little space – an hour, a day, whatever is possible – to slow down and inhabit where you actually are. Thich Nhat Hanh provides these instructions for walking so as to arrive with every step:
The first thing to do is to lift your foot. Breathe in. Put your foot down in front of you, first your heel and then your toes. Breathe out. Feel your feet solid on the Earth. You have already arrived.
It is not necessary to travel far from home to wander
Wandering can be practised either near your home or when you are travelling, but don’t wait to travel to try it. In the evenings, I sometimes take a walk, and I’ve been noticing I generally go the same way. Last night I went a totally different way and I saw things I have never noticed before in a town in which I have lived for 36 years. In his poem ‘Traveling at Home’ (1988), the agrarian writer Wendell Berry, who lives in the Kentucky countryside he has known since childhood, reminds us that wandering does not require us to go to the other side of the globe:
Even in a country you know by heart
it’s hard to go the same way twice.
The life of the going changes.
The chances change and make it a new way.
Any tree or stone or bird
can be the bud of a new direction …
Remember the study correlating wandering and happiness? It’s worth noticing that the study’s subjects were tracked in their own cities, which is to say they were not weekenders on their first visit. Yet those who kept turning up in new and unexpected places reported feeling happier. What distinguished them was their tendency to fully exploit the possibilities.
Engage your senses
Having slowed down and selected a place to wander, the next thing to do is to activate your senses. Rushing toward some goal in the future is fuelled by the idea of how good you’ll feel when you get there. But anticipated pleasure is just a thought, not a place for your body to feel fully alive. Focus on the physical sensations of where you are right now, which is at once the method and the reward for wandering.
Whether you wander in a city or in nature, engaging your senses is like wine tasting: just as a wine expert distinguishes and articulates flavours, colours, textures and so on, you can sharpen your palette and learn to recognise forms, scents, sounds and sensations, and the names for them in nature and civilisation.
To sharpen your palette for nature, join a wildflower walk led by members of a native plant society, a bird walk, a geology walk or a tide-pool walk. In cities, join a guided architectural or cultural tour to sharpen your palette for civilisation.
Of course, guided walks tend to encourage sight (of the object being discussed) and hearing (the guide’s commentary). Try to use other senses, as well. When roaming brownstone Brooklyn, feel the bumpy cobblestones under your feet and the ground vibrating from the train passing over the bridge to Manhattan. Smell the scent of fresh-baked bread from the bakery; of something hot and spicy from a barbecue at a sidewalk stand. Hear the foghorns down on the bay. The same is true for nature: as you look at wildflowers, also listen for bird calls and feel the damp breeze bringing rain.
Think of something to search for
My favourite celebration of wandering in modern English literature is Virginia Woolf’s essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’ (1927). Even before I first read it, an experienced traveller told me a way to get to know a strange city: think of something to look for, then pursue the quest to whatever random places and enquiries with locals it takes you.
In ‘Street Haunting’, Woolf walks halfway across London to a stationer’s shop to purchase a single lead pencil. On the way she records the imaginary life stories she makes up for the people she encounters, and snatches of conversation she overhears. To walk in Woolf’s footsteps, think of something you didn’t know you needed, but having thought of it, you really must have it – a legendary sheep’s milk cheese, a silver cigarette case or an out-of-print book – then go in search of it. The object itself is just a poor excuse. Observe and enjoy what happens on the way. The exercise works just as well in nature, where you might go looking for a trillium in bloom or an outcrop of columnar basalt; it’s always the journey that matters, not the destination.
Wander with others
Some wanderers prefer to go alone. It’s a valid choice in the friendlier regions of cities, but in natural areas especially, I strongly recommend you wander together for safety.
The best wandering companions I ever had were native to the places I visited. They helped me understand their cultures and led me to experiences I would otherwise not have had. At a café overlooking a harbour full of oil-rig tenders and fishing boats in Arctic Norway, my Norwegian friend suggested I order the whale steak. I am no fan of whaling, but wandering requires one to step off one’s well-beaten path, and the whale was already dead. It was served with a rich brown gravy and boiled new potatoes. I ate it. It was good.
In Cambodia, I hired a driver, a friend of a friend. He told me about his boyhood, the artillery shells whistling over the roof, and his schoolteacher father leaving the house with a rifle to skirmish with the Khmer Rouge. I went to a restaurant where they had a live crocodile in a pen. Someone suggested I order the crocodile steak. Yes, I know travellers are supposed to limit their ecological footprint by refusing to purchase parts of animals in questionable conservation status, but I suspended my disdain and ate some crocodile, washing it down with cold beer. It too was good, but I won’t do it again.
Consider what to pack for short and long wanders
It’s nice to have a day pack that stuffs easily into your luggage when you travel, and it’s good for wandering at home too. For day wanders in cities and towns, load it with a backup battery for your phone and a bottle of water. In summer months, you’ll need a sunhat and sunscreen along with a jacket or sweater for when it cools down in the evening. Look for local resources that serve the wanderer well. For instance, in New York City you can find a list of every public toilet in the five boroughs. You may want a schedule of the ferries, and a sturdy pocket map (so much better than peering at a small screen in bright sunlight while holding your phone out on a busy street).
In natural areas, load your day pack with additional items, including high-calorie snacks, a compact LED flashlight and extra batteries. Also consider a very loud whistle for attracting help, carried by many outdoor equipment stores.
To wander on multiday trips, I recommend a travel backpack, which is a specialised version of the nature hiker’s backpack. Travel packs come with wheels or without. Wheels are fine on clean airport floors, but in the streets the bottom of your wheeled bag will get dragged through puddles and things you would rather not think about. The frame and retractable handle make wheeled bags sufficiently stiff and bulky that those of them small enough to go in an overhead compartment won’t have much internal space.
For a trip to Southeast Asia, I purchased a well-designed soft pack without wheels (the Osprey Porter Travel Pack 46, with 46 litres of internal space). I’ve been using it ever since. Osprey makes an especially fine ultralight rain cover to fit. Even with the rain cover, for monsoonal conditions, put your tablet or laptop in an ultralight dry bag, even when stored in the padded compartment provided in the pack.
For doing laundry in your lodgings, bring a few feet of parachute cord for a clothesline and some clothespins to hang things to dry.
Allow for wandering in your planned travel
Some people really like planning their travel, poring over travel guides and blogs for months beforehand. If you want to try wandering as an alternative, you should still reserve your flight or other transportation to and from your destination so as not to pay extra or endure inconvenient arrangements. Also reserve comfortable lodgings for a few days after arrival while you’re getting your bearings. Jet-lagged, you are in no condition to hear that every bed in town other than the presidential suite has been sold. But I don’t draw up an exact itinerary. Yes, I read in advance and have an idea of what I’d like to do, but I generally have no schedule for doing it. At times I have used a local travel agent at my destination with better contacts and information than I have at home.
Know what to do if you get lost
With GPS it will soon be debatable – or already is – whether you can get lost in the wilderness. However, it is quite possible to be stuck, unable to go forward or back the way you came. Geolocation map data can be coarse enough to hide a 15-foot cliff. Using GPS takes skill. The unit can be damaged or the batteries can run out. If you cannot proceed or go back the way you came, just stop. Remain on the trail where you can be found. Make yourself comfortable with the extra clothing, snacks and water in your day pack. From time to time blow your extra-loud whistle.
In 2007, the company Spot released a small, light and affordable emergency satellite locator beacon. The personal locator beacon (PLB) is essentially a panic button that sends your geographic coordinates through a satellite to a dispatch centre. At the time, I was doing quite a bit of solo wilderness travel for research on my book Engineering Eden (2016). I carried a Spot device on a backpacking trip in the Arctic and other journeys. More recently, the emergency signalling function has been combined with a GPS screen for navigation and text-messaging capability in a single device, such as in the Garmin 66i.
In a city, it is possible to know where you are on your phone’s map and to still be, in the deepest way possible, lost because you do not know the city, and even though you can read the map, you do not know the granular detail of the streets. Following a phone’s direct route from where you are to where you’re going can lead you from a bustling tourist district with bookstores, museums and charming cafés into deserted streets with a more threatening feel as day turns to night. Here, engagement of your senses pays off. Pay attention to what’s going on around you, not just the screen of your phone. Before you set out, absorb a general knowledge of the town and its geography, its rhythms and culture. When asking a stranger for directions, keep in mind that in some places it’s considered impolite not to hazard a wild guess even when they have no idea what you’re talking about; in New York City, this happens routinely. On the plus side, Google Translate has become a wonderful aid in these conversations. Try showing your informant the words on the screen instead of proudly butchering their spoken language. Double-check what you’ve been told with another passerby and your phone to make sure.
Turn wandering into an art form
As you get the hang of it, wandering can become a medium of personal expression. Following a century-and-a-half-long tradition of wandering as an art practice, try playing the flâneur, an idler roaming the streets as a detached observer who was the literary brainchild of the 19th-century author Charles Baudelaire and the 20th-century philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. In the 1920s, in a tart critique of fine arts as luxury goods for rich industrialists who profited from the slaughter of the First World War, antiwar Surrealist and Dada artists organised group walks as an art form that could not be subverted to decorate the walls of mansions. Later, an international artists’ collaborative refined this practice as the dérive (literally, ‘drifting’) focusing on a ‘psychogeography’, or how they experienced the places they encountered. Ellen Mueller, a Minnesota-based artist and educator, teaches this tradition in her course Walking as Artistic Practice. To try one of her dérive exercises, go for a walk and record where you are drawn, and where you are repelled, in a notebook or in photos taken with your phone. Why might you be experiencing those emotions and behaviours? How did the architecture, topography and space affect your experience? How does that relate to class, gender, race, ability and other markers of identity?
In the final analysis, wandering sounds less important than making a living or other forms of pragmatism. But what is really at stake is your life – at least what you remember of it. Have you ever noticed that you can account for minutes and hours on certain days when something novel was happening, but have forgotten whole months, or series of months, during which you toed the line and did what was expected of you? So awaken, sleeper!