Walking on The Wild Side

By LANCE MORROW

The part of the self that is Toad of Toad Hall took to the open road again.

The interior Toad rhapsodized, "Walking is the finest thing in the world, but wild walking like this is finer still."

Toad's muscles glowed with well-being. He sported a touraco feather in his slouch hat. He had walked for days out of Kitich, a remote, beautiful camp on the Nyeng River in Northern Kenya, and now was skirting the Mathews Range in sandy, thorny country. Vultures wheeled over a distant lion kill. Toad was walking through heaven.

This was the line of march: first bright Lutupen, the Samburu guide, with his spear and tribal finery, the yellow-and-black-bead cords crisscrossed on his chest, the tops of his ears sprouting the bead horns that gave the Samburu warrior, Toad thought, an air of medieval imp. Toad admired Lutupen's sense of style. Lutupen had slipped a trapezoid of broken mirror under his bead headband for decoration, so that he now had a kind of third eye, a window in the center of his forehead that flashed as he slipped along through the forest.

After Lutupen came the mule, Miss Mule, policed by another Samburu warrior named (it is true) Livingston. After Miss Mule at a cautious distance marched Toad and friends -- the guide Chrissie Aldrich, the Kitich Camp manager Ian Cameron and the others. And last, the ten donkeys that carried water and food (short rations that got shorter as the days passed and the wild walking grew more wonderful). The donkeys advanced along the trail like a party of schoolgirls in dove-gray uniforms, sociable and disorderly, the sheer din of their progress driving off elephants and lions and all other wilder beasts as Toad's parade advanced. Toad surveyed the line of march with a jump of pleasure. En passant with his olive-wood walking stick, he poked cannonballs of elephant dung and judged how long ago the beasts had passed. Now and then they came upon Samburu tending herds of high-humped Boran cattle. But mostly they walked in solitude. Toad savored the wild walker's joys -- the peace of utter remoteness, the little thrill of vulnerability and self-testing.

The jerry cans on the donkeys' backs got lighter. Toad the linguist asked Lutupen in Swahili, "Wapi maji?" (Where is water?) Then after finding a few dung-fouled cattle watering holes, he learned to be more precise: "Wapi maji mazuri?" (Where is good water?) At length they fell to quarreling over water and stopped speaking to one another for hours at a time.

One day, pointing the march back into the mountains, on steep, thickly wooded tracks, thirsty and quarrelsome, they came upon an emerald pool in the forest, a sweet, shaded secret. Toad drank water for half an hour without stopping. That night they slaughtered a goat and feasted. Lutupen hung the remaining goat meat in a tree above him as he slept curled up on a flat rock, and in the morning Toad found leopard tracks around the camp.

But that day as Toad tramped on through the undiscovered country, his eye was suddenly transfixed by the sight beside the old cattle track of four Eveready size-D batteries lying in the dust. It was as if a passing whaleship had answered Ahab: "The white whale? Yeah, we killed him yesterday." An old joke. Toad suffered a deflation.

Well, he reflected later, the planet can no longer sustain the luxury of pure wild walking, which may in any case carry a certain taint of the elitist or the narcissist, a demand for virginity. (Americans and Europeans have always liked to think of themselves as the first white men ever to have walked into some wild place.)

Wild walking intoxicates the Toad. But all walking is a matter of style. In finer sensibility, Toad might admit that a tramp through hyena droppings would rank pretty low on the evolutionary scale of walking.

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge did not fight over drinking water as they rambled through the Lake District. In any case, the important thing to Toad was that walking put the mind in motion, and might even set poetry in motion. A line of verse is a march of poetic feet, the trudge of iambs and shuffle of dactyls, the ambulations of language.

Toad simultaneously loved walking as an escape from thought, a way of setting the world itself astir, like a cycloramic dream, so that it flowed through his eye to his mind at the speed that suits the total creature best -- all higher speeds being a mere greed for frivolous accelerations, for wind in the face.

The best walking is a liberation, and a way of thinking. A creature like Toad is not a tree, but is designed to move across earth's surface, perpendicular to gravity and companioned by time. Somehow walking, thought Toad in his mellower moments, makes time a passage that is not only bearable but also sweet and festooned with an everlastingly changing array of scenery.

So many kinds of walking did Toad savor. Beach walking took him along the edge of eternity. Night walking carried him through another mysterious fluid, darkness. Walking populated his solitude with multitudes of fancies and inner images, and let his mind roam up and down in time. Yet walking in the city also gave him sometimes an ecstatic solitude -- a paradoxical apartness and serenity.

Conversation, Toad thought, was best when walking, since talk itself is an ambling. Toad even talked better to himself when walking -- though if he moved his lips when doing it, he looked like a street crazy. It was at last in the walking that Toad's soul, he found, was most at rest.

Toad yearned always for the wild walking, of course. But he sighed the sigh of resignation. The whole world now is a beaten track. Even if Toad went to the moon for a hike, he would find footprints there.