Walk This Way

I’m a sucker for sidewalks.

When I went to college, it was the first time in my life that I had a sidewalk within several miles of my home. Before, I always had to walk along the gravel shoulder of unlined country roads if I took a walk around my neighborhood. In college, for the first time, I didn’t have to compete with cars and trucks and school buses when I was on foot. I loved it.

Now that I’m back in the same house where I grew up, I miss the sidewalks, but I’m also an old pro at dealing without such luxuries, thanks to 18 years of earlier practice. Besides, there’s not a whole lot to walk to from my house, which might explain the lack of pedestrian paths in the first place. (When my mom used to give directions by telling people, “Go to the end of the world and turn left,” she wasn’t too far off the mark.)

I go back and forth between claiming I live in a rural neighborhood and claiming that it’s a suburban one. I am less than a mile away from several farms, and my house sits on what itself was once farmland. I’m no more than a ten-minute drive from the local mall, movie theaters, restaurants, and a genuine taste of (small) city life. Then again, I’m also seven miles from a woodsy state park and a wind farm.

So, I think it’s the sidewalks that will determine my choice. I am a rural resident. And that’s why I can’t really walk anywhere.

Okay, that’s not entirely true. I can walk anywhere I want, if I don’t mind risking safety on the narrow shoulders of windy country roads or spending at least an hour on travel time just to get to the post office. My time in college on a small campus and in Marburg (that perfectly-sized and manageable town) spoiled me for pedestrian zones. Around here, my nearest grocery store is 3 ½ miles away, and I’m simply not going to walk there. Or ride my bike. (I mean, have you seen the hills in western PA? I’m not facing those with a gallon of milk strapped to my back.)

And this may be the biggest problem with rural and suburban areas. When houses are miles away from shopping areas, and the home is far from the workplace, people need automobiles to get to and from just about everything. When the population density isn’t high enough, public transportation isn’t even a logical option. It’s a shame that to live so in touch with a natural setting, we must also risk environmental damage in order to get to work, school, and any store.

I think I’m a townie at heart. Back in the proverbial day, I loved having the ability to walk to the post office (on a sidewalk), or pick up groceries and carry them in my backpack the quarter mile back to home. And I also loved the manageability of a town. It doesn’t carry the kinds of risks associated with a big city, and it’s possible to become associated with every corner of it. This rurally raised country girl finds it easier to breathe in a town than in a city.

It looks as though town experiments like Kyle, TX, and Celebration, FL, are attempting to provide this kind of town feeling (while also, unfortunately, making it an elite, upper-middle class WASP trap, but that’s a subject for another day). But if existing suburban and rural communities had fewer giant stores and more small and scattered shops, and if those windy country roads were just a little safer for the wary pedestrian, I think even we country mice might stop driving so much. We might prove that it doesn’t take a brand new town experiment to achieve New Urbanism.

And who knows what kind of natural camaraderie with neighbors and connection to the ground we walk and diversity of free market enterprises might sprout from simply placing our homes nearer our markets and offices? I’m sure there’s some way to keep the woodsy and residential feel of my neighborhood while making it a little easier to walk to the store. It could be that all it would take is a good sidewalk.