The dangers of walking include falling in love

A love story in 149,774,100 steps

i.  Arizona: 2009-2011

I fell in love with Jake on a walk, the import of which I didn’t realize when we set out one evening after a heavy rain. Let me paint a picture: The man who will, 14 years later, become my husband, is chasing a small frog. He’s not dying yet, or at least, not more quickly than average, not as quickly as he will be when cancer strikes in 2023. We’ve only been dating for a few months, though we’ve walked together most nights. He’s crouching in the wet creosote-scented grass, cooing at the tiny, marshmallow-sized creature. As soon as his hands start to close around the frog, I see a flicker as it jumps out of reach. Jake squats forward and tries again, man and frog appearing equally vigilant, lit by weak yellow streetlamps marking the sidewalk paths that form trails in and around Jake’s apartment building.

Again, the frog hops away, this time into a bush. Jake almost falls face first into the bush going after the little guy but catches himself and emits a soft curse. He stops cursing, perhaps worried about scaring his little buddy, and starts telling the frog that he wants to be friends. He peers into the bush. I clear my throat and Jake looks at me, startled, like he’s forgotten I’m here. He has forgotten I’m here. He stands up, his hands and knees encrusted with soil and he grins, whoever he was at seven years old momentarily visible. “A few more laps?” he asks, glancing back to see if the frog has emerged. “A few more laps,” I agree, and we keep walking.

We’ve kept walking for fifteen years.

Jake and I are weirdos: The rest of America drives, and we walk. We walked even in places like Tucson, Arizona, where no one else does, where walking is a tangible manifestation of being a weirdo. On our first date, we took a walk that turned onto Speedway Avenue, which meant that we spent much of that not-too-romantic sojourn next to six lane stroads. We walk where there isn’t anywhere to walk: desert suburban sprawlscapes constructed in ways that encourage people to be immobile and socially isolated. Living this way seems unwise to Jake and me, but on our own we lack the ability to change the bulk of the built environment of the United States. We do what we can with it, which is why we made so many laps around his apartment building.

Today, after a decade in New York City, Jake and I once again live in a car-centric place, but we freely express our despair that 40,000-automobile-related deaths a year are socially preferable to voting for better public transit infrastructure and reforming the bureaucratic laws that prevent and slow the building of better infrastructure. We sound like zealots, I’m sure—flagellants wear inconvenience like hair shirts, instead of people who simply prefer the power of their own feet to that of four-ton death-machines.

I once walked to a shift at the hospital on an Arizona day too close to summer for that to be a good idea. I had my scrubs in my backpack to change into, but a woman with a nurse’s badge stopped me from going into the staff entrance. I’d been running late, so I jogged the last half mile, and she looked at me like I was a psych patient. “I’m fine, I just walked to work,” I said. “Why would you do that?” she said, and then, putting her hand on my forearm, leaned in to conspiratorially whisper, “Are you poor?”

Since World War II, most of the U.S. has been constructed to force people to drive from point A to point B, and miss everything on the way. Nature, serendipitous meetings, basic metrics for cardiovascular health. I guess the present transit system is a great deal for car and oil companies, but it’s a poor way for humans to live. On walks in Arizona, we rarely ran into others walking¹, apart from dog owners.

I get it. Walking is dangerous; walking and talking is how you fall in love. Walking is also how you fall into crevasses, off cliffs, and onto icy sidewalks where you might break your ankle, your hip, your heart. Walking is how those motivated people on Annapurna met their ends.² Almost all the people who’ve ever lived have walked, and most of them are dead.

Nietzsche, who walked with his notebook every day between 11am and 1 pm, wrote, “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.” Thinking too hard may not be the best way to start relationships. You can’t think your way into love. Think too hard about someone too early on and you’ll aways find something to talk yourself out of them.

Walking brought Jake and I together because we didn’t think about each other as much as we thought at each other, and so became indispensable to one another. I can go back and examine those early ideas we co-generated, since Jake carries a notebook to jot down notes whenever he walks. He whipped it out during our first date, stopping suddenly before a crosswalk to write something after I’d made him laugh. Later, when my Mom asked me how the date went, I told her about that moment, and how he wouldn’t tell me what he’d written. To this day he never has.

ii. New York City: 2011-2020

When Jake and I moved to New York in 2011, we weren’t the weirdos anymore, or, if we were, we were weird for novel reasons. Jake and I had different theories of city walking, though we agreed that it must be fast. Charles Dickens, while living in London, accidentally captured the New York zeitgeist: “If could not walk far and fast, I think I should just explode and perish.” If you’re dragging the flow of traffic on a New York sidewalk, other New Yorkers may not make you explode, but they’ll actively help you perish. If you’re a tourist who stops dead in the middle of the sidewalk, you better actually be dead, or you will find yourself dead shortly.

I wandered the City aimlessly, foregoing optimization for following whatever caught my eye. Jake would take it all in, but less aimlessly, with strong opinions about routes, which explained why only one of us was perpetually late.³ Walking in the City isn’t just a way to get from point to point. Walking is the point; both the way and the destination, and not only because I have no sense of direction and couldn’t get to where I intended to go. Manhattan is on a grid that even I could orient myself upon. When in doubt, I oriented myself to Jake.

Our city walks began at our apartment on First Avenue and 15^th, 16^th, 17^th, or 20^th streets—depending on the year. We walked when it was snowing heavily, rushing into steamy coffee shops that fogged my glasses. We walked in humidity, when wet trash smell permeated the air and the rush of air from subway grates blew the skirt from my sundress up, Marilyn-Monroe style.⁴We walked in the loud, nighttime crowds of the Lower East Side, eating falafel sandwiches from Taïm and french fries with garlic aioli from Pommes Frites, and we walked to Washington Square Park on perfect, sunny days in spring—days so nice you’d forgive the city anything, apart from the high cost of housing that results from refusing to build more—to stroll and listen to the buskers play jazz. We walked when we were enjoying each other’s company and we walked when we weren’t, not even a little bit, and had to walk our way back to one another. Esther Perel recommends this method since “walking next to someone, a conversation becomes parallel play, with each person looking ahead yet connected by the exchange.” In motion, we could say the things too difficult to say while still.

Unlike Arizona, where there are few distractions from one another, there were so many urban delights fighting for our attention in New York, so many places to walk, and so many other people who liked to walk, people who wanted to walk with me, or with Jake, and still, we walked with each other.

I’ve been struggling with how to organize this essay. Should I be writing about our walks by chronology or by place? Do I start with ideas on walking? Or the story or our first walks, or walks towards the biggest moments of our lives, or with Jake lying in a hospital bed unable to walk at all? It’s been hard to figure out what not to include, too, since the story of our walks is the story of our whole life.

If walking marks time and thought, then our story should be told in steps, like a book’s narrative moves forward with each page turn. Forget chronology, maybe all narrative arcs are really maps; all love stories are cartographies of the heart.  Nabokov wrote, “Where we walk, and what relationships, thoughts and ideas emerge from the walking, gives a much clearer view of a life than a chronologic history.”

A study of 2,000 adults found that they each typically stroll 6,839 steps a day about 2,496,235 steps a year, or 1,182 miles a year. Assuming that Jake and I walked twice that during our time in Arizona, and at least five times that in the decade we lived in NYC, then we’ve walked ~149,774,10 steps: 70,920 miles, at least half together. 35,450 miles of history.

The essays I’ve written in the last seven months have been a way of writing our history, but I don’t feel close to capturing the essence of our lives. I wish I had a cartographer to draw the map of us. How do I get at the crux of walking 35,450 miles in a single essay?

I think, maybe, by talking about the day the walking stopped.

iii. Arizona 2023

Jake and I had planned a trip home (our spiritual home) to New York City in May 2023 to celebrate his remission from squamous cell carcinoma of the tongue. In November 2022 he’d had a partial glossectomy, in which a piece of his tongue was removed with a CO2 laser. From Dec. 1 2022 to Jan. 13, 2023, he had 30 radiation treatments. The delayed ravages—the raw, burned skin on the inside of Jake’s mouth and throat—peaked from Jan. 15 – 21, and lingered for months.

We’d been assured that surgery and radiation would be curative. No chemo needed. Back then, anti-cancer vaccines like Transgene’s TG4050 weren’t available at all. No one told us about the possibility of Xevinapant (Debio 1143), either. We blindly assumed that, despite the high-risk features of Jake’s cancer, surgery and radiation would work. Based on those faulty assumptions, we thought: What better way to return Jake to a normal diet and a normal life than by going back to our city to walk and eat?

Instead, Jake’s first monitoring PET scan on April 26 was “hot,” or, as the radiologist put it: “Focal increased tracer uptake abutting the left anterior thyroid cartilage, concerning for residual/recurrent malignancy. .” On May 11, Dr. Hinni, the surgeon who performed the initial partial glossectomy, squeezed Jake in for a surgical biopsy that confirmed recurrence.

On May 25, instead of getting on our flight to New York, I drove Jake to the hospital to have the cancerous, left half of his tongue removed, which would be replaced with a flap of tissue made from thigh muscle.

Twelve hours later, I was pacing the hospital hallway when I got a text that Jake was in the Post Anesthesia Recovery Unit (PACU). A few minutes later, Dr. Hinni called. The “salvage” surgery, he thought, salvaged Jake’s life—but not his tongue. Dr. Hinni had had to remove Jake’s whole tongue to get clean margins.

I ran to the PACU. Jake’s mouth was closed and his face was swollen; drains came out of his neck and his lower jaw, which had been split for the surgery, and then stapled shut. I couldn’t see into his mouth. I lifted the sheet to look at his leg, where Dr. Nagle, another surgeon working in tandem with Dr. Hinni, had removed tissue to create the “flap.” I was shocked to see that the incision ran down the length of Jake’s left thigh.

The wound was vicious—forty staples and a drain at the bottom filling with a red serosanginous fluid. I was in shock. After the sheer relief at seeing Jake alive, I thought: I’ll have to tell him the horrific news that he has no tongue. Then: how am I going to be able to bear telling him something so life changing if I can’t tell him on a walk?

Within five minutes, Jake’s nurses had kicked me out of the PACU—I’d wheedled my way in where I wasn’t allowed, using the fact that I work at the hospital as an argument—and said they’d call when he was in his room in the ICU. Unsure what to do, I wandered to the “Desert Walkers Path,” a circular nature path behind the hospital.

Darwin used to do his thinking outside, on what he called the “Sandwalk.” According to his biographer Janet Browne, circling the Sandwalk is where Darwin developed his theory of evolution. I walked alone around the circular “Desert Walkers Path” and tried to figure out how life would evolve for Jake—for us. In the hour I spent outside, I came up with no cohesive theory. I had no idea what, if any, path there was forward. I worried, justifiably as it turns out, that Jake might not want to live at all. I don’t know how long I spent there, until I finally got the call and hurried to Jake’s hospital room.

Walking forges an active connection between your body and time, the way a knifemaker’s forge connects body and steel. “Getting your steps in” should have a different, deeper meaning than clocking 10k a day in the vague pursuit of “wellness” goals. It could be another way of saying, “Move towards something or stagnate.” Stagnation is death, which is one of the many problems with the degrowth movement.

Maybe you walk towards an uncertain future, maybe another person, but you need to move. In biologic systems, as in time, stasis is cessation. Even though I was terrified that Jake’s cancer would kill him, even though I saw dying cancer patients every day in the ER, it wasn’t until I saw Jake in that hospital bed, unable to walk, that I first believed he might actually die soon.   

The first time I believed that Jake might yet live was when, two or three days later after the surgery, he got up to take his first walk. Jake had drains still hanging from his surgical sites and was on heavy painkillers like Oxycodone and Dilaudid. He had to be held up by a belt around his waist, to prevent a fatal fall; his muscles were so weak he couldn’t make it more than a few paces down the hall. His right leg, the good leg, seemed to drift towards the midline like a stroke patient’s. He used a walker, like an old man.

Robecca Solnit, in Wanderlust: A history of walking says that

Walking is best imagined as an 'indicator species,' to use an ecologist's term. An indicator species signifies the health of an ecosystem, and its endangerment or diminishment can be an early warning sign of systemic trouble. Walking is an indicator species for various kinds of freedom and pleasures: free time, free and alluring space, and unhindered bodies.

Jake wasn’t close to being a healthy ecosystem. But those first steps indicated, if not anything close to an unhindered body, then a body reclaiming its place on the path. Watching him walk, however slowly and frailly, still brought hope. I strolled with him, as if pretending this was another walk down First Avenue, even though a nurse or physical therapist was on his other side, holding the belt. He was so unsteady. Sometimes, I walked backwards and in front of him, thinking I might catch him if he tripped. Those first steps, he walked towards an unknown future, but he also walked towards me.

Despite the misery of the recovery, Jake was relentless about walks. Soon—or what seemed soon to me, but not to him—he was able to walk an extra hundred feet out of the neuro ICU and onto the pathway that overlooked an atrium with large floor to ceiling windows, for a view of the outside world. On day 9, Jake, myself and his nurse walked outside, carrying trache suction and rescue equipment. Even after 10 years in NYC, this was the most exciting walk we’d ever been on, except for the one when Jake walked out of the hospital and I finally got to bring him home.

iv. San Diego: Now

In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau speaks of sauntering: 

…which word is beautifully derived “from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering.

Jake and I still haven’t made our pilgrimage back to NYC, because two months after his total glossectomy, Jake’s cancer came back and metastasized. Four tumors in his neck, at least four more in his lungs. Still, we’re not idlers or vagabonds. We are sans terre, without land, treading unknown territory, having no particular home except each other. In that way, everywhere we’re together is home. And as long as Jake’s still alive, every land is holy land.

In the six months since Jake’s recurrence, we’ve walked hundreds of miles together that we never expected to get.. Jake’s been calling this our bonus time, but it’s our bonus steps, too. For tens of thousands of paces, we’ve tread lightly over the Earth together. The clinical trial that’s keeping him alive is in San Diego, and, so, unexpectedly, we’re still finding new places to walk. My favorite is the Cove in La Jolla, where we watch the seals and sea lions (and try not to smell them) cuddle together in blubberous heaps on sunny rocks.

In San Diego, we’re the weirdos again, walking to appointments from the hospital housing where we’re staying. While San Diego is building out a light rail system, it’s building out that light rail system too slowly and fighting all the way against NIMBYs and CEQA and NEPA, it still feels like a car city. Our walking habit garners well-meaning comments, especially towards Jake, like “you should take it easy” and other offers of help that seem, like that woman from years ago, to misunderstand that we’re not skipping an Uber out of financial necessity,⁵ but out of another, more vital need: Jake walking means he’s alive. Walking makes us feel alive. Plus, the paths around UCSD are pretty. Green and dotted with large pastel succulents and shy rabbits and shyer grad students.

There’s a small chance that we’re going to get to walk together for much longer than we’d thought. There’s a larger chance, though, that Jake could decompensate quickly when the clinical trial drug petosemtamab stops working. More miles are behind us than in front. I don’t know if there are more miles in front of me than behind. I only know that the path as far as I can see it frightens me instead of coaxing me onwards, because I’ll have to find the way without Jake beside me, with only my own feet and my own thoughts.

Jake’s said that he’ll walk with me until he’s physically unable. And then, after that, he’ll be waiting for me, whatever that might mean, on the other side. We’ve half-joked that if there’s a heaven for us, it’s First Avenue starting at the East River and heading towards the Hudson. As Ram Das said, “we’re all just walking each other home.”

Tonight, as I write this, we’re in San Diego, awaiting Jake’s next petosemtamab infusion. The steroids he gets to prevent an infusion reaction give him a lot of faux energy, so we take advantage by walking at dusk. His feet hurt, because petosemtamab is an EGFR inhibitor, and EGFR is also important for skin, and so the beds of his toenails are a mess. But he wants to get out anyway. We walk our usual loop around the grad student apartments, then into the hospital complex, making a right down an unfamiliar side street.

In less than a block the street turns into a dirt walking path that leads into a nature trail dense with trees. On either side are flowering sweet-smelling shrubs. Small nibbling rabbits dot the grass. Jake creeps slowly towards them, as if he’s a Disney princess expecting they’ll hop over to be pet, but he’s not and they’re skittish. The rabbits scatter into the bushes. He dashes, as best he can dash, after one and gets on his hands and knees, peering into the bush, reminding me of the night so many years ago when I fell in love with him. He flashes me the same boyish smile as if to explain why he’s on all fours in the foliage. It’s a relief to see, even after the last year of suffering, that the Jake I’ve always known is still here. He comes out most clearly on these walks.

Jake leaves the rabbits to their snack and takes my hand as the sun sets and we move further down the path, into the quiet dark. My ever-present anxiety has finally started to abate when we’re spit suddenly out of the dense copse of trees and onto the sidewalk, cars rushing past.

It was such a beautiful walk, and over too soon.

If you’ve gotten this far, consider the Go Fund Me that’s funding my husband Jake’s ongoing cancer treatment.

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1. People like to “go on hikes” In Arizona, but that’s different from everyday walking. The same people who’ll climb camelback mountain for fun will drive to the grocery store

2. That was probably more climb than walk, but I’m leaving the comment in anyway.

3. Me. I’m the one who was late for things.

4. New York has apparently finally figured out what other megacities did decades ago: trash bins are a good idea. The City is surprisingly parochial along many dimensions, including its governmental slowness and inability to copy what other successful cities do.

5. Although, given our dependence on a Go Fund Me set up by Jake’s brother, shaving a few bucks off here and there is nice.

6. Peripatetik: "A disciple of Aristotle, one of the set of philosophers who followed the teachings of Aristotle," from Old French perypatetique (14c.) and directly from Medieval Latin peripateticus "pertaining to the disciples or philosophy of Aristotle," from Greek peripatētikos "given to walking about" Aristotle used to like to roam about with his students while speaking with them. History books suggest he was a bit of a hardass, hence the use of “interrogate” instead of “chat with,” which makes me wonder if learning from Aristotle was the philosophical equivalent of a medical residency, where we also did very little sitting down.