Intro

In 1982, avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson released an album containing the song “Walking and Falling,” which includes these lyrics:

You’re walking / And you don’t always realize it / But you’re always falling / With each step, you fall forward slightly / And then catch yourself from falling / Over and over, you’re falling / And then catching yourself from falling

And this is how you can be walking and falling / At the same time

It struck me then, and now, as profound. How little we consider the act of walking, unless we can’t. Oh sure, you could build and fill a library called The Library of Books About Walking, but those books will be mostly lyrical and poetical and not too concerned with the mechanism of walking itself. Understandable, really. Walking is fundamental to being human. Bipedalism is definitive of being human. It’s so much a part of us, we look right past it (usually on the way to our cars).

This past summer, I committed myself to a week of backpacking above