Rejecting the Gym

Why don't you go for a walk, hon?" my husband asks in that bright voice he uses when one of our kids is tuning up for a tantrum. He is home late, and I have just closed a kitchen cabinet with more force than is strictly necessary. "I'll finish cooking supper," he says. "You go on."

At the table, the children look up from their homework: "Go, Mom."

I'm a bad companion if I skip my evening walk, and everyone at my house knows it. The minutiae of my day always make a Gordian knot of my muscles at night, and the only reliable way to untangle them is to get out of my house and start moving. For a while, I thought this peace came primarily from the exercise itself, from the delight of a body in broad-gestured motion after too many cramped hours at a desk. I even bought a treadmill, a fallback for bad-weather days, but it ended up in a classified ad. For me, this isn't about endorphins or toxin release for keyboard-cramped muscles. And as much as my crabby self could stand some improving, it's not about self-improvement, either. It's about leaving the self behind for just long enough to take a longer view of my own life—and it's a lesson I first learned in a brown field in Alabama.

I graduated from Auburn, a land-grant university often dismissed as a cow college by the allegedly more cosmopolitan citizens of my home state. Cows flicked their flies within the campus boundaries, it's true, but I was there two years before I ever saw a single ruminant at my famously backwoods school. A work-study student paying my own way, I had no time for idle exploring, for poking about in quiet places where the agriculture students learned their trade. Every day I followed the same brick path from crowded dorm to crowded class to crowded office to crowded cafeteria, and then back to the crowded dorm again. I couldn't shower without a suitemate coming in to pee.

One time in the fall of my junior year, I stopped by the cafeteria to grab a sandwich, planning to cram in a few minutes with the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins between my afternoon job at the student magazine and my nighttime shift at the dorm desk. But on the loudspeaker, John Cougar was pounding out his ditty about Jack and Diane, and "Glory be to God for dappled things" kept getting tangled up with "Oh yeah life goes on/Long after the thrill of livin' is gone."

Pressing my fingers into my ears, I hunched over my Norton Anthology, but the backbeat penetrated even so, and the sound of my own breathing and my own blood thumping through my veins quarreled with the rhythm of the poem.

I finally slammed the book closed. My heart was still pounding as I ditched my pack in the dorm lobby and started walking. I was headed nowhere, just out.

It felt good to be moving, to feel my body expanding into the larger gestures of outdoors, exultant at the sense of motion. What a relief to stretch my arms high overhead, to fill my lungs deeply with air. I passed the football stadium, the eagle's cage, the sorority dorms, and came at last to the red-dirt lanes of the ag program's experimental fields, where the brinded cows turned their unsurprised faces toward me in pastures dotted with hay bales looking like giant spools of golden thread shining in the October air. A red-tailed hawk—the only kind I could name—glided idly past, and the brown grass rustled as some rodent or snake rushed to safety.

I caught my breath and walked on, with a rising sense—a truly Hopkinsean sense—that glory was all around me, and that I had it all to myself. I wanted to throw my arms out in an open embrace, to spin around and around like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music.

Embarrassed, I kept walking. By the time the fields gave way to the forestry department's little woodland, the wind had picked up, and red dogwood leaves were lifting and falling between the heavy pines. There are few sights lovelier than leaves carried on wind, but I had failed to note them in the quad. And the swifts wheeling in the sky as evening came on—they were just as clear to anyone standing outside the liberal arts high rise as to one beginning to shiver in the shadows of a miniature forest, but I had missed them, too. Finally, for once, I was awake to my life in the actual world. And in those small fields, that thoroughly managed little forest, my obligations were not significant, my troubles no more lasting than dry leaves in wind.

For a moment—it was really only an instant, a tiny blip that passed almost immediately—I felt connected to something larger than my own time-hounded existence, to something quiet and eternal. Long after my paper on Hopkins was forgotten, long after I was forgotten myself, some goldengrove unleaving would still be releasing its bounty to the wind.