It’s not easy coming up with ideas for this blog. I mean, how many dead people can I memorialize? Glancing at some of my recent posts, I was taken aback by how often I discuss death or people who “passed on” (how I hate that expression) long ago. That’s due partly to the fact that I want to remember the greats of yesteryear and to promote their talents to a new generation. But it is also due primarily to the fact that I am lazy and it takes me a long time to catch up on my reading. By the time I get around to an author on my list, he’s already dead and buried.

I was thinking about all this yesterday as I took a walk through my community, hoping that the exercise might jostle my brain into coming up with a new story idea. As I was walking along the street, a pick-up truck came barrelling down the road and nearly knocked me to the side. In fact, if it had hit me, I wouldn’t be writing this update now. Remember Stephen King? He got hit by a truck up in Maine and nearly died. It seemed like an incident from one of his macabre novels, like the scene in Pet Sematary when the little boy is run over by an 18-wheeler. But such fatal accidents, I’m sorry to say, are as common as dirt.

That got me to thinking about the sorry state of affairs in this country for people, like me, who prefer to walk rather than drive. One of the main reasons I moved upstate is that I like the wide-open countryside, the mountain views, the riverscapes. I imagined that I would take long walks amidst the woods, contemplating poetry and art. I had wanted an escape from the hubbub of Manhattan and its endless stream of traffic jams and its ear-piercing horns. But what I discovered when I moved up here is that it is actually harder to take a walk in the country than it is in the city. When I lived in Manhattan (for nigh on 25 years), I would often walk from where I lived on the Upper West Side down to the Village, and back again. I thought nothing of it (unless it was raining). Once when I was broke and couldn’t scare up subway fare, I walked from Canal Street to 86th and Lex. I had holes in my soles, but it felt good to be alive.

Up here, I can barely walk two blocks without risking my life because some truck thinks it owns the road. Why am I not on the sidewalk, you ask? Well, sadly, there aren’t as many sidewalks here as there should be. For instance, when I walk to the post office, which is less than a mile from my house, I can use the sidewalk for about half that distance but then have to walk on the main roadway that passes through the town since there is no sidewalk outside the post office. You would have thought that the people who designed the post office would have considered the plight of people who may actually want to walk to it, rather than drive.

But clearly all they thought about was how many trees can we take down, how much asphalt can we pour, how much sidewalk can we remove in order to make it as easy as pie for enormous trucks to enter in and out of the parking space in front of the post office building. I literally walk on thin ice as I negotiate the narrow strip of shoulder leading from the local gas station to the p.o. When it rains or snows, this part of the road is under water or hidden beneath mounds of plowed snow. There are giant potholes that make stepping out a hazardous endeavor. You have to dash out onto the main road in order to get to the building. If a garbage truck or oil company semi just happens to be hurtling down the highway at that moment, then you have to jump into a ditch to avoid being hit. Okay, I might be exaggerating a tiny bit. You can skip, rather than jump.

When people in their cars pass me during my ambulatory activities, they often look out their windows at me as if I were out of my mind. I know what they are thinking. If I’m wrapped up in my winter coat with a wool scarf, gloves and cap, I look like a refugee or an escapee from the local halfway house who can’t afford to own a car. Honestly, unless you are walking your dog, people think there’s something wrong with you if you are merely walking. There’s a guy who lives down the street from me who hops in his Chevy truck just to drive to the diner that is literally a half block from his house. He weighs about 300 pounds so I guess he could be forgiven for not being able to make the trip on foot. But I can’t help but wonder if he had always taken that trip using his toes rather than his truck whether he’d be 300 pounds today.

Not a day goes by when some kind soul doesn’t see me walking the streets of my little hamlet, pulls over and asks if I need a lift. That’s one of the things I like about this town. People are hospitable, welcoming and gracious. But hey guys, I’m just walking to the bank. I don’t need assistance! It’s decent of you to ask. But this is the only exercise I get nowadays. I don’t want to end up on The Big Loser.

I noticed a similar phenomenon when I lived further out in the country at my previous residence in Rhinebeck. It was a two or three mile walk from my house to the nearest convenience store. If I needed milk or wanted the Times (they did not deliver in those days), I had to hop in the car and hightail it down to the Getty station. If I was lucky, the paper would still be there. Every so often, I would walk down instead. One time, as I was making my treacherous way down to the corner, a lady pulled over in her Cadillac and asked if there were something wrong. “Car break down?” she asked. She didn’t believe me when I told her I was just fetching the newspaper. I wouldn’t be surprised if she called the cops and said there was a prowler on the loose.

I tried to make that walk a few times. But ultimately had to give it up. An endless caravan of construction vehicles made it a reckless enterprise. In the short time I lived on that road, eleven houses were built on it. So the stream of pickups, cement mixers and dumpster-laden trucks was constant.

Sometimes, when I felt frisky, I tried to take a walk in the other direction, towards a beautiful pond that lay at the end of the road. But there was absolutely no sidewalk there (which I didn’t expect since it was a rural area) and no berm. I literally was almost killed one afternoon when a UPS truck came flying around a corner. The speed limit was 25, but he was going at least 60. A friend of mine was not as lucky. He was killed by a car when he was walking home from a bar. He had stopped to take a pee on the side of the road. A hit-and-run driver, who wasn’t paying attention, side-swiped him. The boy died of internal injuries a few weeks later. The driver later said he thought he had hit a deer and didn’t bother to go back and look. As far as I know, he was never charged.

Here I go talking about death again, and all I wanted to do was celebrate the lost art of walking. I can hear you saying, well, why don’t you get the hell out of Dodge, and explore the woods? Get off the goddamn road and prance to your heart’s content in the forest? I tried that once. I was covered in ticks. And nearly got my head blown off by a hunter who was illegally trespassing on private property. I could go to a state park or wildlife preserve, but that requires getting in my car to get there.

No, the only safe place to walk in my little village is the local cemetery (spelled “cemetary” here.) I don’t mind doing that, but it does bring up the spectre of death. It’s hard to traipse along the graves of people who share your name (there are an awful lot of Brookses buried in Athens) without getting depressed.

All of this has me thinking of Walt Whitman who wrote so many wonderful poems about walking. He talked of “Freedom — to walk free and own no superior.” And I think of Rimbaud. In Edmund White’s recent short-but-sweet bio of the poet, he reveals how Rimbaud’s ribs protruded from his skin, causing interior bleeding, because he walked so often and so vigorously. He walked because he was broke. In fact, Rimbaud walked through the Gotthard Pass in Switzerland, down the mountains into Italy, because he couldn’t afford the fare.

I’m not advocating that strenuous an effort. I just want to be able to walk to the post office to mail a letter without taking my life into my hands. But then it won’t be long before the post office is gone, just like the sidewalk leading to it.