Take a hike

Commonweal, Nov 22, 1996 by Nancy G. Westerfield

For forty-six years, late in the twentieth century, we have lived carless lives, never owning, never driving an automobile. And so: the 100 pairs of shoes that I estimate I have walked my way through.

We married fresh from graduate school, he with a Ph.D., I with a master's degree. Ours would be academic careers, in a variety of small and larger communities across the United States, through lean and fat years of professional employment. Though considered oddities and mavericks - "Dr. and Mrs. Walker," we were dubbed on one campus - we never met with discrimination or pressure to conform.

Actually, in the summer of 1950, he had bought a car and was learning to drive. (I had no such skill.) He sold it so that we could afford to marry. It bought the train tickets that carried us off from Cincinnati to Oklahoma and his first faculty appointment. Our honeymoon was that trip in a Pullman compartment. We arrived with $78 between us.

From Oklahoma we moved to Texas, to Mississippi, on to Arkansas - always by train: a succession of temporary positions replacing professor-reservists called back to Korean War duty. By this time, we knew that there would be no children, a simplification of our wanderings. Finally, we located in states farther north with longer tenures: Iowa, Ohio, and Nebraska, where at last we stayed.

Northern winters have been a fact of life ever since. Forty years of weather have gone by, step by step, underfoot, yet weather never kept us from job commitments. More than once, I was the only librarian to open the college library for students. Cars couldn't start. Feet do.

As a homemaker, household management called for some plain and fancy footwork. Only one town ever had public transportation. I walked, and I carried, carefully scheduling my portages. Once I slipped with groceries, breaking half a carton of eggs over my head: the comic walker. Once he ended in shock, after a shoulder-slalom down an icy driveway: the tragic walker.

Always, by force of circumstances, we lived close to the job. We rented. We never built or bought in suburbia. Living in the "college slum" blessed us with a special affinity toward students, a "Pop and Mom" relationship.

The routine of our daily lives included for relaxation a walk (what else?), every afternoon or evening. Marriage Encounter, every day. Problems talked over, problems solved, hopes and expectations shared. Plans for the next trip abroad - eight of them, six by ship - made possible by sheer carlessness. Plans for retirement years, which we chose to spend in our town of 25,000 on the plains of Nebraska.

Retirement presented fresh opportunities for willing feet. We entered lay ministry, initiating from our Episcopal church three services read weekly, at two nursing homes and in the hospital chapel. We add another in the summer: Sunday-morning worship for travelers at a Holiday Inn. Sturdy volunteer teams have gathered around these initiatives. I still post the Saturday welcome signs at the inn, then set out at 7:15 A.M. on Sunday itself: both five-mile round-trips.

At the end of the second millennium, a man and a woman chose to bond in a nineteenth-century style of life. Did so choosing (we have never even owned a television, though I have no quarrel with electricity) equate with a lifelong marriage? Certainly, the nineteenth was a century of more stable commitments, as well as a century for thrift and self-sufficiency, "virtues" we have practiced. Too, the old-fashioned academic community that we entered midcentury was familial, with maternal oversight of newcomers in its midst. Howsoever, our marriage thrived, and though our lives have never lacked for momentum, walking has been for us a way to keep a marriage going. In robust health of body and spirit, we are girt and shod and street-smart for the rest of the journey.

Nancy G. Westerfield is a poet who lives in Kearney, Nebraska.