Alex Wolfe doesn’t hike. He walks for very long distances, which is an important distinction. Rather than toiling along the Appalachian Trail or scrambling over Wyoming rock fields, his routes cover less majestic landscapes: a Long Island turnpike, the banks of New Jersey’s Raritan Canal, the strip malls of Bucks County, Pennsylvania. These suburb-spanning slogs have all been made in an effort to answer the question: What can we learn about our environment when we travel on foot through a place that is not designed to be walked?
Many of the cities and neighborhoods we ostensibly built for ourselves were actually built for our cars. Anyone who has ever tried to walk to a grocery store in a typical suburban neighborhood, for example, or cross a six-lane arterial to get from a Target to a Best Buy on foot, knows that to be a pedestrian in most of America is to work your way around a lot of obstacles. There are roads with no sidewalks, where you must teeter tightrope-style along a narrow shoulder flanked by 60 mile-per-hour traffic. There are the perilous no-crosswalk blocks where would-be walkers’ safety is left to the mercy of passing motorists. Even in the densest of cities, there is often the perpetual maze of construction sites that force foot travelers from sidewalk to traffic lane.
These are all familiar obstacles to Wolfe. He once walked the length of Western Avenue in Chicago, a major thoroughfare that spans 24 miles. He has traversed the entire isle
— source grist.org | Eve Andrews | Dec 14, 2021