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If A Walker Is Indeed An Individualist There Is Nowhere He Can't Go At Dawn And Not Many Places He Can't Go At Noon. But Just As It Demeans Life To Live Alongside A Great River You Can No Longer Swim In Or Drink From, To Be Crowded Into Safer Areas And Hours Takes Much Of The Gloss Off Walking - One Sport You Shouldn't Have To Reserve A Time And A Court For.

-Edward Hoagland

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If A Walker Is

Edward Hoagland

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If A Walker Is Indeed An Individualist There Is Nowhere He Can't Go At Dawn And Not Many Places He Can't Go At Noon. But Just As It Demeans Life To Live Alongside A Great River You Can No Longer Swim In Or Drink From, To Be Crowded Into Safer Areas And Hours Takes Much Of The Gloss Off Walking - One Sport You Shouldn't Have To Reserve A Time And A Court For.

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Silence Is Exhilarating At First - As Noise Is - But There Is A Sweetness To Silence Outlasting Exhilaration, Akin To The Sweetness Of Listening And The Velvet Of Sleep.

Summer Is When We Believe, All Of A Sudden, That If We Just Walked Out The Back Door And Kept On Going Long Enough And Far Enough We Would Reach The Rocky Mountains.

It's Incongruous That The Older We Get, The More Likely We Are To Turn In The Direction Of Religion. Less Vivid And Intense Ourselves, Closer To The Grave, We Begin To Conceive Of Ourselves As Immortal.

If A Walker Is Indeed An Individualist There Is Nowhere He Can't Go At Dawn And Not Many Places He Can't Go At Noon. But Just As It Demeans Life To Live Alongside A Great River You Can No Longer Swim In Or Drink From, To Be Crowded Into Safer Areas And Hours Takes Much Of The Gloss Off Walking - One Sport You Shouldn't Have To Reserve A Time And A Court For.

Many People Have Believed That They Were Chosen, But None More Baldly Than The Texans.

City People Try To Buy Time As A Rule, When They Can, Whereas Country People Are Prepared To Kill Time, Although Both Try To Cherish In Their Mind's Eye The Notion Of A Better Life Ahead.

Indeed, If "biology Is Chemistry With History," As Somebody Has Said, Then Nature Writing Is Biology With Love.

A Writer's Work Is To Witness Things.

Once I Climbed Into A Mountain Lion's Cage And She Bounded At Me And Put Her Paw On My Face, But She Kept Her Claws Withdrawn.

To Relive The Relationship Between Owner And Slave We Can Consider How We Treat Our Cars And Dogs - A Dog Exercising A Somewhat Similar Leverage On Our Mercies And An Automobile Being Comparable In Value To A Slave In Those Days

There Is A Time Of Life Somewhere Between The Sullen Fugues Of Adolescence And The Retrenchments Of Middle Age When Human Nature Becomes So Absolutely Absorbing One Wants To Be In The City Constantly, Even At The Height Of Summer.

Land Of Opportunity, Land For The Huddled Masses Where Would The Opportunity Have Been Without The Genocide Of Those Old Guard, Bristling Indian Tribes?

A Mountain With A Wolf On It Stands A Little Taller.

Many Divorces Are Not Really The Result Of Irreparable Injury But Involve, Instead, A Desire On The Part Of The Man Or Woman To Shatter The Setup, Start Out From Scratch Alone, And Make Life Work For Them All Over Again. They Want The Risk Of Disaster, Want To Touch Bottom, See Where Bottom Is, And, Coming Up, To Breathe The Air With Relief And Relish Again.

Men Often Compete With One Another Until The Day They Die. Comradeship Consists Of Rubbing Shoulders Jocularly With A Competitor.

There Are Two Kinds Of Writers: Hustlers And Sanctimonious Hustlers.

Country People Tend To Consider That They Have A Corner On Righteousness And To Distrust Most Manifestations Of Cleverness, While People In The City Are Leery Of Righteousness But Ascribe To Themselves All Manner Of Cleverness.

Sophistication" Is Another Word For That Inventive Mix Of Tolerance, Resilience, And Resourcefulness City People Develop.

Suicidal Thinking, If Serious, Can Be A Kind Of Death Scare, Comparable To Suffering A Heart Attack Or Undergoing A Cancer Operation. One Survives Such A Phase Both Warier And Chastened. When-ten Years Ago-i Emerged From A Bad Dip Into Suicidal Speculation, I Felt Utterly Exhausted And Yet Quite Fearless Of Ordinary Dangers, Vastly Afraid Of Myself But Much Less Scared Of Extraneous Eventualities.

We New Yorkers See More Death And Violence Than Most Soldiers Do, Grow A Thick Chitin On Our Backs, Grimace Like A Rat And Learn To Do A Disappearing Act. Long Ago We Outgrew The Need To Be Blowhards About Our Masculinity; We Leave That To The Alaskans And Texans, Who Have More Time For It.

Country People Do Not Behave As If They Think Life Is Short; They Live On The Principle That It Is Long, And Savor Variations Of The Kind Best Appreciated If Most Days Are The Same.

There Were Periods During My Childhood When I Stammered So Badly I Couldn't Talk At All.

If Two People Are In Love They Can Sleep On The Blade Of A Knife.

Black Bears, Though, Are Not Fearsome. I Encountered One On The Road To My House In Vermont, Alone At Night. I Picked Up Two Stones Just In Case, But I Wasn't Afraid Of Him. I Felt A Hunter's Exhilaration And A Brotherly Feeling.

No Birdcall Is The Musical Equal Of A Clarinet Blown With Panache.

To Live Is To See, And Traveling Sometimes Speeds Up The Process.

True Solitude Is A Din Of Birdsong, Seething Leaves, Whirling Colors, Or A Clamor Of Tracks In The Snow.

Animals Used To Provide A Lowlife Way To Kill And Get Away With It, As They Do Still, But, More Intriguingly, For Some People They Are An Aperture Through Which Wounds Drain. The Scapegoat Of Olden Times, Driven Off For The Bystanders Sins, Has Become A Tender Thing, A Running Injury. There, Running Away Is Me: Hurt It And You Are Hurting Me.

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In Order To Really Enjoy A Dog, One Doesn't Merely Try To Train Him To Be Semi-human. The Point Of It Is To Open Oneself To The Possibility Of Becoming Partly A Dog.

The Novelist Screws Up His Courage In Order To Invest Another Two Or Three Years In Another Attempt To Float A Boat Of Original Design Upon An Invented Ocean.

The Question Of Whether It's God's Green Earth Is Not At Center Stage, Except In The Sense That If So, One Is Reminded With Some Regularity That He May Be Dying.

Animals Are Stylized Characters In A Kind Of Old Saga - Stylized Because Even The Most Acute Of Them Have Little Leeway As They Play Out Their Parts.

Our Loneliness Makes Us Avid Column Readers These Days.

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