The Pleasure of Walking Walking gives us back our senses. We see, hear, smell the world as we never can when we ride. No matter what vehicle, it is the vehicle that is moving, not ourselves. We are trapped inside its fixed environment, and once we have taken in its sensory aspects -- mainly in terms of comfort or discomfort -- we mm off our perceptions and either go to sleep or open a magazine and begin dozing awake. But when we walk, the environment changes every moment and our senses are continuously being alerted. Around each comer of a city block, around each bend in a country road, there is something new to greet the eyes, the ears, the hose. Even the same walk, the one we may take every day, is never the same from one day to another, from one week and season to another. This is true not only in the country, but anywhere at all. In New York City, a group of executives who meet every weekday morning walk from their homes to their offices. Their way takes them through quiet streets of old brownstones, one of the oldest neighbourhoods in the city, then up and over the Brooklyn Bridge with its cathedral arches supporting the weblike drapery of cables, then down into the skyscraper canyons of the financial district. On their daily route they see, hear, smell the city in all its seasonal changes, under bright and cloudy skies. Only the most inclement weather stops them -- suitably dressed, they can walk with pleasure in spring rains, autumn drizzles, the sunlight of a summer morning or a soft winter snowfall. The river waters roll by below their feet, sullen or sparkling. Tugboats chug past, shoving and hauling their variously laden barges; on a shrouded morning, foghorns hoot and moan. The famous skyline of lower Manhattan rises before them, glittering in sun, afloat in mist, against a backdrop of sky never twice the same.
