When it comes to the matter of choosing the region for a walking tour, all sorts of considerations enter in. This has been indicated already; your naturalist will fix upon some happy hunting ground where flowers or birds are abundant, or fossil trilobites or dinosaurs are to be discovered; the fisherman will seek out the mountain brooks; the antiquarian, some remote rural region, perhaps, or scene of battle; the genealogist will visit the graves of his ancestors. But, leaving for the moment such special and individual considerations out of account, what should influence the average pedestrian in his choice of locality?
The choice of locality with relation to season has already been considered, [page 43] above.
The choice will not fall upon a flat, undiversified region, particularly if the season be hot and the roads much traveled and dusty. Emerson, in a passage extolling the pedestrian advantages of his native Massachusetts, observes:
“For walking, you must have a broken country. In Illinois, everybody rides. There is no good walk in that state. The reason is, a square yard of it is as good as a hundred miles. You can distinguish from the cows a horse feeding, at the distance of five miles, with the naked eye. Hence, you have the monotony of Holland, and when you step out of the door can see all that you will have seen when you come home.”
Having said so much, Emerson adds, in order to put the Illinoian in good humor again:
“We may well enumerate what compensating advantages we have over that country, for ’tis a commonplace, which I have frequently heard spoken in Illinois, that it was a manifest leading of the Divine Providence that the New England states should have been first settled, before the Western country was known, or they would never have been settled at all.”
In Oklahoma, they say, one can look farther and see less than anywhere else in the world.
The pedestrian seeks wide horizons, but he seeks more than that. The only classical walk which the writer now recalls, taken in a level region, was Thoreau’s tour along the beaches of Cape Cod; but there was the sea—itself an unending delight and stimulus to imagination—and the sand dunes, with all the beauties of mountain form in miniature.
There are, of course, the great recreation grounds of the world: the Swiss Alps, the Tyrol, and in our own country the Glacier National Park, the Yellowstone, and the Yosemite. Such a place is the pedestrian’s paradise. But such a place is, for most of us, far away; ordinarily, the requirement is of something humbler.