A Pedestrian Vacation: Walking From Olympia To Seattle

It started as a silly idea among a group of us who walk three miles around Olympia's Capital Lake almost every evening.

When summer came, we joked, I should walk the 60 or so miles from Olympia to Seattle.

The more I thought about it in the months that followed, the more the idea appealed to me, and its whimsy was just one of the attractions.

I would redefine time and space and turn a pedestrian idea into something new and exciting. I would carry as little as possible, seek the most out-of-the-way routes, and stay in cheap motels.

Hit the road

And so it was that one fine summer morning I kissed my wife and children goodbye and walked out the front door for Seattle.

"Be careful, Daddy," my 15-year-old daughter, Grace, warned me the night before. "No offense, but this seems slightly weird to me."

Three-and-a-half days later, I crossed the Seattle city line on East Marginal Way and caught a bus downtown for a ride home from a friend.

I traveled no hard-beaten mountain path through what passes for wilderness these days. Instead, I walked some 70 miles on a vague meandering route that took me through suburban neighborhoods and past farms and fields; through little forests and around tiny wetlands like lost diamonds amid the concrete, asphalt and steel of humanity.

I strayed unseen (and probably unauthorized) into the ironically pristine splendor of Fort Lewis: I heard the horns and bells of ferries, boats and trains along the misty shores of Steilacoom, Redondo, Tacoma and Des Moines I smelled city fumes and wildflowers, baking bread and burning rubber. I tasted rain and dust.

My route - made up as I went with the help of county maps - zigzagged through Tacoma neighborhoods of leafy trees and shouting children, and over the Hilltop - so dangerous I was warned - but so breathtaking to walk over the brow to the city's old world charm and blue Commencement Bay spread below.

I walked through harsh, gray places like commercial Lacey and Pacific Highway South past the airport. Afoot they are just as ugly as by car. But more interesting up close. Oddly, there were a fair number of pedestrians on Pacific Highway South.

I ate in restaurants or out of stores, and slept in cheap motels. And I slept well.

Avoid the highways

I am not a sleek-runner type, but at 47 I'm in good shape so the walk wasn't too tough. My feet gave me trouble, but I carried plenty of gauze and tape, and I managed to enjoy the trek despite the blisters.

I stayed as far from Interstate 5 and Old Highway 99 as I could, and was mostly successful. I encountered I-5 only to get from the Nisqually Valley to the Fort Lewis golf course, and showed up on 99 only for motels and for the final half-day of the journey.

As I walked hour after hour, something began to happen to me. I settled into a kind of reverie that I hadn't felt in years - maybe even since childhood.

I was trying to explain this to a friend and he referred me to an essay by the poet Gary Snyder. The Chinese, Snyder wrote, consider walking one of the four "dignities" along with sitting, lying and standing, in that they are ways of being fully ourselves, at home in our bodies, in their fundamental modes." `" think many of us would consider it quite marvelous if we could set out on foot again, with a little inn or a clean camp available . . ." he wrote.

I did set out on foot, and it was quite marvelous.

There was solitude among the wheeled masses (Walt Whitman heard America singing, I saw America driving).

There was uninterrupted time - lots of it - just to think.

And in this time, as the miles passed by, I had some insights.

For one, few seem to know what a mile is anymore. When I would ask a store clerk or waitress how far something was, usually they would tell me how long it takes to drive there, or their mileage estimate would be off by several miles.

To quote Snyder again, "Automobile and airplane travel teaches us little that we can easily translate into a perception of space."

I know it is a cliche to say we are terribly isolated by our cars, but this truth penetrates when you walk all day around Puget Sound and see relatively few people on foot.

Combine the isolation with the heavy doses of fear served daily by TV and newspapers, and it's a wonder people ever venture from their cars.

I saw neither murder nor mayhem. I did see a lot of people going about their lives as they hurtled past on the way to work, school or other pursuits. And I found in my heart a rare feeling: sorrow for all the millions of good and lonely people who mean no one any harm.

Weird stuff

As for my daughter Grace's concern that the trip seemed weird, she has a contemporary who apparently found me so.

After checking into a motel, I removed my left shoe to care for a developing blister and then limped outside semi-shoeless to a phone booth. As I was talking with my wife, Donna, a young man rushed up to use the phone.

He stood there, shifting from one foot to the other and glancing at his watch. Then he noticed my unshaven, unshowered, half-shoeless self. "Hey, dude," he said rudely, "but are you talking to yourself?"

No, I explained. I'm telling my wife about my walk from Olympia to Seattle. The young man left in a hurry.

Hal Spencer is an Olympia-based journalist.