There is a loop I walk near where I live — two miles, roughly, along a canal towpath and back through a residential street that opens at one end onto a small park. I have walked it hundreds of times. I know exactly where the path narrows, where a tree root has buckled the tarmac, where a gate hangs at an angle that will eventually need fixing.
And yet it is never the same walk twice.
The Illusion of the Familiar Route
We tend to speak of habitual routes as if familiarity closes them down — as if knowing a place means there is nothing left to know. This seems to me to get things almost exactly backwards. Familiarity is the precondition for noticing. When you are not navigating, you can attend.
The first time I walked this canal path, I was largely preoccupied with where I was going. I noted landmarks. I made a mental map. There was very little room for anything else. Now that the route runs on a kind of automatic, something else comes free. I notice the particular quality of light on the water at four o'clock in November. I notice which moored narrowboat has changed since Tuesday. I notice things I have no name for — gradations of green, shifts in the air that might mean rain.
What Changes
Some of what changes is obvious: the seasons, the weather, the time of day. A canal towpath in early morning mist is an entirely different place from the same path at noon in August. This much everyone knows. But the subtler changes are more interesting.
There is a willow that overhangs the water at a particular bend. In winter it is skeletal and precise, each branch a clear line against the sky. By late spring it has become a curtain, a green waterfall. By late summer the curtain has thickened until the tree is almost abstract. Then the yellowing begins, and the fall, and the return to precision. I have watched this cycle several times now. Each year it is slightly different, and I am slightly different watching it, and the combination produces something I find difficult to name — not nostalgia, not quite satisfaction, something closer to recognition between two changing things.
The Company of the Walk
A walk taken alone is different from a walk taken in conversation, which is different again from a walk taken alongside someone in comfortable silence. I have walked this route grieving, and elated, and bored, and preoccupied, and once in a state of such complete mental blankness that I arrived home without any memory of the journey. The route held all of these. It did not change to accommodate my state; I changed, and so experienced a different route.
This seems to me an important thing about walking in known places: the place stays stable enough to reveal your instability. A route you know becomes a kind of instrument for measuring yourself.
In Favour of Repetition
There is a fashion for novelty in the culture of walking — for the long-distance path, the uncompleted challenge, the new horizon. These have their pleasures and I do not discount them. But I want to make a small case for the repeated walk, the known route, the loop you could walk in your sleep.
It takes time to learn a place. You have to return to it in different weathers and different moods and different lights before it begins to show you what it contains. A walk done once is a walk with a new acquaintance. A walk done a hundred times is something more like conversation with an old friend who, it turns out, still has things to tell you.
This morning the heron was back at its usual post by the second lock. It stood entirely still in the grey February light. I have seen it there, or one like it, dozens of times. I stopped and watched it for longer than usual, and thought: I would have missed this entirely if I had gone somewhere new.