Walk Therapy

The forest is good medicine even if you’re not harvesting pharmaceuticals

Last summer, along the road between my house and Whistler, I saw two people walking.

The road is a 60km stretch of Pacific North West near-wilderness. People don’t walk it. Sometimes, in the blazing high-summer heat, I see a couple of misguided cycle-tourists, their saddlebags stuffed with camping equipment and a regrettable topographically-naïve couch-born idea, pedal-inching up the undulating mountain passes, and I think, you poor fools.

But people don’t walk it.

I swung wide to pass the foot-bound travelers with their modest backpacks and technical-looking walking staffs, wondering, ‘Is this a thing?’

Will Self, the British author, had been on a decade-long walking kick in the early 2000s. He made a point of tramping to and from the airports on all his book tours, conducting publicity interviews with the brave journalists who were willing to match his stride as he walked through the badlands of exurbia.

Self used to be a drug user. He says walking made him feel better than drugs ever had. “But I’m not addicted. I don’t need to score a walk.” A few years later, though, Self admitted as a therapy, walking had stopped working. “As with a narcotic habit, I seemed to require bigger and bigger hits of distance in order to achieve the same localizing effect.”

While I drove at 90 km an hour, the travelers walking my road looked Japanese and I thought that maybe the inventors of “forest-bathing” were now taking to the forests of the world their fix.

Shinrin-yoku was an invention of Japan’s Forest Agency in 1982, a savvy marketing tactic to attribute monetary value to Japan’s forests and encourage people to get out and soak up green space. It was promoted as a health move, but it took a few years for the scientists to prove that basking in a forest atmosphere is good for you. Subsequent studies have shown that walks in the forest generate lower measurements of the stress hormone, cortisol, as well as a decreased red blood cell count in the brain’s prefrontal cortex — making a walk in the woods the neural equivalent of taking a chill pill, without a sedative’s sludgy side effects.

My pilgrims had looked purposeful, not lost, and I felt a flush of curiosity and solidarity. See, I too, had become a walker.

I was regularly taking to the forest out my back door to kill an hour between a newborn’s naps and feeds. I’d go dragging my feet because of the interrupted sleep of those earliest days of parenthood, parts of my body so heavy-feeling that no amount of coffee could jump-start my neural circuits. I strapped on an infuriatingly complicated piece of padded fabric, manhandled four floppy limbs and an even floppier head into place, and went into the intermingled canopy of cedar and cottonwood and birch and hemlock, protected from the open light that blinded me, bedazzled as I was by the blaze of this baby and the god light he was still trailing, by the fact that it was morning again already, by my complete inadequacy to the task and the alienating sense of a world turned upside down.

Science had my back, but I didn’t know it then.

I ran into people on the trails, and we’d nod acknowledgment and continue on our walks. We didn’t have iPhones or fitbits or Stravas or GPS navigators. We weren’t wearing earbuds or texting or instagramming updates of our treks. We weren’t geo-caching or gamifying the outdoors. We weren’t racing. And in that space of no resistance, of mind-ease, in the rhythm of our footfalls, our heart rates would moderate, our cortisol would drop, the blood flow through our brains would shift out of the panic “alert” zones, the phytoncides from the trees would send signals to our immune markers, our cells.

We were retuning ourselves, aligning footfall, breath, heartbeat, with the rhythm of the big trees and the creeks running with meltwater and the crackling underfoot of leaf litter.

Some people resist walking without a device because in the absence of interconnectivity and multi-tasking, an aimless walk seems pointless, like killing time.

But the body knows this is a lie. The baby knew it too. The pilgrim and the forest-bather and the Zen meditatator know it. The new mother, and the concussed, the creatively blocked and the bereaved, know it too. All those bleary walks in the forest attuned me to this: dead time is not made alive by scrolling through a Facebook feed. Choosing presence over productivity might put you at odds with the pace of the mainstream world, but at its core, it’s a call to Being.

A walk in the forest, without any devices, untethered from technology, is an invitation to match your pace with death, to let it shadow you, to fall in step, stride for stride, with this great and timeless truth, that we are just beings of “energy moving forward to the fullest possible expression of ourselves”, as the writer and walker Richard Wagamese says.

And then we depart. And we can’t outrun it, or out-produce it. We just need to be with it. Armed only with a baby, or a walking staff, with the ghosts of all our walking ancestors, amidst the therapy of the trees.

This essay appears in the Summer 2015 issue of Coast Mountain Culture magazine, available now.